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" Recalling Genesis and Other Authoritative Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Memory in the Book of Jubilees "
Dodd, Ronnie Adam
Stokes, Ryan E.
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1053248
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TL52365
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| Main Entry
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Dodd, Ronnie Adam
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Recalling Genesis and Other Authoritative Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Memory in the Book of Jubilees\ Dodd, Ronnie AdamStokes, Ryan E.
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| College
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Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
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| Date
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2019
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Ph.D.
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2019
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| Note
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310 p.
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| Abstract
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This dissertation argues that Jubilees was both composed and preserved in an "oral-textual context" and betrays the remnants of such a context by its overwhelming assemblage of so-called memory variants. The ubiquitous presence of vestigial memory variants between the "text" of Jubilees and its source material supports a process whereby a scribe drew upon his source material from memory as he composed his new jubilean work. Likewise, the same diagnostic memory variants that are evident among the Hebrew jubilean witnesses evince a reception or transmission of the "text" that also proceeded by way of mnemonic recall to a significant degree. The following chapters support this thesis with their respective textual analyses of distinct aspects of Jubilees. Chapter 1 provides a history of research for the fields of orality and memory on the one hand and the textual history of Jubilees on the other. Building upon advances in the former, a new way forward for understanding the latter is proposed. The chapter concludes with a description of the methodology and specific controls in place for this project. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the author of Jubilees worked with stable, albeit multiform, textual traditions of his source texts (e.g. Genesis-Exodus, the Book of the Watchers, Leviticus, Psalm 90) rather than uninstantiated etherial traditions. Chapter 3 argues that when the jubilean author utilized source material outside of his pentateuchal base narrative or even substantially out of the sequence of his base narrative, he consistently accessed this cognitively (i.e. he recalled it from mnemonic stores) instead of retrieving a physical manuscript from which to transcribe. Chapter 4 advances the thesis of chapter 3 by arguing that even when the author was rewriting the base narrative of his work from the Genesis-Exodus storyline, he very often was rewriting from memory instead of meticulously transcribing from a physical manuscript. Chapter 5 corroborates the claims made about the compositional method of the author with evidence from the reception-transmission of Jubilees itself. By collating Hebrew manuscripts of Jubilees against one another and against the Ethiopic tradition, it is clear that both mnemonic recall and textual transcription worked side-by-side. This is consistent with the oral-textual model advocated by David Carr, whereby Second Temple scribes utilized their cognitive abilities significantly in their scribal practice, but that this was supported by textually instantiated witnesses. This chapter also defends the precision and reliability of the Ethiopic (and by extension the Greek) jubilean traditions. Therefore, the use of the Ethiopic in this project is justified so long as it is accompanied by a sophisticated methodology that avoids overburdening the evidence. Chapter 6 synthesizes the claims and arguments made in chapter 2–5 and lays out the significance of the project for the study of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jubilees, and the scribal apparatus of the Second Temple period. Avenues for future research are discussed, with particular attention given to the textual family of the jubilean base text, the compositional model of Jubilees, and the nature of the Pseudo-Jubilees texts (4Q225-227 and 4Q217) .
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Biblical studies
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Judaic studies
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Religion
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Stokes, Ryan E.
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Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
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