Professor Jeremiah W. Cataldo discusses the necessity of focusing on the neglected areas of Biblical memory, identity and community, in the edited collection Imagined Worlds and Constructed Differences in the Hebrew Bible, one of the latest volumes in The Library of Hebrew/Old Testament Studies.
1. How would you describe this book in one sentence?
This volume analyses constructed memory and identity in the Bible through the lens of modern social-scientific method, and explores how social and political identities are imagined within collective memories and what that means for biblical interpretation.
This area is under explored in biblical studies. Scholars often make profound claims about the Bible and its relevance, but many still have a feeble grasp on the role that cultural memories played in shaping collective identity for Judeans and Israelites broadly. Thus, for example, there is a tendency to assume that all people in Israel and in Judah saw the world around in them in the way that the biblical texts describe it.
3. Are there any new discoveries that you and the contributors made while writing the book? What themes did you chose to focus on, and why?
The tension between the perceived fixedness and the more real fluidity that lays in national, political identity is something that needs to be better understood in the context of Israel/Judah. Terms such as "Israelite" and "Judean" are often used interchangeably by modern interpreters, as if the historical personages and communities viewed those categories as the uniform landless, apolitical, and religious identities that modern interpreters tend to see.
In reality, however, there were likely many different competing definitions of those sociopolitical categories, though restricted by broad sociopolitical boundaries. It may be helpful to start reading the biblical authors as competitors over the specifics of those identities, while biblical editors sought roughly to diminish those differences.
4. What does your book focus on that hasn't been explored elsewhere?
It focuses on how communities in the Bible "imagined" their identities, using Benedict Anderson's nuance of the term. It explores how those imaginings set the groundwork for national and political identities and how they reinforced different types of insider-outsider dichotomies.
5. What do you hope this volume will contribute towards biblical focused scholarship?
I hope that it will open the doors for a better appreciation of the ways that identities in the Bible reflect historical social and political concerns rather than being an expression of something more universal. I hope it will also encourage us to be more attentive to the nuances of biblical authors and of our own perspectives. Such nuances make any claim to absolute and universal meaning suspect. Being attentive to those puts us in better positions to better appreciate the contributions coming out of minority-based critical approaches rather than tow the line of dominant tradition, even if (or perhaps because) that tradition is inflated with politically correct vocabulary but with little sustained investment in needed change.
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