Performing Memory in Biblical Narrative and Beyond

Memory-‘authentic’, manufactured, imagined, innocent or deliberate-becomes remembrance through its performance, that is, through being narrated orally or in writing. And when it is narrated, memory becomes a shaper of identities and a social agent, a tool for shaping a community’s present and future as much as, if not more so, than a near-simplistic recording of past history and a sense of belonging. In this volume, various aspects of narrated ‘memories’ in the Bible and beyond it are examined for their literary and sociological charge within biblical literature as well as in its cultural afterlives-Jewish, Christian and ‘secular’. From inner-biblical memory shaping claims to contemporaneous retellings, the shifts of tradition to story are explored for ways, means and aims that, authorially intentional or otherwise, become influential in adapting the Bible for the postmodern scene and adapting the postmodern scene to the Bible. This compilation of articles is the result of a collective research project with participants from the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University (The Netherlands), Tel Aviv University and Haifa University (Israel), Poznan University (Poland), Bowdoin College and Brite Divinity School (USA). This is Volume 3 in the subseries Amsterdam Studies in the Bible and Religion.