Memory, Trauma, and Identity in Ezra-Nehemiah

Methods, theories, iMagination

social scientific approaches in BiBlical studies

edited by

David J. Chalcraft, Frauke Uhlenbruch

and Rebecca S. Watson

sheffield phoenix press

2014

WOMEN IN THE PENTATEUCH

Hebrew Bible Monographs, 23

Series Editors David J.A. Clines, J. Cheryl Exum, Keith W. Whitelam

Editorial Board

A. Graeme Auld, Marc Brettler, Francis Landy, Hugh S. Pyper, Stuart D.E. Weeks

ChalcraftA.indd 3 6/4/2014 5:49:34 AM

Copyright © 2014 Sheffield Phoenix PressPublished by Sheffield Phoenix Press

Department of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield45 Victoria Street, Sheffield S3 7QB

www.sheffieldphoenix.com

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any informationstorage or retrieval system, without the publisher’s permission in writing.

A CIP catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library

Typeset by the HK Scriptorium

Printed by Lightning Source

ISBN 978-1-909697-36-2 (hbk) ISSN 1747-9630


Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Abbreviations ix

List of Contributors xi

IntroductionBiBliCal studies and the soCial sCienCes: WhenCe and Whither? David J. Chalcraft xiii

I. Methods, Perspectives and Theory 1

1. i explain a riot! neW testament sCholars disCuss struCture

and agenCy in an age of neoliBeralism

James G. Crossley 22. hoW Can evolutionary theory ContriBute to BiBliCal studies? István Czachesz 163. using pierre Bourdieu in the study of BiBliCal narrative

Linda A. Dietch 394. Jonah and sCriBal Habitus

Amy Erickson 59

II. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance 79

5. Who has the right to Be Called a Christian? devianCe

and Christian identity in tertullian’s On tHe PrescriPtiOn Of Heretics

Outi Lehtipuu 806. Jesus and the Contours of oppression: laBelling

and devianCe in the Johannine passion

Mark Finney 99


III. Social Psychology and Trauma Theory 123

7. ‘i shall not Want’? a psyChologiCal interpretation of psalm 23 Rebecca S. Watson 124 8. memory, trauma and identity in ezra–nehemiah Jeremiah W. Cataldo 147

IV. Cultural Studies, the Social Sciences and the Hebrew Bible 159

9. numBers 13 By gene rodenBerry

Frauke Uhlenbruch 16010. ezekiel at the tWin toWers

Johanna Stiebert 172

V. Anthropology and Archaeology 185

11. is anyone home? amos 6.8-11 in light of post-earthquake housing

Ryan N. Roberts 18612. metalWorkers in the old testament:

an anthropologiCal vieW

Emanuel Pfoh 201

Index of Biblical Passages 218Index of Names 222Index of Subjects 225

vi Methods, Theories, Imagination


prefaCe and aCknoWledgments

This volume owes its existence, first and foremost, to the energy of colleagues in the Centre for Society, Religion and Belief (SRB) at the University of Derby. The co-editors have all been associated with SRB and would like to extend their thanks to members, including Professor Paul Weller, whose early support was crucial to the formation of the Centre, which David Chalcraft originally spearheaded.

All of us feel that there was something special about SRB and the Univer-sity of Derby, and we are pleased that the Centre continues to flourish under the leadership of Dr Kristin Aune. Derby was special to each of us because it provided an open and ambitious environment for us to pursue our research interests unencumbered by vested interests or the weight of tradition. Derby continues to be at the cutting edge of research, to welcome and encourage new approaches and energetically commits itself and its staff to raising its research profile.

Frauke Uhlenbruch, who completed her PhD thesis in Biblical Studies at the University of Derby and was Graduate Research Assistant in SRB, would like to extend personal thanks to the team at Derby: to Kristin Aune as rep-resentative of the Centre for Society, Religion, and Belief, its members and friends. Yet more personal thanks to her colleagues at the postgraduate office at Derby, providers of constructive feedback, appropriate ridicule and—most importantly—trusted coffee break companions.

