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.
A review copy arrived some time back. I’ve worked through its contents and wish to make the following observations on the book. But before I do, please note the Table of Contents (the contents tab on the left of the page).
There are 31 essays in this volume and all but six of them have appeared previously. There is a fairly wide range of texts examined and most of the essays are interesting. But three of them are VERY interesting:
- Reading Chronicles and Reshaping the Memory of Manasseh
- When Yhwh Tests People: General Considerations and Particular Observations Regarding the Books of Chronicles and Job
- Social Sciences Models and Mnemonic/ Imagined Worlds: Exploring Their Interrelations in Ancient Israel
The work in hand extends to over 700 pages and every page has one central point: memory. Or to be more precise, ‘Site of Memory’. And what is that exactly?
‘Site of Memory’ is used here to refer to any socially constructed space, place, event, figure, text or the like- whether it is manifested ‘materially’ or only in the mind of members of a social group- whose presence in the relevant cultural milieu evokes or was meant to evoke core images or aspects of images of the past held by the particular social group who lives in that cultural milieu.
If that seems an ambitious project, it’s because it is. How, after all, are we supposed to glean what memories various texts provoke in modern readers, much less those who lived thousands of years ago?
To state the problem another way, how are we supposed to know what the person on the other end of a phone call is saying when we only hear what the person near us is saying? How are we to know what ancient readers hear when ancient texts speak when all we have is the text doing the speaking and not the ancient doing the hearing?
There is no doubt that we are well equipped to infer certain facts when we hear just half of a ‘call’:
‘No, I can’t make it to dinner tomorrow, how about we make it Saturday?’
‘Ok then, Saturday works. See you at 7.’
It’s fair to infer that the person on the other end of the line has declined dinner on some day of the week and that he or she has agreed to both a time and a day. But that’s all we know. We don’t know the details of the restaurant or anything about the other person at all.
And that, it seems to me, is the problem with memory studies on the whole. Texts surely do intend to provoke something in the readers. Jeremiah’s ‘remember Shiloh’ certainly is a very fine example of that provocation to remembrance of a particular textual event. The problem we run into though is that we may well understand Jeremiah’s meaning but we are lost in terms of his audience’s understanding of that sermon.
Ben Zvi realizes all of that, I think, which is why he writes
Of course, written texts or collections of texts are not themselves memories. They may, inter alia, encode, communicate, shape, reshape, recall memories, but they are not memories. Only people can have memories.
Indeed! And we are at a loss precisely because we have no people to question concerning how texts provoked or affected memories in their minds or in the minds of anyone else.
In short, then, the entire ‘memory’ project is a pipe dream. It bears the resemblance of scientific enquiry because it uses social-scientific terminology and is very popular in various corners of biblical studies. There are memory sessions and sections at academic conferences. All of which serves to legitimize what is, as far as I can objectively tell, a pursuing of imaginary readings.
That doesn’t mean that there are interesting things to be found in the present volume or in the whole ‘social memory’ quest. There certainly are. But what are we to do with the delights we pluck off the tree of social memory studies once we have them in hand? If we bite into them with any force at all they evaporate into the ether because they are ephemeral and imaginary.
There is plenty of ‘fruit’ to be plucked from the social memory tree here planted and tended by Ben Zvi. Unfortunately, there’s nothing nutritious in that fruit because it consists of air. It is wispy and attractive and tempting like cotton candy. But like cotton candy there’s nothing to it except a bit of a sugar high headache and sticky fingers that have to be washed off before you can get back in the car of scholarship to make your way back home to the study of substantial matters.
It is impossible to ‘get inside’ someone’s head and the simple truth of the matter is, we have no idea how memories arise or affect individuals or societies. Not in any meaningful, practical way.
I wish things were otherwise. I wish the hopeful and helpful promises made by the memory theorists actually delivered what they hoped they would deliver. But they don’t.
The tool doesn’t work.
How ancient texts could and could not be changed has been in the focus of vibrant scholarly discussions in recent years. The present volume offers contributions from a representative group of prominent scholars from different backgrounds and specialties in the areas of Classical and Biblical studies who were gathered at an interdisciplinary symposium held in May 2015 at the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. In the first part of the volume Ancient Scribal and Editorial Practices, the authors approach ancient scribal and editorial techniques in Greek, Latin, and Syriac sources concerning classical and biblical texts, their textual criticism, and editorial history. The second part Textual History of the Hebrew Bible focuses on scribal and editorial aspects of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. The third part Writing and Rewriting in Translation deals with a variety of writings from the Old Testament, New Testament, Apocrypha, and Patristic texts in various languages (Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian), focusing on issues of textual criticism and translation technique. The volume contains an especially rich assortment of contributions by Georgian textual scholars concerning ancient editorial practices and ancient Georgian translations of biblical and patristic texts. This collection of papers provides insights into a variety of different areas of study that seldom come into contact with each other but are clearly in many ways related.
You Need a Commentary That Helps Make Sense of the Bible
If you or someone you know wants to get a copy of the entire 42 volume collection in PDF format, you can do so from yours truly for the exceptionally reasonable price of $75 by clicking my PayPal Link. Leave your email in your paypal payment note so I can send it to you right away.
Should you only wish one volume, email me and we can arrange it.
***
Saint Paul knew more than I can ever imagine about Christians living in tension with the Gospel and with each other, and his several letters to the Church in Corinth are pivotal to the entire New Testament. Which is why I am so pleased to mention here some recent commentaries by a friend of mine, Jim West, on I and II Corinthians.
Subtitled ‘for the Person in the Pew’, and published by Quartz Hill Publishing House of Quartz Hill School of Theology, California, these two commentaries are in fact part of a much larger project by West to write similar commentaries on every book of the Bible, and to make them available in print and electronically for everyone to read. That project is now nearly completed and the results are tremendous.
I think there are three main reasons why these commentaries are so successful. First, West is a first-class Biblical scholar, one who makes the intelligent critical study of the text central to his theological interpretation. That commitment is rarer than one might imagine and to have it realized across the entire Bible is an astonishing feat that gives us now a unique resource.
Second, and delightfully, Jim West is a great writer: his pages fizz with sharp words and phrases and he appears incapable of saying anything boring about these texts. This ability keeps us reading along with him and, more importantly, reading along with Saint Paul. I have rarely come across any Christian writing project, aimed at ‘the person in the pew’, that has succeeded so brilliantly in bringing alive its subject matter.
Third, West couldn’t dodge an issue if his life depended on it, which can be an uncomfortable position for a Christian theologian. Corinth, as with most churches in most places, had some strange people believing and practising some odd things. The knack, as West points out, is to engage them endlessly with love and grace rather than self-righteous anger, but to engage them: ‘Paul lived with a purpose. And he urges the Corinthians to do the same. As we all who name the name of Christ must’ (West on I Cor. 9:27, p.60).
I am going to be talking to Jim about making these commentaries available through Ming Hua’s website, but inspect them for yourselves if you have the time: you will find them a superb companion to your own reading of the Bible and, as importantly, a great reminder of just how much the early Church struggled with some of the same problems we face now.
– Gareth Jones, Principal, Ming Hua Theological College, Hong Kong
Share this: