Rethinking the Judean past: questions of history and a social archaeology of memory in the first book of the Maccabees.

Abstract

This article explores the issue of history within post-structuralist social models of investigation applied to the biblical text. Within the context of a biblical narrative of Judean history, such as the Hasmonean revolt, the author assumes the necessary exploration of social voices, narratives, and even "controversial" texts, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Maccabean period. While historians have perceived the past as a reality to be reconstructed and collided, this article argues for the perception of the past as an ethnographic reality, where sociability and the authority of texts depend on conflicting memories. Narratives and historical narrations arise out of a concern for continuity and the future, more than out of the past and its singularity. Thus social and individual memories reflect social and individual experiences and cannot be discarded, even when they conflict with one another.

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In recent years, it has been argued that the biblical text, or other related texts, reflect social realities, and therefore they cannot be viewed as "autonomous literary worlds." For example, Philip Esler has consistently argued that

   at the social level, they may be interpreted as the vehicles for the
   construction of institutional and symbolic canopies within which the
   communities for which they were written might find meaning in the face of a
   hostile world [1994: 18; cf. 1987].

From that perspective of symbolic creations of alterity and within a world of difference, biblical texts constitute reflections by communities. Those texts were at one point or another constituted into textual inscriptions, and they form part of larger genres, such as wisdom literature, or collections of proverbs, or historical books. Thus, when Mary Douglas attempts an anthropological reading of the Book of Numbers, she argues that there is a need to know the community in which the text was constructed, its date and process of construction (1993: 35).

Those texts have arisen out of encounters with different realities, such as customs or religious systems of classification, that have helped the constant reshaping of cultural categories of ethnicity and identity within Israel. Identity, understood as an emic perspective of self-social assertion, is therefore articulated through processes of alterity and difference creation over periods of time, and through creative reformulations arising out of those social encounters with alterity and difference. In the case of the people of Israel as portrayed through the Bible, for example, such cultural and religious identity has been constantly rethought because of its history of dislocation from Egypt in the first place and the subsequent topological conquest of their land by other, larger, nations and empires. Such history of colonization made Israel vulnerable to constant changes in its social and religious institutions, nevertheless prevented by the writing up of cultural and religious traditions to be passed on from generation to generation.

Such literary accounts can be considered social histories, so that those texts constitute past creations that embody community perceptions of historical events. Thus, while scholars engaged in biblical criticism or anthropologists concerned with the social paradigms of a historical anthropology perceive such biblical voices as expressive, impressive, and authentic, approaches to the biblical text from anthropology have certainly been dominated by the structuralist paradigm. Moreover, such focus on the rationale of human thought and the universal creativity of processes of thought has ignored either interpretivist or historical paradigms. The biblical text has been explored in isolation from the search for structures of the mind, to the detriment of the possibility of exploring textual approximations and creations in their relation to social, cultural, and contextual realities, as perceived by communities.

In this article I contest this sort of structural predicament by focusing on the biblical texts as a socially constructed memorial, as an expression of a social past. I argue, using parameters of an historical anthropology and an "ethnographic present" taken from the First Book of the Maccabees, that the paradigm of an anthropological history of the text can provide the complementary context for continuous anthropological inscriptions of the biblical text.

In choosing the text of First Maccabees, I am choosing a narrative that has been on the one hand considered one of the most reliable historical sources within the biblical canon; on the other hand, it has been a controversial text, given importance by certain traditions of Christianity while being rejected by others, who have perceived it as a narrative in which Judean heroes have been taken as an example of Christian witness. In doing so, I try to argue that it is not only through myths of origins that social groups are invented and reaffirmed, but also through the use of narratives, considered historical because they have arisen out of the human experience of any social grouping of ancestral and mythical figures. My choice, moreover, contests the traditional paradigm of a unified social action that makes sense, and poses questions on those narratives that do not make the same sense to all. As I will show, anthropologists dealing with the biblical text started their own writing using those texts that were more familiar to them and that were easily accepted as examples of the human creation of myth and explanations related to the supernatural. In other words, they started by using cultural creations that in the anthropological work on non-Western societies were termed "cosmologies."