For Rebecca Watson, who held the position of Visiting Fellow in Bib-lical Studies, SRB was an oasis to escape all the administrative and teach-ing demands of the Cambridge Ministry Course (for which she was working at the time) for a day and to engage with others in a research culture. As someone who was new to social science Rebecca also found it very stimulat-ing to meet with others with expertise that she felt she did not have and with research interests that were outside her usual sphere of engagement, and it was encouraging to be part of a research group that was working hard to increase its profile and output. Rebecca is also grateful to have had the opportunity to present her ideas in seminars and at the symposium, at both of which she was able to benefit from very helpful feedback. Rebecca would also like to thank her mother, Joyce Chaplin, for her helpful input at times when time was short and for her critical proofreading skills, and her hus-


viii Methods, Theories, Imagination

band, James, and her children, Hugh and Henrietta, for putting up with her absence on those long days when she crept out of the house before dawn to travel up to Derby and did not return until very late in the evening, as well as their tolerance while the book was in process.

David Chalcraft would like to extend his thanks to all members of SRB past and present, and to all participants in SRB activities and all the contribu-tors to the volume. Even though he has now moved on to the University of Sheffield, returning as Chair to the department where he was once an under-graduate, connections with Derby (which is, after all, less than an hour’s drive down the M1 motorway) are still maintained and are a continuing source of encouragement.

The editing of the volume has been a collaborative project shared between the three co-editors, and we have all benefitted from the close attention paid by all to our individual chapters. We have had specific responsibility for par-ticular sections, and each of us has looked at the whole with a critical eye. Chalcraft wrote the Introduction, but not without the critical support of his co-editors.

Finally, the editors are grateful to Professor David Clines and Sheffield Phoenix Press for their interest in the volume and for supporting a new series, The Bible and Social Science, of which this book is the inaugural volume.

David J. ChalcraftFrauke UhlenbruchRebecca S. WatsonSeptember, 2013


aBBreviations

AJEM Australian Journal of Emergency ManagementAnt. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testamentb. Babylonian Talmud BAR Biblical Archaeology ReviewBASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental ResearchBBET Beiträge zur biblischen Exegese und Theologie BEATAJ Beiträge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des

antiken JudentumBETL Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensum BibInt Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches BKAT Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissen-

schaftCIS Copenhagen International SeminarCurBS Currents in Research: Biblical Studies EPSL Earth and Planetary Science LettersER Epidemiological ReviewsESHM European Seminar in Historical MethodologyFBE Forum for Bibelsk EksegeseFOTL The Forms of the Old Testament Literature HALOT Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner and J.J. Stamm (eds.),

The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (trans. and ed. under the direction of M.E.J. Richardson; 4 vols.; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994–1999).

HAR Hebrew Annual Review HSR Historical Social ResearchIGR International Geology ReviewJBL Journal of Biblical Literature JGR Journal of Geophysical ResearchJHS Journal of Hellenic Studies JNES Journal of Near Eastern StudiesJSHJ Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus


x Methods, Theories, Imagination

JSNT Journal for the Study of the New TestamentJSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement SeriesJPS Jewish Publication Society JSJSup Journal for the Study of Judaism, Supplement Series JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series JSS Journal of Semitic StudiesJTS Journal of Theological StudiesLAI Library of Ancient IsraelLHBOTS Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament StudiesLRB London Review of BooksNEA Near Eastern ArchaeologyNEAHL The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy

LandOLA Orientalia lovaniensia analectaPrescr. Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics PT Psychology TodaySAHL Studies in the Archaeology and History of the LevantSBTS Sources for Biblical and Theological StudySP Special Papers (Geological Society of America)Spec. Leg. Philo, De specialibus legibus TA Tel AvivVT Vetus Testamentum VTSup Vetus Testamentum, Supplement SeriesWar Josephus, The Jewish War WBC Word Biblical Commentary


ContriButors

david J. ChalCraft, is Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. Previously he was Professor of Classical Sociology and Head of the Society, Religion and Belief Research Group at the University of Derby.

Jeremiah W. Cataldo is Assistant Professor, Frederik Meijer Honors College, Grand Valley State University.

