Water is a vital resource and is widely acknowledged as such. Thus it often serves as an ideological and linguistic symbol that stands for and evokes concepts central within a community. This volume explores ‘thinking of water’ and concepts expressed through references to water within the symbolic system of the late Persian/early Hellenistic period and as it does so it sheds light on the social mindscape of the early Second Temple community.

Collective identity creates a sense of “us-ness” in people. It may be fleeting and situational or long-lasting and deeply ingrained. Competition, shared belief, tragedy, or a myriad of other factors may contribute to the formation of such group identity. Even people detached from one another by space, anonymity, or time, may find themselves in a context in which individual self-concept is replaced by a collective one. How is collective identity, particularly the long-lasting kind, created and maintained? Many literary and biblical studies have demonstrated that shared stories often lie at the heart of it. This book examines the most repeated story of the Hebrew Bible—the exodus story—to see how it may have functioned to construct and reinforce an enduring collective identity in ancient Israel. A tool based on the principles of the social identity approach is created and used to expose identity construction at a rhetorical level. The author shows that exodus stories are characterized by recognizable language and narrative structures that invite ongoing collective identification.

In ancient Israelite literature Exile is seen as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts "the Exile" is a central ideological concept. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms that YHWH punished Israel/Judah for having abandoned his ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain "Return". As the Exile comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH's proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. The concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.

In ancient Israelite literature Exile is seen as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts “the Exile” is a central ideological concept. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms that YHWH punished Israel/Judah for having abandoned his ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain “Return”. As the Exile comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH’s proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. The concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.

Ehud Ben Zvi has been at the forefront of exploring how the study of social memory contributes to our understanding of the intellectual worldof the literati of the early Second Temple period and their textual repertoire. Many of his studies on the matter and several new relevant works are here collected together providing a very useful resource for furthering research and teaching in this area. The essays included here address, inter alia, prophets as sites of memory, kings as sites memory, Jerusalem as a site of memory, a mnemonic system shaped by two interacting ‘national’ histories, matters of identity and othering as framed and explored via memories, mnemonic metanarratives making sense of the past and serving various didactic purposes and their problems, memories of past and futures events shared by the literati, issues of gender constructions and memory, memories understood by the group as ‘counterfactual’ and their importance, and, in multiple ways, how and why shared memories served as a (safe) playground for exploring multiple, central ideological issues within the group and of generative grammars governing systemic preferences and dis-preferences for particular memories.

This volume sheds light on how particular constructions of the 'Other' contributed to an ongoing process of defining what 'Israel' or an 'Israelite' was, or was supposed to be in literature taken to be authoritative in the late Persian and Early Hellenistic periods. It asks, who is an insider and who an outsider? Are boundaries permeable? Are there different ideas expressed within individual books? What about constructions of the (partial) 'Other' from inside, e.g., women, people whose body did not fit social constructions of normalness? It includes chapters dealing with theoretical issues and case studies, and addresses similar issues from the perspective of groups in the late Second Temple period so as to shed light on processes of continuity and discontinuity on these matters. Preliminary forms of five of the contributions were presented in Thessaloniki in 2011 in the research programme, 'Production and Reception of Authoritative Books in the Persian and Hellenistic Period,' at the Annual Meeting of European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS).