In Memory and Tradition in the Book of Numbers, Adriane Leveen offers a rereading of the fourth book of Moses. Leveen examines how the editors of Numbers created a narrative of the forty-year journey through the wilderness to control understanding of the past and influence attitudes in the future. The book explores politics, collective memory and the strategies used by its priestly editors to convince the children of Israel to accept priestly rule. Leveen considers the dynamics of the transmission of tradition, memory and values in an atmosphere of crisis as a generation witnessed its parents die in the wilderness yet chose to live in the promised land in fulfilment of God's vision.

The book examines politics, collective memory, and transmission of tradition in the book of Numbers.

Memory and Covenant applies new insights into the meaning and function of social memory to analyze the two major "religions" of the Pentateuch (D and P) and their relationship to one another. Ellman shows that for the deuteronomic tradition, memory is an epistemological and pedagogical means for keeping Israel faithful to its God and God's commandments, even when Israelites are far from the temple and its worship. The pre-exilic priestly tradition, however, understands that the covenant depends on God's memory, which must be aroused by the sensory stimuli of the temple cult.

Although the Psalms of Asaph (Pss. 50, 73‒83) contain a concentration of historical referents unparalleled in the Psalter, they have rarely attracted sustained historical interest. Karl N. Jacobson identifies these psalms as containing cultic historiography, historical narratives written for recitation in worship, and explores them through mnemohistory, attending to how the past is remembered and to the rhetorical function of recitation in the cultic setting. Jacobson describes mnemohistory at the intersection of memory and history, explores the singularity of the rhetorical and formals aspects of remembrance in the Asaph material, and discusses “residual mnemohistory,” material that is not intentionally called to remembrance. Jacobson shows that Asaph “remembers” the past as a movement from henotheism to a more orthodox form of Yahwism as the core memory that informs a new historical situation for worship participants. By describing the “way Asaph remembers,” Jacobson highlights symbolic and individualized elements of the psalms’ mnemohistorical work that earlier form-critical approaches failed to recognize.

Reading Genesis presents a panoramic view of the most vital ways that Genesis is approached in modern scholarship. Essays by ten eminent scholars cover the perspectives of literature, gender, memory, sources, theology, and the reception of Genesis in Judaism and Christianity. Each contribution addresses the history and rationale of the method, insightfully explores particular texts of Genesis, and deepens the interpretive gain of the method in question. These ways of reading Genesis, which include its classic past readings, map out a pluralistic model for understanding Genesis in - and for - the modern age.