James g. Crossley is Professor in Bible, Culture and Politics in the Depart-ment of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield.

istván CzaChesz is Heisenberg Fellow and Privatdozent of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg.

linda a. dietCh is Adjunct Professor of Hebrew Bible at the theological school of Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.

amy eriCkson is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, Iliff School of Theol-ogy, Denver, Colorado.

mark finney is Lecturer in Religion in the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield.

outi lehtipuu is Academy Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki.

emanuel pfoh is a researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET) and teaches in the Department of History of the National University of La Plata, Argentina.

ryan n. roBerts is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Johanna stieBert is Associate Professor in Hebrew Bible, University of Leeds.

frauke uhlenBruCh was Graduate Research Assistant at the Centre for Soci-ety, Religion and Belief at the University of Derby and is now an editor at De Gruyter, Berlin.

reBeCCa s. Watson is Research Associate at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Previously she held a Visit-ing Research Fellowship in Biblical Studies at the University of Derby.



8

memory, trauma and identity in ezra–nehemiah

Jeremiah W. Cataldo

Ruth Leys’s theory on trauma and memory, when used as a heuristic device, reveals qualities of Ezra–Nehemiah that frame the text as an autotelic response to a constructed, or fabricated, on the part of Ezra–Nehemiah, form of ‘survivor’s guilt’. While the experiences of the exiles helped shape the community’s collective identity, the events themselves, while important, were not the primary bases for golah identity. It was, as Leys’s theory on responses to trauma as identity narratives helps clarify, the golah community’s experi-ence in Yehud that resulted in its internally legitimated response of identity. This response, the intent of which served to mobilize collective identity, sup-ported a central belief that a restored ‘Israel’ was the end-goal of the experi-ences of the Judean exiles. Read this way, Ezra–Nehemiah exposes itself as being premised upon the belief that restoration was the desired consequence of exile, and it presupposes that the restored society would be built around the social-political authority of the community. This strategy of response, or ‘adaptation’, to use Leys’s terminology,1 fulfilled initially the role of a sur-vival mechanism by legitimating golah identity within the expected reality of an ideological restoration—the identity of the community was at risk due to assimilation for social, economic or political gain.2 The author(s) of Ezra–

1. Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2007), p. 79. R. Leys is a leading scholar on the role that trauma plays in identity formation. Her work has employed psychoanalytic theories, from Freud to more recent scholars, exploring in detail the concepts ‘survivor’s guilt’ and shame and their impacts upon individual and collective psyches.

2. Such gains would be a significant reason behind intermarriages, which Ezra–Nehe-miah was staunchly against (cf. Neh. 9.2; 13.3-30; Ezra 10.1-44). Preservation of social-political, or ‘ethnic’, identity would have necessitated as a response, according to K. Hoglund (cf. Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Palestine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah [Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992], p. 226), resistance to intermarriage, ‘which was a mechanism employed by imperial systems to ensure control over a subject territory’. This response would not have been only one left at the imperial level, but would have been useful, even more so, on the local level. This leads M. Douglas, for example, to argue that Leviticus and Numbers make the most sense in the same context in which Ezra–Nehemiah


148 Methods, Theories, Imagination

Nehemiah developed this group mechanism into a strategy of social engage-ment—which included techniques for adapting to a ‘hostile’ environment—that supported the golah community’s pursuit of social-political authority in Yehud. With that said, this work focuses on the development of the described strategy within the cultural memory of the Judean exiles as that which can be determined from Ezra–Nehemiah.

The affective ideological framework, the purpose of which was to organ-ize and mobilize group identity, of Ezra–Nehemiah was a response to the golah community’s disadvantaged social-political position. Ezra–Nehemiah’s articulation of this position, we may say somewhat confidently, was the con-sequence of an analogical narration of the event of the exile with the tradi-tion of the exodus.3 Both were important dramaturgical events that affected the community’s collective identity as a restored community. Consequently, the events themselves are preserved within collective memory, responses to these events as they are interpreted and remembered are ritualized, and the disadvantaged position of the golah community is interpreted through the values generated through an internalization of a dramatized trauma. In short, the internalization of this dramatically constructed trauma of the exile in Ezra–Nehemiah (cf. Ezra 9.7) was, as Morton Smith described it,4 a defensive mechanism but only in the sense that a successful defense preserved the plau-sibility of golah collective identity as the identity of the group in power. Ezra’s rejection of the people in the land, for example, as polluters and abominators (9.10-11) should be read prescriptively as an attempt to rewrite the economy of power in the province (notably, through religious concepts of sacred and profane).

