This series spawned out of my recent several-part series analysis of the biblical exodus. Here I argue that along with the objectively historical, legend and myth constitute significant portions of Old Testament texts, especially ones describing Moses, the Hebrew exodus, the conquests under Joshua, the reign of King David, among others. Commentary is made on the methodological approaches used by historians to learn about the ancient past while we also explore recent research on the reliability of memory and oral traditions.

In Part 2, we consider the aforementioned reliability of memory and oral traditions, notably because the ancient Hebrews and Jews preserved their traditions orally, handing them down generationally, for many centuries before they reached their crystallized form in the canonical biblical books we have today.

See Part 1: Introduction to Historical Method
See Part 3: ‘Distanciation’ and the Canaanite Extermination (Again)

Most written historical texts from the ancient world are the product of oral tradition. The Greek poet Homer’s The Iliad and Odyssey were transmitted orally for centuries before being written down in the eighth or seventh century BCE. The story of Gilgamesh’s quest to overcome death was dispersed by word of mouth across Ancient Near Eastern cultures before taking on material form on tablets. Jesus of Nazareth (c. BCE 6–4–30/33 CE) lived in an oral culture, delivering his message orally and repeatedly, which was later crystallized in the canonical Gospels by authors drawing on those early oral traditions. Most of what is known about Muhammad, the founder of Islam, comes from the Hadith, which were accounts and reports handed down orally after his death in 632 CE. The overwhelming majority of African cultures have been primarily oral, rather than literacy-based, and passed down stories of gods, ancestors, and heroes this way. Human beings like to tell stories.

Yet the reliability of oral tradition raises pressing questions. Oral traditions passed down through generations typically produce a plurality of versions spread over time and space, often becoming vulnerable to conflicting and ambiguous interpretations (Goody 2016), creating many (sometimes competing) streams of memory (Crook 2013, 55). These traditions frequently accrue legendary embellishments for being repeatedly told and retold (White 1963, 189), long after the lifetime of their informants (Vansina 1985, 12-13). The invention of material and/or adding in of new content into the tradition by those passing it down occurs when transmitters do not have perfect recall (Goody 2016).

Since forgetting and distortion are obvious shortcomings, many cultures have used various mnemonic tools to try to preserve accuracy. A link between oral tradition and memory is therefore established. Singing, concise teachings, performances, and proverbs (Zlotnick 1984), adages, aphorisms, idioms, maxims, rhymes, and rhythms, as well as strong rather than dull or “colorless” characters (Ong 2013), are strategies used for the purpose of accuracy when preserving and handing down traditions.

But the boogeyman of memory distortion, defined as the “difference between memory of the past and past actuality” (Schachter 1995, quoted by Wold, Stuckenbruck, and Barton 2007, 166), always rears its head. Human memory is not an exact reproduction of past experiences but instead an imperfect process that is prone to various kinds of errors and distortions (Deese 1959; Manning and Loftus 1996, 5-13; Schacter and Slotnick 2004; Loftus 2005; Gallo 2006; Baym and Gonsalves 2010; Schachter, Guerin, and St Jacques 2011). Recent studies show this; to cite an example, memory imperfection lies behind eyewitness misidentifications that have contributed to the conviction of innocent individuals (Wells and Olson 2003; Semmler 2010).

If serious questions regarding eyewitness testimony have emerged in criminal justice systems since the 1990s (Wells and Bradfield 1998, Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer 2000), one might expect historians to take these considerations into account, especially since the vast majority of historical texts were not written by eyewitnesses and, in many cases, are reporting information derived from informants who were not themselves eyewitnesses. In addition, there is no rule of thumb that an eyewitness account is necessarily a reliable testimony of historic events, although such a source is generally (but not always) superior to second- or third-hand accounts. Presently, the majority of studies of memory and eyewitness testimony has been produced by cognitive psychologists, although it has caught on in Biblical Studies too (Bauckham 2008; Schröter 2008; Sargent 2012; Kozushko 2018).

Let me now turn to some of the major causes of memory distortion and how these may explain the legends and myths of historical personages, biblical and non-biblical.

