MEMORY AND HISTORY IN CHRISTIANITY

AND jUDAISM

MICHAEL A. SIGNER

Editor

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

Notre Dame, Indiana

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Memory in Ancient Israel

Marc Brettler

After a decade of radical change, the study of biblical history has become a veritable minefield. Until recendy, most biblical scholars believed that the Hebrew Bible was basically true, and that writing a history of Israel on the basis of biblical texts was a demanding but eminendy feasible venture.1 Now, the situation has changed radically-the historicity of many of the fundamental "events" of the Bible, ranging from the existence of the patriarchs or King David to the historicity of the Exodus, has been questioned. The tide of a recent book, In Search of'Ancient Israe/',2 which suggests that the results of such a search are negative, is typical of the swinging pendulum. Despite this trend, which is fundamentally icono­clastic, there are those who allow for the positive, constructive role of memory3 within ancient Israel. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, for example, in Zakhor: jewish History and Jewish Memory, claims that only with the rise of Wissenschaft des ]udentums in the early nineteenth century did history begin to displace the positive and significant role of memory within the Jewish community. Yerushalmi observes: "The biblical appeal to remem­ber thus has litde to do with curiosity about the past. Israel is told that it must be a kingdom of priests and a holy people; nowhere is it suggested that it become a nation of historians. "4

Here I will examine more carefully the role of memory within ancient Israel, directing my attention in two directions. I will first move beyond the Hebrew Bible to examine attitudes toward history in classical rabbinic literature. This survey suggests that the recent approach, which sees much of the "historiography" of the Bible as memory rather than actual history, is fundamentally correct. My use of rabbinic materials to illuminate the Hebrew Bible is based on the belief that it is often improper to draw a clear dividing line between biblical Israel and post-biblical Judaism, or between pre-exilic Israel and post-exilic Judaism.5 While it is true that certain fun­damental religious and social changes occurred as a result of the destruc­tion of the first temple in 586 B.C.E.,6 and later, of the Second Temple in

I

2. MARC BRETTLER

70 c.E., there is much continuity between pre-exilic, exilic, and post-exilic religion and that of the classical rabbinic period.

After examining these post-biblical texts, I will turn to the exodus tra­dition. Specifically, I will examine the implications of variant stories told within the canon, focusing on the plague narrative. This will dovetail with my presentation of the post-biblical material, for a detailed examination of the various ways a particular "event" is narrated forces us, I believe, to reexamine the notion of the Hebrew Bible as history. Furthermore, the study of such variants encourages us to ask the right questions: Why does the canon contain so many different and, in some cases, contradictory ac­counts, and what does this imply in terms of history, memory, tradition, and their roles in ancient Israel? These questions are influenced by canoni­cal criticism, which has developed within biblical studies during the last twenty years. 7

There is a common perception that Judaism is a historical religion, 8 and that the Rabbis were concerned with history per se. As eminent a scholar as Ephraim E. Urbach can speak of the Rabbis' "interest taken in history and events of the past. "9 Yet Urbach's reconstruction of "The Con­ception of History among the Sages" is fundamentally incorrect because he has failed to appreciate the difference between history and (collective) memory. In the rabbinic tradition, following the biblical tradition, memory, often refashioned or newly created memory, was extremely important, es­pecially as it related to religious practice and to group identity. There was, however, little interest in history in the sense of the past for its own sake. This position is illustrated most dearly by the rabbinic dictum, "what was, was," which is used in the sense of "the past is irrelevant" in order to show that the actual past has no bearing on halakhic (Jewish legal) practice.10 This is a truly remarkable adage for a community which is supposedly ob­sessed with history!

Even more decisive is Mishnah Hagigah 2.:r, which forbids specula­tion on "what is before," as well as "what follows, what is above, and what is below," and suggests that it would be better for individuals engaged in such speculation if they were never born.11 There is much discussion of the exact meaning of the phrase "what is before," and some sages connect it to mystical speculation concerning what existed before the first day; or before the completion of creation. Yet that is not the obvious meaning of the phrase. Indeed the Tosefta, the collection of non-canonical material from the period of the Mishnah, explicitly polemicizes against the view that "what is before" refers to events before the completion of the week of creation; the Tosefta glosses "what is before" with the phrase "what was," indicating that the reference is to the past in general. 12 This inter-

MEMORY IN ANCIENT ISRAEL 3

pretation is buttressed by the likelihood that the rabbinic expression is a reflection of the Akkadian formula "what precedes and what follows, what is to the right and to the left, what is above and what is below," which is very similar to the one found in the Mishnah .13