While many developments in theoretical analysis have superseded structuralism, I use the term post-structuralism in two ways. On the one hand I refer to the possibility of using different anthropological approaches to history in a period after structuralism. On the other hand, I argue that without the seminal work of post-structuralism (e.g., Derrida) and its questions related to history (Attridge, Bennington, & Young 1987), it would not have been possible to breach the possibility of returning diachronic synchronicity in the study of ethnographic materials, i.e., through the rethinking and inclusion of history in such methodological considerations. First, I present a short review of the main contributions by anthropologists to the study of the biblical text during the 20th century, followed by a general analysis of the Maccabean revolt and its insights using anthropological concepts.

Anthropology and the Biblical Text

At the beginning of the 20th century, paradigms of investigation in anthropology were dominated by the American cultural paradigm and the German ethnological search for cultural traits in non-Western societies. Thus the developments of a somehow different kind of anthropology, social anthropology, came about during the 1920s through the possibility of a central anthropological concern, fieldwork. An extended, if not intensive, period of the anthropologist's life and research were to be spent in a particular place or particular places. Participant observation rather than questioning through interpreters became the accepted norm of becoming acquainted with customs and ways of doing things by people of other cultures. As a consequence the emphasis was put on research based on and related to living communities and their daily interaction, rather than on the process of indirect reporting.

From that research paradigm it was difficult to imagine that anthropologists could deal with written texts from the past, which were, as in the case of the biblical texts, associated with contemporary European rituals and religious practices.

The most influential essays related to anthropological investigations on the biblical texts and to the search for structures within and among the different books of the Bible, were produced by Edmund Leach (1969, 1976, 1983; cf. 1985 [1976]), who elaborated Levi-Straussian structural methodology applied to the study of myth (Levi-Strauss). If myth was present in all societies, Levi-Strauss had turned to "cold societies" (i.e., pre-literate) as his ground for comparison. In that sense, the biblical text was probably ignored because the myths of the Israelites and of the Jewish Christians had become over the centuries a Western myth that was considered the foundation of an European Western civilization. While Levi-Straussian categories became extremely influential in many areas of anthropological and other research in general, it was Edmund Leach who, departing from Levi-Strauss but following his general paradigm, made an attempt to find such common structures of thought in the variety of textual expressions contained in the Bible.

Leach and the Absence of Context

In his first essays on the biblical myth of Genesis, Edmund Leach suggests that religion requires the irrationality of myths as stories, in order to provide a "demonstration of faith by the suspension of critical doubt" (1969: 7). Further, in his work on Solomon he admits that his departure from Levi-Straussian thought relates, not to a change in his modus operandi, but to his lack of understanding of the Levi-Straussian esprit. For Levi-Strauss, in Leach's interpretation, esprit "is the causal force producing myths of which its own structure is a precipitate" (Leach 1969: 25). From that perspective of esprit's omission, Leach's contribution reflects his search for new parameters of structural methodologies, based on his understanding of patterns that exist within one particular social structure, rather than in the fluidity of the cultural comparison (1983: 1-6). Leach's interest in kinship and kinship patterns, descent and lineages, reflects his search for patterns within a particular society--the Israelites--and its historical continuity.

Difficulties with Leach's choice of materials can be seen from Ricoeur's criticism of Levi-Strauss's work. Ricoeur, with the help of Von Rad's research into the history of the First Testasment, questions the usefulness of structuralism in interpreting the entire Bible. Taking into account the known fact that at least part of the biblical material reflects Israel's historical development, it is difficult to move forward with the structuralist paradigm of investigation. Indeed, Leach's dismissal of the historical criticism methodology in biblical scholarship (what he called "unscrambling the omelette"--1983: 3) made his intellectual discrepancies with Julian Pitt-Rivers challenging within anthropology.

Leach's total synchronicity of the biblical narrative as myth, as a sacred tale, as a story, does not allow room for any diachronic perspective in the historical developments within Israel, within the text, or within the understanding of those who read biblical texts in particular ritual and cultic settings. Synchronicity takes, in the case of Leach's work, the central place in a biblical text that, understood as a story, needs to be read as a single myth, with the sense of a single unit, rather than with a chronological sequence in mind.

Leach's methodology and its dismissal of all diachronic parameters, even structural comparisons, put him at center stage at a time when structuralism was a fashionable paradigm and when the structuralist revolution was replacing other possible models. Further, Leach's criticism of interpretive models, such as that of Mary Douglas' work on Leviticus, makes him appear as a controversial figure rather than as someone trying to understand ethnographic materials--in particular, the biblical text.

