Rethinking the Judean past: questions of history and a social archaeology of memory in the first book of the Maccabees

Abstract

This article explores the issue of history within post-structuralist social models of investigation applied to the biblical text. Within the context of a biblical narrative of Judean history, such as the Hasmonean revolt, the author assumes the necessary exploration of social voices, narratives, and even "controversial" texts, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Maccabean period. While historians have perceived the past as a reality to be reconstructed and collided, this article argues for the perception of the past as an ethnographic reality, where sociability and the authority of texts depend on conflicting memories. Narratives and historical narrations arise out of a concern for continuity and the future, more than out of the past and its singularity. Thus social and individual memories reflect social and individual experiences and cannot be discarded, even when they conflict with one another.

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In recent years, it has been argued that the biblical text, or other related texts, reflect social realities, and therefore they cannot be viewed as "autonomous literary worlds." For example, Philip Esler has consistently argued that

   at the social level, they may be interpreted as the vehicles for the
   construction of institutional and symbolic canopies within which the
   communities for which they were written might find meaning in the face of a
   hostile world [1994: 18; cf. 1987].

From that perspective of symbolic creations of alterity and within a world of difference, biblical texts constitute reflections by communities. Those texts were at one point or another constituted into textual inscriptions, and they form part of larger genres, such as wisdom literature, or collections of proverbs, or historical books. Thus, when Mary Douglas attempts an anthropological reading of the Book of Numbers, she argues that there is a need to know the community in which the text was constructed, its date and process of construction (1993: 35).

Those texts have arisen out of encounters with different realities, such as customs or religious systems of classification, that have helped the constant reshaping of cultural categories of ethnicity and identity within Israel. Identity, understood as an emic perspective of self-social assertion, is therefore articulated through processes of alterity and difference creation over periods of time, and through creative reformulations arising out of those social encounters with alterity and difference. In the case of the people of Israel as portrayed through the Bible, for example, such cultural and religious identity has been constantly rethought because of its history of dislocation from Egypt in the first place and the subsequent topological conquest of their land by other, larger, nations and empires. Such history of colonization made Israel vulnerable to constant changes in its social and religious institutions, nevertheless prevented by the writing up of cultural and religious traditions to be passed on from generation to generation.

Such literary accounts can be considered social histories, so that those texts constitute past creations that embody community perceptions of historical events. Thus, while scholars engaged in biblical criticism or anthropologists concerned with the social paradigms of a historical anthropology perceive such biblical voices as expressive, impressive, and authentic, approaches to the biblical text from anthropology have certainly been dominated by the structuralist paradigm. Moreover, such focus on the rationale of human thought and the universal creativity of processes of thought has ignored either interpretivist or historical paradigms. The biblical text has been explored in isolation from the search for structures of the mind, to the detriment of the possibility of exploring textual approximations and creations in their relation to social, cultural, and contextual realities, as perceived by communities.

In this article I contest this sort of structural predicament by focusing on the biblical texts as a socially constructed memorial, as an expression of a social past. I argue, using parameters of an historical anthropology and an "ethnographic present" taken from the First Book of the Maccabees, that the paradigm of an anthropological history of the text can provide the complementary context for continuous anthropological inscriptions of the biblical text.

In choosing the text of First Maccabees, I am choosing a narrative that has been on the one hand considered one of the most reliable historical sources within the biblical canon; on the other hand, it has been a controversial text, given importance by certain traditions of Christianity while being rejected by others, who have perceived it as a narrative in which Judean heroes have been taken as an example of Christian witness. In doing so, I try to argue that it is not only through myths of origins that social groups are invented and reaffirmed, but also through the use of narratives, considered historical because they have arisen out of the human experience of any social grouping of ancestral and mythical figures. My choice, moreover, contests the traditional paradigm of a unified social action that makes sense, and poses questions on those narratives that do not make the same sense to all. As I will show, anthropologists dealing with the biblical text started their own writing using those texts that were more familiar to them and that were easily accepted as examples of the human creation of myth and explanations related to the supernatural. In other words, they started by using cultural creations that in the anthropological work on non-Western societies were termed "cosmologies."