Memory in a Time of Prose

Abstract

Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? To address this question, the following study focuses on matters pertaining to epistemology, or the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. The investigation that unfolds with these interests in mind consists of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175–830 BCE) with a wider constellation of archaeological and historical evidence unearthed from the era in which these stories are set. What this approach affords is the opportunity to examine the relationship between the past disclosed through these historical traces and that past represented within the biblical narrative, thus bringing to light meaningful details concerning the information drawn on by Hebrew scribes for the prose narratives they created. The results of this comparative endeavor are insights into an ancient world of oral, living speech that informed biblical storytelling, where knowledge about the past was elicited more through memory and word of mouth than through a corpus of older narrative documents. For those Hebrew scribes who first set down these stories in prose writing, the means for knowing a past and the significance attached to it were, in short, wed foremost to the faculty of remembrance.