Though there is no single view of history in the rabbinic period, the predominant conception of history within the rabbinic world is best summarized by Urbach's Jerusalem colleague, Moshe Herr.14 Herr notes, "Without a doubt, the rabbis were not interested at all in the real, his­torical images of the Bible, but in the lesson that a well-known personality could or may teach further generations." 15 This factor is responsible for major revisions of the past on the part of the Rabbis-it is not that they could not see what the text actually said, but that they appreciated the im­portance of the canonical text for the life of the community, and revised what the biblical text said through interpretation, often radical interpre­tation, to serve that community's needs. Their use of history is funda­mentally didactic. This agrees with the following characterization of the ancient biblical historians by Nahum Sarna: "They were not recording his­tory for its own sake but were making theological-didactic interpretations of selected historical events. "16 It also fits in with the observations of sev­eral scholars concerning the Hebrew root zkr, which is often used in the Hebrew Bible not in the abstract sense of remembering, but in relation to a particular cultic act.

Herr's concluding remarks are insightful enough to quote in full:

There is no fundamental difference between the rabbi's treatment of the Bible or the events of the Second Temple period, and their treatment of contemporaneous events. The few exceptions prove the rule-the rabbis were not interested in historiography, even though they thought that the past could educate and even though they had a historical per­spective. They do not object to historiography; they are indifferent to it. The rabbis were ahistorical; moreover, they never paid attention to the question, "why engage in historiography," and that is determi­native. For it seems that there was no question in their experience that was more boring and meaningless than the question of the need and the purpose of a description of exactly what transpired.

Herr's view finds a parallel in the approach of Jacob Neusner and his students to the conception of history in various rabbinic texts.17 The Chris­tian and Judaic Invention of History, edited by Neusner, contains a set of essays emphasizing the social dimensions of accounts of the past; these are called "History Fabricated," "History Transcended," and "History

4 MARC BRETTLER

Invented. "18 The following remark from Neusner's concluding essay, "The Role of History in Judaism," is especially apposite: "The upshot is that in an exact sense, 'event' has no meaning at all in Judaism, since Judaism forms culture through other than historical modes of existence. "19

The Rabbis were not unique among the Jews of antiquity in their in­difference to the actual past, creatively recasting earlier traditions, and when this did not suffice, creating tradition to justify their ideological, usu­ally religious goals. This same tendency is seen in Josephus. Toward the beginning of his Antiquities, Josephus promises, "The precise details of our Scripture records will, then, be set forth, each in its place, as my nar­rative proceeds, that being the procedure that I have promised to follow throughout this work, neither adding nor omitting anything. "20 Yet, as any reader of Josephus knows, his account is far from an exact retelling of the Bible known to us from either the Masoretic text or from the Septuagint; there are glaring omissions, additions, cases of rearrangement, and changes. Louis Feldman has studied many of Josephus' changes as they relate to particular biblical characters and has shown how Josephus has been in­fluenced decisively by Hellenistic literature and has often assimilated bib­lical characters into Hellenistic types or has revised stories so they would not be offensive to his Hellenistic audience.21 Josephus' method was typi­cal of pre-modern historians, even those who might claim they are repro­ducing their sources exactly.

This brief examination of the rabbinic notion of history, suggesting a lack of concern with the actual past, is striking given the biblical com­mands of zkr, "remember." Before turning to the exodus tradition, I would like to examine the use of zkr in reference to the exodus. Others have of­fered comprehensive studies of this word,Z2 I will instead look at its use in two central contexts: Exodus 13 and several texts in Deuteronomy.23

Exodus 13=3-IO reads:24

And Moses said to the people, "Remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how YHWH freed you from it with a mighty hand: no leavened bread shall be eaten. You go free on this day, in the month of Abib. So when Y HWH has brought you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which He swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall observe the following practice: Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a pilgrimage festival of YHWH. Throughout the seven days unleavened bread shall be eaten; no leavened bread shall be found with you, and no leaven shall be found in all your territory.

ME MORY IN ANCIENT ISRAEL 5

And you shall explain to your son on that day, 'It is because of what YHWH did for me when I went free from Egypt.' And this shall serve you as a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead-in order that the teaching of YHWH may be in your mouth-that with a mighty hand YHWH freed you from Egypt. You shall keep this in­stitution at its set time from year to year."

This unit, which is filled with legislation, begins with the command: "Remember this day." As its continuation makes abundantly clear, this is not a command to remember for its own sake; rather, recalling the exodus is the motivation behind a set of laws. These laws include at least: (I) not eating leavened bread; (2) eating unleavened bread for seven day&; (3)

having a pilgrimage festival on the seventh day; (4) banishing leavening from the boundaries; ( 5) a formal recitation from parent to child of the events being commemorated; and perhaps ( 6) a commemoration of the event through the wearing of "a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead," which in rabbinic law is connected to the tefillin, or phy­lacteries.25 History itself, in the sense of an accurate reconstruction of the past, is not the main issue, indeed is not at all the issue of the opening com­mand, "remember the day"; instead, the cmnmand to remember is central because it serves to justify the law-it assures "that the teaching of YHWH may be in your mouth."

