Retracing a Remembered Past: Methodological Remarks on Memory, History, and the Hebrew Bible. Bib Int 23.3 (2015): 291-315

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biblical interpretation 23 (2015) 291-315

Retracing A Remembered Past

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/15685152-00230A06


ISSN 0927-2569 (print version) ISSN 1568-5152 (online version) BI 2

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* This author would like to thank F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Paul Kurtz, Ehud Ben Zvi, and the anony-mous reviewers of this journal for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Errors and infelicities are of course my own.

Retracing a Remembered PastMethodological Remarks on Memory, History, and the Hebrew Bible

Daniel PioskeGeorgia Southern University, USA

[email protected]

Abstract

Historians of the southern Levant have increasingly made recourse to the concept of memory as an analytical tool to examine the past recounted within the Hebrew Bible. The intent of this article is to review current approaches toward memory among these historians in order to consider certain theoretical questions raised within this research. Most significant of these will be concerns related to the epistemological relationship that obtains between those ancient, literary memories outlined within these investiga-tions and that past reconstructed through the techniques of modern historical inquiry. The epistemological differences perceived between the past claimed by memory and history leads to the contention that historians charged with interpreting the referential claims of ancient texts informed by a community’s shared memories must do so through a hermeneutical framework that is sensitive to memory’s distinct epistemological underpinnings. This study then concludes by advocating for a post-positivist interpre-tive approach that situates the referential claims of a remembered past alongside a con-stellation of ancient referents, textual and material, that attest to the place and time being recollected in order to trace out the semblances and dissimilarities that emerge.

Keywords

memory – history – epistemology – Ricoeur – Hebrew Bible

mailto:[email protected]

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Following upon earlier developments within the broader discipline of his-tory, historians of ancient Israel and Judah have increasingly made recourse to the concept of memory within their research and publications.1 In addition to book-length treatments of the topic,2 a number of recent articles have ap-pealed to memory in an effort to better understand the past portrayed within the literature of the Hebrew Bible and the scribal practices involved in these texts’ formation and transmission.3 Considering the rich and prolific applica-tion of memory-oriented research among historians working in adjacent his-torical fields, the potential of this line of study to open up new vistas into how the past was conceived and communicated in the ancient world of the south-ern Levant is without question. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the cur-rent interest in memory has been “more practiced than theorized” by historians of ancient Israel and Judah, making the appeal to memory vulnerable to frag-mentation and depreciation through a lack of sustained reflection on memo-ry’s relationship to history, and how its claims about the past pertain to the historian’s critical representation of what once was.4

My intent in the following is to review recent approaches to memory among historians of the southern Levant in order to consider certain hermeneutical commitments that have guided important contributions to this line of research. In response to these studies, the second part of this investigation will be devoted to examining a central issue raised with this turn to memory for those historians tasked with reconstructing an ancient past: namely, the problem of epistemology, or the question of what type of knowledge is

1 For recent considerations of the place of memory within contemporary historical research, see Ricoeur 2004: 384–411; Megill 2007; Rosenthal 2009; Gardner 2010, Klein 2011; and Feindt et al. 2014. For the genealogy of historical interest in memory in the twentieth century, see especially Confino 2008.

2 In addition to the important function of memory for the methodology supporting D. Carr’s recent work on the formation of the Hebrew Bible (Carr 2011: 3–35), see, for example, Smith 2004; Hendel 2005; Köhlmoos 2006; Davies 2008; Leveen 2008; Becking et al. 2009; Ben Zvi and Levin 2012; Carstens et al. 2012; Edelman and Ben Zvi 2014; Wright 2014; and Pioske 2015. Though Childs’ short volume on memory is concerned principally with theological matters pertaining to the Hebrew Bible’s rich vocabulary of remembrance, its investigation neverthe-less offers a significant, early reflection on the semantics of biblical memory (Childs 1962).

3 Na’aman 1995, 2011, 2012; Blenkinsopp 1997; Fleming 1998; Brettler 2001; Hendel 2001, 2006, 2010a, 2010b, 2015; Smith 2002; Bloch-Smith 2003; Gertz 2004; Davies 2009; Barstad 2010; Kofoed 2011; Ben Zvi 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b; 2013; Lemche 2012.

4 So the concerns registered by Confino regarding the use of memory within historical studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The danger, Confino writes of his time (and ours), is that memory may become a worn out, “hollow metaphor” in which the concept of memory forms “more of a label than a content” for historical research (Confino 1997: 1386–88).

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available within pre-modern texts affiliated with forms of cultural memory. For if the past recounted in the Hebrew Bible is to be connected to the discourse of memory, as these scholars contend, then a significant question posed by this research is how the referential claims of such texts touch upon the historian’s representation of a given past occurrence. To address this question, my analy-sis draws on the insights developed within P. Ricoeur’s seminal meditation on the epistemological relationship between memory and history (Ricoeur 2004: 133–280, 384–411, 493–99). With Ricoeur’s discussion in view, this study then concludes by advocating for a post-positivist hermeneutical approach toward a remembered past that situates the referential claims of cultural memory alongside a constellation of ancient referents, textual and material, that attest to the place and time being recollected.

Memory and the Biblical Past: Current Approaches

By and large, current approaches to memory among historians of the southern Levant have focused on the concept of “cultural memory” as an object of re-search. In part, this particular view of memory has gained traction because of its recognition of the important cultural cues and frameworks involved in the construction of both individual and collective memories,5 and the awareness that cultures themselves, inasmuch as individuals, retain and cultivate mean-ingful recollections through shared texts, rituals, places, and customs (Ass-mann 2011: 16–18). From this perspective, a focus on cultural memory accords the historian’s traditional aim of contextualizing written discourse and social practice new importance in the study of how collective memories, as products of culture, may have been formed and transmitted over time among particular groups in antiquity. In a similar vein, the notion of cultural memory has also gained acceptance because it values the material means by which cultures create shared recollections (e.g., texts, monuments, buildings), thus replacing abstract or psychological conceptions of memory with an understanding of the term that encourages the study of those archaeological remains and an-cient writings familiar to historians for more nuanced interpretations of how ancient societies constructed and reconstructed a common past (Assmann 1995: 132).

