Cultural memory offers an approach to the Hebrew Bible that examines how representations of the past are shaped, transmitted, and transformed in relation to the communities that remember them. Important antecedents in the work of Wellhausen, Halbwachs, Alt, von Rad, and Childs illustrate how cultural memory can connect literary, historical, socio-political, and religious dimensions of biblical interpretation.
See also Cultural Memory in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis to Kings (Cambridge, 2026).
By Ronald Hendel
University of California, Berkeley
August 2026
The study of cultural memory in the Bible is a relatively new type of inquiry, one that does not ask primarily what actually happened in the past, but how the past is remembered, and how the remembered past shapes the self-consciousness of a community. This study also involves what Jan Assmann calls mnemohistory, that is, the history of memory, the winding pathways whereby history is transformed into memory by selection, revision, and narrative and ritual transformation. This general perspective contrasts with much biblical scholarship in the modern period, which generally seeks to reconstruct the history “behind” the text, whether it be political, religious, or literary history. In recent decades some scholars have turned to focus on the literary or ideological features of the texts, often without relation to the history behind the texts. Still others have abandoned reading the biblical text itself and have focused on its reception in later communities, focusing on meanings “in front of” the text.
The approach of cultural memory, I submit, offers a way to join these disparate inquiries. It melds close literary readings of texts with detailed attention to historical contexts and to the interpretive life of the remembered past. It is a way to “brush history against the grain,” as Walter Benjamin advises, starting with the social frameworks of communities of memory and working back and forth between the representations of the past, the past as such, and the circles of interpretation. It offers a long perspective on the Bible as the cultural memory of Judaism and Christianity, and to a lesser extent, Islam, which these religious cultures have cultivated in various ways, including its transformations in modernity.
While emphasizing the new features of this mode of inquiry, it also has ample antecedents in biblical scholarship. For instance, Julius Wellhausen famously argued that the accounts of the ancestors in Genesis reflect the era in which the stories arose in ancient Israel: “We attain to no historical knowledge of the patriarchs, but only of the time when the stories about them arose in the Israelite people; this later age is here unconsciously projected, in its inner and its outward features, into hoar antiquity, and is reflected there like a glorified mirage.” Wellhausen was primarily interested in the history behind the text (literary, political, and religious), but his comments show an acute awareness of the relationship between the biblical representations and the world of the Israelite storytellers and authors. In the context of cultural memory studies, Wellhausen is a “presentist,” one of those who see cultural memory as a pure projection of present circumstances.
Wellhausen’s position anticipates Maurice Halbwachs’ conception of collective memory (mémoire collective) as, in part, a projection of the present into the past: “collective memory … reconstruct[s] an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society.” Cultural memory is a usable past that suits the interests of the present, but Halbwachs also indicates that it can conserve aspects of the past that remain relevant. Since the past no longer survives, cultural memory can innovate. But it retains details of past memories that are compatible with current frameworks: it adapts “beliefs inherited from the past to the beliefs of the present.” History and cultural memory have a complicated relationship, which need not be reduced to a purely presentist model. While Wellhausen’s position remains a real option, Halbwachs introduced important nuances, yielding a dialectic between the past and the present in cultural memory.
Other biblical scholars also made contributions that are compatible with this nascent field of study. Albrecht Alt observed that many biblical narratives, particularly in Genesis and Joshua, are bound to particular places (Ortsgebundenheit). The locale shapes and activates cultural memory. A story may respond to unusual features in the landscape, such as the ruins at Jericho and Ai or the standing stone at Bethel. These physical features anchor the cultural memories in the lives of ancient Israelites. For instance, in the story of Jacob at Bethel, Jacob’s experiences are actualized to some degree in the worshiper’s ritual encounter at that place. As Alt writes, “The uniqueness of the story is always meant as a first time … i.e., it has been regularly repeated according to the given model.” Alt’s views are consistent with Halbwachs’ work on “legendary topography,” where places of memory are visible signs of invisible realities, which the place makes available for worshipers and pilgrims.
As Alt emphasizes, the actualization (Vergegenwärtigung) of the remembered past was an important factor in Israel’s “conscious[ness] of being one people.” This is also a central theme in cultural memory studies. This theme was developed by other scholars after Alt, including Gerhard von Rad: “Each generation was faced with the ever-identical yet ever-new task of understanding itself as Israel… In this process of actualization, the tradition here and there had to be reshaped.” While von Rad was discussing biblical theology, he was also addressing the processes of cultural memory. Similarly, Brevard Childs observes that “each successive generation rewrites the past in terms of her own experience.” I am not claiming that von Rad’s or Childs’ theologies are equivalent to a theory of cultural memory, but that aspects of memory studies have long circulated in biblical scholarship. In some ways the study of cultural memory offers a different kind of answer to some questions posed by theology, one that focuses on the history of memory rather than the history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte).
In sum, the study of cultural memory is both old and new in biblical scholarship. It provides a connective field for many issues that have concerned biblical scholars. The challenge for the study of cultural memory in and around the Hebrew Bible is to draw connections between text and context, to study the relationships between biblical representations of the past, the historical past, and the forking paths that join and separate them. It is a task with literary, historical, socio-political, and religious dimensions.
Adapted from Ronald Hendel, Cultural Memory in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis to Kings. Elements in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026, pp. 9–11.