The Bible and Collective Memory, Final Seminar Presentation (original) (raw)
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Scripture as the Memory of God's People
All human communities and relationships exist, in part, through a remembered past. The Church is a community radically constituted by memory, particularly the historic and spiritual memory recorded in Scripture. This paper will investigate the ways in which memory constitutes the Church and therefore the life of God's people. It will first examine the general significance of memory within human social and political relations. The paper will then explore the exemplary role of memory within the Christian Church. This will reveal how memory helps to incorporate the whole person into Christ, making membership in the Church both personal and corporate. Part I: Memory & Personal Existence While this inquiry will not directly focus on the nature of personhood, we can state at the outset that to be a person is to be a relational being. 1 It follows that the individual cannot be sufficiently understood when wholly abstracted from a social framework. 2 Human relations potentially include God, our neighbor, our self, and the world. The first two, God and neighbor, are of primary interest, insofar as this paper explores the nature of a social community formed by and oriented toward God. Yet, our relations with God and neighbor depend in part on how we understand ourselves and the world. Part I of this paper will explore how the faculty of memory serves as a foundation for these relations and therefore our social existence.
Reconsidering the Role of Memory in Religious Education
This paper examines the importance of memory in the Hebrew bible and how memory lay at the center of Ancient Israel's religious faith and cultural identity. It argues for a similar, albeit nuanced, memory-based approach to contemporary Christian religious education. It analyzes memory through the lens of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic of narration and considers ways in which forgetting as well as remembering might play a role in faith formation and identity in the twenty-first century.
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This dissertation argues that memory is a central idea in the two major religions of the Pentateuchdeuteronomic and priestlyand that examination of memory both offers new insights into these religions and their relationship to each other, and lends coherence to, and integrates, various levels of those religions: their terminology; religious programs; textual presentation; theologies and cosmologies. It seeks to develop a comprehensive understanding of memory in the Pentateuch through three kinds of analysis. First, by exploring the language associated with memory in each tradition, it demonstrates that D conceptualizes memory in verbal terms while for P, memory is associated with sensual, mainly visual, experiences. As well, in D, memory is mainly an Israelite activity while in P, God"s memory is most important. Part two relates the respective conceptualizations of memory to the religious programs of each tradition by making use the Divergent Modes of Religiosity model of anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse which correlates the type of memory privileged in a religion with the character of its ritual. The study concludes by considering the relationship between the religious programs devised by the authors of D and P and their respective cosmologies as represented by the two creation accounts which open the Pentateuch. The study also sheds light on particular issues in Pentateuchal scholarship: the debate between proponents of actualization and proponents of practice as the primary focus of deuteronomic religion; the absence of prayer in deuteronomic religion; the significance of creation for a historically oriented religion; the tension embedded in priestly literature between a theology predicated on creation and one predicated on revelation as well as the function of revelation in P; the primacy of P to H; and the identification of a number of passages as either P or H.
ilarly, he is familiar with much reception history of the book but does not make it a focus of the commentary. Instead, he has produced a detailed analysis of Job within its biblical context, with attention to language, text, and theology. daniel d. pioske, Memory in a Time of Prose: Studies in Epistemology, Hebrew Scribalism, and the Biblical Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Pp. xiv + 281. $99.
History and Memory in the Prophets
C. J. Sharp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 132–48, 2016
Written prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament includes many allusions to what look like historical events. Frequently they are isolated from any wider context, however, and others relate to events not otherwise known to us. In the past, scholars have assumed that these need to integrated into what we can reconstruct of Israel’s “grand narrative” of its national past and that those who heard these prophecies, then as well as now, had to have the whole narrative in mind in order to understand the reference. In this chapter it is suggested that the data can be better understood as the product of social memory. Modern examples from small but long-lived communities illustrate how episodic and sometimes even scientifically unhistorical memories can nevertheless be vital for moral, religious, and social self-understanding.
P. Carstens, T. Bjørnung Hasselbalch, and N. P. Lemche. (eds.) The Bible and Cultural Memory, 2012
Edited by Pernille Carstens n This series conains volumes dealing with the snrdy of the Hebrew Bible, ancient Israelite society and ftlated ancient iocieties, biblical Hebrew and cognate languages, the reception of biblical texts ,to9"gh the cennuies, andthe history of ttie discipline. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and the piinted version of theJournal of Hebrew Scriptures, which is also av:ailable online. Trine Biornung l{asselbalch Niels Peter I-emche gfigla' ptess 20t2 s, gp. tr .HIS PrncB DoES Nor RBCoGNIZE HIM'(Ion 7:10): RBTTBCTIONS oF NoN-INSCRIBED MnuoRY IN THE BooroFJon TenyE SronoALEN