Border Crossings and Inversions

In a post-structuralist era, that of the 1980s, it was made clear by some scholars, such as Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, that one of the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism was the question of history. While structuralism did not have to deal with it, post-structuralism opened avenues of investigation related to the diachronic in myth, and its proponents were hard pressed to dialogue, for example, with post-structuralist Marxism (Bennett). Derrida introduced discussions on the meaning of history and set a different agenda for our understanding of "difference" in the context of diatribes on history (Derrida 1973: 141, in Bennington & Young: 1-2). Others, such as Cousins, attempted to break a historical methodological circle where history and truth merge by arguing, interestingly enough, that "to be historical is one and only one possible mode of the existence of objects" (135).

It must be recognized that while relations between structuralism, post-structuralism, and history became extremely complex, processes of disciplinary border crossing still took place. Theologians conversant with the historical criticism methodologies of the biblical text explored anthropological perspectives, while anthropologists such as Mary Douglas explored the perspectives of religious studies methodologies by following in the steps of Victor Turner and his anthropological explorations on human religious experience. The result was a departure from Leach's structural analysis. But the quantity of such ethnographic exploration has still been very limited, and it has positioned itself at the fringes of the larger anthropological project.

The border-crossing mentality has certainly been influenced by Bernhard Lang in his attempts to suggest that both anthropologists and biblical scholars can profit from using one another's perspectives on the study of text, and further asserting that "I venture to predict that what may now look like the fringe activity of a few anthropologists interested in the Bible ... will develop into a recognized, established approach" (17). Such a statement is problematic because an established methodology cannot be assumed to be universal--as the only one available to shed light on any comparative ethnography. It is this category of ethnography that makes the biblical text a social arena to be explored. Gillian Feeley-Harnik's remark to theologians, to the effect that "anthropology might serve to widen horizons for biblical scholars" (1982; cf. Lang: 17) becomes crucial here, and it can be inverted so as to argue, as I do in this article, that if the biblical text is treated as ethnography there is still an open "field" and "archive" to be explored. Therefore, before dealing with a particular ethnography, the First Book of the Maccabees, I would like to locate such ethnography within a wider concern for a historical anthropology or an anthropological history of the ethnographic particular.

Historical Fields and Ethnographic Archives

The crafts of anthropology, namely fieldwork and participant observation, have not precluded the use of history, but at the same time they have not included history as a "proper" anthropological craft. The closest anthropological creation of the past, the "ethnographic present," has already been deemed problematic, however fundamental it is to the creation of written texts, monographs, and comparative ethnographies (Sanjeck). Thus the "past," not only as represented in literary texts of fiction or as conditioned by archives, has not been perceived as a natural ethnographic site. But in research areas such as ethnicity creation and identity awareness, anthropologists have explored the past by reinterpreting colonial archives or reconstructing lineages, oral histories, and myth narratives.

For some, including myself, history and the understanding of a social past have become crucial in order to deal with the "ethnographic "present" or the present itself. Such a present, informed by the facts, reflects the disjunction of unified narratives as fixed literary texts or social actions as separated from memories and the absence of them. Thus

   culture is continually being invented or modified, without being totally
   transformed. Men [and women] live in a world of intention and consequence.
   Intention and action are turned into culture by history [Cohn: 217].

Social actions and their intentionality are, moreover, expressed-through textual inscriptions of the past, which are subsequently read by those who live after such events. History as "truth" does not concern me, as historical narratives are produced by particular individuals, communities, or schools of thought, and from their own point of view and their own social experience. M. I. Aguilar, for example, has referred to this understanding of history as historical anthropology in order to differentiate it from that of most historians. In this context, moreover, three specific elements constitute the foundation for a methodology that differentiates itself from history while at the same time constituting itself as an anthropological elaboration of the past. The methodological elements in question are (1) the use of ethnographic material (2) the use of archival materials (written or oral), and (3) the dialectical contestation of different ways of looking at the same cultural and social history, where sources can speak in equal terms and where the authority of the text itself provides the common ground for such research (cf. Cohen: 241).