The turn to cultural memory also appears to signal growing discontent with the broad generic designation of “history” or “historiography” to categorize

5 “No memory,” M. Halbwachs remarks, “is possible outside frameworks used by people in so-ciety to determine and retrieve their recollections” (Halbwachs 1992: 43).

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those narrative works included within the Hebrew Bible. Where scholars once wrote confidently of the beginning or creation of historiography in ancient Is-rael (Von Rad 1944; Halpern 1988; Brettler 1995), recent discussions of biblical memory have been more hesitant with seamless correlations between history writing and biblical storytelling. M. Smith, for example, maintains that a “sig-nificant paradigm shift” is needed in the field of biblical studies in which the Hebrew Bible is viewed not as “the locus of Israel’s historical record (or not), but as the partial record of Israel’s cultural memories of its past that contain some accurate historical information” (Smith 2004: 131–32). Similarly, P. Davies considers the biblical vision of Israel and Judah’s past to be “Judean Cultural Memory” (Davies 2008: 111–22), with J. Kofoed also registering his preference for interpretations of biblical narrative as cultural memory over against the “categorization of biblical texts along the historiography-antiquarianism con-tinuum” (Kofoed 2011: 128). And, though R. Hendel contends that the biblical writings are a complex amalgamation of narrative forms “involving myth, memory, and history” (Hendel 2010b: 259), the persistent reference to those narratives about Abraham, the Exodus, or Solomon as “memories” (Hendel 2005: 31–94), and to readings of Genesis as a “book of cultural memory” (Hen-del 2010a: 29), intimate a preference for this term as the key designation to de-scribe these ancient narratives.

The mounting interest in cultural memory for an analysis of that past por-trayed in the biblical narrative is, I believe, a positive development indicative of more nuanced, careful readings of these texts for historical considerations of the southern Levant’s ancient history. The growing currency of memory for historical research across the social sciences has nevertheless made the term susceptible to becoming a catchword utilized frequently as a simple substitute or synonym for older notions of “tradition,” “folklore,” “Märchen,” “Heldensa-gen,” or “Geschichts-Legende” once common to biblical historians. Within Fin-kelstein and Silberman’s important study of the formation of the Hebrew Bible, for example, memory functions as a veritable leitmotif running through-out the entire volume (Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 45, 68–71, 86, 103, 123–48, 166, 169, 209, 223, 249, 312). Nevertheless, though memory often appears to be the answer to the question posed at the outset to part one of the work – “The Bible as History?” – what memory is for these authors and why it should replace the notion of history for considerations of the biblical narrative is never addressed, leaving the meaning of memory and the reasons behind its appeal for the reader to determine.6 A casual use of memory is certainly not limited to these authors, but can be seen in a wide number of erudite pub-

6 In more recent publications, Finkelstein has continued to refer to “historical memory” and “biblical memory” when discussing the biblical narrative (Finkelstein 2011a: 233, 238; 2011b:

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lications, from the impressive work of A. Mazar (e.g., Mazar 2003: 86–87, 94; see also Finkelstein and Mazar 2007: 59–64, 190–91) to the elegant history of ancient Israel by M. Liverani (Liverani 2005: 6, 176, 234–35, 333, 337).

Worrisome about cursory references to memory, as Confino notes, is that a lack of conceptual clarity regarding an author’s understanding of the term cre-ates a scholarly landscape in which memory can signify any number of things for historical research, and then, in time, nearly nothing at all (Confino 1997: 1387). Klein’s oft-cited analysis of the emergence of memory within historical discourse similarly notes that a related danger in the casual appropriation of the vocabulary of memory by historians is that the concept may soon become a “metahistorical category that subsumes” very different historical approaches without a recognition of their distinctiveness, and that frequent references to memory instead of “tradition” or “history” may, in the end, have “no theoretical aim other than improving our prose by varying word choice” (Klein 2011: 115).7

For this reason more theoretically sensitive treatments of memory by histo-rians of ancient Israel and Judah have become particularly important. M. Smith’s work on memory and the experience of the divine in ancient Israel places a finger on the pulse of perhaps the most pressing theoretical problem within discussions of memory, history, and the Hebrew Bible by returning to the basic question of what type of literary discourse the biblical corpus con-tains and how its rendering of the past comports with modern understandings of historiography (Smith 2004: 125). In exploring memory as one avenue to move beyond the impasse created by a modern fixation on the biblical narra-tive as a form of history writing (or fiction), and by drawing on the works of Halbwachs, Nora, Le Goff, and Yerushalmi in order to do so, Smith’s volume functions as an early signpost pointing the way forward for discussions over the connection between memory and the biblical writings by appealing to thinkers who have engaged the relationship between memory and history on a theoretical plane.

A result of Smith’s early reflection on biblical memory is a penetrating sec-tion detailing the manner in which the Sinai theophany can be viewed as a significant cultural memory that was “remembered” differently over time in response to new social contexts and changing theological sensibilities (Smith 2004: 140–52). With its focus on the ruptures and competition between various

354, 360). On the “blurred memory” related to the Great Wall at Mizpah, for example, see Finkelstein 2012.

7 On the problematic appeal to vague understandings of memory by historians, see also the comments in Winter 2001: 52–66. For a similar assessment of the “abuse of memory” from the field of anthropology, see Berliner 2005: 197–211.

