The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible [Paperback]

Ilana Pardes (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520236866 | ISBN-13: 978-0520236868 | Publication Date: September 2, 2002 | Edition: 1

The nation--particularly in Exodus and Numbers--is not an abstract concept but rather a grand character whose history is fleshed out with remarkable literary power. In her innovative exploration of national imagination in the Bible, Pardes highlights the textual manifestations of the metaphor, the many anthropomorphisms by which a collective character named "Israel" springs to life. She explores the representation of communal motives, hidden desires, collective anxieties, the drama and suspense embedded in each phase of the nation's life: from birth in exile, to suckling in the wilderness, to a long process of maturation that has no definite end. In the Bible, Pardes suggests, history and literature go hand in hand more explicitly than in modern historiography, which is why the Bible serves as a paradigmatic case for examining the narrative base of national constructions.
Pardes calls for a consideration of the Bible's penetrating renditions of national ambivalence. She reads the rebellious conduct of the nation against the grain, probing the murmurings of the people, foregrounding their critique of the official line. The Bible does not provide a homogeneous account of nation formation, according to Pardes, but rather reveals points of tension between different perceptions of the nation's history and destiny.
This fresh and beautifully rendered portrayal of the history of ancient Israel will be of vital interest to anyone interested in the Bible, in the interrelations of literature and history, in nationhood, in feminist thought, and in psychoanalysis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Biography of Ancient Israel by Ilana Pardes is based on a reading of the nation as a collective character, not an abstract concept. Particularly in Exodus and Numbers ("where the primary questions about the origin and singularity of the nation are raised"), Pardes argues, Israel is "personified; it is a character with a distinct voice ... it moans and groans, is euphoric at times, complains frequently, and rebels against Moses and God time and again." The Biography of Ancient Israel considers its subject a "male character who is God's first-born son" (though Pardes acknowledges that the Hebrew Scriptures are also full of female metaphors for Israel). Following Israel through its birth, youth, and young adulthood, and ending at Mt. Nebo, where the Scriptures' personification of Israel as God's son ends, this book is preoccupied with understanding the ways in which individual and national lives influence one another. "The biography of the nation seeps into the lives of individuals and shapes their desires and destinies, wittingly and unwittingly," Pardes writes. Although many readers may find it hard getting through parts of this academic biography, their work will be amply rewarded by such insights. --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A creative reading of the text emerges that helps explain its continual power to shape individual and communal identities far beyond its historical and geographic origins.... A wonderfully written book." - Choice

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Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520236866
• ISBN-13: 978-0520236868
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #363,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Imagining a Nation, December 24, 2000

By 

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (Contraversions) (Hardcover)

Ilana Pardes's book, 'The Biography of Ancient Israel,' is, quite simply, a tour de force. In the most concise, persuasive, but deliciously self-interrogating manner, Pardes projects a psychoanalytic model of development onto the story of the 'children of Israel' who, in their forty years of wandering, emerge from a ragtag community of slaves into a fully formed 'nation' with a collective identity. She does so by bringing together traditional exegetical sources, contemporary biblical scholarship and literary and anthropological theories with her own utterly fresh approach to the story of Israel in the desert. Taking as her point of departure Benedict Anderson's speculation on the comparative qualities of national and individual biographies, Pardes writes a kind of 'prequel' to Anderson's 'Imagined Communities.' The episodes and metaphors in Exodus and Numbers congeal in her reading into the phases of a nation's life, proceeding from infancy through nursing and weaning, youth, adolescence and young adulthood at the threshold of entry into Canaan. One of the beauties of Pardes's narrative is the way it accretes discarded stories and encounters with threatening others as part of the volatile and dynamic emergence of the Isrelite self, allowing for a reexamination of the murmuring and rebellious acts of various factions as evidence of the ongoing negotiation between internal and external forces in the natural process of identity formation. If the hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt signified "repressed memories of a lost cultural past that erupt in the midst of a cultural lacuna," the sexual and theological boundaries trespassed with the Moabite women and their fertility god, Baal Peor, at the end of the desert sojourn, is an adult transaction, "a scene of full-blown cultural intermingling between two peoples." This volume, written in a most engaging prose accessible to scholars and lay readers alike, suggests new insights into monotheism as a narrative principle that incorporates while superseding disenfranchised strands. Literary approaches to biblical exegesis that look for developmental threads rather than a plurality of soucrces have combined with new theories of biography to inspire a number of studies of biblical figures, from Freud's portrait of Moses to Jack Miles's 'biography' of God. Pardes's 'Biography of Ancient Israel' is an invaluable addition to this bookshelf.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jacob and his children, November 19, 2001

By 

Donald Lokken (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (Contraversions) (Hardcover)

The author's penetrating analysis of Jacob (Israel) at Jabbok and the rites of initiation that it involves, puts the Book of Genesis in the same category as other ancient literatures. I found this very valuable information for a greater understanding of humanity and its common struggles. Everything else was just topping on the cake, which I thought to be a delicious flavor through and through, without delving too deeply at a cursory glance, full of things to meditate and assimilate into my own daily life. There are some books you wait a lifetime to read. This is one of them. Excellent scholarship and wisdom.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not much bang for the buck, August 25, 2000

By 

David Schorr (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (Contraversions) (Hardcover)

I didn't think this book was nearly as good as Pardes's earlier "Countertraditions". Probably the best part of this book is the way the author points out partially suppressed traditions in the text that go against the "official line".

Otherwise, the book is pretty weak. Neither the thesis of a national biography nor that of the interplay between national and personal biographies are really fleshed out. The book reads more like a series of observations, with the implications left unexplored.