Memory and Covenant

The Role of Israel's and God's Memory in Sustaining the Deuteronomic and Priestly Covenants

Barat Ellman

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781451465617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451469592
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Memory and Covenant applies new insights into the meaning and function of social memory to analyze the two major "religions" of the Pentateuch (D and P) and their relationship to one another. Both these traditions regard memory as a vital element of religious practice and as the principal instrument of covenant fidelity—but in very different ways. Ellman shows that for the deuteronomic tradition, memory is an epistemological and pedagogical means for keeping Israel faithful to its God and God's commandments, even when Israelites are far from the temple and its worship. The pre-exilic priestly tradition, however, understands that the covenant depends on God's memory, which must be aroused by the sensory stimuli of the temple cult. The exilic priestly tradition (the literature of the Holiness school) incorporates the theme of transcendence put forth by Deuteronomy and reconceives of the cult in symbolic terms rather than as literally an appeal to God's memory.

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Memory at Work in the Lived Covenant

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“Remember, do not forget”: Israel’s Covenantal Duty in Deuteronomy

Introduction: Deuteronomic Ritual

Deuteronomy is not usually associated with ritual. Its law code says almost nothing about the practices associated with the shrine such as sacrifices and purification rites other than that they must be performed “only in the place which [Yahweh] has chosen.”^[1] When it does stipulate specific activities, such as the pilgrimage festivals (Deut. 16:1-17) or sacred donations (Deut. 14:22-29; 15:19-21), it couches them in hortatory reiteration of the religious principles to be gleaned from observance: the sacrificial system becomes an instrument of social welfare;^[2] the slavery laws to teach gratitude for God’s blessing.^[3] Only the ritual for the unsolved murder has no obvious pedagogical feature.^[4] The deuteronomic charges that surround the law code exhibit a similar orientation. They are general rather than specific, focusing, for instance, on observance of laws and statutes as a whole (e.g., Deut. 4:1; 7:8; 11:1).^[5]

Although ritual, in the strictest sense of the term, is not a deuteronomic concern, it would be wrong to say that Deuteronomy ignores religious practice altogether. On the contrary, D prescribes a number of mandatory practices that, in their codification, can justly be understood as the deuteronomic equivalent of ritual. Both the presentation of the first fruits during the Festival of Weeks (Deut. 26:1-11) and the triennial payment of tithes (Deut. 26:12-15) involve precisely scripted declarations. The law is to be read before all the people on every seventh celebration of the Festival of Booths (31:9-13). The requirement of domestic instruction is fulfilled through parents’ recital of the law and scripted answers to their children’s questions (6:7, 20-25). To this must be added the performance of the song of Deuteronomy 32. Although it is not expressly stated, periodic performance of the song seems to be the intent underlying its presentation to the Israelites.^[6] Practices such as these are intellectualized rituals.^[7] They are content-filled rather than symbolic; didactic rather than experiential; and meant to lead the practitioner directly to action rather than to effect transformative change either in the community or the cosmos.

Common to all the religious practice represented in D (excepting the unsolved murder ritual) is the incorporation and exploitation of memory. It is memory that promotes observance of commandments and motivates right treatment of the disadvantaged. For Deuteronomy, memory of slavery, of the exodus, of the wilderness period, of all that Yahweh has done for Israel, provides the cognitive foundation for Israel’s covenantal loyalty. If the cause of Adam’s transgression was that he “listened to the voice of your woman,” as the garden narrative suggests, then the best way to prevent Israel’s disobedience is to ensure the people listen to the right voice remembering and reminding them of their obligations to Yahweh. Deuteronomy is keenly aware of the possibility of succumbing to the wrong voice:

If your brother, the son of your mother, your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom . . . entices you . . . saying, “Let us go after and serve other gods. . . . Do not listen to him or look softly upon him . . .” (Deut. 13:4, 9)^[8]

Because of the ease with which wayward and deviant behavior can be learned, Deuteronomy twice cautions against such instruction: In Deut. 18:9, Israel is warned against learning “to do the abominations of those nations [in the land of Canaan],” and in Deut. 20:18, the reason apostate Israelite towns within the land must banned is so that the people as a whole will not be taught to behave as had the rebels.