The past as ethnographic material is reconstituted, not only by exploring encoded records of the past, but also by suggesting that there is a constant relation of decoding. Such decoding is based on the acknowledgment of all those who have written an account of a particular period, as all important in the textual representation of the past. To that effect, the so-called "primary" and "secondary" sources, archives and literary sources of a period in the past, share the same authority. After all, colonial archives, as the products of men and women from a particular background in a particular social and cultural predicament cannot be deemed more authentic than letters or essays written by people who were not holding a political or religious office. This realization, that human experience is recorded in many more ways than that preferred in the past by historians, has been influential in the writing of histories "from below," i.e., dealing with those who have not produced archival materials but usually are the objects of such archives. The past records of different countries written by colonial elites have been contested, and I argue have been complemented by the histories of the poor and the oppressed (e.g., Illife). The First Book of Maccabees offers this sort of background, while at the same time highlighting a further case of a particular history of production.

The Maccabean Myth

The first book of Maccabees deals with a period of forty years, from the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes (175 BCE) to the death of Simon the Hasmonean (135 BCE). The work of a single author, most probably an eyewitness to the Hasmonean revolt (cf. G.Y.M.: 657), the text has been praised as a somehow accurate historical narrative.

In fact, after the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE), his generals divided the empire, and Judea fell within the administrative claims of two groups, i.e., the dominant powers of the Euphrates and Nile valleys. From 312 BCE Seleucus I ruled in Syria and Babylon, while Ptolemy I ruled Judea until 198 BCE, when Antiochus III, having defeated the forces of Ptolemy V near the Jordan, took control of Judea. Thus, while Judea was a Syrian colony, in the year 167 BCE, the Maccabees (Hasmoneans) emerged from a country district to challenge the Syrian policies implemented through Judean supporters.

The policies of Antiochus Epiphanes for Judea included processes of accommodation and cultural assimilation that relied on local elites and interest groups to create the conditions for a peaceful occupation and government. Thus the building of the gymnasium, together with the stripping of the temple and the later occupation of Jerusalem, created the conditions for a colonial occupation. That occupation was based on polities of cultural change, as "the king issued a proclamation to his whole kingdom that all were to become a single people, each renouncing his particular customs" (1 Macc 1:41-42). Unification assumed the creation of a colony, however, as "anyone not obeying the king's command was to be put to death" (1 Macc 1:50). Jewish prohibitions were abolished, and foreign gods were placed in the temple--indeed, in every town in Judea. The "abomination of desolation" (1 Macc 1:57; cf. Dan 9:27, 11:31) was a statue of Baal Shamem or the Olympian Zeus, erected on the Judean altar of holocausts.

The revolt started in the town of Modein, where Mattathias and his family refused to follow the king's decree. They made their point very clearly by killing a fellow Judean who happened to be sacrificing to a foreign god at that particular moment, and the king's commissioner. Mattathias then left for the hills, accompanied by his sons. As followers of Mattathias were slaughtered, those remaining agreed to expand the activities permitted on the Sabbath in order to fight their persecutors on the Sabbath day if necessary. They were joined by "a community of Hasideans," perceived within the text as "stout fighting men of Israel, each one a volunteer on the side of the Law" (1 Macc 2:42). The organization of such an armed force meant in practice the overthrowing of altars and the forced circumcision of all uncircumcised boys found in the region.

As Mattathias' life ended, he exhorted his sons to win honor, a desired commodity in Mediterranean society, by remaining faithful to the Law, as all the heroes of the past had done. Then Mattathias appointed his son Simeon as leader, and Simeon's younger brother, Judas Maccabeus, as general of the resistance army. His first successes were against Apollonius and a force from Samaria, and against Seron, commander of the Syrian troops. After that, Judas and his brothers began to be feared, and their reputation reached other peoples. As a result, the king ordered the complete destruction of Israel and assembled a powerful army that crossed the river Euphrates and advanced along the upper provinces. The armies met at the battle of Emmaus, where Judas was again victorious. A year later, the memory of David's victory against the Philistine champion Goliath led Judas and his army to another victory against Lysias, at Bethzur, some 18 miles south of Jerusalem. Subsequently the temple was purified and the old sacrifices offered once again. With the death of Antiochus Epiphanes, his remorse for what he had done in Jerusalem (1 Macc 6:12-13), and the accession of Antiochus V to the Syrian throne, there was some hope of peace--but it did not come. Judas sent emissaries to make a treaty with Rome on account of their military fame, and history continued.

