meetings
MONDAY, November 21, 2011
4:00 pm, Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena 11
Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting session
Bible in Ancient and Modern Media:
Memory, Identity, and Circulation of Biblical Culture
organized by the Memory and Identity Working Group
Session Chair: Daniel Fisher, University of California, Berkeley
How have biblical societies and their writings been received, used, and reused in different cultural contexts? This session explores this question, across history, with particular focus on the role that reused texts, images, and objects play in the formation of memory and identity. Emphasis is placed on how these cultural items gain and shed meanings as they circulate through time and through space, from Jerusalem in the post-exilic period to 19th century Europe. How has biblical culture been created, deployed, and experienced during this time by Judeans, Jews, and Christians? Other questions that will be considered include: What roles has biblical culture played over time in the evolving dynamics between Jews and Christians? Why is a particular medium chosen at a particular time by certain individuals and groups? How does the use of a particular medium contribute, in diverse ways, to the construction of memories and identities? This session has been organized by the University of California, Berkeley’s Memory and Identity Working Group (www.berkeleymemoryid.com).
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Introduction: Daniel Fisher, University of California, Berkeley (10 minutes)
Paper 1: Dale Loepp, University of California, Berkeley
Solomon’s Trade in Horses: A Case Study in the Reshaping of Cultural Memory (25 minutes)
At the death of a prominent political leader, commentators often remark that history will be the ultimate judge of a leader’s stature—and quite understandably, historiographical texts often play a pivotal role in this shaping of cultural memory. The life of one of Israel’s best-known rulers, King Solomon, provides an interesting case study of this phenomenon as his reputation unfolds in subsequent biblical literature and other religious and historical texts. While Solomon’s initial portrait in the Deuteronomic tradition is ambivalent: he is on one hand hailed as a material and intellectual success and on the other as a religious failure; Solomon becomes the ultimate cultic leader and perfect ruler in the subsequent Book of Chronicles. And even though this reshaping of the Solomonic tradition has at times been dismissively dubbed a “whitewash” by some biblical commentators, the rehabilitation of Solomon’s reputation is actually a fairly sophisticated reworking of the Chronicler’s source materials found in the Deuteronomistic History. This recycling of a malleable historiographical tradition specifically addressed a time when the temple cult was being re-established in Jerusalem after a period of destruction, neglect, and active competition from other cultic centers.
As one aspect of the Chronicler’s broader project of re-formulating his received tradition for a new audience, this paper will specifically focus on Solomon’s accumulation of horses, a royal act explicitly condemned in Deuteronomy (Dt. 17:16). Through astute editing and a re-ordering of the source materials, I will argue that the Chronicler successfully undermines the earlier Deuteronomic condemnation of Solomon by providing cultic justification for Solomon’s trade in horses.
Paper 2: Ra’anan Boustan, University of California, Los Angeles
Walking in the Shadows of the Past: The Jewish Experience of Rome in the Twelfth Century (25 minutes)
The Jewish and Christian inhabitants of twelfth-century Rome viewed the urban landscape of their city through the lens of its ancient past. Their perception of Rome was shaped by a highly localized topography of cultural memory that was shared by Jews and Christians alike. Our reconstruction of this distinctively Roman perspective emerges from a careful juxtaposition of the report of Benjamin of Tudela’s visit to Rome preserved in his Itinerary and various Christian liturgical texts and travel guides, especially those produced by the canons of the Lateran Basilica. These sources demonstrate that long-standing traditions regarding the presence in Rome of ancient artifacts from the Jerusalem Temple and their subsequent conservation in the Lateran persisted into the twelfth century and had a potent impact on the local culture of the City. During that pivotal century and within the special microcosm of Rome, Jews and Christians experienced unusually robust cultural interactions, especially as the Jews increasingly aligned themselves with the protective power of the papacy.
Paper 3: Benjamin Fisher, Towson University
Reading the Bible through a Historical Lens: Jews, Christians, and the Early Modern Background to Modern Biblical Scholarship (25 minutes)
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historical memories of the biblical past began to move toward the center of both Jewish and Christian religious identities, and European biblical scholarship was significantly transformed by the emergence of historicist approaches to reading Scripture. Leading scholars such as John Calvin, Joseph Scaliger, Daniel Heinsius, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden emphasized the importance of appreciating ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman religious practices in order to achieve an accurate understanding of both the Old and New Testaments. Historical approaches could be both validating and subversive, and European scholars were acutely aware of this ambivalence. These methods were used constructively to show that Christian Scriptures were true because they were historical, to reconcile contradictory accounts in the New Testament, and to support their authors’ views regarding the political organization of their own societies. Additionally, Catholic and Protestant scholars used the Bible’s ancient historical context to subvert the theological doctrines of their adversaries.
This paper demonstrates the absorption of these methods of biblical scholarship by one of the leading rabbis of seventeenth century Amsterdam. Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira argued that many elements of the New Testament reflected the influence of ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman religious practices that were prevalent in the Mediterranean world where Jesus lived. Furthermore, he attempted to show that there was evidence for the development of the Gospel texts over time. By dislocating the study of Christian Scriptures from the realm of theological study to the discipline of historical analysis, Morteira sought to encourage certain Christian movements to adopt Jewish perspectives regarding the canon of Scripture, and to demonstrate the superiority of the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, however, Morteira participated in the historicization of biblical memory and the emergence of modern methods of biblical criticism in early modern Europe.
Paper 4: Kevin M. McGeough, University of Lethbridge
Negotiating the Real and the Hyperreal: Nineteenth Century Experiences of the Bible in the Context of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (25 minutes)
The emergence of Near Eastern archaeological explorations by European nations in the 19th century led to a new impulse to contextualize the Bible within an Egyptian and Mesopotamian setting. As people became more familiar with the visual culture of the ancient Near East, a concomitant rise in literacy, rise in transportation technologies, and rise in theologies privileging personal experience of the Bible compelled people to situate the Bible in an historical framework of world progress and decline, in which world-historical cultures were situated in relational hierarchies to contemporary European societies. Beyond the obvious justifications for European imperialist programs, these ventures allowed Europeans to experience the Near East and indirectly experience the Biblical world. Despite the positivist trappings of academic contextualization attempts, for non-specialists, this experience of Biblical lands was a personal and potentially destabilizing experience. Through text, image, and object, Nineteenth century educators, showmen, and evangelists created novel methods for experiencing the Bible in its “authentic” setting. Yet closer examination of these attempts show that many of these experiences were designed to minimize the “otherness” of certain elements of Biblical culture and structure new understandings of difference. For example, Old Testament landscapes in 19th century popular art were created using Orientalist tropes, New Testament landscapes retained their "English-ness". Similarly, esoteric approaches to the Bible, inspired by archaeological evidence (but not ‘limited’ by scholarly interpretation) were used by groups such as the Freemasons and Theosophists to create collective group memories, integral to the construction of their identities. This paper shall explore some of the ways that Nineteenth century European identities were reified and challenged by popular encounters of the Near East, how collective “memories” were created in response to these popular encounters, and some of the material manifestations of the memory of these encounters (such as tourist souvenirs, photographs, and artwork).