Biblical Past Research Articles

The Desert as an Inventarium

Abstract This article is about the symbolic representation of the wilderness motif in a selection of rabbinic travel tales, taking into consideration its representation in earlier Jewish writings. The article includes a selection of rabbinic travel narratives found in b. Baba Batra that concern the desert journeys of the remarkable rabbinic protagonist Rabba bar Bar Ḥanna. The hero of the stories is presented as viewing the giant dead bodies of the biblical tribes in the wilderness, Mount Sinai, and Korah and his people, all according to the sequence of biblical events in the books of Moses. Wilderness plays an integral role in these stories. While there is little interest in this motif in Palestinian rabbinic literature, wilderness plays a distinct role in the eschatological process according to the rabbinic theological speculations known from the Babylonian Talmud. According to the selected travel narratives, which all focus on the wilderness, several objects from the biblical past, as well as some items from the dawn of creation, which are designated to play an important role in the eschatological process, are stored there.

Continuity and innovation in architectural depictions of the Jerusalem Temple

Architectural depictions of the Israelite or Jewish sanctuaries are found throughout ancient Jewish literature, from the tabernacle account in Exodus to the Mishnah. This article examines how and to what extent the attempt to create architectural continuity has influenced some of the depictions of both the First and the Second Temple composed during the Second Temple period. It turns out that similar exegetical challenges underlie the Temple accounts of Chronicles, Josephus and the Mishnah, and their depictions were influenced not only by their historical sources but also by their exegetical and ideological views. The discourse on continuity and innovation in the architecture of the Temple is part of the larger question of the relation to the biblical past, which has preoccupied Jewish authors in the Second Temple period and in the first centuries after the destruction.

Egeria’s “Panoramic Now”: Time and Temporality in Late Antique Pilgrimage

Focusing on the late fourth-century travel account produced by a woman known today as Egeria, this article asks how her somatic, interpersonal, and sensory experiences and feelings shaped her understanding of time, or temporality. The various ways she experiences time in both parts of her diary are considered: her descriptions of travels to holy places and people in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia, followed by a detailed description of Jerusalem’s Lenten, Holy Week, and Easter rites. Taken together, the two parts of Egeria’s travel diary reveal diverse ways of measuring and feeling time. It is argued that her feelings – frustrations, excitement, joys, and sorrows – shape her experiences of the biblical past, whether through its availability or grief at its loss. The itinerarium and liturgy provide many ways to engage biblical time, whether topographically, liturgically, or calendrically.

"No Wonder That on This Spot God Spoke to Us": Intersection of Anglican Tourist-Pilgrims and Archaeology in British Mandate Palestine

For British Anglican tourists, archaeological tourism in Palestine marked an expansion of a broader British cultural and religious relationship to Palestine as a land made familiar by a childhood of bible stories and nativity scenes, and one which played a role in the biblification of Palestine and the appropriation of its past to validate and strengthen a connection to Britain and the Mandate. Archaeology offered a direct link to the materiality of the biblical past, experienced via a “kairotic moment” in which the past meets the present. By examining reports of British travelers to Palestine, this article considers how materially embodied religious experiences not only drove tourist movement to Palestine but also functioned as a keystone in Britain’s relationship with Palestine during the Mandate period. Behind this growth in archeological tourism, however, is a story of tension, most notably between Mandate Palestine’s first director of antiquities, John Garstang, and the Mandate and Westminster governments. From his optimism in a report on the future of archaeology in Palestine in 1919 to his bitter resignation in 1926, Garstang’s story represents the Mandate’s failures with regard to archaeology. These tensions and Garstang’s unease foreshadowed the development of archaeology as a tool of settler colonialism in occupied Palestine today.

‘Comprehended history’: Hegelian and Judaic conceptions of the embodiment of exile

ABSTRACT This paper explores the structural similarities between Hegel’s conception of spirit and the Jewish medieval text, the Zohar’s, figuration of Shekhinah. The formal logic of spirit’s self-actualization is historically exemplified by Shekhinah in her existence as divinity’s indwelling presence in the world and her mythic embodiment of Jewish history. This study reads Shekhinah’s journey towards union with God as analogous to spirit’s passage towards absolute knowledge, a passage which concludes with what is often referred to as spirit’s ‘return to its elf.’ Contrary to some popular interpretations of Hegel, spirit’s return is an iterative, tautological return to itself as differentiated in itself. The discussion concludes with the claim that Shekhinah’s eschatological journey towards harmonious reunion with God occurs through a proleptic movement in which biblical past and prophesied future, or the Jews’s historically first and theoretically final redemption from exile, coalesce in a here and now in a similarly iterative manner which precludes it from a determinate, apocalyptic end.

