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TREASURES OLD AND NEW
Essays in the Theology of the Pentateuch
By Joseph Blenkinsopp William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2004 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-8028-2679-2
Chapter One
Memory, Tradition, and the Construction of the Past in Ancient Israel 1
According to the biblical record, the Babylonian army of Nebuchadrezzar II invested Jerusalem in January 587 B.C., breached its walls in July of the following year, and torched the city with its palaces and temple in the second week of the month of Av, namely, sometime in early August of the same year, about eighteen months after the siege had begun (2 Kings 25; Jeremiah 52). If we leave aside a long-standing dispute as to whether the year in question was 587 or 586, this summary of what happened would, I believe, be widely accepted. Since the Babylonian Chronicle breaks off in 593, about six or seven years prior to the disaster, we have no direct attestation to the event apart from the biblical record. But the same chronicle matches the biblical account of the capture of the city by the Babylonians a decade earlier, and administrative texts excavated in Babylon contain lists of rations for various high-ranking deportees, including the Judean king Jehoiachin, exiled at that time and detained in Babylon (Pritchard 1995: 308, 563-64). Ostraca discovered at Lachish, the most important Judean city after Jerusalem, document the approach of the Babylonian army from the southwest and are therefore consistent with the biblical record (Gibson 1971: 32-49). Physical testimony to the struggle for the city is also provided by charred remains, including Scythian arrowheads used by the Babylonians, at the base of a tower in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem (Avigad 1980: 49-53). Circumstantial evidence, therefore, favors the essential historicity of the biblical narrative of the fall of the city, and no information currently available contradicts it.
The process by which the historian establishes that this event of major importance took place more or less as described does not seem to leave any place for memory. We cannot appeal to oral history, there are no ethnotexts as there are for the Great War of 1914-18, or the Shoa, or the Armenian genocide now (at this writing) almost a century in the past. It seems, in fact, that the science of historiography as conceived by the great nineteenth-century historians (von Ranke, Mommsen, Langlois, et al.), the detailed chronicling of events, is essentially disconnected from, or even hostile to, memory, since it tends to objectify the event wie es eigentlich geworden ist - as it really came about - and to move along a different groove from that of the tradition within which a particular society transmits its collective memories. Historical recording is flat and detached; it lacks the vitality and emotional charge of memory (Wieseltier 1993: 16-18). Here we recall Yerushalmi's comment about Judaism's deep concern to remember, coupled with a relative indifference to recording past and contemporary events (Yerushalmi 1982: 5, 9-10).
There was a time, of course, when the catastrophe of 586 B.C. was remembered. As I was writing the first draft of this paper, in November 1993, people were recalling the assassination of President John F. Kennedy almost exactly thirty years earlier, and it was clear that among those who lived at that time memories were still vivid. Unless we assume that the biblical historian was involved in wholesale invention, we may suppose that the memory of that other event long ago - the burning of the city and the temple, the dragging of the blinded king into exile, the refugees, and the deportations - was still vivid to many in the homeland and abroad thirty years afterward, say, around 556 B.C. The chronicler of the "return to Zion" informs us that half a century after the event, at the laying of the foundation stone of the rebuilt temple, some of the people remembered having seen Solomon's temple and maybe even had worshiped in it, and they could not hold back their tears (Ezra 3:12). By the time the work of rebuilding and dedication was finished, more than two decades later, most if not all of these people would have been dead. The primary memory of the event would have died with them, just as the primary memory of the sinking of the Titanic (again, at this writing) is about to disappear forever.
Memories are, however, communicable and, once communicated, can become part of the collective consciousness of a society, an ingredient, no doubt the principal ingredient, of the tradition by which a society constructs, maintains, and perpetuates its identity. In this respect collective, social memory functions like biological memory, the genetic code in the individual. In most societies, even today, the primary vehicle for memory transmission at the local level is the kinship network and, along with this, its many analogues - affinity associations of different kinds, such as churches, synagogues, religious congregations, parties, and sects. Within the extended family, what has been called "the grandfather law" enables the memory of the individual to reach back two or three generations (Connerton 1989: 38-39). My own grandfather gave me, as a small child, an emotional and vivid impression of his own memories - transmitted no doubt with advantages - as a combatant in the Great War of 1914-18, with the result that First Ypres, Polygon Wood, the Somme, and Passchendaele were, and still are, more real to me than World War II, which I experienced firsthand at an English boarding school. After reading, much more recently, Paul Fusell's The Great War in Modern Memory, I realized that my vicarious recall of those events was part of a larger pool of social memory that was still shaping the consciousness of entire societies in the modern world. Something like that may be assumed to have taken place among Judeans in the homeland and abroad in the aftermath of the disasters of 586 B.C. The memory of the disaster would have remained as an active ingredient of consciousness in the three- or four-generational household and the larger society after the passage of almost a century, thus presumably well into the fifth century B.C. It is not surprising, therefore, if it has insinuated itself in one way or another into practically all the biblical texts that can be dated to the first century following the disaster.
Scholars have often observed that the collective consciousness of societies that have experienced disaster, the Irish and Poles, for example, is more profoundly shaped by memory than those whose experience of disaster is more episodic or, a fortiori, those who have acquired a reputation for inflicting disaster on others. Consider, for example, how pervasive in the ethnic consciousness of the Serbs is the defeat at Kosovo in 1389, or, among the people of the Cevennes region, are the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the suppression of the Camisards. Few communities known to history have had a closer acquaintance with disaster than the Jewish people, and few are less subject to collective amnesia. But how does such a society preserve its memories when the links of person-to-person transmission are stretched and thinned out with the passage of time?