This idea that biblical remembering should not be conceived of as an abstract activity, but as one intimately connected to performance is already recognized in the Babylonian Talmud: "remembering leads to doing. "26

Alternatively, we should connect this biblical passage to Paul Connerton's understanding of ritual commemoration in his influential book How Soci­eties Remember: "What, then, is being remembered in commemorative ceremonies? Part of the answer is that a community is reminded of its iden­tity as represented by and told in a master narrative. "27 A basic character­istic of this identity in the case of Israel is being a newcomer, who is never­theless beloved of the deity.28 The positions of the Talmud and of Connerton are not identical; the Talmud emphasizes the importance of the ritual itself, while Connerton, and independently of him, the Egyptologist Jan Ass­mann/9 emphasize the social role of constituting a community through rituals which tell of past "events." Yet, both suggest that it is not the past itself, and certainly not the past reconstructed exactly through historical method, that is typically important to societies.

The case is similar with the phrase "you shall remember that you were slaves in Egypt" and its variants, which appear five times in Deuteronomy. The phrase never appears in isolation; this too suggests that the act of

6 MARC BRETTLER

memory itself is not central. Rather, it appears as a motivation of five dif­ferent laws: the Sabbath (s:rs), treating slaves properly (rs:rs), observing the pilgrimage festivals (r6:n), treating the resident alien, orphan, and widow properly (2.4:18), and leaving produce in the field for the resident alien, orphan, and widow (2.4:2.2).30 Here, too, "remembering leads to doing."

These texts, then, do not focus on memory in the sense that we are used to thinking about it. It is memory applied, not accurate historical re­search, that is called for within this legislation. These texts do not en­courage historia in its etymological sense of "investigation. "31 This is not because the ancient Israelites did not investigate or search out; note for ex­ample Job 5:27, where Job's friend Eliphaz concludes his first speech con­cerning God's retribution, "See, we have inquired into this and it is so; Hear it and accept it." Indeed, such investigation typifies the wisdom tra­dition, which nourishes the Book of Job.32 Investigation is also found in legal texts; so for example, the people who suspect that an entire city has apostatized are told according to Deuteronomy 13:15 to "investigate and inquire and interrogate thoroughly." Thus historia in the most general, etymological sense of investigation was well known in Israel; it simply was not typically applied to history in the sense of a reconstruction of the past based on investigation. The Bible, the collection of ancient Israelite litera­ture that has come down to us, suggests that the Israelites were largely agnostic toward the real past. 33

This attitude explains why there is so much variation within the Hebrew Bible concerning the most fundamental issues, such as the exodus. For ex­ample, biblical scholarship has suggested that the plague narrative of the Book of Exodus is comprised of several strands which have been com­bined. This is easiest to demonstrate in the plague of blood, which as it now stands is a combination of two complete accounts by the Yahwist and the Priestly writer. The account of the Yahwist, who according to Brevard Childs, "shows tremendous freedom and imagination in fashioning his ac­count, "34 reads:35

Then YHWH said to Moses, "Pharaoh is obstinate; he refuses to free the nation. Go to Pharaoh tomorrow morning, just when he is going to the water; confront him at the bank of the Nile. Be sure to bring the walking stick that had turned into the snake. Tell him, 'YHWH, the God of the Hebrews already sent me to you with this message, "Free my nation so they can worship me in the steppe," but so far-you haven't heeded me. Thus says YHWH-this is how you will know that I am YHWH: I am about to strike the water of the Nile with the

ME MORY IN AN C IENT ISRAEL 7

walking stick that I am holding-it will turn to blood. All the fish in the Nile will die, and the Nile will stink. The Egyptians will be unable to drink water from the Nile."' He raised the walking stick and hit the water of the Nile while Pharaoh and his servants were watching; all the water of the Nile turned into blood. All the fish in the Nile died, and the Nile stank, and the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile. Pharaoh turned around and went home, paying no attention to this as well. All the Egyptians dug around the Nile looking for water to drink, because they could not drink the water of the Nile. A week went by from the time YHWH contaminated the Nile.

In contrast, the Priestly account reads:

YHWH said to Moses, "Tell Aaron, 'Take your walking stick and stick out your hand over the water bodies of Egypt: over their rivers, canals, over their ponds-over every place where there is water-it will become blood. Blood will be throughout the entire land of Egypt­even on the trees and rocks."' Blood was throughout the entire land of Egypt. The Egyptian court conjurers did the same thing, surrepti­tiously, so Pharaoh was unyielding, and did not heed them, just like YHWH had predicted.

