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SUSAN NIDITCH, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Library of Ancient Israel; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996). Pp. xi + 170. 19.
This is a thought-provoking book in which Niditch brings the results of recent research on the interplay between orality and literacy in traditional societies to bear on the Hebrew Bible and its development. She challenges the notion of cultures as either oral or literate and replaces it with the idea that a culture may well operate according to another model in which there is a spectrum of orality and literacy, each mode of communication being used by the people of that culture at the same time for different purposes. This third model, according to N., is the one which best describes the creation of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). This calls...