At one time biblical scholars appealed confidently to oral tradition as a principal constituent of historical reconstruction. They claimed, for example, that stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been transmitted faithfully by word of mouth, together with the appropriate social setting, from the Middle Bronze Age, therefore the early second millennium B.C., to the time when the memories were first committed to writing. Until fairly recently there was wide agreement that these earliest sources were written down no later than the tenth or maybe the ninth century B.C., thus about a millennium after the events they purport to narrate, and no doubt some people are still prepared to accept that. But more recent studies in oral tradition have demonstrated, what should have been obvious from the start, that the survival of memories transmitted orally over such an enormously long period of time has a very low percentage of probability even in situations of cultural and political continuity, decidedly not the case in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Palestine (Culley 1972: 102-16; Van Seters 1975: 158-660; Vansina 1985). The painstaking attempt to authenticate the social and cultural background of the stories with reference to Nuzi customary law (e.g., dealing with adoption and surrogate spouses) and Mari nomadic-pastoral economy has held up no better. The book of Job may serve to demonstrate that creating a plausible social setting does not settle the issue of historicity.
Another problematic aspect of the debate about the place of oral tradition is the common assumption that oral transmission and writing are mutually exclusive. Numerous studies have shown that this is not the case. Oral composition, transmission, and instruction are frequently attested in societies familiar with writing, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, for example (Carruthers 1990; Le Goff 1992: 68-80). A related problem, apparent in recent attempts to determine the degree of literacy or illiteracy at different times in Israel of the biblical period (Harris 1989; Baines 1992: 4:333-37; Young 1998: 239-53, 408-22) arises out of failure to clarify what being literate meant for a society like Israel at different points in its development. We are talking about what was basically, at all times, an agrarian, peasant society, and therefore about people the vast majority of whom had neither the competence nor the motivation to read or write. There were, of course, scribes whose own degree of literacy may in many cases have been confined to the ability to read and reproduce the Hebrew alphabetic script, not a particularly difficult skill to acquire. When the need arose, one would have had recourse to such a "specialist" and paid the going rate, as happened to a day laborer in seventh-century-B.C. Judah who by this means petitioned the local governor at Yavneh-Yam for the return of his confiscated outer garment (Gibson 1971: 26-30). At any rate, nothing much can be deduced from the relatively few inscriptions that have survived from the period of the kingdoms. Outside of small social, economic, and intellectual elites, a significant degree of literacy requires not only a developed urban culture and an appropriate institutional setting (e.g., a palace or a temple) but also the means to produce and disseminate writing, conditions that were absent during most if not all of the biblical period.
2
Let us return to the disaster of 586 and its aftermath. Inevitably, in the course of time, the event was recorded in writing. It was recorded toward the end of the work to which modern scholarship has given the inelegant title the Deuteronomistic History (hereafter the History tout court, and its author the Historian), which dates in its finished form to no earlier than the middle of the sixth century B.C., and perhaps considerably later. This kind of historiography seems to have developed from the writing up of court chronicles, a task entrusted to an official known in Judah as the mazkir (recorder, chronicler, or, more literally, "remembrancer"; see 2 Sam 8:16; 20:24; 1 Kgs 4:3; 18:18, 37 [= Isa 36:2, 22]; 1 Chr 18:15; 34:8. Esth 6:1 mentions a seper hazzikronot, literally "a book of things to be remembered," i.e., a record or chronicle). Into this annalistic base different kinds of narrative, including legends about holy men and (less frequently) holy women, were in due course inserted. The Historian's account is quite detailed, but clearly its purpose was not so much to perpetuate the memory of the disaster as to explain why it happened. The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple raised an intractable and, for some, insuperable problem regarding the reality, power, and ethical character of the national deity. In fact, much of the writing that has survived from that time was written to address this issue. The historian's explanation, which in the post-Holocaust age can hardly fail to appear problematic, is that the people must take the blame since they had been warned continually through YHVH's "servants the prophets" of the consequences of nonobservance of the laws and yet did nothing about it.
Historians are not, in any case, the principal custodians of a society's memories, least of all in a culture in which only a very small percentage of the population has the competence, leisure, and motivation to read history. At the same time the History, and the book of Deuteronomy, closely related in theme and ideology with it, reflect an educational program that appeals to collective historical memory as a means of reinforcing the frequent injunctions to observe the laws (e.g., Deut 8:11, 14, 18-19; 9:7). Hence the formulation of motivation clauses in the form of historical reminiscence appended to several of the laws, a feature, as far as we know, unique in ancient jurisprudence. An example: "You shall not oppress the resident alien; you know what it is like to be an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt" (Exod 23:9). Those who heard these words were expected to know what it was like to be an alien even though they had never been in Egypt.
Without getting into the long-standing and still inconclusive debate on the identity of these "Deuteronomists," I suggest that this program, implemented in the period of the Second Temple in open-air assemblies (e.g., Neh 7:73-8:12), was the brainchild of Levites one of whose functions was, according to late-biblical sources, religious education. An important point is at issue here. Societies in which collective memory and its perpetuation, either in writing or otherwise, are tightly controlled by a dominant social class will tend to leave nothing behind once that social class, which has identified itself with the nation, disappears from the scene. This seems to have happened to the Etruscans. Once the aristocracy disappeared, the people in effect lost their contact with the past, and therefore their identity as a people, with the result that we can view them today only through the blurred filters of Roman historiography and archaeological discovery (Le Goff 1992: 98). In the province of Judah successively under Iranian, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman rule, the educational program pursued by Deuteronomists, Levites, and their heirs the Pharisees led to a democratization of social memory and thus created a situation favorable to ethnic survival in spite of almost incessant social and political upheaval.
Orality and writing therefore interact subtly in the ways in which they mediate the past into the present. Even in societies more culturally advanced than sixth-century-B.C.
Continues...
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