‘Survivor’s Guilt’ as Internalized Mobilization in Ezra–Nehemiah

According to Ruth Leys, because responses to trauma are usually efforts to alter the circumstances that first caused the trauma, an individual or collec-tive survivor internalizes the offending aggressive action.5 By internalizing it, the subject, individual or collective, redefines the effects of the traumatic action as meaningful within her identity—that is, the meaning and value of

was written (see M. Douglas, ‘Responding to Ezra: The Priests and the Foreign Wives’, Biblical Interpretation 10 [2002], pp. 1-23). G. Ahlström (The History of Ancient Palestine [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993], p. 846) maintains that the clash between the golah and the am ha’arets, which necessitated the response under discussion, was motivated primarily by a conflict over property rights between the two ‘factions’.

3. Cf. the tone and frame of the so-called National Confession in Neh. 9.1-37.4. Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (London:

SCM, 2nd edn, 1987), p. 63.5. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, pp. 61-65.


8. Cataldo Memory Trauma and Identity in Ezra–Nehemiah 149

a trauma are rewritten to ‘make sense’ within the individual’s or collective’s worldview. To alleviate dissonance, Leys points out, the subject develops a narratable logic behind the event as well as her response to it. Consequently, responses to the traumatic event are usually expressed in opposition to the aggressive action as it has been internalized. Thus, the event is primarily remem-bered as it has been perceived and interpreted rather than by its objective or actual physical actions or experiences. We can confidently say, then, that responses to trauma reflect a progressive narrative of identity. In this general sense, narration of a perceived trauma—which at some point in the narration of identity becomes archetypical rather than restricted to any real, historical experience—constitutes in part the mechanism through which place and iden-tity, as a consequence of a traumatic act, may be interpreted.

When the surviving individual or collective cannot effectively incorporate a given trauma, including both the event itself and the survivor’s correspond-ing internalizing response, there results an increasing anxiety, a cognitive dis-sonance, over disorder, or anomie—a response that Melanie Klein attributes to an individual’s ‘death instinct’.6 For the collective psyche, the presence of anxiety often provides a stimulus for ritualization, which simultaneously legit-imates and preserves mechanisms of defense against anxiety.7 It was, for exam-ple, the anxiety over the fragile plausibility—a consequence of the antagonistic relationship with the am ha’arets—of golah identity that prompted the ritualiza-tion of the Passover as a celebration for the exiles alone (cf. Ezra 6.19-22). As an event that celebrated the divine selection and sparing (from annihilation, anomie, irrelevance) of a chosen people, the Passover ritualized the legitima-tion of collective identity linked directly and uniquely to the authority of Yhwh. Ezra reinterprets ‘Israel’ as a reference to the golah community, and divine authority, which represents the idealized social-political order, as the God of that concept of Israel (v. 21). Through ritualization, in other words, the community institutionalized its response to the trauma of irrelevance—the loss of an externally legitimated identity—by seeking to internally stabilize its own collective identity, link it with past religious and political traditions, and externally legitimate it through divine authority. By reminding the com-munity of the lessons of the trauma of exile, ritualization also resulted in new definitions of moral responsibility in the form of religious obedience. For Ezra, because Yhwh was responsible for the exile, collective guilt must be a legitimate part of the community’s collective identity. Or, to use Ezra’s lament, ‘O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you,

6. Melanie. Klein, Envy and Gratitude, and Other Works, 1946–1963 (New York: Vintage Digital, 2011), p. 4.

7. Richard Davis, ‘The Ritualization of Behaviour’, The Australisn Journal of Anthropol-ogy 13.2 (1981), pp. 103-12 (106).



my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens’ (9.6).

