Traditional History and Cultural Memory in the Pesharim

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-370
Author(s):  
Shem Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Common Descent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
And Function

AbstractThis article explores the type and function of historiography in the pesharim, a group of biblical commentaries in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although the unabashedly subjective viewpoint of history in the pesharim strongly contrasts modern notions of historiography, they nevertheless present a kind of history writing. In particular, historiography in the pesharim is analogous to traditional history, a type of history writing found in oral epics from around the world. Like traditional history, the pesharim owe their primary allegiance to a special register of language that is both traditional and adaptable. Rather than a factual record, the pesharim are formative cultural texts that use history to create and transmit cultural memory. More specifically, traditional history in the pesharim constructs a common descent of membership and “instrumentalizes” the past for identity formation in the present.

(Re)storying Japanese Canadian Histories: Artistic Engagements

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862098726
Author(s):  
Matthew Chin ◽  
Izumi Sakamoto ◽  
Jane Ku ◽  
Ai Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Art Making ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Structure ◽  
Academic History ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Japanese Canadian ◽  
Cultural Identity Formation

This paper examines how Japanese Canadian (JC) artists challenge discursive limitations of constructing representations of JC pasts. Their interventions into JC history-making are significant given the rise of interest in and proliferation of JC historical accounts, partly as a result of the accelerated passing of the remaining survivors of JC incarceration within a broader context of unsettled and unsettling discourses around incarceration in JC families and communities. Contrary to narratives of JC history premised on the conventions of academic history writing, we explore how JC artists engage with the past through their creative practices. Focusing on JC artist Emma Nishimura’s exhibit, The weight of what cannot be remembered, we suggest that JC creative history-making practices have important implications for processes of ethno-racial and-cultural identity formation. In so doing, we decenter state-bound history-making processes that reproduce colonial frameworks of JC subjectivity, temporal linearity, and “objectivity.” Instead, we focus on the temporally circuitous way that Nishimura and other JC artists engage with the past through the idiom of personal intimacy in ways that facilitate a more expansive notion of JC identity and community. Though Nishimura’s work is indexical as opposed to representative of contemporary JC art-making, it is significant in tapping into a common structure of feeling among JC artists that emphasizes a notion of JC’ness rooted in the active struggle to establish a relationship with the past. In attending to Nishimura’s work, we highlight the productivity of art-making as a method of (re)storying to expand meaning-making endeavors within and across communities.

Capturing the Voices of Pseudepigraphic Personae: On the Form and Function of Incipits in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Perrin
Keyword(s):  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
First Person ◽  
Common Elements ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Early Judaism ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
And Function

Abstract It is widely recognized that the authors of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls often shrouded their tales in first person voices and exhibited a perennial interest in the production and transmission of ancestral booklore. The present study explores the literary convention of the incipit in light of these interrelated methods of pseudepigraphy. Throughout the Aramaic Scrolls incipits introduce entire compositions and putative texts within narratives. Comparative philological analysis reveals that these incipits feature strikingly similar literary-linguistic idioms. However, it is equally apparent that that these common elements were uniquely patterned by individual authors. It is suggested that these commonalities should inform how we conceive of the scribal milieu(s) from which the Aramaic Scrolls emerged and our understanding of pseudepigraphy in early Judaism. The article concludes with a fresh proposal for the function of the title “A Copy of the Writing of the Words of Noah” in 1QapGen 5:29.

Yizhar Hirschfeld. Qumran in Context, Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence. Peabody, MA: Henderson Publishers, 2004. 220 pp; 136 figures.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-376
Author(s):  
Rami Arav
Keyword(s):  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
French School ◽  
The Dead

About 35,000 books and articles have been published thus far on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). The vast majority deal with the literature found in the eleven caves in the vicinity of Qumran and only a few deal with the archaeological remains of Khirbet Qumran nearby. The site was exhaustively excavated a few times in the past fifty-four years. The first that also determined the nature of its interpretation was carried out during 1951 to 1956 by Fr. Roland de Vaux from the French school of biblical studies at Jerusalem, the Ecole Biblique. Most of the site was unearthed during this excavation. The latest excavations were carried out in the past ten years and thus far with extremely meager publications.

