Wednesday, 14 October 2015

Torah and Canon: 2nd Edition,
James A. Sanders, Cascade Books, 2005, page 20

James Sanders fixes upon the power of what he calls the "Torah story" in fostering and maintaining the community. Recitation is one of the ways in which the story is reviewed:

There a number of psalms and prayers and other bits of liturgy in the Bible, both First and Second Testament, and outside it in some of the literature that comes to us from a later time in Early Judaism, which reoeat, recite or review the story. It seems that the later the composition of the recital was, the longer it tended to be. The shortest appears in one verse in 1 Samuel 12:8 and the longest (aside from the Genesis-Kings complex itself), is the almost six-chapter recital in Sirach (or, Ecclesiasticus) 44-50.