BIBLE AND INTERPRETATION:
Memory and the Knowledge of Things Past
By Daniel Pioske
Georgia Southern University
March 2015
Excerpt:
Not surprisingly, I find the concept of memory to be of historical value. In terms of the history of ancient Israel and Judah this significance can be located, at least to a certain degree, in the interpretive possibilities memory permits when assessing the past(s) represented in the Hebrew Bible. For in contrast to the now stale debates of the 1990s and early 2000s between those who held to the historical or fictitious character of biblical storytelling, a connection between the past portrayed in the Hebrew Bible with a form of memory (whether cultural, collective, or social) allows the historian to move beyond these rather rigid distinctions. This is possible because studies of memory have illustrated how a remembered past is always constructed through the prism of present concerns, but in way that does not necessarily sever such memories from a time previous to their recollection.