But as Gísli Sigurðsson does for the Icelandic sagas, he does not think anything that appears in the Bible looks like the text of an oral bard or storyteller.81 Most of the “traditional language” found in the Bible can be accounted for by literary invention or by the borrowing of written language from, for example, the Assyrian world.82 This is really two different things. Borrowing from written language is certainly part of the oral-and-written process I am outlining, as illustrated in Lars Lönnroth’s