Focusing on the Persian period, this collection features influential biblical scholars who explore how prophecy and prophetic books were constructed. The contributors analyze the historical and cultural contexts that shaped these texts, offering insights into their significance and development within the biblical tradition.
The book compiles Ehud Ben Zvi's influential studies on social memory and its impact on the intellectual landscape of the early Second Temple period. It offers insights into the literati's textual repertoire, making it a valuable resource for researchers and educators interested in this historical context. The collection includes both previously published works and new contributions, enhancing the understanding of the era's social and literary dynamics.
There has been much interest in the Book of Chronicles in recent years. A book long considered marginal has become one of the most central in current studies. This is due, in part, to the increased and increasing emphasis on Persian period Yehud (and Samaria), and to the fact that Chronicles may provide a window for understanding how other books that later became biblical were understood at the time. In addition, Chronicles is also a second „national“ history and as such it served to reconfigure and reimagine the past/s communicated by other books. This commentary makes use of (social) memory (and other social-anthropological) approaches, examines the ongoing construction of meaning at the level of the separate units in the book, that of the book as a whole, and that of the book as part of a extant „library“ within which it constantly interacts and modifies. Explorations of the influence of the book and its images of the past over time round off the analysis.