6078 Words

Genesis 1:1 to 11:32, taking away all verse numbers, has in the Greek LXX (Septuagint) 6078 words.

Iliad A', taking away all line numbers, has in Greek 4522 words.

The way in which Homer was transmitted from the poet himself to Peisistratus' time, or that of his sons, was by poet apprentices learning song after song (24 of the Iliad, 24 of the Odyssey, a few hymns) by heart.

This means, the 6078 words of the Greek LXX would be a possible feat to memorise orally.

So, this is a challenge to CMI (or others interested) : learn the first 11 chapters of Genesis by heart.

I am supposing all of it was transmitted orally, except chapter 1, since it was revealed to Moses on Sinai, while the chapters from 12 to 50 could be preserved in writing in the single Beduin tribe of Abraham and get stocked in Egypt. Homer, to make a scene easy to recall, stated the same thing over and over again, and used long descriptions so the audience (including the apprentice poets) were able to pick it up, the flow was not too fast. The redactors from Adam to Abraham would have instead made each "chapter" short, so it could be repeated over and over again. In fact, Bible chapters were divided by a bishop who was riding on hunt, and who knew all the Bible by heart.

Classically, scrolls of the books of the Bible have always been divided by blank spaces at the end (petuhoth) or middle (setumoth) of the lines. However, Langton is believed to be the one who divided the Bible into the standard modern arrangement of chapters. While Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro is also known to have come up with a systematic division of the Bible (between 1244 and 1248), it is Langton's arrangement of the chapters that remains in use today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Langton

But while we cannot rely on all pieces of Genesis "chapters 1 to 11" or even "2 to 11" (as the portion is known since Stephen Langton's day) correspond to Langton's chapters, we note that his chapter divisions often coincide with natural divisions of the content.

If on top of that chapter 1 (772 words, like JRRTOLKIEN adds up to 772 in ASCII, but that's before I took out the extra words, 1, 2 ... 31 that just number the verses, which are an even later division), if on top of that chapter 1 was not originally transmitted, but was revealed to Moses, this makes the burden on a memory even shorter. 772 - 31 = 741. 6078 - 741 = 5337. And 5337 is not all that much longer than Iliad A'. It's 118 % of it.

In other words, if Greeks could learn all of the Iliad, patriarchs could learn the reports on what happened from previous patriarchs, plus the ones they were redacting, in both cases by heart.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Nahum
1.XII.2020

Sancti Nahum Prophetae, in Begabar quiescentis.