The Exodus in Biblical Memory

Abstract

ProQuest Information and Learning Foreign Text Omitted... tradition (which is a product of oblivion and memory) -Jorge Luis Borges exodus from Egypt is a focal point of ancient Israelite religion. Virtually every kind of religious literature in the Hebrew Bible-prose narrative, liturgical poetry, didactic prose, and prophecy-celebrates the exodus as a foundational event.1 Israelite ritual, law, and ethics are often grounded in the precedent and memory of the exodus. In the Decalogue, Yahweh identifies himself as the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Exod 20:2 = Dent 5:6). In the covenantal language of this passage and many others, the deliverance from Egypt is the main historical warrant for the religious bond between Yahweh and Israel; it is the gracious act of the great lord for his people on which rests the superstructure of Israelite belief and practice. In some texts (and featured prominently in the Passover Haggadah), the historical distance of the exodus event is drawn into the present by the elastic quality of genealogical time: You shall tell your son on that day, `It is because of what Yahweh did for me when he brought me out of Egypt' (Exod 13:8; cf. Deut 6:20-25). In its existential actuality, the exodus, more than any other event of the Hebrew Bible, embodies William Faulkner's adage: The past is never dead. It's not even past.2 Given the centrality of the exodus, it is not surprising that scholars have expended much energy trying to ascertain its historical content. Recent decades have seen a diminution of William F Albright's confidence that the exodus was IMAGE FORMULA5 undoubtedly a historical event.3 He thought it quite unreasonable to deny its [viz., the biblical account of the exodus] substantial accuracy and assigned to the exodus a date of ca. 1297 B.C.E.4 This position contrasts, for example, with the recent history of ancient Israel by John Hayes and Maxwell Miller, which consigns the exodus to the shadowy realm of folk tradition into which critical historiography cannot penetrate.5 While the designation of folk tradition or folk history is apt for the general picture of the exodus, it does not necessarily follow that critical historiography has no point of entry into this tradition. Rather, I would suggest, the historian has much to investigate regarding the collective memories of a culture.6 Cultural memories tend to be a mixture of historical truth and fiction, composed of authentic historical details, folklore motifs, ethnic self-fashioning, ideological claims, and narrative imagination.7 They are communicated orally and in written texts and circulate in a wide discursive network. For the collecIMAGE FORMULA7 five memories of the exodus, the Bible is our primary written source (including its constituent documentary sources), but we may plausibly assume that the written texts depend in various ways on earlier discourses, both oral and written. collective memory of the exodus is, in this sense, situated in a history of discourses. In a recent book, Moses the Egyptian: Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann advocates an approach to cultural memories that he calls mnemohistory.8 Unlike history proper, mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered. It surveys the story-lines of tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of reading the past. Mnemohistory is not the opposite of history, but rather is one of its branches or subdisciplines, such as intellectual history, social history, the history of mentalities, or the history of ideas .... Mnemohistory is reception theory applied to history.9 data for mnemohistory are texts, artifacts, and other evidence of cultural discourse about the remembered past, and its object is to discern how such discourses are constituted and how they serve to inform and influence the cultural present. …