Ezra–Nehemiah’s conviction that the community was associated with the transgressions of the past suggests an assumed, imposed even, guilt for the event of the exile. According to Leys, ‘[S]urvivor guilt is inseparable from the imitation of the aggressor. The victim becomes contaminated by the aggression directed against himself by identifying with it and passing on its sting’.8 Shaped by the very forces that created an environment in which occurred a conflict over the body, survivors as human agents internalize their experi-ences. Consequently, the identity of the survivor will always bear the weight of the experience that made the survivor a survivor. But where the individual must repair damage from a blow to the psyche, the collective must incor-porate the damage from a corresponding blow within the structures and relations upon which its collective identity is based. Where, for example, the exile changed the structures and relations that defined Judean society, removing from that society the previous aristocracy and subsequently alter-ing the previously legitimated hierarchy of power, the concept of restoration in Ezra–Nehemiah reflects a progressive return to structures and relations of power that support golah authority. By ‘progressive return’, we mean not that there was a return to a past state entirely but that there was a co-option of traditional structures and relations, which before the exile had supported the authority of the later exiled Judeans, along with the internalization of the trauma of the exile. Traditional structures, relations and identities were reinterpreted to make them meaningful in a postexilic world. But they were reinterpreted in ways that made them meaningful for the (re)legitimation of golah authority.

As an affective motivation, survivor’s guilt refers not primarily to a need to justify one’s own survival, and so also a felt failure to be annihilated, but to an instinctual need to remember and be heard.9 ‘By saying men and women died like sheep’, Leys cites of Terrence Des Pres, ‘we say that they collaborated in the administration of their own deaths, and therefore they are responsible for the crimes that occurred’.10 In past studies on trauma, attention has been foremost on the survivor’s identification with the aggressor rather than with the dead victim—this identification is thought to leave a permanent imprint on identity resulting in, on the part of the victim, a felt responsibility for the traumatic actions.11 Yet identification, according to Des Pres, is not a thing, a

8. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 17 (emphasis mine).9. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 62, who summarizes the argument of Terrence Des

Pres (‘Victims and Survivors’, Dissent 23 (1976), pp. 49-56 [49]; The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976], p. 133).

10. Des Pres, ‘Victims and Survivors’, p. 49; cited in Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 92.11. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 61.



static imprint or relic of a historical past; it is intrinsically an act or process.12 In other words, identity is not a product of ‘mobilization’, it is the process through which social-political agents, individual and collective, engage, inter-nalize, rationalize, express, etc., for the constructive purpose of a stabilized world, a world that ‘makes sense’.13 That said, a survivor’s identification with the dead, both Leys and Des Pres emphasize, is ‘radically misunderstood’ if it is ‘taken as evidence of something “suspect” in the survivor’s behavior’ in relation to the dead—that is, if it is interpreted solely as identification in the ‘past-ness’, as though a permanent imprint in the perfective sense of a trau-matic event.14 Likewise, the traumatic effect upon golah collective identity is misunderstood if it is argued to be an imprint of exile rather than the commu-nity’s ongoing attempt to define itself within the social-political environment in Yehud; golah identity, as expressed by Ezra–Nehemiah, is irrelevant outside that context. In other words, golah identity was the expression of a collective response to an altered social-political environment in Yehud, for which Nehe-miah’s summary of the berît between Yahweh and the people (in Neh. 10.28-39) laid the conditions or range of corresponding appropriate behaviors.

As Leys argues, treating the traumatic event as something that leaves a ‘reality imprint’ upon the brain falsely ‘testifies to the existence of a time-less historical truth unaffected by suggestive-mimetic factors or unconscious-symbolic elaboration’.15 In that situation, symptoms of trauma are literal or material replicas of the trauma that stand outside interpretation.16 Yet it is more accurate that symptoms of and subsequent responses to trauma are products of an evolving dialectic between processes of internalization and externalization of meaning that characterize identity and its expression. In that sense, symptoms are influenced not only by a past traumatic event but also by the individual’s or collective’s attempt to internalize the meaning of that event in light of the changing environment. Because the surrounding environment is constantly changing, the internalized meaning and the corre-sponding expression of identity are always in a state of progressive, or perhaps iterative, expression.17

It is in that sense, then, that we can say that Ezra–Nehemiah’s co-option of the exodus tradition (cf. Neh. 9.9-37) emphasizes the community’s dramatur-gical identification with the construction of a new social-political body and a

12. Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 133.13. For a larger discussion regarding identity as a source for mobilization, see Karen

A. Cerulo, ‘Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions’, Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997), pp. 385-409.

14. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 61; Des Pres, The Survivor, pp. 38-39.15. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 60.16. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 60.17. Cf. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 61.



corresponding collective identity.18 In this, the text emphasizes the performa-tive dimension of (ideological) conquest in the golah community’s assertion of a new social-political order.19 The ritualization of this dramaturgy is itself a response to anxiety over the irrelevance of the community’s expressed iden-tity. As the legitimacy and effectiveness of ritual are preserved as long as there exist clearly defined actors and roles, this ritualization in Ezra–Nehemiah identifies and preserves the distinction between the golah community and the Am Ha’arets. And it is from this basis that Ezra–Nehemiah’s articulation of restoration begins. Restoration, in short, is the idealized state in which the anxiety over irrelevance—irrelevance as a type of ideological death—has been effectively dissociated from the group’s identity.

Ezra–Nehemiah’s Autotelic Response to Anxiety

The actions that form the basis of a response to trauma may be either the result of intentional agency or actions that are autotelic.20 Something that is autotelic may be described as having a purpose in and not apart from itself. And so, the purpose for the response may be the reason of the response. Or, accord-ing to Terry Eagleton, that which is autotelic is that which has its legitimating grounds within itself.21 The ‘autotelic affect’ may be defined as affects that ‘can be discharged in a self-rewarding or self-punishing fashion independently of any object whatsoever’.22 ‘The object of affects such as anger, enjoyment, excite-ment, or shame is not proper to the affects in the same way that air is the object proper to respiration’.23 But, Leys warns, while such affects are not tied to one object but can be contingently attached to a range of objects, this does not mean that they are intrinsically independent of all objects.24 Autotelic affects are contingent upon a given object within a given circumstance while the object that fulfills this role may change with the circumstance.25

Ezra–Nehemiah’s dogged focus on the distinction between the golah com-munity and the Am Ha’arets was a consequence of the community’s anxiety over its own possible irrelevance. That is, the identity of the community was

18. Leys discusses dramaturgy as a response to trauma in Trauma: A Genealogy (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 68-76.

19. Leys explains the performative dimension of mimesis or antimimesis, as used by different scholars, in Trauma, pp. 70-72.

20. Cf. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 133.21. Terry Eagleton, ‘God, the Universe, Art, and Communism’, New Literary History

32.1 (January 2001), p. 27.22. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 133.23. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 134.24. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 134.25. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 135.



a product of its threatened irrelevance (as one can read in Neh. 13.23-31 and Ezra 9.1-15; 10.1-5). The autotelic nature of Ezra–Nehemiah’s articula-tion of identity emphasizes—over and against any reduction of agency to the binarism or voluntarity of compulsion—the active, performative dimension of the subject’s, or agent’s, experiences.26 Moreover, visual recognition of the destruction, and so ‘loss’, of Jerusalem’s walls and Temple legitimated not only the cultural memory27 associated with the exile but also an anxiety over the possible irrelevance of the group—irrelevance representing an ideological destruction symbolized by the destruction visible in Jerusalem. Yet in legiti-mating these things, cultural internalization of the meaning associated with the visual destruction of Jerusalem also needed to generate feelings of loss, shame and regret (see again the National Confession in Nehemiah 9 and Ezra 9.1-15; 10.1-5). To accomplish this, the emotive response must correlate with the prescribed cultural meaning, the ‘trauma’, in order to both validate the prescribed cultural meaning as affective and create a psychological depend-ency between individual identity and the affective meaning. The necessary immediacy of these feelings was not the product of the event of the exile, which for the community was a historical event, but the community’s dis-advantaged position within the social-political environment, including that environment’s distributed systems of power.28 For Ezra–Nehemiah, in its con-structive, or prescriptive, endeavor, the actions producing an emotive affect were found not in the exile itself but in the altered social-political landscape. For the author, the exile was a past event, a cultural memory, whose urgency had given way to theological and prophetic allegory. Preserved as such, its accessibility to analogical association to the community’s position and its related anxiety was apparent.