‘Vandalizing’ Father Hittite. Karabel, Orientalism and Historiographies

This paper provides a framework to highlight the entanglement of discovery and historiography based on the example of the rock-relief figure of Karabel (Turkey), a pivotal monument to recognize the Hittites and the biblical past. I lay out the common narrative of the re-discovery's story that resemble a hagiography, and I put it into perspective with critiques from post-colonial studies. Due to the ongoing damage at the figure of Karabel, I hypothesize that the one-sided role of the monument in the story of the re-discovery of the Hittites by western scholars is insufficient to avoid the radical rejection of the Karabel relief by some people. This article is theory-in-practice: it highlights some pitfalls and tells a story with more diversity, open thought, and considerations beyond traditional narratives of power in passéist oriental archaeology.

Victorian ethnographic perceptions of Palestine and the historiography of ancient Israel: a preliminary exploration

ABSTRACT Victorian travellers, explorers and scholars in the Levant produced a series of ethnographic observations of Palestine’s indigenous population essentially through biblical lenses. These perceptions sought ultimately to retrieve the biblical past in the context of the imperial present. At the same time, modern historiography about ancient Israel developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the full-blown allochronism and Orientalism of the early modern Western visitors to Palestine have in recent decades been surpassed by more critical insights in the scholarly assessment of the region, some traits from that Victorian ethnographic and Bible-centred gaze still linger in contemporary historical constructions of ancient Palestine through the concept of ‘ancient Israel’, notably in the conceptualisation and periodisation of such a history.

Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America by Jordan T. Watkins

Reviewed by: Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America by Jordan T. Watkins David Waldstreicher (bio) Keywords Bible, Religion, Slavery, Abolition Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America. By Jordan T. Watkins. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. Cloth, $59.99.) When intellectual and religious history have noticed the problem of slavery, it has often been to lament its divisive or prejudicial effects. In his inventive and largely convincing study, Jordan Watkins sees silver linings that actually connect and illuminate, rather than shadow, realms of thought and belief often segregated by scholars. He also sees links to the present that have been underestimated. The debate over slavery, he argues, heightened a sense of distance from the past, which "emerged as a powerful force for interpretive change" (6). Rather than functioning as the dead hand of history, slavery "roused the republic to historical consciousness" (xxii). Watkins makes this perhaps subtle and even counterintuitive point in summary in every chapter, but what the book arguably does best is establish a quite consequential relationship between the way leading intellectuals and some political actors in the North came to read the key civic texts and the way they read the Bible. Increasing awareness of differences between the biblical past and the American pre sent, especially concerning to theologians who followed the new historically informed biblical criticism, began to parallel the republic's lengthening distance from the founding, whether conceived of as 1776 or 1787. At first, distance fueled an interest in context and an intention to separate the timely from the timeless. The new historical criticism, however, also provided openings for dismissing aspects of the Bible, such as miracles or Old Testament proscriptions, as anachronisms, the obscure "letter" that ought to be sacrificed to higher laws or the spirit of the text. Recent debates about versions of constitutional originalism—textual, public meaning, "living,"—have their roots in these antebellum debates and practices.1 Antebellum historical thought, then, wasn't shallow or simplistic; the stakes were high [End Page 473] because people could see the implications, for example, of arguments that stressed how Jesus accommodated to the sin of slavery but emphasized the necessity of moral progress, as opposed to readings that saw slavery as so modern as to be unbiblical, or alternately as the very essence of Bible times, and thus God's plan. "Attention to context and circumstance could be used both to deny and to affirm slavery's biblical sanction," but for Watkins, antislavery led to more creativity and fit better with important religious and intellectual trends. Similarly, and influenced by these hermeneutics, constitutional interpretation shifted from reverence or confidence in a clear original intent that might seem to favor a timeless slavery to debates about the ambiguities and contradictions in the nation's founding where it came to slavery. One hinge, for Watkins, was William Lloyd Garrison, who (like the Quakers who set the stage but get no attention here), prioritized higher law—the Golden Rule, the Declaration's emphasis on equality—over the Constitution and its compromises and silences. The publication of historical evidence like Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 could also support different readings of the framers' original intentions: ambiguous compromises; a striking disinclination to defend slavery in the abstract; or its permanence in law. (In other words, all of the major interpretations still debated today using much of the same evidence.) While capturing the disagreements that shaped so much of the abolitionist movement after 1830, Watkins stresses how an emphasis on progress rather than a primordial golden age, for both moderate antislavery and radical abolition, became a strength, at least insofar as it could be squared with non-literalist or fundamentalist readings of scripture. Controversies over fugitive-slave renditions pushed the dynamic further, allowing for still more intense considerations of precedents regarding the letter and the spirit of the laws. Proslavery Biblicism tends to hover in the background, sacrificed to the emphasis on historicism and its development: We get a lot of Theodore Parker here at the expense of other strains, especially as we move from Biblicism to...

