The Oral and the Written

PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

How did an ancient reader know where to pause, even to end a sentence? Today, we have the comma, the period, the semicolon, the question mark, the exclamation mark, quotation marks, and more, to guide us as we read along, whether aloud or silently. The answer is: ancient compositions such as the Bible (but also the Iliad, etc.) were accompanied by an oral reading tradition. Just as the scribes of antiquity transmitted the text in written form, the oral tradents transmitted the reading tradition, from generation to generation.

A hint of this may be found in Exodus 17:14, the first time that writing is mentioned in the Bible: “And the Lord said to Moses: ‘Write this as a memorial in a scroll, and place it in the ears of Joshua.’” The first half of God’s instructions refer to the written form of the text, while the second half refers to the oral transmission. Moses is instructed to teach the oral reading of the text to Joshua, who represents the next generation.

And so the text was transmitted orally by Jewish reciters for centuries if not millennia (depending on when one dates the Pentateuch). Eventually, a group of medieval Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes developed a way of preserving the oral tradition in writing, thus safeguarding it for posterity. This work resulted in the development of two concurrent sets of marks: one to indicate the vowels and one to indicate (all at once) the accents, the punctuation, and the cantillation. This elaborate system, produced in the eighth to ninth centuries CE, ensured the correct pronunciation and recitation for generations to come—indeed, unto the present day.