In the Introduction, I observed that one of the chief accomplishments of Lord and Parry's work was to alert scholars to the possibility of conceiving textuality in diverse ways. The dominant literary conception understands texts to be fixed, linear sequences of words; variants among parallel versions are understood as deviations from an authentic original. By way of contrast, Lord and Parry's work points to an alternate conception in which variants reflect a text's natural diversity. In this so-called oral conception of textuality, no single version is more authentic or original than any other. Texts are by nature multiform.

In this chapter, I would like to explore the ways in which adopting an oral conception of textuality helps us see m. Shevuot differently. The inquiry focuses on analysis of the relationship between m. Shevuot and its tannaitic parallels. I argue that the gains of adopting the oral conceptual lens when examining this body of materials are twofold. First, by putting aside literary notions of textuality, we open ourselves to the possibility of recognizing nonlinear forms of continuity among the parallel traditions. While it is certainly true that parallel versions reproduce linear sequences of words in a verbatim fashion, too much attention to the literal correspondences between parallel traditions can blind us to the presence of other, equally compelling, but nonliteral correspondences. The second gain of this exercise is intimately connected with the first.