The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped the way many think about war. Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible? In this book, Jacob Wright offers a fresh and fascinating response to this question: War pervades the Bible not because ancient Israel was governed by religious factors (such as 'holy war') or because this people, along with its neighbors in the ancient Near East, was especially bellicose. The reason is rather that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel, one that can both transcend deep divisions within the population and withstand military conquest by imperial armies. Drawing on the intriguing interdisciplinary research on war commemoration, Wright shows how biblical authors, like the architects of national identities from more recent times, constructed a new and influential notion of peoplehood in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book presents a new thesis on the history of Israel: David was originally king of Judah, not of Israel. The tales of his encounters with Goliath, Saul, Jonathan, Michal, Bathsheba, Absalom, and Solomon are later additions to the account. The work develops a new model for the study of biblical literature.

This monograph presents a fresh and detailed treatment of the problems posed by the Nehemiah-Memoir. Starting from the pre-critical interpretations of Ezra-Neh, the study demonstrates that the use of the first-person does not suffice as a criterion for distinguishing between the verba Neemiae and the additions of later authors. The earliest edition of the Memoir isconfined to a building report, which was expanded as early generations of readers developed the implications of Nehemiah's accomplishments for the consolidation and centralization of Judah. The expansions occasioned in turn the composition of the history of the "Restoration" in Ezra-Neh.

With a bold new thesis about the discovery of 'peoplehood,' this book revolutionizes our understanding of the Bible and its historical achievement.

In this book, Aubrey Buster demonstrates how methods adapted from cultural and social memory studies and the new formalism can illuminate the communal function of biblical and extra-biblical historical summaries in Second Temple Judaism. Refining models drawn from memory studies, she applies them to ancient texts and demonstrates the development of Judah's speech about their past across the Second Temple period. Buster's wide-ranging study demonstrates how and where the historical summary functions in the book of Psalms, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Chronicles, as well as the Qumran Psalms Scrolls, Words of the Luminaries, Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus, and Pseudo-Daniel. She shows how the historical summary proves to be a generative, replicable, and ultimately productive form of memory. Crossing the boundaries of genre categories and time periods, liturgical performances, and literary works, historical summaries crafted a highly selective but broadly useful mode of commemoration of key events from Israel's past.

Balances historical and contemporary concerns in an engaging and informative way, drawing connections between ancient and contemporary ethical problems.

This study investigates the construction of Israel's identity through the prism of memory practices embedded in the Conquest Narrative of Joshua (chapters 1-12). A number of studies have emerged in the past decade dealing with Israel's identity in the Book of Joshua (Mitchell 1993; Rowlett 1996; Nelson 1997; Hawk 2000). These works are part of a wider literary and sociological trend in Biblical Studies, reflecting the growing number of Biblical scholars engaging with issues of ethnic and/or national identity in the Hebrew Bible (Mullen 1993; Sparks 1998; Grosby 2002; Goodblatt 2006). While many facets of Israel's identity in the Book of Joshua have been explored, the manner in which remembering the past impacts identity has been overlooked. -- Modern scholarship has established that memory is constitutive of identity (LeGoff 1992; Gillis 1994). Taking this lead, this research draws upon the burgeoning field of social and cultural memory, as reflected in the works of Maurice Halbwachs (1980; 1992), Paul Connerton (1989; 2008) and Jan Assmann (1992; 2006), to illuminate the relationship between memory and identity depicted in Joshua 1-12. This thesis argues that the conquest of Canaan under Joshua is a memory of war constructed by the Deuteronomistic Historian to engage in internal debates about the future course of the Babylonian golah. By means of inscriptive, performative and rhetorical practices of memory found in Joshua 1-12, the Deuteronomist draws the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of his exilic community. Thus, the exiles are reminded of the founding memory of Israel as a people living in the Land, triumphing over its syncretistic 'nations', owing to their undivided obedience to YHWH. They are also reminded that returning to pre-exilic syncretism or assymilating to Babylon means being cut off from the realm of memory projected by this narrative over the whole Land.