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memories of Sinai maintained by different groups in an era stretching from the early Iron Age to Qumran, Smith’s investigation can be favorably compared with the interpretive goals of the Annales school and those historians from this tradition whose interest came to rest on retracing the long-term transforma-tions of particular religious and national memories within a given community or region.8 From this perspective, the historical study of memory is directed principally at understanding the cultural concerns or mentalités of certain eras by exploring how older cultural memories were preserved, transformed, or for-gotten among new generations over time.

In a number of recent works, E. Ben Zvi has approached the relationship between memory and the history of the southern Levant from a somewhat dif-ferent direction. Particularly important for Ben Zvi’s work on memory and his-tory are theoretical considerations of group formation, and how, more specifically, collective memories of a pre-monarchic and monarchic past in Ye-hud shaped the construction of identity in the province during those critical centuries in which the territory subsisted under Persian rule (Ben Zvi 2011a; 2011b, 2013).9 A key question posed throughout Ben Zvi’s research thus con-cerns how a remembered past was appropriated and revised within Second Temple societies, and to what ends these cultural memories were summoned forth and used.10 Ben Zvi’s recognition of the malleable character of cultural memory and its adaptability for deepening social cohesion (Ben Zvi 2010: 172) provide particularly valuable historical insights into how various Yehudite communities, or at least their elites and scribes, negotiated the past in the present by drawing on and transforming older cultural memories within the literature they created.

Ben Zvi’s interest in the role of cultural memory for identity formation and acculturation in the Second Temple period is, then, decidedly synchronic in orientation, with the historian’s gaze fixed on a particular era and the manner in which certain cultural memories were selected and reframed in order to mold the “social mindscape” and self-understanding of a specific historical

8 Smith himself acknowledges the important influence of the Annales school on his thought (Smith 2004: 5), and draws attention in his comments on cultural memory to four of the most important historians of memory from this school: Philippe Ariès, Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Nora, and Danièle Hervieu-Léger. Smith’s interpretive framework is thus anticipated, to some extent, already in Marc Bloch’s seminal chapter on “collective mem-ory” in Bloch 1961[1939]: 88–102.

9 Important theoretical influences within this line of research stem from the works of Zerubavel 1997, 2003 and Misztal 2003.

10 A similar approach appears in the work of Kofoed 2011, for example, regarding the Chron-icler’s portrayal of Saul.

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community at a specific moment in time (Ben Zvi 2011a: 99–101). Accordingly, the primary concern within this interpretive framework is not the emergence or genealogy of particular cultural memories, but rather the reception of a re-membered past and its effect on a later community who considered these cul-tural memories their own. Bracketing the referential claims of memory in this manner thus permits a sophisticated treatment of how a common past could be manipulated by those literary cultures writing within a distressed Yehud, and in doing so illustrates the ways in which the content of a remembered past is so often contingent on the historical and social circumstances prevailing when this past is recollected.

Smith’s and Ben Zvi’s studies find importance here not only for being at the forefront of discussions pertaining to memory and the Hebrew Bible, but also because their investigations demonstrate the different historical questions that can be directed at these texts when they are framed through the lens of memory. Whether viewed through the long-term transformations of certain cultural memories over the centuries or a pointed analysis of how a particular community recast the memories handed down to them by previous genera-tions, both Smith’s and Ben Zvi’s work reveal the potency of historical investi-gations directed at issues surrounding memory and the biblical past.

What escapes historical scrutiny within these interpretive frameworks, however, is the vexing question of whether biblical memories about an Egyp-tian bondage or a King David have any connection to actual historical experi-ences or figures. Such a concern becomes particularly consequential for historians of ancient Israel and Judah who must decide whether certain bibli-cal references, if connected to the discourse of memory, merit historical con-sideration for those periods to which these texts refer. The question left open within these studies, in other words, is the historical value of those referential claims about the past embedded within ancient literature informed by the cul-tural frameworks of memory.

Provan, Long, and Longman (2003) and P. Davies (2008, 2009) have taken up this question more directly, though from much different perspectives. Admit-tedly, Provan et al. do not focus on the challenges and possibilities of cultural memory per se for a historical understanding of ancient Israel and Judah, but the authors do devote a considerable amount of their opening methodological remarks to a key epistemological problem impinging on the historical assess-ment of any remembered past: namely, the confidence placed in the testimony about what has been recollected (Provan et al. 2003: 36–61).11 In opposition to

11 The authors do, however, make an explicit connection between their concept of testi-mony and memory (Provan et al. 2003: 46–47, 124).

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“scientific” epistemological frameworks capable of testing hypotheses and pre-dicting behavior through repeated experiments, these authors instead under-score the dependence of historical knowledge on the testimony of others regarding an unrepeatable experience of past occurrences. A consequence of this perspective is the close link established between historical knowledge and trust, with the historian’s reconstruction being founded, these authors assert, on the credence placed in the testimony offered by particular informants. Un-tenable therefore is a methodology that holds to a “headlong rush toward skep-ticism” and an “a priori suspicion” of every potential historical source from antiquity, as some sources from the past must be depended on if the historian is to piece together and reconstruct elements of what once occurred (Provan et al. 2003: 55–62). For this reason the authors argue for a stance of “epistemo-logical openness” to the past recounted within ancient texts, and in doing so affirm the possibility of biblical memory to retain an impressive amount of historically meaningful information (Provan et al. 2003: 43–50).

