I’d be quite surprised to find that the “strong oral tradition” preceded the religious texts in any culture.
When your world is confusing, puzzling and dangerous, and the priests claim to have the direct line to supernatural forces and insist you appease them or get swept away by floods, burned by fires, and starved by famines, it becomes far more important to believe what is safe to believe than strive for accuracy.
Somebody move that gun pointed at my head and I’ll tell you what I really believe. 
The Torah/Pentateuch, (as well as the Heptateuch proposed by some scholars that includes Joshua and Judges), fits the role of the anthropological meaning of Myth. Myth is story that sets out truths that a people understand to be relevant. By providing the Law in the context of the Story, the Law is shown to be a part of the history of the people. Rather than merely a set of arbitrary rules to be followed, the Law is shown to have sprung from the interaction of the people and their god.
Myth, (for that matter, history and biography prior to the eighteenth century Enlightenment) was used for moral instruction. Facts were good, but the meaning and message were more important. As to the interpretations, they began several hundred years later. Under the Seleucid (Greek) empire, there was a movement among some Jews to embrace Hellenization, moving away from their traditional roots. When Antiochus IV was sucked into the politics of Jewish unrest, he decided to destroy the Jewish religion to undercut the urges of rebellion among the more orthodox Jews. This led to a more general uprising against him that is documented in the four books of the Maccabees. Following the death of Antiochus fighting the Parthians, the Seleucids faced their own civil war over the rightful succession and they backed off on the persecution they had begun. The Hellenizers and the Orthodox were still upset with each other, of course, and the first efforts to reconsider and further interpret scripture began in that period. One factor in the collapse of the Seleucid empire was the advance of Rome into the eastern Mediterranean.
The factions in the various civil wars tended to align along religious lines, leading to a movement, (the Pharisees), to especially lay out the meaning of the scriptures for day to day life.
After several civil wars and more Roman interference, Judaea finally revolted against Rome and was utterly crushed. With the destruction of the Temple, (which put an end to sacrifices that could only be performed there), and the general interference of the Romans in Jewish life, the reconsideration of scriptures, originally a oral-only effort, began to be written and eventually (around 200) began to take shape as the Talmud. (With the destruction of the Temple and further Roman interference, most of what became the Talmud was written in Babylon, away from the turmoil of the Levant.)
Really? Christianity developed for twenty years before Paul wrote anything and continued for another 60 before enough texts could be assembled (after 60 more years) into a form that would, at a future date, become scripture.
I think you’re way off base here, but your opening sentence, although consistent with your premise, is incorrect. (In fact, that mistranslation has persisted through millennia of superb Christian philology, in my opinion, because of the convenient “them Law us Spirit” sloganeering.)
“Torah” never was connected, etymologically, with “law,” for which a whole bunch of words is used (in the Torah :)) in English commandments (mitzvoth), laws, obligations, tenets, etc.
Rather,
The word “Torah” in Hebrew is derived from the root ירה, which in the hif’il conjugation means “to guide/teach” (cf. Lev 10:11). The meaning of the word is therefore “teaching”, “doctrine”, or “instruction”; the commonly accepted “law” gives a wrong impression.[6] Other translational contexts in the English language include custom, theory, guidance,[7] or system.[8]
It seems to me the bible is exactly what it seems -
It’s an origin story and history book (same thing?) that explains where how God and the people came to be and how things are- basically the facts of the world. It’s a collection of laws. For many people, these origin/history stories serve many purposes, including justifying the status quo or claims to lost land and privileges.
I Think many people underestimate oral tradition - it can be incredibly precise and consistent over the generations simply because it is The Word - to be repeated literally word-for-word. I have no doubt that like Iliad and Odyssey, something that must be repeated precisely becomes embedded in the minds of those who say and hear. People have often committed to memory book-length scripts and scriptures - human memory can be amazing, and is tuned to sequential recollection.
This is important for another reason - the priests and the people will want the exact same words rather than paraphrasing because huge doctrinal different can result from changes a word or phrase. I suspect the rote of the Pentateuch was hand-in-glove with the resulting dogma answers based on its precise wording, and writing down was just a bonus.
I would be more impressed by the Bible if it weren’t just about the most mind-numbingly boring book ever written.
The Torah was meant to be a book of G-d’s laws. The sole purpose of the story portions are to a) establish the source of G-d’s authority to make the laws, and b) to tell the events that some of the laws exist to commemorate.
Those all mean exactly the same thing in this context. There may be debate over what the best word is to describe them, but whether they are teachings, guides, or customs, they still are the main purpose of the Torah. They cover at least half of the entire five books.
