The Weight of Words

Many years ago, one of my teachers told me that in the ancient biblical world, the oral word was given more “weight” than the written word. In other words, they trusted the oral word over the written word.

An example of an oral tradition in Judaism is the Talmud. This voluminous collection of Jewish writing was originally passed down orally from one generation to the next. It was not until after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., that the Talmud was written down.

Even the Bible itself was originally passed down orally. One clue to this fact is that much of the Bible was written in poetical fashion, which indicates that it was, not only communicated orally, but sung. It is a fact that songs are much easier to memorize than simple rote. This is probably the reason why we have not found any manuscripts of the Bible older than about 2,300 years.

It is the importance placed on the oral word that prevented Isaac from taking back the blessing he gave to his son Jacob. In the ancient Hebrew culture, the firstborn son received a double portion of the father’s inheritance. In Genesis 27, Jacob, at the direction of his mother, tricks his father Isaac into thinking he is his brother Esau, who is the firstborn, and giving him the blessing reserved for the firstborn. Later, Esau comes for his blessing, but his father, after realizing what has happened, tells him, “Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.”

Then Esau asks, “Haven’t you saved a blessing for me?”

Isaac replies, “I have made him your master and given him all his relatives as servants; I have sustained him with grain and new wine. What is left that I can do for you, my son?”

From the perspective of the Hebrews of the Bible, once the spoken word has been heard, it can no more be taken back then if one asked for the return of a meal that has already been consumed. This concrete view of the spoken word can easily be seen in the following passage.

…Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it… (Exodus 17:14, NIV)

This, and other mainstream translations, remove the concrete nature of the Hebrew and replace it with a more abstract one in order for it to be more easily read by the reader. Here is this passage from my Revised Mechanical Translation (RMT), which retains the more concrete nature of the passage because of the word-for-word style of this translation.

…write this remembrance in the scroll and place it in the ears of Yehoshua… (Exodus 17:14, RMT)

This does not mean that Mosheh was to literally place the scroll in Yehoshua’s ear, but is instead, an Hebraic way of expressing the idea of reading the words of the scroll to another person.

One last observation about the weight of words. I think that we can all agree that even though words have no physical weight, the right words, or should I say the “wrong” words, can throw a punch that can hurt just as much as a punch from a fist. So, we can say words have “weight.”