There is much to be commended in these opening pages devoted to histori-cal epistemology and the destabilization of foundationalist assumptions wed-ded to problematic notions of interpretive neutrality and the transparency of historical evidence. Nevertheless, disquieting about this stance toward the tes-timony of a remembered past is that an interpretive framework by which to assess the reliability or unreliability of a particular biblical account is never fully developed, leaving the historian unable to respond to the possibility of damaged or manipulated memories common to even the most trusted of wit-nesses. The fragility of testimony and the chance of error or distortion within any remembrance of what once was (Bloch 1953: 79–80), particularly within accounts written by ancient authors whose concern with the past was not pri-marily a historical one, are consequently overlooked and minimized by these authors in such a way that testimony about the past and the critical assess-ment of its historical authenticity are often indistinguishable. Thus, when one reads in the history written by these scholars of the general historical reliabil-ity of the conquest account in Joshua-Judges in spite of the archaeological evi-dence against it, or the curious claim that literacy was widespread at the end of the second millennium BCE in Palestine (Provan et al. 2003: 58–59, 191–92), one cannot help but wonder if an epistemological openness toward the past con-tained in the biblical narrative has not fallen into the “blind faith” these au-thors had previously warned against (Provan et al. 2003: 48).

A much more skeptical approach toward memory’s historical value has been advocated by Davies. Crucial for Davies’ description of cultural memory is its fundamental difference from modern historical knowledge, particularly in the ways in which a group’s shared memories can be transformed and even

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invented in response to present communal needs (Davies 2008:111–12; 2009). Though Davies holds out the possibility that cultural memories may contain “true” or “genuine” recollections of the past (Davies 2008: 114–15), how these genuine memories are to be distilled from their invented counterparts is not discussed in a systematic way, and one senses from Davies that such a feat is, in the end, mostly unfeasible for the historian of antiquity.12 In place of investi-gating that past referred to within the biblical corpus, the value of viewing these ancient texts as expressions of cultural memory is that such an approach allows the historian to focus “on the memory itself rather than the event it conjures” (Davies 2009).

The difficulty with the cultural memories embedded in the Hebrew Bible from the standpoint of historical reconstruction, Davies comments, is that much of the biblical narrative is both “unverifiable” and subject to authorial motivations other than describing a historical past (Davies 2008: 126–28; 130–35; 2009). A verifiable event within this schema are those cases “where we ‘know’ that something is historical or not” on the principle of “independent attestation,” or when two unrelated sources from the ancient world cite the same referent (Davies 2008: 126). Thus, with few extra-biblical texts from the ancient Near East that directly and independently attest to references within the biblical narrative, and with archaeology providing, according to Davies, only a “sketchy history” of a particular region (Davies 2008:129), the historian can do little to verify those claims about the past made within the biblical nar-rative. Consequently, “much of the time” the modern historian “is unable to produce ‘historical knowledge’ … because so much of the time what the bibli-cal narratives cover, and what the archaeological and epigraphic remains at-test, is irretrievable” (Davies 2008:142).

Davies’ emphasis on the potential of a community’s recollections to be distorted or even constructed anew through time remains an important cor-rective to ingenuous appropriations of a remembered past for historical recon-struction. Davies’ insistence on independent attestation and the process of verification as requisites for historical knowledge is, however, unusually re-strictive. Few, if any, ancient historians work on such stringent epistemological

12 So Davies concludes his important section on cultural memory with a question absent of a response: “The issue remaining, and likely to be debated ad infinitum, is just how much of these memories is indeed genuine recollection and can be converted into our notion of history, and how much is not. And how far can we actually decide, either way?” Davies’ own example of working through the relationship between memory and history is taken from biblical references to Ezra and Nehemiah in the books that bear their names. The biblical literature that refers to a period before this time in ancient Israel and Judah is, however, not discussed in this manner (Davies 2008: 115).

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principles for the simple reason that independent attestations from different perspectives of the same event seldom exist from antiquity (whether in Egypt, Israel, Greece, or Mesopotamia), leaving little that could be known, historically speaking, about various cultures from the ancient world. The historian of an-tiquity is not the only type adverse to this hyper-skeptical epistemological per-spective. In J. Gross’ haunting and acclaimed history of Jedwabne, Poland, during the Second World War, for example, the author registers his discomfort precisely with strict demands of “independent confirmation” of a particular account in order for it to be considered historically reliable. Instead, Gross ar-gues for an affirmative stance toward the testimony of a source “until we find persuasive arguments to the contrary” (Gross 2001: 91–92; emphasis original). One can retort that Gross’ sources are often eyewitness accounts and not an-cient writings, but it is important to bear in mind that the memories of trau-matized victims have long been found to be the most prone to error (e.g., Megill 2007:19–20), and that Gross’ methodological remarks are therefore not borne lightly or without deep reflection on the ethical implications of the his-torian’s task.

All of this is not to suggest that a single account of a particular past can be assumed to be historically meaningful, and too many examples throughout history – from the Letter of Aristeas to the Donation of Constantine – suggest otherwise. Assessing the historical value of an ancient source steeped in cul-tural memory is, however, much more nuanced and complicated than Davies’ remarks suggest. Not only is the principle of verification difficult to sustain epistemologically,13 but the accent on memory being “invented” and “severed” from the past also fails to recognize that even the most “minimal history pro-duced by the doubter” (Davies 2008: 134) is, as a narrative construct, both very much an invention of the historian’s labor and profoundly severed from that

13 The idea of historical verification suffers from the realization that two independent accounts of a particular event can, of course, still mislead, and their independent per-spectives always remain couched in the ideological frameworks from which they were written (and are always interpreted through the historian’s own cultural biases and per-spectives). The idea that a particular past can be verified also presupposes that there is an objectively given, “true” past the historian can both access and hold up to a particular account in order to adjudicate its veracity. Such hopes have long been abandoned by his-torians (e.g., De Certeau 1988: 56–68; Megill 2007: 1–16). As Ginzburg notes in his eloquent discussion of epistemology, the historian’s knowledge is always “uncertain, discontinu-ous, lacunar, based only on fragments and ruins,” with the merit of the historian’s account resting on the persuasiveness of its evidence and argumentation, not its certitude (Ginz-burg 2012: 24). For a sophisticated critique of the principle of verification from the field of biblical studies, see also Dobbs-Allsopp 1999: 238–51.

