The Saga of Noah in Slavonic Parabiblical Writings, Iconography and Oral Tradition (The Case of the Folk Bible)

Mainstream epistemological paradigms employed in the study of vernacular biblical traditions define the parascriptural folklore corpus either as a hybridized derivative from the canonical text, or as a spinoff of related apocryphal literature. Accordingly, oral accounts are considered to be fictional byproducts of a certain written corpus. Their function is thus understood only as instrumental in providing a somewhat laicized interpretation of the written accounts, with the inevitable shortcomings of ethnohermeneutics. This type of academic discourse implicitly suggests the hierarchical division between written and oral; it further conjectures a distinct social subordination and extrapolates that the intellectual product produced by men of letters ought to have supremacy (at least from a chronological perspective) over the one created by those who can neither read nor write. Literacy is thus assigned primary status over orality and the written is recognized as the “prototype” of the oral; that is, the canonical Scriptural text and related apocryphal literature are examined as the ultimate template for folklore tradition.

Since the 1990s, the present author has been advocating the term Folk Bible to denote the oral, vernacular counterparts of the Scriptural text (in its either canonical, or apocryphal versions), thus challenging the above epistemological model. By arguing that the intellectual lineage of the textual corpus of the Folk Bible transcends the ancestral pool of classical Jewish and Christian written sources and extends far beyond their immediate scope, the current article focuses on the ethohetmeneutical settings of the oral counterparts of the Old and the New Testaments, as attested by folklorists and anthropologists since the second half of the nineteenth century.

While it is true that some oral accounts could have been be composed as vernacular exegesis of the canonical Scriptural text and/or related apocryphal writings (thus representing secondary products stemming from written sources), the Ur-hypertext of the Folk Bible is a much more complicated phenomenon. Sheltered within its virtually boundless fabric are vestiges of the oral antecedents of the Scriptural text, which continued to be verbally transmitted and transferred in complex multilingual environments. In fact, apocryphal writings may be featured as witnesses to the unfolding of this Ur-hypertext at different stages of its transmission; in a way, they may be considered as snap-shots registering its intellectual lineage. Thus, some oral accounts may have been interpolated into the corpus of the Biblical apocrypha by its compilers/scribes ad hoc, rather than the other way around. At the same time, folklore tradition may have been penetrated by some of the apocryphal narratives, with another mediator being iconographic tradition. To sum up, the relationship between oral and written modes of transmission of the parabiblical and biblical corpus has to be studied against the background of a much larger context. This should take into consideration not only the modus operandi of the scribal conventions per se (as well as iconography), but also that of the folklore tradition.

The present article discusses one particular type of vernacular narratives representative of the Folk Bible phenomenon; they are related to the saga of the righteous Noah, and Slavonic tradition serves as a primary model. The analysis of some of the constituents of this mega-narrative shows that they contain themes and motifs attested in rabbinic sources (Midrashim and Targumim), Judaeo-Christian apocryphal literature, and Islamic interpretive traditions (as found in Hadīth, Tafsīr, etc.). As such, they may be regarded as witnesses to parascriptural intertextuality. For the storytellers and singers composing this type of accounts, the Bible was a book ever imagined, but never held.

Florentina Badalanova Geller, “The Saga of Noah in Slavonic Parabiblical Writings, Iconography and Oral Tradition (The Case of the Folk Bible).” In: David Hamidović, Eleonora Serra, Philippe Therrien (eds.), The Reception of Biblical Figures: Essays in Method [Judaïsme ancien et origines du christianisme, vol. 27], Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 25–78.