Consequently, restoration was the desired response to exile. This belief was a consequence not of the exile itself but, for the author of Ezra–Nehemiah, of the lack of any material basis for the golah community’s desired author-ity—a desire that it maintained on the margins of social-political power in the province.29 Initially, belief in restoration provided a shared ideal around

26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Series Q) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 13; as cited in Leys, From Guilt to Shame, p. 133.

27. P. Davies’s work (Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008]) on the quiddi-ties of cultural memory within the biblical text also provides a helpful background on this social-psychological concept.

28. Cf. the larger discussion in Jeremiah W. Cataldo, A Theocratic Yehud? Issues of Gov-ernment in Yehud (LHBOTS, 498; London: T. & T. Clark, 2009).

29. This argument is made at length in Jeremiah W. Cataldo, Breaking Monotheism: Yehud and the Material Formation of Monotheistic Identity (LHBOTS, 565; London: Blooms-bury, 2012).



which social cohesion could occur. It functioned as a survival mechanism in that it preserved the boundaries of golah collective identity from irrelevance. It became a mobilizing desire when its effectiveness at encouraging social cohesion became apparent. In other words, the desire for restoration was the result of an effective defense.

Cultural Trauma and Restoration: Writing the Narrative of Identity

It seems, then, that with respect to the golah community the trauma of the exile is largely inseparable from the possible dissolution of the community’s own collective identity. Within Ezra–Nehemiah, responses to this collective trauma emphasized social cohesion through the attainment of social-political authority through Yhwh and defense against external threats, whether imag-ined or real. This resides at the base of Ezra–Nehemiah’s concept of restora-tion.

Kai Erikson, who helped pioneer a theoretical conceptualization between individual and collective trauma, differentiates between the two types in the following way:

By individual trauma I mean a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effec-tively. . . . By collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.30

Expressions of restoration within Ezra–Nehemiah were acts that remem-bered the tradition of the exile, thereby preserving within cultural memory its continued effect on collective identity. In addition, the golah community’s disadvantaged position, in terms of distributed power relations, generated feelings of trauma as a response to its position on the margins of power within the social-political context of Yehud. Intermarriage, in this sense, was so vehemently condemned in Ezra–Nehemiah because the assimilation of community members made increasingly real the irrelevance of the com-munity, threatening the legitimating basis of the golah collective identity. This basis was the structural response to a ‘constructed cultural trauma’,31 a trauma of isolation and distinction, that provided a catalyst for social cohe-sion by emphasizing the social-political boundaries between the golah com-munity and the am ha’aretz.

30. Kai T. Erikson, Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 15th edn, 1978), p. 154.

31. I am borrowing J. Alexander’s phrase in ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al.; Berkeley, CA: Univer-sity of California Press, 2004), p. 1.



‘Cultural trauma’, Jeffrey Alexander clarifies, ‘occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’.32 As Leys’s analysis of trauma has shown, feelings of trauma need not stem only from a physical event but can be a collective response, thereby pro-viding social cohesion, to a cultural memory. Within Ezra–Nehemiah, the exodus and the exile were legitimated together as a shared tradition on which the community cognitively identified its own existence as a divine remnant from which a nation would be restored. The trauma in Ezra–Nehemiah was an interpretation of the community’s social uncertainty within the social-political environment in Yehud. ‘The objects or events’, and this can be seen in Ezra–Nehemiah, ‘that trigger trauma are perceived clearly by actors, their responses are lucid, and the effects of these responses are problem solving and progressive’.33