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past the historian has attempted to represent (e.g., Ricoeur 1984: 3.142–56; De Certeau 1988: 96–115; Chartier 1997: 7–9, 13–27). Put differently, in thinking through the epistemological relationship between memory and history one must move beyond the assumption that what separates modern historiogra-phy from ancient literary memories is that the former is capable of circum-venting “inventive,” imaginative discourse within its historical rendering of the past, and the related thesis that biblical memory, as opposed to “real history,” is alone in its ideological motivations and distance from the past it represents (Davies 2008: 122, 149, 178).

In stepping back from these two investigations, what unites the opposing viewpoints of Provan et al. and Davies is that both perspectives promptly dis-solve the tension they discern between the past claimed by memory and by history. For Provan et al., this act is accomplished by contending that the epis-temological underpinnings of memory and history are, in practice, nearly identical; for Davies, this tension is eliminated by maintaining, conversely, that the epistemological divide between memory and history is so great that almost no connection remains.14 An impediment to the acceptance of the conclu-sions reached in either of these important works, however, is their lack of en-gagement with the considerable philosophical and theoretical literature that has been directed precisely at the epistemological relationship between mem-ory and history, and which cautions against a premature dismissal of the ten-sion between the two. For this reason, a more deliberate consideration of the epistemological underpinnings of memory and history is required.

“Memory is of the Past”: Epistemology and the Rival Claims of Memory and History

“Memory,” Aristotle remarks in his short treatise on the subject, “is of the past” (Aristotle, “Of Memory and Recollection,” 449b.15). The long philosophical tra-dition that has supported this view of memory’s connection to a time prior to its present recollection, from Augustine to Husserl to Bergson, sets in motion

14 This point mirrors the arguments of B. Schwartz, who, in a series of works, has critiqued what he terms “traditionalist” and “presentist” conceptions of memory, or the view that a culture’s memories remain relatively constant over time (traditionalist) or are almost entirely reshaped by the concerns of the present (presentist). Schwartz’ attempt to cir-cumvent these two positions and maintain the tension between memory and historical experience – “tension, not easy compatibility, defines the relation between memory and experience” (Schwarz 1996: 922) – is one the following discussion of epistemology will also endeavor to uphold. See Schwartz 1982; 1996; 2000: 1–28, 293–312; 2010.

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what Ricoeur labels the “enduring competition” between memory and histo-ry’s epistemological claims (Ricoeur 2004: 498–99), or the struggle between two very different forms of retrospection – the framing of a past through a culture’s sanctioned memories and the critical inquiry into it through the his-torian’s investigation – to lay claim to what once was.

The epistemological tension observed by Ricoeur between memory and his-tory is thus understood as the outcome of two processes that, though having the similar intent of re-presenting former phenomena, nevertheless pursue and mediate the past through quite disparate means.15 For cultural memory, a past is disclosed through the cultural practices and frameworks of a collective remembering: the transmission of stories from generation to generation through oral tales and shared texts, participation in ritual acts of commemora-tion, the common experience of sacred places, the mutual encounter with past symbols, the veneration of familiar monuments. Cultural memory is in this sense participatory and selective, communal and self-enclosed, and as such exhibits little interest in the historian’s individual, critical examination of evi-dence in an effort to render a historically accurate account of a given occur-rence.16 In contrast to the historian’s reconstruction of a past made in response to that evidence identified and summoned forth within a particular portrayal, what is represented within cultural memory is instead grounded in acts of at-testation: “We attest that these events once happened within our community. Believe us.” Those who do continue to give life to these memories by accepting them as their own, and by recounting them in the present. The quest for an accurate, judicious reconstruction of a certain past occurrence within the his-torian’s research thus finds its counterpart, Ricoeur comments, in an individu-al or community’s faithfulness toward a remembered past (Ricoeur 2004: 55).

The fissure opened up between memory and history resides then with the recognition that, as a critical epistemological framework, the historian’s re-construction cannot affirm the claims of a remembered past on faith. What separates the act of historiography from the recounting of a culture’s sanc-tioned memories is consequently the historian’s determination to isolate and

15 The same point is made when Yerushalmi, in the concluding remarks of his seminal lec-tures on Jewish memory and history, writes that “memory and modern historiography stand, by their very nature, in radically different relations to the past.” For Yerushalmi, the historical consciousness of modernity is therefore “not an attempt at the restoration of memory, but a truly new kind of recollection” that seeks to displace and supplant former ways of knowing about the past (Yerushalmi 1982: 94).

16 “Whether personal or collective, memory refers back by definition to the past that contin-ues to be living by virtue of the transmission from generation to generation; this is the source of a resistance of memory to its historiographical treatment” (Ricoeur 2004: 398).

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compare disparate testimonies about the past with other past traces that may corroborate or discredit their claims: the contours of a potsherd, the orienta-tion of a dilapidated wall, the paleography of an inscription, the account of another witness.17 To be sure, the knowledge elicited through the historian’s interpretation of these disparate fragments of evidence can only be “indirect, presumptive, conjectural” (Ginzburg 1989: 106).18 But in the historian’s endeav-or to bring together and assess those vestiges that remain from antiquity an effort is made that is absent from the act of remembering: namely, the attempt to offer an argument about what once actually occurred in the past through the evidence solicited and cited. From an epistemological standpoint, “the chasm between history and memory is hollowed out,” Ricoeur writes, precisely “in the explanatory phase, in which the available uses of the connector ‘be-cause …’ are tested” (Ricoeur 2004: 497).

