Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? Daniel D. Pioske attempts to answer this question by studying the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. This book is comprised of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175-830 BCE) with a wide range of archaeological and historical evidence from the era in which these stories are set. Pioske examines the relationship between the past disclosed through these historical traces and the past represented within the biblical narrative. He discovers that the knowledge available to the biblical scribes about this period derived predominantly from memory and word of mouth, rather than from a corpus of older narrative documents. For those Hebrew scribes who first set down these stories in prose writing, the means for knowing a past and the significance attached to it were, in short, wed foremost to the faculty of remembrance. Memory in a Time of Prose reveals how the past was preserved, transformed, or forgotten in the ancient world of oral, living speech that informed biblical storytelling.

AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsPreface1. Introduction: Memory in a Time of Prose2. Hebrew Prose and Stories of an Early Iron Age Past: Historical and Epistemological Considerations3. Gath of the Philistines: The Resilience of a Remembered Past4. David on the Desert Fringe: The Entanglements of Memory5. A Past No Longer Remembered: The Hebrew Bible and the Question of Absence6. ConclusionBibliography