Chapter Eight. The Bible In The Making: Slavonic Creation Stories

The article focuses on the interface between the Biblical Creation account and Slavonic folk cosmogony, as mirrored in oral tradition. Exploring the encounter between the Holy Scriptures and ethnopoetics, it approaches phenomena of popular faith which exemplify correspondences between the written accounts of the Book of Genesis (both canonical and apocryphal versions), and their oral expression through vernacular language(s). In this, it examines the relationship between Holy Writ and its oral counterparts. It could be argued that the Slavonic folklore version of the Book of Genesis not only exemplify the encounters between the written canon and the local oral traditions, but also represents the unfolding of a certain oral Ur-hypertext, the earliest existence of which preceded the actual formation of the Biblical text itself. This oral Ur-hypertext provided the fabric and created context from which the written text of the Bible eventually sprang. This Ur-hypertext did not only beget, foster and nourish the corpus of texts which letter formed the written body of the Bible, but also survived to the present day in oral traditions of many religious communities as clusters of verbal and ritual texts constituting the framework of their belief systems. Slavonic oral tradition represents one such case.