Responses to trauma often include efforts to alter the circumstances that caused the trauma.34 Memories about the past are what guide the col-lective thinking about the future.35 As Alexander writes, ‘Traumatic feel-ings and perceptions . . . come not only from the originating event but from the anxiety of keeping it repressed. Trauma will be resolved, not only by setting things right in the world, but by settings things right in the self. [T]he truth can be recovered, and psychological equanimity restored, only . . . “when memory comes”.’36 The memory of the exile fashioned the response of the golah community to the situation of social uncertainty in which it found itself. Ezra–Nehemiah’s emphasis on empirical confirmation of collec-tive identity, through constructing the walls of Jerusalem (cf. Neh. 4.19), and the corresponding separation of the golah community from the am ha’aretz along ideological lines reflect a deeply rooted anxiety over irrelevance. But the trauma that Ezra–Nehemiah has in mind is not any physical destruction of the people—Nehemiah’s own acts of physical violence (cf. Neh. 13) suggest that violence was not something consciously or unconsciously feared by the author. The trauma that the author has in mind is the loss of social-political power—or, perhaps better stated, the ‘never having attained’ of that power within the province of Yehud.37

32. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, p. 1.33. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, p. 3.34. Cf. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, p. 3.35. Again, see Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, p. 3.36. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, p. 5, Alexander quotes Saul

Friedländer.37. See again the larger argument in Cataldo, Breaking Monotheism.



In sum, Leys’s theory helps clarify that for Ezra–Nehemiah the concept of restoration, as a motivation for collective identity, was less a reaction to the historical event of exile(s) and more the internal mobilization of the com-munity in response to its disadvantaged social-political position in Yehud. As part of this mobilization, the textual narrative preserves an action strategy consistent with what Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps refer to as the ‘narrated self ’: ‘The inseparability of narrative and self is grounded in the phenomeno-logical assumption that entities are given meaning through being experienced and the notion that narrative is an essential resource in the struggle to bring experiences to conscious awareness’.38 Ezra–Nehemiah articulates the ‘expe-rience’ of trauma as a shared idea—therefore, bringing it into the collective conscious awareness—upon which the golah collective identity is based. It is, in short, a constructivist text, the intent of which was to rewrite the tradition of the exile(s) as being the shared experience of the golah community alone—that is, in clear distinction from the Am Ha’arets. And in this sense, it is also very much in line with what Northrop Frye describes as the ‘tactics of ideol-ogy’, ‘where the aim is to persuade and create a response of conviction’.39 As such, the exile is redefined as a collective trauma—Ezra–Nehemiah’s cause of conviction—for the golah community and not the Am Ha’arets or even directly those Judeans remaining in Babylon. It provides the basis for legitimation of golah collective identity as that of a group predisposed to social-political authority within Yehud. And it reflects a constructivist push to mobilize indi-viduals within the province into the formation and legitimation of a mono-theistic, collective identity in response to the community’s—note, the whole of the community as distinct from any successful individuals—marginal position within the distribution of power within the province.

Works Cited

Ahlström, Gösta W., The History of Ancient Palestine (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993).

Alexander, Jeffrey C., ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Col-lective Identity (ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al.; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 1-30.

Cataldo, Jeremiah W., A Theocratic Yehud? Issues of Government in Yehud (LHBOTS, 498; London: T. & T. Clark, 2009).

—Breaking Monotheism: Yehud and the Material Formation of Monotheistic Identity (LHBOTS, 565; London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

38. Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, ‘Narrating the Self ’, Annual Reviews in Anthropology 25 (1996), pp. 19-43 (21).

39. Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), p. 17.



Cerulo, Karen A., ‘Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions’, Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997), pp. 385-409.

Davies, Philip R., Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).

Davis, Richard, ‘The Ritualization of Behaviour’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 13 (1981), pp. 103-12.

Des Pres, Terrence, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

—‘Victims and Survivors’, Dissent 23 (1976), pp. 49-56.Douglas, Mary, ‘Responding to Ezra: The Priests and the Foreign Wives’, Biblical Interpreta-

tion 10 (2002), pp. 1-23.Eagleton, Terry, ‘God, the Universe, Art, and Communism’, New Literary History 32.1

(January 2001), pp. 23-32.Erikson, Kai T., Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood

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Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).Hoglund, Kenneth G., Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Palestine and the Missions

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Memory, Trauma, and Identity in Ezra-Nehemiah

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