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and Discovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and Discovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950

The Old and the New Israel: The Cultural Origins of the Special Relationship

Abstract Understandings of the new American nation as a “Second Israel,” and a prevalent political discourse devoted to the narratives of the Old Testament, were a distinct trait of the early United States. Indeed, the images and narratives of the Old Testament were as common in the formative decades of the United States, in the words of the great historian Perry Miller, as “the air that the people breathed.” This attachment to the Old Testament, and the fact that American nationalism and twentieth century Zionism crystalized around the biblical history of the Israelites, bears considerably on the relationship of the two nations. The “special” bond between the modern countries, which is commonly understood in terms of pragmatism, interests, and shared ideologies, thus rests on a deep cultural connection. The American public’s consistent backing of the State of Israel (one that far surpasses the constituency of evangelical Christian Zionists), which politically translates into a robust, lasting and bi-partisan support that defies the arithmetic of appeals to Jewish voters (or donors) seems puzzling at times. It becomes more intelligible in light of the centuries-long tradition of American public speech describing the nation as a new incarnation of biblical Israel. This usable biblical past, which continues to influence American culture in meaningful ways, adds an important dimension for our understanding of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel.

‘Blood and water flowed to the ground’: sacred topography, biblical landscapes and conceptions of space in the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum

ABSTRACT The anonymous Latin eyewitness account of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s conquest of the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187, known as the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, is fundamentally preoccupied with the capture and destruction of Christian holy sites in the Levant. This article analyses conceptions of space in the Libellus with a particular focus on the author’s exegetical approach to the sacred topography of the Holy Land, which arguably plays a larger role in the narrative than the historical actors themselves. It examines how the author deploys this landscape typologically in order to tie the events of 1187 into the conceptual framework of the biblical past. The paper also explores how his positioning of Christians and Muslims within the spaces of the text highlights the weaknesses of the former and the dual nature of the latter as both desecrators and potential worshippers in this region of conflict and encounter.

Observaciones sobre la sintaxis de la toponimia en el itinerario del Pseudo Antonino de Placentia

SummaryOne of the basic features of the itineraries is the presence of toponyms. In the particular case of the Christian itineraries, toponyms operate in two different levels: in the places of the biblical past that is meant to be recalled in the peregrination itself and in the places “truly” visited. This fact gives toponyms a very interesting “diversity”, not only from a cultural standpoint, but also because of all kinds of linguistic facts: phonetic, morphologic, syntactic, etc. These linguistic facts reflect the situation and evolution of late Latin, an aspect of which I am going to focus on the syntactic level.

Sharon B. Oster. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp.