Torah has never meant “history book” or “book of stories,” which is what other people were arguing the purpose was. Those are other parts of the Tanakh.
That’s because you’re not reading the right parts.
Do you have evidence of this? Clearly the Torah as we know it today was a combining of various oral traditions, which is why we have two creation stories. But it also takes the story of the Flood from Gilgamesh, and there was certainly evidence that the writers of the Bible were exposed to that story.
It is telling that though the Torah was handed to Moses, the stories in Judges mention the Ark of the Covenant all the time but no one was bound by, followed, or even mentioned the Law.
I disagree. I think the Torah, and the Tanakh as whole, are first and foremost the Story of the People of Israel, a shared history and tradition intended to hold us together as a people. The laws are an important part of that story, but they’re not its sole purpose.
But then, I’d expect the Diaspora-Orthodox perspective to differ from the Zionist-Secular one.
Really? What if you wanted to remember facts about where the good water and grazing was from year to year, and what the reason was that you went here and not there, and who was related to whom and what everyone’s ancestry was, and so on, and so on? If “I’d be quite surprised” flies in GQ, then “I’d be quite surprised” to find that remembering things accurately wasn’t extremely important to people who had never learned to write.
Which doesn’t really address my assertion that you can’t judge people’s ability to remember and quote accurately by looking at the results of a parlour game which isn’t being taken seriously by the players, much less being played by people who’ve been highly motivated to master the skill. See also my answer to Monty.
From a narrative standpoint, that’s actually kind of low-key awesome, isn’t it?
Picture it: some guy mundanely goes on and on about how X begat Y who begat Z, and in the same bland tone of voice casually mentions how the King of the Universe appeared unto Abraham and spoke of smiting those who are evil in His sight, and then in that same bland tone of voice tells a dull story about one of the matriarchs.
It’s all just a bunch of stuff that happened, right?
So here’s how many cubits wide and tall it was, and then a great miracle happened there, and then he planted a vineyard, and then his grandkids grew up, such that here’s a long genealogy including a guy who was a great hunter – not, y’know, that he was inhumanly good at it; he was just, like, the Jim Thorpe of hunters, is all.
That was before editors were invented.
A quick search on
‘pentateuch oral tradition’ yields several results, including this:
This is exactly it. Not only are you supposed to do X, but here is why you do this.
We are bored silly with long genealogies because they mean so little to a modern, non-nomadic society. In a world where you have only kin to rely on, and where importance is as much about heredity as anything, where tribe matters - then begats are important.
Look at the hoops that the gospel writers jumped through to “prove” Jesus was of Bethlehem and the descendant of David. The family was from Nazareth up north, but they found an excuse to plunk him in Bethlehem that would satisfy the gullible public.
If you don’t write things down, you end up with St. Paul’s Christianity. The followers of Jesus generally hung around the temple repeating an oral tradition, waiting for him to come again shortly and rescue the Jews from the Romans and establish the new Kingdom of Israel. Paul suffered some sort of brain attack, then began making up his own version that had a message for everyone, eventually supplanting the original to the point that his is the message we have today.
The existence of some oral traditions that got incorporated is not surprising. It seems that the contradictory stories could have been included so all those with traditions could read their traditions in the book.
I’m questioning the thousands of years part. I don’t know when the tribes began, but clearly the Joseph story was personifying the tribe into a founder. Plus, while it is not a part of the Torah, the story of David and the Davidic empire couldn’t be that old when the Bible was written.
But we don’t know how old the various strands woven into the Bible are.
Very good, Big T! 
Alessan:
Well, first of all, I’m specifically talking about, as per the OP, the Pentateuch - the five books of Moses. There’s practically no history in it that doesn’t relate somehow to the laws contained therein. And what is “tradition” if not those laws? Shabbat (to whatever degree one observes, even if not in Orthodox fashion, it is still marked as a special day), holidays, kosher (or, for those not observant, “kosher style”, but the style exists because the laws had been observed) foods, circumcision…some nowadays may say that the laws, as observed in detail by the Orthodox, are outdated, but who can deny that whatever “shared tradition” exists is due to these?
But yes, I’m coming from an Orthodox perspective. To quote the very first commentary of Rashi on the Pentateuch (who is quoting a Midrash) - “Rabbi Yitzchak says, The Torah should have started with “This month is to you” (Exodus 12:1),” because that’s the first commandment given to the Children of Israel. (He answers that it is to establish that G-d, as the creator of the world, has the right to grant the Land of Israel to whom he pleases.)" The fact that such a question could even be asked indicates that the purpose of the Torah (as seen by the Rabbis of the Mishnah, Midrash and Talmud) are the commandments for the Jewish people to follow.