Absent of this evidential thrust, the past represented within cultural mem-ory is best understood as the aggregation of older experiences that have been bound up with the concerns and aspirations of those subsequent communities that have made these memories their own. In opposition to the historian’s re-search, the knowledge generated through cultural memory can thus be con-nected to a prolonged, cumulative process. As older memories accumulate and cohere to “new social and symbolic structures” within a community, these memories represent a past in which “an assemblage of old beliefs coexists with the new, including old beliefs about the past itself” (Schwartz 2000: 301, 302). The past contained within cultural memory should not then be perceived as

17 “In its demand for proof,” Megill writes, “history stands in sharp opposition to memory. History reminds memory of the need for evidence coming from eyewitnesses and from material remains” (Megill 2007: 58). The sharp epistemological break signaled here by Megill follows a tradition of earlier scholarship that has engaged the relationship between memory and history from a theoretical perspective, from P. Nora’s sentiments expressed in the opening pages of Le Lieux de Mémoire (Nora 1989: 1) to M. Halbwachs’ much earlier study of collective memory and the belief that “history begins only … when social mem-ory has faded or decomposed” (Halbwachs 1968: 68; my translation).

18 With Ricoeur, my understanding of the historian’s representation draws near to the idea of “standing for” or “taking the place of” some past referent. The historian’s representation in this sense does not claim to reduplicate or recover that past which is being described, but rather offers a literary construct that aspires to bear a resemblance to that reality it represents. The historian’s literary work provides a figure – a depiction, rendering, por-trait, portrayal – of an absent thing that, through the interpretation of the evidence left behind, strives to offer a true depiction of some past reality. Its epistemological founda-tion, in this sense, mirrors that of a metaphorical utterance wedded to the conditional: the historian’s representation is, “what I would have seen, what I would have witnessed if I had been there” (Ricoeur 1984: 3.142–56; emphasis original).

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either the sustained perpetuation of older referents or the bald invention of new ones, but as the dynamic interplay between preservation and adaptation. Just as the present assuredly influences the content of a remembered past within a community, so also does past reality limit what can be maintained within these cultural recollections.

The epistemological differences between a past reconstituted through the forces of cultural memory and the past reconstructed through the historian’s critical research are therefore significant and derivative of the different condi-tions of retrospection that govern each mode of inquest into the past. But de-spite memory’s and history’s distinct epistemological frameworks and means of representation, the historian cannot expunge the referential claims of a re-membered past from his or her list of potential sources when attempting to reconstruct the history of a particular past. The reason is that all historical knowledge is dependent, at base, on the memories of others.19 The historian’s inability to evade the referential claims of memory thus stems from the recog-nition that the sense of temporality and anteriority opened up through the capacity to remember forms the necessary precondition for the production of historical knowledge (Megill 2007: 24–25). The awareness of a past and ability to attest to it through the exercise of memory – memory’s function as the “guardian of the ultimate dialectic constitutive of the pastness of the past”20 – accords memory a certain priority in regard to history, and establishes it as the “womb” or “matrix” out of which historical thought emerges (Ricoeur 2004: 87, 498). Said differently, it is the shared horizon of a past reality beyond mem-ory and history, first attested to through the act of remembering, that prevents the referential claims of cultural memory from ever being fully detached from the realm of the historian’s potential sources.

Three methodological points, each hermeneutical in orientation, arise out of this reflection on history’s difficult, but unavoidable, epistemological rela-tionship to memory. First, the crucial differences separating the knowledge generated through the cultural frameworks of memory and the historian’s re-search give pause to any interpretive approach that dissolves the tension be-tween memory and history by conflating the referential claims of a remembered

19 Thus Bloch writes in his great meditation on historical evidence that within the docu-ment and archive “is nothing less than the passing down of memory from one generation to another,” even if the historian’s task is to remain on guard against the “errors of mem-ory, that loose, that ‘slippery’ memory, denounced long ago by one of our old jurists” (Bloch 1953: 71, 101).

20 This dialectic, Ricoeur writes, is “the relation between the ‘no longer,’ which marks its [the past] character of being elapsed, abolished, superseded, and the ‘having-been,’ which des-ignates its original and, in this sense, indestructible character” (Ricoeur 2004: 498).

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past with the historian’s critical representation of what once was. Indeed, to suggest that memory is the “womb” of historical knowledge is not to imply that the historian’s primary task is that of dutifully reproducing the content of a remembered past, but only that the documents and archives on which histori-ans depend would be impossible without the memories of others (Megill 2007: 24).21 The uncritical adoption of cultural memories of a David or Elijah within the Hebrew Bible as historically authentic suffers, then, from a failure to recog-nize the significant disjunction that separates the epistemological underpin-nings of cultural memory and history, and thus from a neglect of the critical, discriminating assessment of evidence so essential to the historian’s enter-prise. Simply stated, the appeal to memory for an understanding of the biblical past cannot be used as a surreptitious argument cited in order to safeguard the historical value of these ancient texts’ referential claims.

At the same time, however, the disparate epistemological underpinnings separating memory from history cannot be cited as justification for an a priori rejection of a remembered past within the historian’s work. The stubborn avowal of memory to be “of the past,” confirmed within every act of recogni-tion, indicates that the claims of memory, regardless of their antiquity, cannot be proscribed at the outset from the historian’s reconstructive efforts. The epis-temological tension between memory and history cannot then be dissolved by disregarding memory’s claims, but must be attended to through a different form of confrontation if the common past horizon beyond memory and his-tory is to be acknowledged and upheld. Thus, though the past handed down through the conduits of cultural memory is certainly not the historian’s, and though a community’s remembered past remains particularly susceptible to the practices of adaptation and modification that weakens its ties to the reality of a historical past, the break between the past claimed by memory and history cannot be assumed. It must be shown so through the historian’s research.