These two accounts have been combined by an editor or redactor into a single more or less readable source. Yet, a careful reading shows clear dif­ferences between them, not merely in terms of style or vocabulary, but in content as well. To cite the most obvious differences: in one account, only Moses confronts Pharaoh, while in the other he is joined by Aaron; in one the plague is quite extensive, affecting the entire land of Egypt-rivers, canals, and ponds-while in the other only the Nile is affected; in one, Pharaoh's obstinacy is the motivation for the plague, while in the other his unyielding nature is noted at the end of the plague. A modern historian would have decided between these two versions of the same plague, would have "inquired" into the better source, and would have asked and an­swered: Was or wasn't Aaron involved? Was the plague limited or was it very extensive? When was Pharaoh's heart hard, and should it be expressed in terms of "obstinate" (Hebrew kbd) or "unyielding" (Hebrew IJzq)? But our redactor is no historian; he almost seems to delight, at least in this in­stance, in narrating both contradictory accounts in their entirety. 36

This celebration of diversity within the canon may be seen even more clearly if we move away from a close investigation of a particular plague and look at the structure of the plague narratives as a whole. We are used

8 MARC BRETTLER

to thinking of ten plagues, yet the number ten is the result of the combi­nation of two, or more likely three sources, none of which had all ten plagues. The longest, that of the Yahwist, had seven plagues: blood, frogs, swarms of insects, pestilence, hail, locusts, and death of the firstborn; the Priestly account had blood, frogs, lice, boils, and death of the firstborn, while the plague of darkness seems to be added from another account. Thus, the number ten is the result of the combination of these different, but partially overlapping accounts. The overlap is not only in the identi­cal plagues narrated in both, namely blood, frogs, and the death of the firstborn, but also in the account of lice, which parallels swarms of insects, and pestilence, which parallels boils. 37 In any case, though the redactor did succeed in creating an artistic whole,38 it is very striking that he did not take the simpler route of deciding which version was better or more correct. This is because the redactor did not care: both versions together served best to help constitute Israel as a community and to illustrate the key point of the story, found in Exodus ro:2-that the purpose of all the plagues and all of the wonders is "in order that you may know that I am Y HWH. "39 The historian's craft of sifting and weighing evidence would have gotten in the way of the fundamental goals of the narrative.

Even if one does not accept the very strong evidence for the source­critical division of the plague narratives, the existence of different tradi­tions concerning the plagues in two psalms is incontrovertible. In contrast to the account in Exodus, whieh in its current form narrates ten plagues, each of the psalms narrates seven plagues, though they do not agree on which plagues they were and on their order. Psalm 78 describes blood, swarms of frogs, locusts, hail affecting vegetation, hail affecting animals, pestilence, and the smiting of the firstborn, while Psalm ros describes dark­ness, blood, frogs, swarms of lice, hail, locusts, and the smiting of the first­born.40 There certainly was a collective memory of plagues against the Egyptians, but this collective memory did not compulsively determine ex­actly how many plagues there were or their exact order.

This tendency toward fluidity continued into later times as well. The Haggadah, the text read during the Passover Seder, recounts the following narrative, which is a borrowing from the Tannaitic midrash, Mekilta: "Rabbi Eliezer says: How do we know that every plague which God brought against the Egyptians really represents four plagues?"41 The appropriate prooftext is brought, and the mathematically proper conclusion that there were forty (4 X ro) plagues is adduced. This is then followed by Rabbi Akiva's observation and prooftext that each plague is really comprised of five ( 5 X ro) plagues, so there were, of course, not seven, not ten, not even forty,

ME MORY IN ANC IENT ISRAEL 9

but fifty plagues! The compiler of the midrash adduces these opinions of forty versus fifty plagues, but does not decide between them. This is espe­cially remarkable since both Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva use the same prooftext; one can easily imagine a discussion of whether that text legiti­mates multiplication by four or by five, but no such discussion is extant. Both traditions are allowed to stand, side by side.

In the context of the Passover Haggadah, this midrash is probably to be connected to the earlier statement, "the more one tells about the exodus, the better, "42 where the word, "to do more," is taken playfully as "to mul­tiply." This yields "the more one multiplies in relation to the telling of the exodus, the better." This playfulness is an important indicator of attitudes toward the past, for it is the constructed past that is being played with. The story of the exodus is being rewritten even in the post-biblical period so that it is a better story, not in the sense of a finer literary narrative, but in terms of better serving its primary goal, proving that God is indeed very powerful and therefore worthy of worship.