“Imagination inflation” is a product of memory distortion that can occur in three ways (Schacter, Guerin, and St Jacques 2011): [1] The imagining of an event causes an increase in confidence or belief that the event actually occurred in the past; [2] that people performed an action or perceived an object that they only imagined; [3] the development of a full-blown false recollection of an experience that did not occur.

Arguably, tenets of imagination inflation were prominent among the followers of general Ned Ludd, a weaver and the founder of the nineteenth-century British rebels known as the Luddites. Ned makes for a good case of this phenomenon.

Ned produced many letters, and much about his life was common knowledge, such as once being an apprentice, destroying a stocking frame using a hammer when his craft was criticized, recruiting a relative named Eliza, and establishing an administrative staff and officer corps around him. His charisma influenced many, especially those who feared for their livelihoods in the wake of new technologies, such as the introduction of wide-framed automated looms operated with little or no skill.

Many Britons rebelled, fearing their traditional skills would become irrelevant and their livelihoods threatened. There were assassinations, businesses broken into, wide frame looms smashed, and mills burned down. Ned clearly had a passionate, fanatical following. Beyond the destructive uprisings by his followers, many songs, poems, and artworks were produced in his honor. It is surprising then that Ned was entirely mythical, never having existed. He was a product of the collective imagination and memory of the Luddites (Crook 2013, 76).

Ned shows what should be of great relevance to professional historians sifting through data based on collective memory in their attempt to reconstruct past events, which is that in the mere span of just over three decades, an entire mythology developed around him. He became increasingly depicted in mythical ways, such as being a general, King Ludd, the “Hero of Nottinghamshire,” Great Enoch, and even boasting omniscience.

One or more aspects of “imagination inflation” were behind Ned’s historical persona, the result of imagination and fabrication. The emergence and spread of Ned’s mythology probably owes itself to an unverified article published in The Nottingham Review, dated 1811, and a history of Nottingham published that same year by writer John Blackner, who coined the term “Luddite.” Ned’s case gives the words of psychologists Charles Manning and Elizabeth F. Loftus some power: “It is not only… possible to distort memory for events, it is possible to implant an entire memory for something that never happened” (1996, 5).

Part 3 (Forthcoming)

References

Baym, Carol L., and Gonsalves, Brian D. 2010. “Comparison of Neural Activity That Leads to True Memories, False Memories, and Forgetting: An FMRI Study of the Misinformation Effect.” Cognitive Affective Behavior Neuroscience 10:339–348.

Crook, Zeba A. 2013. “Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus”. Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 11:53-76.

Deese, James. 1959. “On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 58(1):17–22.

Gallo, David A. 2006. Associative Illusions of Memory: False Memory Research in DRM and Related Tasks. Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

Goody, Jack. 2016. “Myth.” Britannica. Available.

Loftus E. F. 2005. ““Planting Misinformation in the Human Mind: A 30-Year Investigation of the Malleability of Memory.” Learning Memory 12(4):361–366.

Manning, Charles., and Loftus, Elizebeth F. 1996. “Eyewitness testimony and memory distortion.” Japanese Psychological Research 38(1):5-13.

Ong, Walter J. 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. East Sussex, England, United Kingdom: Psychology Press.

Schachter, Daniel. 1995. Memory Distortion. Cambridge, England, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Schacter, Daniel L., and Slotnick, Scott D. 2004. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Distortion.” Neuron 44(1):149–160.

Schacter, Daniel L., Guerin, Scott A., and St Jacques, Peggy L. 2011. “Memory Distortion: An Adaptive Perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Science. Available.

Semmler Carolyn A., and Brewer, Neil. Eyewitness Memory. In The Cambridge Handbook of Forensic Psychology, edited by Jennifer M. Brown and Elizabeth Campbell E, 49–57. Cambridge, England, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Vansina, Jan 1985. Oral Tradition as History. Madison, Wisconsin, United States: University of Wisconsin Press.

Wells, Gary L., and Olson, Elizabeth A. 2003. “Eyewitness Testimony.” Annual Review of Psychology 54:277–295.

Wold, Benjamin G., Stuckenbruck, Loren T., and Barton, Stephen C. 2007. Memory in the Bible and Antiquity. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.

Zlotnick, Dov. “Memory and the Integrity of the Oral Tradition.” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 16(1):229–241.