As a corollary to this observation, a third methodological point that arises from this reflection on epistemology is that the referential claims of a remem-bered past cannot remain bracketed, indefinitely, within the historian’s work. This is not to argue against a methodology that does set aside the referential claims of particular cultural memories in order to pursue other important his-torical questions. But it is to contend that the genealogy of these memories, and that past claimed within them, must be confronted at some point within

21 So Riceour comments, “[W]e have nothing better than our memory to assure ourselves of the reality of our memories – we have nothing better than testimony and criticism of testimony to accredit the historian’s representation of the past” (Ricoeur 2004: 276).

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the historian’s research if memory’s intrinsic bond to the past is to be sus-tained.

The key question is how a historical approach toward the claims of such memories would unfold. The absence of an uncontestable, objective, and uni-versally recognized description of “the” past by which the historian could com-pare and adjudicate the historical veracity of a memory’s claims undermines any interpretive approach toward a remembered past dependent on the no-tion of verification.22 A hermeneutic aware of the limitations of historical knowledge must, then, proceed with more modest aims. Rather than seeking the historical verification of certain cultural memories through a mode of in-dependent attestation, the historian confronted by the referential claims of a culture’s memories is better served, from an epistemological perspective, through the triangulation of a disparate collection of past referents, textual and material, that attest to that place and time being remembered. That is, rather than restricting the historical appraisal of certain literary memories to the direct corroboration between ancient sources, a more nuanced approach locates the referential claims of these texts within a diverse assemblage of past referents in order to ascertain and trace out those points of semblance or dis-connect that emerge. What is sought through this critical assessment of a re-membered past is not then certainty regarding a particular reference’s historicity, but rather the plausibility or implausibility of a memory’s claim when triangulated with an assemblage of other past traces. In the absence of well-documented events from antiquity, the question the historian poses to that past claimed through cultural memory is whether its references offer a persuasive account of a given occurrence in light of what other material and textual referents suggest about the place and time being recounted.

A hermeneutical approach sensitive to the fragile connections and pro-found disruptions between memory and history is thus best served by situating the referential claims of a particular cultural memory within a broader context of ancient referents in order to determine if the past represented through it is commensurate with these other material and textual traces. Assessing the historical character of those descriptions surrounding the funeral games of

22 The crumbling of these foundationalist assumptions wedded to historical knowledge is often traced to Nietzsche’s reflections on epistemology, a famous instance of which stems from section 12 of his third essay in On the Genealogy of Morality: “From now on, my phil-osophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge,’ let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge as such’ … There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’” (Nietzsche 1997: 87; emphasis original).

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Patroclus in the Iliad (Il. xxiii.826–35), for example, would proceed by holding up this account against Mycenean Late Bronze Age mortuary remains and epi-graphs that potentially attest to these Late Bronze Age practices; efforts to de-termine what light the literary references of Beowulf might shine on the history of the early medieval period in northern Europe would involve situating this work within a wider network of archaeological traces and documents from the western Baltic in the fifth through seventh centuries CE.23 Given the malleabil-ity of cultural memory and its susceptibility to being reshaped and trans-formed over time, the references preserved within its stories may find little historical worth. But the inherent possibility of memory to attest to the past in a historically meaningful way requires that a rigorous effort be made to ascer-tain what, if any, of its referential claims retain historical value. The task of the historian confronted with ancient texts informed by the cultural memories of a society is consequently to “expand, correct, criticize, and even refute” the claims made within these writings in order to bring about a more textured and judicious account of what once was (Ricoeur 2004: 500). Or, to put it more suc-cinctly, the historian’s responsibility is to “use memory in order to get beyond it” (Megill 2007: 21).

In returning to the ancient world of the southern Levant, two biblical refer-ences help to illustrate the practical interpretive implications of these episte-mological considerations. The first surrounds the site of Ai (et-Tell), located ca. 20 km to the north of Jerusalem in the central highlands. In the Book of Joshua, the city of Ai contributes to a particularly important literary moment within the overarching story of the Israelite movement into Canaan. Following upon the miraculous destruction of Jericho (Joshua 6), the Israelites are said to have journeyed westward to Ai where, after an initial military setback triggered by disobedience against holy war stipulations (חרם), Ai is captured and razed, all 12,000 of its inhabitants killed, and its king executed (Joshua 7–8). The Israelite victory leads to the capitulation of the Gibeonites (Joshua 9), and sets the stage for the further defeat of a number of other Canaanite cities in the region (sum-marized in Josh. 11:16–23).

Early excavators at Ai immediately recognized the difficulties the site posed for the historical integrity of the biblical account.24 Though Ai was indeed once a monumental location covering 110 dunams, this impressive site existed only in the Early Bronze Age or the third millennium BCE (Callaway 1976; Fin-kelstein 1988). After ca. 2400 BCE the city was abandoned and remained so

23 So, for example, Sherratt 1990; 2005; Cramp 1993; Webster 2002; Niles 2007.24 For a fascinating account of early attempts to reconcile the archaeological remains of Ai

with the biblical narrative, see Callaway 1968.

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until the early Iron I period (twelfth century BCE), when a small village of ca. 10 dunams occupied a modest section of the already ancient acropolis (Callaway 1976). The absence of any Late Bronze remains at Ai from the time when, pre-sumably, the biblical account of Ai’s destruction would have taken place25 thus came to form a serious impediment to those who read the narrative in Joshua 7–8 as a historical account of the early Israelite “conquest” of Canaan. Ai sim-ply did not exist when a putative Joshua would have marched through the re-gion.

