UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I examine the Hebrew Bible as a cultural product, analyzing the diachronic text formation practices therein as acts of cultural memory.

Whereas approaches to cultural memory tend to focus on continuity, I turn my attention to forgetting, arguing for the forgotten as a site of fecundity—while remembering makes texts present across time, forgetting is the mechanism that allows meaning to change and multiplicities to converge, forming cultural text into a portable and durable cultural symbols. In this project, I center the scribes writing into the text as agents within the tradition who perform this kind of memory work as they redact, add to, or insert text into their inherited literatures.

This dissertation is made of three case studies that address selected pericopes from three of the main literary genres in the Hebrew Bible: pentateuchal law (Exod 34:11-17), prophetic poetry (Isa 2), and historical narrative 1 Sam 13-15). Each study integrates an eclectic methodology, drawing from the methods traditional to biblical studies (text-criticism, redaction-criticism, philology, etc.) along with theories of cultural memory and intertextuality. I begin each case study by making an argument concerning the text’s composition history, and I proceed to analyze the secondary layer as an act of cultural memory that brings the text forward in time, but which also changes the text and its potentialities moving forward. This change, I argue, is part of what allows syntheses between cultural texts to converge into cultural symbols, which can be described as extra-textual hermeneutical assumptions by which readers approach the text. Those which I suggest are active in these case studies are Canon, Isaiah as Seer, and Divine History.