It may seem unwarranted to focus so much attention on the exodus tradition, since it represents only a small part of the historical traditions of the Hebrew Bible, but the "event" is in many ways paradigmatic,43 "more than a story told-it was a cul t enacted,44 fundamentally different from many other biblical historical texts. However, the exodus is not at all unique in reference to the central question we are looking at-the con­nection between history, memory, and tradition. I have shown elsewhere, for example, how the stories of Judges, and even the stories of David, which an earlier generation had considered to be the work of a Solomonic court historian,45 are also much more the product of memory than of history.46

In the late I97os, before "collective memory" entered the lexicon of biblical scholars, it was fashionable to talk about the Bible as story and/or history.47 These studies are still quite useful, though they need to be modi­fied to reflect our appreciation of the role of memory in history and the growing skepticism about the historicity of the details, and in many cases, even the broad outlines, of biblical historical texts.48 Some of these earlier studies correctly began to move away from the Bible as history to the Bible as story. I would suggest that the rabbinic models we examined support this movement. History is under-represented within the rabbinic corpus because history in the sense of research concerning the past as it actually happened was trivial to the rabbinic world-as it was trivial to the bibli­cal world. It is the story, especially as reflected in midrash Aggadah (narra­tive} that was so important for the Rabbis because this story helped to evoke the world and the values that they desired to teach and to perpetuate. 49 This

IO MARC BRETTLER

is no different from the situation in the biblical period, when stories were created or changed, often quite radically, for "theological-didactic rea­sons. "50 Thus, the sharp discontinuity which so many scholars see between the attitude toward history in the Bible and in the rabbinic period is ap­parent only-these scholars often incorrectly took the biblical stories at face value, rather than examining them in terms of function, where they clearly match their rabbinic counterparts. 51

Our understanding of both the rabbinic and biblical corpora has been enriched through various expositions of memory, especially collective memory, and its role in pre-modern societies, that is to say, societies before the rise of movable print, and especially those in which literacy was not high. 52 If biblical Israel should be compared with oral societies, the follow­ing observations by David Lowenthal are especially pertinent:

Absolute "truth" is a recent and uncommon criterion for evaluating accounts of the past. In most oral societies, the status of historical ac­counts depends more on the reputation of their narrators than on their faithfulness to known facts or their explanatory validity. For the Kuba, the true past is what the majority think worthy of belief; for the Tro­briands, it is whatever the ancestors have declared to be true, even events everyone knows did not happen. Seldom querying the logical feasibility of what they hear, oral audiences may comfortably embrace contradictory testimony about the past, even conflicting accounts by the same informant. 53

Lowenthal here emphasizes how and why memory, in contrast to the real past, typically changes. 54 This is done, he notes, especially in traditional societies, but in ours as well "to validate the present. "55 Lowenthal notes that "survival requires an inheritable culture, but it must be malleable as well as stable" 56 and "[t]he prime function of memory, then, is not to pre­serve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present. "57 He quotes Harold Pinter: "The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember. "58 This range, from accurate memories to fiction masquerading as memory, characterizes the biblical corpus. In this respect, ancient Israel is no dif­ferent from its neighbors, the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians. 59 This attitude toward the Hebrew Bible properly deprivileges the biblical text­it shows how the Hebrew Bible shares much with pre-modern history and even modern national history, but does not reflect in some unmediated fashion the events of the past. We must not approach the Hebrew Bible, which is pre-modern religious history, as contemporary secular history;

ME MORY IN ANC IENT ISRAEL II

the following characterization of medieval Church chronicles should also be applied to the Bible: "the truth was too important to leave to chance. "60

Finally, the proper appreciation of memory within the creation of biblical historical texts puts the Bible in its proper genre-it is no longer historical literature, where the biblical authors are envisioned as twentieth-century university historians. Rather, it is national history, precisely the type of his­tory which even in modern times has been most open to being rewritten or created and is most easily influenced by memory in all of its permuta­tions, with all of its problems and benefits.61

The demise of the Hebrew Bible as history does not mean the demise of the Hebrew Bible as a religious or cultural document. The texts that I have adduced suggest that the Hebrew Bible was not understood as his­tory in the biblical period-memory of the past was not invoked for its own sake. The stories of the Hebrew Bible, just like their counterparts, the most fanciful of the rabbinic stories, did not function as academic history, to narrate the real past, but as memory-to "legitimate a present social order"62 or "to render the present familiar. "63 The insight of the contem­porary Jewish feminist theologian, Judith Plaskow, hits the mark: "The Exodus story, as a story, is constitutive for Jewish self-understanding. "64 The function of so-called biblical historical texts as memory, as stories nar­rating a past, not the past, is properly appreciated in the most recent book on Jewish historiography, Amos Funkenstein's Perceptions of]ewish His­tory, where he characterizes Ruth and Esther as "historical novels," while emphasizing their importance as meaningful works within Israelite cul­ture. 65 I would generalize his idea concerning Ruth and Esther to much of the rest of the biblical corpus of "historical" texts. When reading the Hebrew Bible, we must therefore learn to interpret historical texts prop­erly: we must grow to appreciate their importance and their meaning for a society which took its stories, rather than its true history, very seriously.