Reviewed by: No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Sharon B. Oster Julian Levinson Sharon B. Oster. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001077 Sharon Oster's insightful, well-researched book is framed by a discussion of the notorious Seligman affair, which she describes as a turning point in the relationship between Jews and American society. In the summer of 1877, the German Jewish financier Joseph Seligman was denied entry to the prestigious Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, on the grounds that he represented what hotel manager Judge Henry Hilton called a class of "ostentatious … vulgar" outsiders who were "repulsive to the well-bred" (8). Seligman was a Jew "in the trade sense of the word" (8) and hence deemed irredeemably unfit to rub shoulders with the leisure class. Scholarship on Jews in America has dwelt considerably on negative stereotyping of Jews, but Oster draws attention to the surprising note of praise that Hilton reserved for another kind of Jew: those like the old New York Sephardic families the Nathans and the Hendricks. These represented what he termed the "Orthodox Hebrew Church" (8), a noble religious heritage that the Seligman Jews had long forgotten. For Oster, this opposition between the debased materialistic Jew and the noble Hebrew is a central, if unstable, binary structure in the American imaginary. Seligman may have been sent packing, but the idea of the noble Hebrew endured even from this notorious episode as an alternate source of value, and it is chiefly here that Oster's interest lies. Oster's book may be seen as an effort to reread American literary representations of Jewishness in light of the recent "temporal turn" in the humanities. Whereas many recent scholars of American Jewish culture have analyzed constructions of Jewishness in relation to discourses of race and nationhood (e.g., Sander Gilman, Jonathan Freedman, Eric Goldstein, and Jennifer Glaser), Oster explores how Jews have been associated with competing models of temporality and history. The "Hebraic myth" in her subtitle refers to a constellation of ideas about the deep biblical past within American Protestant culture: biblical Israel is an ancient nation whose erstwhile privileged role in salvation history has been superseded by Christianity; yet it also continues to exert its presence throughout history, either as a typological precedent for Christians (as in the Puritan settlers' self-conception as the "new" Israel), or as a still-legible stratum within the practices, sensibilities, even the physiognomy, of contemporary Jews (as in Hilton's understanding of the Sephardim). As an enduring, alternate locus of meaning within Christian society, the "Hebraic myth" thus complicates the notion of history as a unilinear progression. As Oster contends, "the noble Hebrew marks the disruptive return of the past, complicating narratives of Protestant redemption in anticipation of alternate futures" (25). In order to show a range of uses for this Hebraic myth in American literature, Oster brings together a set of texts written by Jews and Christians (the key figures are Abraham Cahan, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Emma Lazarus). In her readings, she explores how ostensibly secular literary [End Page 214] texts are bound up with religious modes of thinking, specifically ideas about temporality. Cahan represents New York City as a "crossroads of different orders of time" (85); Yezierska creates a protagonist who "convert[s] her noble Jewish past into the stuff of narrative and social distinction" (221); and Lazarus "harness[es] the Hebraic myth to disrupt typology" (235). Her readings of these figures are solid and illuminating. By linking secular and religious themes under the broader rubric of temporality, Oster enables us to reconsider important questions such as the roles of nostalgia, redemptive futurity, and cultural critique in Jewish American texts. The most original and, to my mind, the truly inspiring sections of the book are those that take up non-Jewish writers, particularly James and Wharton. Anyone interested in the representation of Jews in the classic texts of American literature will especially welcome Oster's extended readings of The Golden Bowl...

Facing the Holy Ark, in Words and in Images

This essay explores depictions of the ark of the covenant in late antique Jewish and Christian texts, as well as ancient art. It explores the interrelationships between the arks of the covenant from the wilderness tabernacle and the first Jerusalem temple, and the ark for Torah scrolls in late antique synagogues. The inaccessibility or invisibility of the arks of the covenant in the tabernacle and temple is contrasted against the visibility and symbolic depictions of the Torah arks in late antique synagogues. Moreover, the author demonstrates how early rabbinic texts depicted Torah scrolls within or alongside the arks of the covenant, fusing all three arks into one. In doing so, the rabbis draw a connection between the late antique present and the biblical past, which can be juxtaposed against claims of discontinuity by other sources from late antiquity.

