Ronald Hendel. Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi, 200 pp.

Ronald Hendel's Remembering Abraham is a synthetic work that draws on diverse methodological approaches to tease out the interplay of past and present in the Bible's depiction of history. The plasticity of collective memory—the idea that a community's memory of the past changes as tha...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. VerfasserIn: Weitzman, Steven 1965- (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Review
Sprache:Englisch
Verfügbarkeit prüfen: HBZ Gateway
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Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Veröffentlicht: 2006
In: AJS review
Jahr: 2006, Band: 30, Heft: 1, Seiten: 195-197
weitere Schlagwörter:B Rezension
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Zusammenfassung:Ronald Hendel's Remembering Abraham is a synthetic work that draws on diverse methodological approaches to tease out the interplay of past and present in the Bible's depiction of history. The plasticity of collective memory—the idea that a community's memory of the past changes as that community changes—is a key idea for this book, part of which is a study of the Bible's portrait of Abraham as a reflection of Israel's evolving identity. Hendel is no minimalist, however. For him, biblical history is not simply an invented memory without connection to what really happened, but a pastiche of memory and myth—a reflection of genuine historical experience framed within fictionalized representation. Remembering Abraham is something of a pastiche itself—several of its chapters reproduce previously published work—but the juxtaposition of these studies has value in its own right, offering students and general readers an accessible introduction to how a clear-headed and well-informed scholar distinguishes history from myth in the Bible—and why, in the end, the Bible resists such a distinction.
ISSN:1475-4541
Enthält:Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0364009406240091