NOTES

I would like to thank Ms. Susie Tanchel of Brandeis University for her assistance with an earlier draft of this essay. The section on rabbinic historiography is espe­cially indebted to discussions with Professor Isaiah Gafni of the Hebrew Univer­sity of Jerusalem. This essay was completed in August 1997 and has been slightly revised and updated. It has been impossible to incorporate the very extensive recent literature from the "Copenhagen School" ·(especially by Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson); I discuss their recent work in a forthcoming essay, "The Copenhagen School: The Historiographical Issues," presented at a 1999 confer­ence on the Copenhagen School at Northwestern University.

12. MARC BRETTLER

r. This set of assumptions is often associated with the Albright School, named for William Foxwell Albright, one of this century's most prolific and in­fluential American scholars of the Hebrew Bible. See the summary and critique of his methods in Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources, Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), esp. n-34.

2. Philip R. Davies, In Search of 'Ancient Israel', Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 148 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992).

3· I do not attempt to define "history" or "memory," but follow the pre­dominant use of these terms found in the other essays in this volume. The crucial point is that writing an objective history was never the goal of ancient biblical historians. Instead, memory, the way in which individuals and groups recalled events, which was subject to all of the problems and benefits which contempo­rary personal memory is subject to, was very determinative in shaping biblical his­torical texts. My understanding of how and why "memory" in this sense func­tioned in ancient Israel is developed below.

4· Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 10. This book has been at the center of controversy concerning the connection of memory and history within Jewish tradition; see most recently David N. Myers, "Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary," History and Memory 4, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1992): 129-46.

5. This point has been made by others, who have noted that these distinc­tions often convey a bias against (rabbinic) Judaism; see James Barr, Judaism­Its Continuity with the Bible, The Seventh Montefiore Memorial Lecture (Southampton: University of Southampton, 1968); Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology, trans. Edward Quinn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), esp. 1-66; and Rolf Rendtorff, "The Image of Postexilic Israel in German Bible Scholarship," in "Sh'arei Talmon": Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, ed. Michael Fishbane and Emanuel Tov (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 165-73. Extended examples of con­tinuity between the pre-exilic, exilic, post-exilic, and rabbinic traditions are shown in Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). I have explored this issue recently in "Judaism in the Hebrew Bible? The Transition from Ancient Israelite Religion to Judaism," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 429-47.

6. I prefer this date for the destruction of the First Temple; see Gershon Galil, "The Babylonian Calendar and the Chronology of the Last Kings of Judah," Bib­lica 72 (1991): 367--78; idem, "A New Look at the Chronology of the Last Kings of Judah," Zion 56 (1991): 5-19 (Hebrew: English summaryV-VI); and Ormond Edwards, "The Year of Jerusalem's Destruction. 2 Addaru 597 B.C. Reinterpreted," Zeitschrift fUr die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 104 (1992): 101-106.

7· See esp. Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), and the critique of Mark G. Brett, Biblical

ME MORY IN AN C IENT ISRAEL 13

Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I99I).

8. This is noted and polemicized against in Jacob Neusner, "The Role of History in Judaism: The Initial Definition," in The Christian and Judaic Invention of History, American Academy of Religion Studies in Religion 55, ed. Jacob Neusner (Atlanta: Scholars Press, I990), 247·

9· Ephraim E. Urbach, in "Halakhah and History," in Jews, Greeks and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity, Essays in Honor of WiUiam David Davies, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly and Robin Scroggs (Leiden: E. J. Brill, I976),

!2.0.

IO. Cf. e.g., the Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 5b. The relevant texts all appear in Urbach's article, cited in the previous note. My interpretation of these texts, however, differs radically from his. Unless noted, all translations from Hebrew texts are my own.

II. For a translation, see Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I988), 330.

I2. Tosefta Hagigah 2:7. For the text, see Saul Lieberman, The Tosefta (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), vol. 2, 382 (Hebrew). For a discussion, see idem, Tosefta Ki-Fshutah (New York: Jewish Theological Semi­nary of America, I962), vol. 5, 1295--96 (Hebrew).