‘So complete a change’ (in So Short a Time) – Scottish Romanticism, Modernity and Collective Memory

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Flow Of Time ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Cultural Reinvention

This chapter provides an overview of the themes of the book. Largely in response to their own national predicament in post-Union imperial Britain, Scottish writers of the Romantic period brought to the British Atlantic a historiography of collective or cultural memory, which imagined an unprecedented fissure within the flow of time that had rent the present from the past. This sense of an immense gulf between past and present – measured in only one or two generations and imagined to be within reach of, or just beyond, living memory – was attended by deep national anxieties but also by a renewed optimism, of social and cultural reinvention. As it circulated along the routes of the British empire, Scottish history writing of the period made a fundamental contribution to the culture of modernity in the Atlantic world.

scholarly journals The Book of Joshua—Part 1: Texts and Versions

2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
English Translations ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Textual Traditions

Over the past few decades there has been increased interest in, and research on, the text of the book of Joshua in the Masoretic tradition, the Septuagint, and other ancient versions, as well as the fragmentary remains from the Dead Sea Scrolls. This article provides a discussion of the ancient evidence and an analysis of the major modern theories. English translations of the various textual traditions are compared and discussed. Although the differences are not as extensive as in Jeremiah, and the Qumran material is relatively scant, contemporary scholars have devised a number of intriguing theories to explain the differences and to highlight their significance within the literary, textual, and theological development of this important biblical book. This article is the first half of a two-part treatment discussing recent scholarship on the book of Joshua.

The Eleazar Miracle and Solomon's Magical Wisdom in Flavius Josephus'sAntiquitates Judaicae8.42–49

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Duling
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nag Hammadi ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
And Function ◽  
Miracle Story ◽  
New Evidence

The fascinating legend of Solomon's magical wisdom was widespread in Late Antiquity, and new evidence for it has surfaced in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts. Yet the key literary text for understanding the legend remains the miracle story of Eleazar in Josephus'sAntiquitates Judaicae8.42–49. In this article, I would like to examine the story's form, content, and function. First, it is necessary to clarify the story by a formal analysis and by relating its form to other miracles within the corpus of Josephus, and to similar accounts of miracles in Late Antiquity. Next, I shall examine the way in which this miracle functions in theAntiquitatesfrom the perspective of Josephus's overall apologetic purpose, his view of miracle and magic, his portrait of Solomon, his knowledge of the Jewish legend of Solomon's magical wisdom, and his immediate context for the story. Finally, I shall propose a modest hypothesis about Josephus's treatment of the Eleazar miracle in relation to his social location as a Jewish apologist to educated Greco-Roman readers in the first century CE.

The Temporal Turn in Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-395
Author(s):  
Sarit Kattan Gribetz ◽  
Lynn Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Second Temple Judaism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ancient Judaism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Current Article ◽  
The Relationship

Despite the apparent finality of Heschel’s pronouncement, in 1951, that Judaism is a ‘religion of time’, the past two decades have seen renewed scholarly interest in the relationship between time, time-keeping, and forms of temporality in Jewish culture. This vibrant engagement with time and temporality in Jewish studies is not an isolated phenomenon. It participates in a broader interdisciplinary examination of time across the arts, humanities and sciences, both in the academy and beyond it. The current article outlines the innovative approaches of this ‘temporal turn’ within ancient Judaism and Jewish studies and reflects on why time has become such an important topic of research in recent years. We address a number of questions: What are the trends in recent work on time and temporality in the fields of ancient Judaism and Jewish studies? What new insights into the study of Judaism have emerged as a result of this focus on time? What reasons (academic, historiographical, technological and geopolitical) underpin this interest in time in such a wide variety of disciplines? And finally, what are some new avenues for exploration in this growing field at the intersection of time and Jewish studies? The article identifies trends and discusses key works in the broad field of Jewish studies, while providing more specific surveys of particular developments in the fields of Second Temple Judaism, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and some medieval Jewish sources.

scholarly journals The future orientation of culture and the memory of the past in the making of history

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 361-379
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Hałas
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Memory Time ◽  
Cultural Texts

The article describes the semiotic approach developed by Boris Uspenskij to study the historical process. Uspenskij’s semiotics of history is integrally bound with the Tartu-Moscow School’s programme of cultural semiotics and is rooted in the fundamental premises of that programme, which he helped to shape. These premises contain a complex ontology of culture, encompassing three levels: cultural memory, sets of cultural texts, and semiotic systems, which model both the image of the world and programmes of action. Uspenskij’s analytical model of semiotics of history highlights the pragmatic aspect of the process of historical communication: the agency of its participants as carriers of culture and sign users. This article presents the role of reflexivity in the historical process, associated with reconstruction of the meaning of the past and prospective shaping of the future. Making history means constantly renewing the narrative about past events, which determines the future course of history in the present. Uspenskij presents opposite cultural tendencies in the historical process, associated with different types of semiosis, as symbolic conflicts. The article shows the role of symbolism and symbolic politics in the processes of making history in the model of semiotics of history. This model makes it possible to link together research on cultural memory, time, communicative action and symbolism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document