Review of Edelman and Ben Zvi (eds.), Remembering Biblical Figures

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Edelman and Ben Zvi, Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods: Social Memory and Imagination (Nathan Schumer).

Edelman, Diana and Ehud Ben Zvi, editors. Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Period: Social Memory and Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Remembering Biblical Figures in the Later Persian & Early Hellenistic Periods is a new edited volume examining the biblical texts through the theoretical lens of social or collective memory. Social memory suggests that groups form shared memories as part of their constitution of group identity. Thus, such shared memories of the past (in this case, the Biblical past) should be interrogated in order to see what they can tell us about the group that treats them as memories rather than what they can tell us about the Biblical period itself. Epistemologically, memory studies claims that while depictions of the past may not be true in a conventional historical sense, they were true for the people who remembered them. The book incorporates recent research on the neuroscience of memory in order to show that this theoretical lens is widely applicable, but also draws on the traditional canon of memory studies, including the influential scholars and theorists Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

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