Four short kilometers to the northwest of Ai resides the ancient settlement of Bethel (Beitin). Though a nameless king of Bethel is cited in Joshua as one of the rulers defeated during the Israelite invasion of Canaan (Josh. 12:16), Bethel receives much more attention in the Books of Judges and 1 Samuel as a key highland location positioned between the important centers of Shiloh and Gi-beah in the land of Benjamin. In these texts, Bethel is portrayed as a significant site of tribal assembly (Judg. 20:18, 26; 21:2), an important cultic location (1 Sam. 10:3), and a settlement where, along with Gilgal and Mizpah, Samuel was said to have come to judge (1 Sam. 7:16).

The references to Bethel within Judges and 1 Samuel set their stories in an era before the rise of the Israelite or Judahite kingdoms, or sometime during the Iron I period (twelfth through eleventh centuries BCE). From an archaeo-logical perspective, what is striking about the remains of Bethel is that the lo-cation appears to have been one of the most prominent settlements of the central hill country during this era. In the recent review of the archaeological finds produced in the excavations of Bethel by Albright and Kelso in the mid-twentieth century (Kelso and Albright 1968), Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz have argued that the Iron I settlement witnessed a period of strong activity, and one that correlated to another important Iron I location, Shiloh Stratum V (Finkel-stein and Singer-Avitz 2009: 37–38, 43). Such a conclusion finds significance because of the changing demographics of the highlands after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age palatial society. In an era that witnessed the proliferation of very small villages in the region of Ephraim and Benjamin, Bethel stands out in the archaeological record as one of the more substantial centers that arose at the beginning of the Iron Age.

When setting these references to Ai and Bethel alongside the material traces of that period to which these stories refer, the archaeological remains recov-ered from the two locations relate to the biblical narrative in very different

25 Albright, followed by the majority of those who viewed the conquest as a historical event, calculated the conquest of Canaan to have occurred sometime in the late thirteenth cen-tury BCE (Albright 1939).

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ways. With Ai, the dearth of Late Bronze Age remains from the site find little connection to the biblical description of an impressive Canaanite city con-quered and destroyed by foreign, Israelite forces. For Bethel, however, there appears to be at least some resonance between the allusions to the location’s import in the Iron I period and the notable settlement activity attested to at the site within the archaeological record.

Interpreting the biblical references to Ai and Bethel through the lens of cul-tural memory helps to account for the volatility of these allusions in terms of their relationship to the archaeological remains of the region. For in light of the epistemological considerations discussed above, the expectation sur-rounding stories informed by cultural memory is that such narratives would have been marked by both continuity and change as they were transmitted over time in the ancient world. In the case of Ai, the dynamics of this transmis-sion appear to have tended much more toward transformation and revision. Confronted with the impressive ruins of a location already over a thousand years old, stories arose within ancient Israelite society about a place called “the ruins” (Hebrew: עי) that were made so by Joshua’s forces.26 The discontinuity apparent between memories of Joshua’s conquest and the archaeological re-mains related to the location suggests that whatever forces led to Ai’s abandon-ment in the Early Bronze period, its desertion and decay were dramatically reframed through memories of a Joshua and the entry of Israelites into the land of Canaan. The story of Ai’s conquest in Joshua 7–8 would thus conform to what Halbwachs, and more recently Davies, rightly perceive as the potential of cultural memory to be severed from any historical past in the service of pres-ent interests (Halbwachs 1992: 213–14; Davies 2008: 111–12, 122).

The biblical references to Bethel in the period before the rise of Saul, how-ever, caution against a perspective that would view the past claimed by cul-tural memory as one produced only through consistent revision and invention. For though the archaeological evidence from Bethel cannot verify the historic-ity of the biblical allusions to the site in the Iron I period, the relationship be-tween these biblical references and other material traces from the region are at least suggestive, and merit further historical reflection in a manner that stories of Ai’s conquest in the Book of Joshua do not. Indeed, a provocative feature of the biblical depiction of Bethel’s early Iron Age significance is that these refer-ences find more support from the archaeological record than recent efforts to impugn the historical character of these texts and locate Bethel’s true cultic

26 So already Noth’s assessment of the relationship between the location’s name and the story told about it (Noth 1935).

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and cultural importance instead many centuries later in the post-exilic era.27 As Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz comment, “Evidence for activity at Bethel in the Babylonian, Persian and early Hellenistic period is very meager, if it exists at all” (Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz 2009: 45).

The point in briefly lifting up the examples of Ai and Bethel is that they help to illustrate the dynamics of cultural memory anticipated in this study’s reflec-tion on epistemology. From an interpretive standpoint, what these dynamics require is a hermeneutical framework sensitive to the interplay between reten-tion and transformation that typifies the transmission of a culture’s sanctioned memories over time. Thus, if certain biblical references are to be affiliated with the discourse of cultural memory, the historian is best served by situating the referential claims of these texts within a wider constellation of ancient refer-ents that pertain to the period being recollected in order to trace out both the continuities and discontinuities that may obtain. As in the case of Ai, this in-terpretive approach may find little that connects its stories to the world behind these references; with Bethel, some lines of semblance may pertain.

The value of attending to the problem of epistemology raised with the re-cent historical interest in cultural memory thus resides in the interpretive dex-terity it encourages. For rather than locating the referential status of memory within the domain of either the historical or fictitious, an awareness of the epistemological underpinnings of cultural memory allows the historian to bet-ter contend with the possibilities of both revision and permanence within a past portrayed in ancient texts informed by the cultural frameworks of memo-ry. A rigorous consideration of what type of past knowledge cultural memory might constitute for the historian thus promotes an interpretive approach to-ward a remembered past that is able to index the malleable, transformative dimension of cultural memory that gave its stories their vitality and meaning over time in antiquity, and to perceive as well the fragile connections these memories potentially retained to certain past historical experiences.

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27 See, for example, Blenkinsopp 2003; Knauf 2006; Davies 2007.

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Documents

Retracing a Remembered Past: Methodological Remarks on Memory, History, and the Hebrew Bible. Bib Int 23.3 (2015): 291-315