Calendar and Commemoration

My principal research project at present, provisionally entitled Calendar and Commemoration: Memorializing War in the Hebrew Bible, builds on the focus of my first monograph on ritual innovation, but now explores a new area in which religious change is also discernable; namely, the prominence of war in texts from across the Hebrew Bible that concern calendrical festivals. Much has been written about how the memory of war shaped the spatial landscape of the southern Levant and Near East, from ruins and stele erected at battle sites, to the commemoration of military victories in palace and temple reliefs. Yet, the temporal dimension to war commemoration, insofar as the calendar was used to memorialize military events, has been so far neglected. 

Calendar and Commemoration argues that the biblical texts that stem from the Iron Age and even the Persian period contain little evidence that ancient Israelites structured their year to include annual ceremonies marking the dates of particularly noteworthy historical battles (an aspect of war commemoration that we take as axiomatic today). Rather, the festivals with a militaristic aspect ritually recalled the cosmic victories of the Israelite divinity himself, who was lauded as a fearsome warrior and divine king. With the onset of the Hellenistic era, however, I argue that a major ritual transformation took place: namely, new cyclical festivals were introduced to the festal calendar to mark the dates of important battles conducted by human agents, and to valorize the Jewish leaders who secured these victories.

Beyond its contribution to various exegetical debates across diverse biblical traditions – from the Psalms and pentateuchal calendars to the Former and Latter Prophets and late biblical texts like Esther and 1 and 2 Maccabees – this book will offer a longue durée analysis of biblical festal culture, charting major change in how cyclical ceremonies crafted ideas of military agency of both the biblical God and his chosen leaders. It will also contribute to the broader study of collective violence in antiquity by demonstrating the historically contingent and dynamic nature of war commemoration; while collective violence was universal to all ancient societies, its connection to socio-religious ceremony and notions of calendar was far from predetermined.

I have presented my preliminary book findings in several publications and talks. 

Collective Violence and Memory 2024