13. The parallel was first adduced by S. E. Loewenstamm, "On an Alleged Gnostic Element in Mishna Hagigah ii, I," in Yehezkel Kaufmann Jubilee Volume: Studies in Bible and Jewish Religion Dedicated to Yehezkel Kaufmann on the Oc­casion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Menahem Haran Uerusalem: Magnes Press, 196o), Hebrew section n2-21 (Hebrew). For the idiom and its variants, see The As­syrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago: Oriental Institute, I968), vol. r, A, Part II, 272a (s.v. "arka 2b"). In terms of chronol­ogy, it is noteworthy that the idiom is found in Neo-Assyrian and Nco-Babylonian sources. The formulaic nature of this phrase in ancient Near Eastern texts is further bolstered by the evidence adduced by Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Fshutah, vol. 5, 1295.

14. Moshe Herr, "The Conception of History among the Sages," in Pro­ceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1977), I29-42 (Hebrew). This study of Herr is also re­lated to the Hebrew Bible by Yair Zakovitch, "Story Versus History," in Proceed­ings of the Eighth World Congress of]ewish Studies, Panel Sessions: Bible Studies and Hebrew Language (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1983 ), 48-49.

15. Herr, "The Conception of History among the Sages," 138. I6. Nahum M. Sarna, "Israel in Egypt," in Ancient Israel: A Short History

from Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1988), 51. I cannot fully agree with Sarna's perspective; he suggests that particular traditions are chosen for their didactic value, while I feel that often traditions are created or transformed to a very significant degree for didactic purposes.

14 MARC BRETTLER

17. See The Christian and Judaic Invention of History, ed. Jacob Neusner. These works do not, however, acknowledge Herr's seminal contribution.

18. Ibid., 143-2.08, by William Scott Green and Jacob Neusner. 19. Ibid., 2.46. 2.0. H. St. J. Thackery,]ewish Antiquities, Books I-IV, Loeb Classical Library

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 9 (§ 1.17). On the meaning and origin of this claim, see most recently Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephus, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 2.52-55.

21. Many of these studies are now collected in Louis H. Feldman,] osephus's Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Studies in josephus' Rewritten Bible (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).

22.. See the summary in Ronald Clements, "zkr," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. J. Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980), vol. 4, 64-86.

2.3. These two texts are related: Exodus 13 should be considered proto­Deuteronomic, and is thus indirectly connected to the texts in Deuteronomy. See Brevard Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, Studies in Biblical Theology 37 (Naperville, lll.: Allenson, 1962.), 54; Masseo Caloz, "Exode, Xlll, 3-16 et son rap­port au Deuteronome," Revue biblique 75 (1968): 5-62 and my "The Promise of the Land of Israel to the Patriarchs in the Pentateuch," Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies 5-6 (1982): xvi, esp. nn. 41 and 42.

2.4· I here largely follow the; translation of Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

25. For a discussion of this verse in relation to tefillin, see Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 2.7o-73 ("Excursus 5").

26. Menahot 43b. 27. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­

versity Press), 70· 28. See Peter Machinist, "The Question of Distinctiveness in Ancient Israel:

An Essay," Scripta Hierosolymitana 33 (1991) [= Ah, Assyria ... : Studies in As­syrian History and Ancient Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor, ed. Mordechai Cogan and Israel Ephal], 196-212, reprinted in Essential Papers on Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 42.o-42.

29. Jan Assmann, "Guilt and Remembrance: On the Theologization of His­tory in the Ancient Near East," History and Memory 2, no. I (Spring-Summer 1990): 5-33.

30. On the use of this phrase as a "motive clause," see Rifat Soncino, Motive Clauses in Hebrew Law: Biblical Forms and Near Eastern Parallels, Society of Bib­lical Literature Dissertation Series 45 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 198o), II2-13.

31. See Gerald A. Press, "History and the Development of the Idea of His­tory in Antiquity," History and Theory 16 (1977): 28o-96, esp. 284.

MEMORY IN ANCIENT ISRAEL 15

32.. See Rainer Albertz, "The Sage and Pious Wisdom in the Book of Job: The Friends' Perspective," in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. John G. Gammie and Leo G. Perdue (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 2.43-61.

3 3. For a contrasting opinion, see Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). I cannot accept his position; see my review in journal of Religion 70 (1990): 83-84.

34· Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Com­mentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 135, cf. 133-37·

3 5. The translation that follows is mine; most printed translations gloss over the differences found between the sources. My division into sources largely follows Moshe Greenberg, Understanding Exodus (New York: Behrman House, 1969). For a different division (following Martin Noth), which would suggest even greater differences between J and P, see Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O' Brien, Sources of the Pentateuch: Texts, Introductions, Annotations (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 38, q6.