As Mendenhall observed more than fifty years ago, a validating function analogous to the “historical prologue” in ancient Hittite suzerainty treaties is performed in the reference to God’s saving acts that opens the Decalogue (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6). Both rehearsals of the past reference the sovereign’s demonstrated power to protect its vassal as the justification for the vassal’s exclusive loyalty. The assertion, “I Yahweh am your God who took you out of the land of Egypt, the house of servitude,” rationalizes the command: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Deuteronomy, however, broadens both the information rationalizing Israel’s debt to Yahweh and the occasion for articulating it. God’s claim upon the people is substantiated not only through the words spoken directly to the Israelites at Sinai/Horeb. The whole of Moses’ instruction does so. Moses’ instruction, moreover, does not simply substantiate God’s claim; both it and the law associated with it are what must remain eternally present in the minds of God’s people if total fidelity is to be ensured.^[9] The covenant in Deuteronomy involves cognitive, emotional, and performative elements, all three of which are motivated by memory. As expressed in Deut. 6:5, Israel is required to “love Yahweh your God with the entirety of your heart, the entirety of your selfhood, and the entirety of your power.”^[10] The “love” that is commanded is total; it involves all of the self, all of the time.^[11] Memory provides the epistemological and psychological basis from which to carry out this obligation.^[12]

As scholars have observed, Deuteronomy’s conceptualization of covenant exhibits ideational affinities both with the northern prophetic tradition represented by the eighth-century bce prophet Hosea, and with the sapient traditions of the ancient Near East. Like Hosea, for Deuteronomy knowledge of God and love of God are intricately related, and both are necessary ingredients of fidelity to God. The straying wife in Hos. 2:4-15 is ignorant of God’s providential acts: “But she does not know (wǝhȋʾ lōʾ yādʿȃ) that I gave her the grain and the new wine and the new oil . . .” (Hos. 2:10). Lacking knowledge of what God has done, she has no knowledge or memory of God. “And Me she has forgotten,” God declares (Hos. 2:15).^[13] The equation of forgetfulness and lack of piety, and its inverse, the identification of memory with faithful observance that is found in Hosea, assumes central importance in deuteronomic literature. Similarly in deuteronomic literature, memory leads to knowledge of God and God’s laws, to love of God and to the intentional implementation of God’s commands.

Deuteronomy is also associated with ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature.^[14] It shares topics and terminology with Egyptian, Akkadian, and Sumerian wisdom texts as well as with the biblical book of Proverbs.^[15] The characterization of God’s relationship toward the Israelites in the wilderness when God tested and chastised them “as a man disciplines his son” (Deut. 8:5), for example, recalls Proverbs’ preoccupation with parental training and disciplining of children (cf. Prov. 12:1; 13:24, etc.). And like Proverbs, Deuteronomy regards generational transmission as the preferred pedagogical model.^[16]

But Deuteronomy differs from these literatures in three respects. In Deuteronomy, wisdom is theologized. The law (tȏrȃ) is Israel’s wisdom (Deut. 4:6-8) and Israel’s particular experience is the curriculum accompanying it. Moreover, learning has one purpose: it is to be harnessed to obedience and service to God. Deuteronomy also evinces a real concern for understanding as well as knowing by rote what is learned. For instance, Deuteronomy does not simply command that when a slave is released, he or she must be provided the material good needed to set up independent life. The text explains, “Do not regard it as difficult when you send him free from you, for your servant has earned double his wages [in] the six years, and Yahweh your God will bless you according to all you do” (Deut. 15:18). And finally, wisdom for Deuteronomy is dynamic. One learns as one teaches and one enacts what one learns. Proverbs, as Michael Carasik observes, offers an essentially passive model for learning content that is not specifically directed to the present generation as a dynamic community charged with performance. He writes:

In comparison with the Bible generally, Proverbs replaces learning (למד) with receptivity (שמע), and awareness (זכר) with retention (שמר). Both of these changes point to the same conclusion. In Proverbs generally, and with apparent deliberateness in Proverbs 1–9, we find an emphasis not on mental processes but on the contents of the mind. (Italics in original.)^[17]

In contrast, the deuteronomic conceptualization of wisdom emphasizes both the process and the content of learning, because learning that sticks, so to speak, requires continual rehearsal of the lesson and performance of the commandments learned.

Another departure from Proverbs is the particularistic orientation of Deuteronomy. That orientation reflects what H.-P. Müller describes as the

synthesis . . . in which the earlier wisdom theology, which for the most part had not advanced beyond the stage of implications, was combined with theological schemata based on law and history.^[18]

According to deuteronomic thinking, Israel’s history, particularly God’s work in that history, provides the curriculum for Israelite piety, as the explanation for the public reading of the law illustrates.^[19] By recalling and verbalizing that history, the Israelites are instructed and reminded a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Theoretical Underpinnings
• Memory at Work in the Lived Covenant
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects and Names
• Index of Biblical References and Rabbinic Texts