Ehud Ben Zvi has been at the forefront of exploring how the study of social memory contributes to our understanding of the intellectual worldof the literati of the early Second Temple period and ...their textual repertoire. Many of his studies on the matter and several new relevant works are here collected together providing a very useful resource for furthering research and teaching in this area. The essays included here address, inter alia, prophets as sites of memory, kings as sites memory, Jerusalem as a site of memory, a mnemonic system shaped by two interacting 'national' histories, matters of identity and othering as framed and explored via memories, mnemonic metanarratives making sense of the past and serving various didactic purposes and their problems, memories of past and futures events shared by the literati, issues of gender constructions and memory, memories understood by the group as 'counterfactual' and their importance, and, in multiple ways, how and why shared memories served as a (safe) playground for exploring multiple, central ideological issues within the group and of generative grammars governing systemic preferences and dis- preferences for particular memories.
This article is about constructions of internal territorial space and its ideological implications. It discusses the lay of the land of the Israelite society that the literati "saw" when reading ...Deuteronomy. It focuses on the horizontal, non-hierarchical arrangement of an array of cities that so strongly characterizes the book. Then it addresses what the preference for this array suggests in terms of the polity that Deuteronomy conjures and how this preference relates to both central ideological tenets of the book and additional features of its imagined polity. Neither the imaginary landscape of the Israelite polity nor the polity itself evoked by Deuteronomy were consistent with those evoked by any of the "historiographical" works in Yehud. As a result, its literati had to assume either that such a landscape was never actually fulfilled in any period of the past or try to conform Deuteronomy's landscape to other past-shaping, ideological texts (and related memories) that existed in their core repertoire, or both, in a complementary, balancing way.
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This article explores, from a perspective informed by Social Memory studies, memories of kings of Judah (/Israel) in three different corpora (the Deuteronomistic Historical Collection, the Prophetic ...Book Collection and Chronicles). It draws attention to the interdependence between memories of kings and other characters populating the world of memory evoked by each of these corpora and explores the ways in which the worlds of memory evoked by each of them interacted, informed and balanced each other within what we may call the "comprehensive mnemonic system" of the literati. The article sheds light on generative grammars governing systems of preferences and dis-preferences for certain types of memories of kings in each of the corpora and across them, and at times, even across cultures, and highlights that the world of memory of the Yehudite literati of the late Persian/early Hellenistic period was shaped by a consistency of inconsistency, and an overall coherence manifested through a seeming lack thereof that served well the social reproduction of the group.
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The goal of this article is to draw attention to a seemingly strange, generative pattern that, at times and under certain conditions, has shaped socially shared worlds of imagination among ...subordinate groups within imperial or hierarchically asymmetric structures of power, especially among “retainer” groups who saw themselves as a “cultural elite” of the subordinate group. I am referring to a generative pattern that in a significant number of such groups, across time and space, has led to constructions of worlds of imagination, and vicarious participation in them through readings or other social acts of imagination that involved “bracketing the empire out.” The article focuses on the world of the literati of late Persian Yehud/Judah, and especially the bracketing out of Ramat Rahel, the most obvious and monumental, explicit, imperial site in the province, but a number of various examples from diverse historical and geographical contexts are also brought to bear to make a point that this is a well-instantiated pattern. The article then concludes with a discussion of what was often gained by acts of imagination and memory involved in bracketing out “empire” and under which circumstances such acts tended to be historically likely.
This volume aims to examine the literary and socio-historical relationship between the Books of Chronicles and the priestly literature in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel. Experts across this body of ...literature come together to examine the connections and interactions between specific texts, ideas, and socio-historical contexts of the literary works, as well as explore broader themes in the relationship between them.
The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in ...Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. BZAW welcomes submissions that make an original and significant contribution to the field; demonstrate sophisticated engagement with the relevant secondary literature; and are written in readable, logical, and engaging prose.
The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in ...Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. BZAW welcomes submissions that make an original and significant contribution to the field; demonstrate sophisticated engagement with the relevant secondary literature; and are written in readable, logical, and engaging prose.
The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in ...Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. BZAW welcomes submissions that make an original and significant contribution to the field; demonstrate sophisticated engagement with the relevant secondary literature; and are written in readable, logical, and engaging prose.
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