36. Our redactor is not consistent in this respect; in the following plague of frogs, both sources are not included in their entirety. On the redaction of this unit, see Moshe Greenberg, "The Redaction of the Plague Narrative in Exodus," in Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed. Hans Goedicke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 2.43-52.; see esp. 2.52., where Greenberg speaks of the redaction in terms of "enrichment" and "multivalence of events."

37· On these parallels or "pairs," see ibid., 2.46. 38. Ibid. 39· Childs, Exodus, 143-44, plays down the significance of the didactic ele­

ment with the Exodus plague narrative; this may be accurate in terms of the text's prehistory, but does not reflect the current place of 10:1-3 in the complete narrative.

40. My analysis of these psalms follows Samuel E. Loewenstamm, The Evo­lution of the Exodus Tradition, trans. Baruch J. Schwartz Uerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992.), 79-86, 184-88. For a different analysis of these psalms, see Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken, 1986), 7S·

41. Jacob Z. Lauterbach, Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1933), 2.51. For the text in the Haggadah, see The Passover Haggadah with English Translation, Introduction and Commentary, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1953), 42.-43.

42.. Ibid., 2.2.-2.3. 43· I have borrowed this term from Van Austin Harvey, The Historian and

the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (London: SCM, 1967), 353-58; on the influence of the exodus motif on other biblical texts, see Yair Zakovitch, "And You Shall Tell Your Son ... " The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible Uerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), esp. 46-98.

44· See Connerton, How Societies Remember, 43, in reference to certain cele­brations of history by the Nazis, which like the exodus story, involved substan­tial revisionism.

16 MARC BRETTLER

4 s. See especially the influential article by Gerhard von Rad, "The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel," in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (London: SCM, 1984), 166-204.

46. See my "Never the Twain Shall Meet? The Ehud Story as History and Lit­erature," Hebrew Union College Annual 62. (1991): 2.85-304 and "The Book of Judges: Literature as Politics," Journal of Biblical Literature 108 ( 1989 ): 395-418, and my "Biblical Literature as Politics: The Case of Samuel," in Religion and Poli­tics in the Ancient Near East (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 1996) and The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (London: Routledge Press, 1995).

47· See James Barr, "Story and History in Biblical Theology," journal of Re­ligion 56 (1976): 1-17; R. J. Coggins, "History and Story in Old Testament Study," journal for the Study of the Old Testament 11 ( 1979 ): 36-46;John J. Collins, "The 'Historical Character' of the Old Testament in Recent Biblical Theology," Catho­lic Biblical Quarterly 41 (1979): 185-204; and Yair Zakovitch, "Story versus His­tory," 4 7-6o.

48. In this last respect, the study of Zakovitch, which is not well-known, has anticipated many recent developments.

49· See now the insightful analyses of these stories in Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: John Hop­kins University Press, 1999).

so. This term is borrowed from Sarna, above, though I use it somewhat dif­ferently.

51· The main difference between the rabbinic and biblical depictions of his­tory is that so much of the rabbinic material is presented with biblical prooftexts or allusions; this is a stylistic difference only. It might look like another difference is that the historical texts from the rabbinic period are concerned predominantly with the distant past, while the biblical texts care about the recent past. However, given the current revisionism concerning the dating of biblical texts, it is quite pos­sible that both corpora were concerned with the more distant, rather than the im­mediate, past.

52.. The meager evidence concerning schools and literacy in ancient Israel does not suggest widespread literacy; see James L. Crenshaw, "Education in An­cient Israel," journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985): 6o-15; Menahem Haran, "On the Diffusion of Literacy and Schools in Ancient Israel," Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 40 (1988): 81-95; and James L. Crenshaw, Education in Ancient Israel: Across the Deadening Silence, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1998). For a contrasting view, see Aaron Demsky, "Education in the Biblical Period," Encyclopaedia ]udaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972.), vol. 6, 382.-98. On writing curbing social memory, see Connerton, How So­cieties Remember, 75--76 and 113, n. s; on the printing press as a conservative force on memory, see David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2.14.

53· Ibid., 2.35. 54· Ibid., 206-2.10.

ME MORY IN AN C IENT ISRAEL

55· Ibid., 369. 56. Ibid., 69. 57· Ibid., 210.

17

58. Ibid., 193, citing Thomas P. Adler, "Pinter's Night: A Stroll Down Memory Lane," Modern Drama 17 (1974): 462.

59· Assmann, "Guilt and Remembrance: On the Theologization of History in the Ancient Near East."

6o. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, zo66-IJD7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 120, cf. n8-20.

61. See the essays collected in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

62. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 3. 63. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 39· 64. Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Per­

spective (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 16. The italics are in the original.

65. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 ), 57-58.