The Interface of Orality and Writing: Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres (Biblical Performance Criticism)

How did the visual, the oral, and the written interrelate in antiquity? The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance, and literacy and popular culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Incorporating both customary and innovative perspectives, the essays advance the frontiers of our understanding of the nature of ancient texts as regards audibility and performance, the vital importance of the visual in the comprehension of texts, and basic concepts of communication, particularly the need to account for disjunctive and non-reciprocal social relations in communication. Thus the contributions show how the investigation of the interface of the oral and written, across the spectrum of seeing, hearing, and writing, generates new concepts of media and mediation.

Annette Weissenrieder, Associate Professor of New Testament at San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, is author of Images of Illness in the Gospel of Luke. Insights in Ancient Medical Texts and many other books. Her main areas of research are ancient architecture, especially of temples, Vetus Latina Luke and Matthew, Greco-Roman medicine and philosophy, and New Testament anthropology. Robert B. Coote is Nathaniel Gray Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Professor of Hebrew Exegesis and Old Testament at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, CA. He is the author of Amos Among the Prophets, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, The Bible's First History, Early Israel, and In Defense of Revolution: The Elohist History, among other works.

Robert B. Coote is Professor of Old Testament at San Francisco Theological Seminary.