Articles
 Justice for All
 Church in Decline
 Striking Similarity
 The Efficacy of Prayer
 Are You Ready for Change?
 A Question of Vocation
 The Challenge of Change
 Elul 24
 Elul 23
 Elul 22

Series [All]
 Administration
 Elul 5777 (9)
 Exploring Translation Theories (25)
 Live Like You Give a Damn
 Memory and Identity
 The Creative Word (19)
 The Cross-Cultural Process (7)
 The Old Testament is Dying
 The Oral Gospel Tradition (4)
 We the People (8)

Archive

Sunday, 22 May 2016

Ezekiel and Cultural Memory II

Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity,
Tom Thatcher ed., SBL, 2014, page 47

Having pointed to the perviously unknown and unsourced allegations that Ezekiel makes about Israel's history, Carol Newsom asks an important question:

Why would Ezekiel construct a history that is so much at odds with the master narrative that both he and his audience could scarceky fail to interpret it as a contrdiction of common cultural memory?

Newsom suggests that the answer may be found in a delicious quote from a twentieth century philosopher of history:

"Every present has a past of its own, and any imaginative reconstruction of the past aims at reconstructing the past of this present." (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946, page 247)

Isn't that delightful! When a past is constructed, it depends upon the frame of this particular present to 'configure' or in this case, Newsom is suggesting, 'imagine' a past that would result in the observed or experienced present. She concludes:

Since Ezekiel considered the present of his people to be one of radical apostasy, he constructs the only past that he judges can rightly account for it, one in which the sins of the contemporary period are present from the very beginning. The force of Ezekiel's rhetoric this depends on his audience's reconising his deliberate distortion of cultural memory.

Posted By Jonathan, 8:15am Comment Comments: 0