Memory and the City in Ancient Israel

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• Publisher: Eisenbrauns
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781575067124
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient cities served as the actual, worldly landscape populated by “material” sites of memory. Some of these sites were personal and others were directly and intentionally involved in the shaping of a collective social memory, such as palaces, temples, inscriptions, walls, and gates. Many cities were also sites of social memory in a very different way. Like Babylon, Nineveh, or Jerusalem, they served as ciphers that activated and communicated various mnemonic worlds as they integrated multiple images, remembered events, and provided a variety of meanings in diverse ancient communities.

Memory and the City in Ancient Israel contributes to the study of social memory in ancient Israel in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods by exploring “the city,” both urban spaces and urban centers. It opens with a study that compares basic conceptualizing tendencies of cities in Mesopotamia with their counterparts in ancient Israel. Its essays then explore memories of gates, domestic spaces, threshing floors, palaces, city gardens and parks, natural and “domesticated” water in urban settings, cisterns, and wells. Finally, the studies turn to particular cities of memory in ancient Israel: Jerusalem, Samaria, Shechem, Mizpah, Tyre, Nineveh, and Babylon. The volume, which emerged from meetings of the European Association of Biblical Studies, includes the work of Stéphanie Anthonioz, Yairah Amit, Ehud Ben Zvi, KÃ¥re Berge, Diana Edelman, Hadi Ghantous, Anne Katrine Gudme, Philippe Guillaume, Russell Hobson, Steven W. Holloway, Francis Landy, Daniel Pioske, Ulrike Sals, Carla Sulzbach, Karolien Vermeulen, and Carey Walsh.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: An Introduction and Invitation to Join the Conversation about Cities and Memory
• Chapter 2: Cities of Glory and Cities of Pride: Concepts, Gender, and Images of Cities in Mesopotamia and in Ancient Israel
• Chapter 3: Testing Entry: The Social Functions of City Gates in Biblical Memory
• Chapter 4: Inside-Outside: Domestic Living Space in Biblical Memory
• Chapter 5: Threshing Floors and Cities
• Chapter 6: Palaces as Sites of Memory and Their Impacton the Construction of an Elite “Hybrid” (Local-Global) Cultural Identity in Persian-Period Literature
• Chapter 7: City Gardens and Parks in Biblical Social Memory
• Chapter 8: In Defense of the City: Memories of Water in the Persian Period
• Chapter 9: Cisterns and Wells in Biblical Memory
• Chapter 10: Exploring Jerusalem as a Site of Memory in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods
• Chapter 11: The Memory of Samaria in the Books of Kings
• Chapter 12: How to Slander the Memory of Shechem
• Chapter 13: Mizpah and the Possibilities of Forgetting
• Chapter 14: Dislocating Jerusalem’s Memory with Tyre
• Chapter 15: Nineveh as Meme in Persian-Period Yehud
• Chapter 16: “Babylon” Forever, or How to Divinize What You Want to Damn
• Chapter 17: Building Castles on the Shifting Sands of Memory: From Dystopian to Utopian Views of Jerusalem in the Persian Period
• Index