From the Guest Editors

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the Guest EditorsGregg E. Gardner and Lily C. VuongGregg E. Gardner Search for more articles by this author and Lily C. Vuong Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe ark of the covenant and the golden candelabrum (a.k.a. menorah) are among the many religious relics that have long been the object of popular fascination. Sensationalist tales about their whereabouts have increased exponentially with the expansion of media outlets in the digital age—the True Cross, Noah’s Ark, and other objects, it seems, are “discovered” on a regular basis.And yet, we should not let sensationalism discourage us from engaging in critical, scientific explorations of the very real roles that material culture plays in religious traditions. In recent years, specialists in anthropology, religion, and history have increasingly examined the production, circulation, and consumption of objects, and how they mediate relationships amongst humans, as well as between humans and the divine. This renewed focus on the materiality of religion illuminates how religious traditions incorporate patterns of feelings and sensations that are bound up with performances, objects, and spaces. As David Morgan has written, not everything meaningful to a religious group is necessarily expressed in words or written down in texts. A subset of the recent “material turn” in religious studies is an increased interest in relics, defined as the remains of significant individuals (“primary” or “corporeal” relics) or the objects with which they came into contact (“secondary” or “contact” relics). Relics index duration, postpone oblivion, function as signs of a previous power, and reassure the user of the persistent potency of that power. Annabel Wharton writes that relics thus signify nonmaterial references in culturally complex ways, as multifunctional signifiers operating across a range of social contexts and subject to reappropriation by various groups. In late antiquity, both Jews and Christians fostered connections to the even more distant biblical past by cultivating narratives on the fate of the temple vessels. These are generally understood to include the ark of the covenant, menorah, showbread table, as well as the pots, shovels, bowls, basins, and other implements used in the Jerusalem temple’s sacrificial rituals. Also included are valuables that were given by kings and wealthy individuals, or acquired as spoils of war, and stored in the Jerusalem temple’s treasury. As will become evident from the papers that follow, however, this group of objects was never any one thing—rather, their nature and inventory differ from one source to another, in accordance with each author’s proclivities, objectives, and social-historical context.This special issue of Near Eastern Archaeology on the fate of the temple vessels in Jewish antiquity explores how the material culture of Jerusalem’s First Temple (ca. 960 to 586 BCE) and Second Temple (ca. 515 BCE to 70 CE) were depicted by Jews in late antiquity (70 to 640 CE) in their texts and material culture. The paper by Ballentine provides the early context, suggesting new ways to understand the vessels’ depictions in the Hebrew Bible. The bulk of the papers address depictions of the temple vessels in late antique Jewish sources (DesRosiers, Fine, Fraade, Stern), ranging from the first-century historian Flavius Josephus to classical rabbinic literature (Talmud, Midrash), to ancient art, to graffiti on the walls of underground burial installations. These papers wrestle with the often tense relationships between postdestruction Jewish realities and the emphasis on cultic activities inherited from the biblical past and symbolized by the temple vessels. The authors show how the past was drawn upon and reshaped in light of late antique Jews’ contexts in the Roman and Christian worlds. The paper by Concannon brings our exploration to date, examining contemporary uses of the Second Temple and its era. Challenging disciplinary boundaries between textual and material studies, these papers contribute to our understanding of ancient Judaism and, more broadly, the role of material culture in religion. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 82, Number 3September 2019The Fate of the Temple Vessels in Jewish Antiquity A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703985 Views: 84 Copyright 2019 American Schools of Oriental Research Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Seeing Race in Biblical Egypt: Edwin Longsden Long’s Anno Domini (1883) and A. H. Sayce’s The Races of the Old Testament (1891)

<span>To download this paper, please click </span><a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10077609/1/PIA_28_Challis.pdf">here.</a> <div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"> <span><br /></span> <span>This paper discusses the impact of ideas about the historical and racial origins of the Holy Family that are captured in the painting </span><span>Anno Domini or the Flight into Egypt </span><span>(1883/4) by Edwin Longsden Long. </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>fits into a wider 19</span><span>th</span><span>-century popular visual and literary narrative around Egypt and its ancient and biblical past. This general narrative, and its racial constructions, has been explored within reception theory and art history, but often overlooked in histories of archaeology and Egyptology. This paper unpacks how </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>fits into a well-known orientalist way of seeing Egypt but also reflects ideas about race that were prevalent in archaeology and other newly established scientific disciplines at the time. The construction of the Virgin Mary and Christ child as White Europeans in </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>both reflects and had an impact on constructions of race in Britain and on ancient (and modern) peoples in the Holy Land and Egypt in the late nineteenth century.</span> <span>These constructions fed the growing use of scientific terminology to give such racist imagery authority, as found in A. H. Sayce's ‘Sunday school book’ </span><span>The Races of the Old Testament </span><span>(1891). Sayce’s popular book used photographs taken by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1887 of different 'racial types' from Egyptian monuments. </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>vividly illustrates the preoccupation with race and identity found in archaeological interpretations of and motivations for recording material culture from ancient Egypt. This paper illustrates how art, archaeology, orientalism and racial theory fused and fed each other.</span> </div></div></div>

Memory in a Time of Prose: Studies in Epistemology, Hebrew Scribalism, and the Biblical Past by Daniel D. Pioske