The production of this sort of narrative is important for successive generations of Jews because it shows that a small nation can stand against a mighty power if and only if such a nation has a common bond of ethnicity and identity related to a common myth of origin. Such a myth needs to be actualized and reinvented throughout history by the creation of heroes that decide to maintain their distinct identity against all pressures for cultural accommodation and syncretistic acculturation.

The Maccabean revolt became a myth because it attributed to the main actors of that historical period some supra-human capabilities. Large armies that tried to pacify Judea were confronted by smaller armies of freedom fighters who were not only able to withstand the challenge put to them but were also capable of winning battles. Their reputation as good fighters grew, and some of the hesitation of the invading armies relates to their fear of the somehow irrational fighting powers of a lesser equipped and prepared local army. This sort of myth is based on a textual narrative and a historical contradiction. On the one hand there was a good deal of social charisma and nationalist sentiment bestowed upon the hasidean leaders, and on the other hand it was only by divine intervention that they were able to accomplish their victories over the Syrians.

The Maccabees: Ethnicity Retold

The Maccabean narrative has all the characteristics of a myth suggested in a more current development of Levi-Strauss and understood as a "strongly structured, important story" (Strenski: 130). This view avoids all the difficulties of Leach's position on biblical myth by recognizing that (as suggested by Mary Douglas in the case of Balaam's story in Numbers) literary texts have a reason to be placed where they are, and one of the ways of explaining such positioning is to look at their contents and their contexts (Douglas 1993b: 411-12). This allows the narrative of a group of rebels to be placed in the context of the history of Israel and of the development, or self-preservation, of a particular identity. Emphasis on wars between male armies acquire a different meaning--that of ethnicity--when women who had their children circumcised were put to death together with their children (1 Macc 1:60-44) despite the fact that when a reader is confronted with the First Book of Maccabees as a source s/he may know very little about women's lives, except for that of Salome Alexandra (Sievers: 144).

My argument concerning the Maccabean revolt is simple. The myth of the Maccabees needs to be considered a myth of ethnic continuity rather than a myth of ethnic origin. As a nationalistic narrative it deals with the possibility of accepting cultural continuity based on difference, rather than discontinuity based on similarity. This argument relates to a somehow very complex part of wider anthropological contextual concerns with ethnicity and identity, formation of boundaries and their consequent imaginary dissolution, and the creation and re-creation of otherness.

In historical terms, the narrative offered by the author of the first book of the Maccabees deals with a historical event and a historical predicament. In a particular space and time, at the time of the Syrian and Egyptian conquest, Judea faces cultural domination and the re-creation of cultural selves. A central issue is at stake: i.e., the cultural traditions of the Israelites, who through these practices consider themselves different from others and even consider themselves the chosen people of God. The inhabitants of Judea, moreover, suffer the fate of all colonies throughout history: other peoples' customs, narratives, beliefs, and histories are imposed on them. Their choice is either to comply or to perish. Thus the Maccabean narrative speaks of those who (at the request of some Israelites) complied with the foreign practice of taking part in activities related to the gymnasium built under the auspices of Antiochus Epiphanes. The issue for the author of First Maccabees was not the existence of the building, but the fact that it challenged the foundations of Israel as a nation and the covenant with God, symbolized by the circumcision of all males. Therefore those seeking cultural compromises with the colonizers "disguised their circumcision and abandoned the holy covenant, submitting to the heathen rule as willing slaves of impiety" (1 Macc 1:15-16). The book of Daniel, written at the height of the Maccabean revolt, dwells on the same themes of cultural and religious resistance to foreign invaders and their customs (Bartlett: 10-11).

The Maccabean revolt arose from such compromises and sought a complete break with foreign cultural practices. The self-reflexive mode of the priest Mattathias, the one who unleashed the Maccabean revolt, expressed this sentiment of identity and ethnic perception when he thought aloud, saying,

   Alas that I should have been born to witness the overthrow of my people and
   the overthrow of the Holy City, and to sit by while she is delivered over
   to her enemies, and the sanctuary into the hands of foreigners [1 Macc
   2:7].

