Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible.

• Author: Van Seters, John
• Position: Book review

Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible. By RONALD HENDEL. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005. Pp. xiii + 200. $35.

This is a collection of six essays, all but one of which have been published previously, on the general theme of the construction of ancient Israel's corporate identity by means of memories of a historical or fanciful past. The author is professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies at Berkeley and an exponent of the Harvard school of Frank Cross, a perspective that is strongly reflected in most of the essays.

Chapter one, "Israel among the Nations," sets the origin and construction of Israelite identity within the cultural and religious matrix of the Levant out of which it established certain "external boundaries," such as language, a shared identity of "traditional stories of the past," a "web of genealogies" that articulated clan and family relationships, and a "body of shared rituals." Particular treatment in this chapter is given to the last item of identity, namely, the use of three religious practices: circumcision, food laws, and the observance of the Sabbath. Yet it is hard for Hendel to make the case that these three elements were distinctive or used as boundary markers before the exilic period.

Chapter two, "Remembering Abraham," discusses the use of genealogy and the stories of the ancestor Abraham in the construction of identity, giving examples of both "memory" and "counter-memory." This is reinforced in chapter three, "Historical Memories in the Patriarchal Narratives," where Hendel tries to assess the degree to which these memories of the patriarchs contain remnants of a distant past and therefore reflect a continuity of identity throughout the people's history. To do this he invokes the old arguments of the Albright school on personal and place names and patriarchal religion, in spite of the fact that such arguments have long been discredited.

Chapter four, "The Exodus in Biblical Memory," makes a similar attempt to construct a tenuous historical connection to the slavery of the Egyptian empire and the epidemics of the Late Bronze Age. Again, the attempt to retain the notion of a memory of an earlier age, however much transformed, and in the face of extensive historical and archaeological criticism, does little to confirm the overall thesis of the book. Chapter five, "The Archaeology of Memory," on the biblical tradition of Solomon, takes a different tack by acknowledging the...