Reviewed by: Memory in a Time of Prose: Studies in Epistemology, Hebrew Scribalism, and the Biblical Past by Daniel D. Pioske Mahri Leonard-Fleckman 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. Daniel Pioske's interest is epistemology in relation to the writing of biblical prose—what scribes knew when they were constructing and compiling biblical narratives, and the limits of this knowledge (pp. 5, 7). As a historian, P. pushes back against what he perceives to be problematic "epistemological assumptions" of the "historicity" of oral biblical traditions that have largely characterized modern historical studies of ancient Israel (pp. 60-61). Instead, he seeks to historicize "the very conditions of knowing" behind the composition of biblical prose (p. 63). At the end of the book, P. labels this an "episteme of memory" (p. 227) because it relies largely on oral traditions and the fragility of human memory. Throughout, P.'s project demonstrates continuity with his first book (David's Jerusalem: Between Memory and History [Routledge Studies in Religion 45; New York: Routledge, 2015]) and the influence of Yosef Yerushalmi and Paul Ricoeur. Underlying his epistemological study are three arguments. First, biblical prose was an innovative method for narrating the past that developed in the late Iron II Period, ca. 830 B.C.E. (p. 53). Second, knowledge available to the scribes derived primarily from oral traditions that interfaced with textuality throughout the development of prose narratives (p. 23). And, third, memory was essential for the preservation of these oral traditions. P. therefore builds on important recent studies regarding the orality-textuality dynamic, such as David M. Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (New York: Oxford, 2005) and F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp's On Biblical Poetry (New York: Oxford, 2015), as well as debates regarding the dating of prose writing in ancient Israel, including Seth Sanders's epigraphic study (Invention of Hebrew [Traditions; Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009]). With these varied studies underpinning his work, P. describes his unique contributions as twofold: his foci on epistemology and place (i.e., the archaeological record) (p. 9). To these, I would add a third contribution in his comparative work with Greek authors, which he uses effectively (and with caveats regarding distinctions between these corpora) to demonstrate the innovative move from poetry to prose in antiquity (p. 22). After a substantial chapter on theory (chap. 1), the book consists of a series of case studies of early Iron Age sites. These case studies propose distinct ways for how the complexity of memory may have played out in relation to how such sites were remembered in later texts. These case studies are: Gath and the "resilience" of memory (chap. 2); Ziklag, the northwestern Negev and the "entanglements" of memory (chap. 3); and a series of sites that subscribe to the "absence" of memory (chap. 4). For me, the first, theoretical chapter and the subsequent discussions of memory were the most sophisticated and engaging of the book. It seems to me that we (biblical scholars) currently use the term "memory" quite easily, often as a replacement for "history" and as if the term were self-explanatory. P.'s theoretical [End Page 530] discussion, and his continued attention to epistemology and memory, demonstrate a refreshing self-awareness and nuance in his application of terminology. I learned from him. As he demonstrates through his case studies and states explicitly in his closing remarks, he cautions against a "single-dimensional," flat understanding of memory, while providing the reader with a multilayered, contextual understanding of how memory may have functioned to preserve, transform, or forget particular sites in biblical texts (p. 227). P.'s careful attention to archaeological sites is similarly nuanced. As a text scholar, P. demonstrates a remarkable breadth of understanding of particular sites and their histories through an archaeological lens. My two main critiques pertain to questions of prose dating and the relationship between textuality and orality. Regarding the former, it seems to me that the potential role of writing in the Iron I and IIA is...

From the Dome of the Chain to Miḥrāb Dāʾūd: The Transformation of an Umayyad Commemorative Site at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem

As a monument with a disputed function and iconography, the Dome of the Chain is something of an art historical conundrum. Constructed by the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwan (r. 685–705) in 692 on the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, it reportedly commemorates a chain tethered to the heavens that aided the Prophet King David (Dāʾūd) in the dispensation of justice. By the sixteenth century, however, the Dome of the Chain became associated with other sites of Davidic commemoration such as the Qurʾanic Mihrab of David (Miḥrāb Dāʾūd) referred to in Qurʾan 38:21–26, and was believed to be located in the western citadel of Jerusalem. Through an analysis of the Arabic primary sources, this study situates the history of the Dome of the Chain and the Qurʾanic Miḥrāb Dāʾūd within the context of the Davidic repertoire and commemorative practice in Islam. By examining changing trends of Davidic commemoration in Jerusalem from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, this study reveals trajectories of Islam’s engagement with its biblical past in relation to the localized commemoration of Davidic justice and kingship within Jerusalem.

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

La semplificazione dell'altro Il caso della Palestina

This volume addresses the way in which the British government carried out its politics in Palestine between 1914 and 1924, supporting the Zionist movement in its aims of creating a «national home» in the Land of Israel. London transformed into political practises a long-lasting process of cultural construction of Palestine: the latter was simplified and interpreted according to an allegedly immutable Biblical past, so that the local population was completely overlooked and marginalised.