The social phenomenon of colonial oppression nevertheless continued with the alliance between Israel and Rome and culminated in the total suppression of Judea by the Roman legions. Apart from dealing with the production of such history, therefore, it is possible to search into "the history of such production" (Cohen: 241-46). If the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land helped to create a new Israel, a new people, and indeed a people different from those around them, the narrative of the Maccabees was created with specific purposes in its author's mind. It was also re-created by others, such as Flavius Josephus, and subsequently reinvented and actualized by narrative moments in other "ethnographic presents" within the social and ritual history of Israel.

Thus an historical anthropology of such historical productions needs to address the possibility that the narrative of Maccabees and its myth of ethnicity could have been reinvented as a tradition by other authors and in other circumstances. This sort of history of production constitutes an ethnographic reinvention of an historical past and the avenue for further ethnographic explorations of other pasts within the biblical text as we know it now. In the following section I address such ethnographic possibility by examining the rewriting of such a narrative by Flavius Josephus, a historian who undertook a controversial anthropological project: the past as he understood it.

Historicity and [Mis]representation

Three kinds of historical production can be associated with the Greek text of the Hasmonean revolt. Any of those productions, if acknowledged, provides an oral or written narrative, a social perception, a memory of the past, and an invention of the social imagination.

In the first one, by means of an emic creation of historical markers concerning a subversive revolt, a writer created a narrative of men and women who resist the Syrian colonial occupation (1 Macc). Assuming that, as has been widely argued, there was a Hebrew text that went missing, the Greek text constitutes the final production of a social history, written down because of its importance for nation-building. The heroes of the past are textually inscribed in order to remind descendants of the Hasmoneans of the fact that even under colonial rule it is possible to keep the national identity acquired through the covenant and expressed through an inclusive bodily mark, the ritual circumcision.

In the second one, an individual labeled a historian, Flavius Josephus (Joseph ben Matthias, 37-100 [?] CE) wrote a historical account of the same revolt (ANTIQUITIES OF THE JEWS XII, 5-11; XIII, 1-7), following the patterns of his time and using the literary freedom associated with Hellenistic historiography (Gafni: 127). As a historian he is controversial because, in the rephrasing and retelling of the Maccabean narrative as presented in First Maccabees, he adds details, he emphasizes opinions, and, in general terms, he makes the text more palatable to wider Greek audiences. Issues of textual translation arise here and they can justify the changes he made in the text. Thus, if Josephus truly had in front of him a literal Greek translation of a "missing" Hebrew text, he nevertheless undertook to make his own transcription of such events better understood by his Greek readers. Any such literary puzzles points to the fact that Josephus expressed his opinions in the writing of history rather than in a scribal copying of a text from the past. Moreover, and according to Villalba I Varneda, Josephus "manages to create a history which is intellectual in character, and in which any historical hiatus is filled in with logical and well-founded reasons," so that his work shows an "apodictic character," by which he does not avoid partiality in his writing (Villalba I Varneda: xiii-xiv, 36-37).

It can be argued that, as a descendant of the Hasmoneans, Josephus was heir to some orally transmitted family traditions (Feldman: 138). Nevertheless, he writes of a period that he did not experience, i.e., the Syrian occupation, a period that shows some similarities with the Roman period of occupation that he did, indeed, experience. While authors such as Robert Einsenman have argued that Josephus, like the final redactors of the Gospels, had associated himself with the "Zealot" or "Messianic" movements and therefore was a "self-serving and inadequate observer" (11-12), I would argue that his writings constitute history from his own point of view, experiential history not to be discarded but to be compared with other literary sources of that time.

Such secondary production of history, I would call an interpretive production of historical markers. Historical accounts, or the production of such markers, are not free from interpretive inventions and socio-cultural commentaries. History is indeed a post-factual commentary and a guided interpretation of social events, guided more by memories and intuitions than by systematic reconstructions of true facts gathered and understood as "authentic data." Memory, as the foundational principle of history, "is not a passive receptacle, but instead a process of active restructuring, in which elements may be retained, reordered, or suppressed" (Fentress & Wickham: 40). Further, "remembering is a condition sine qua non of survival" (Blenkinsopp: 82).

It is the same process that makes the production of colonial archives possible. A centralized administration, that of any colonial power, asks its functionaries to provide reports, not only to show that their job is being done, but also to plan future policy and changing strategies. Thus a third way of producing history, an "etic" (from the point of view of the outsider) production of historical markers is to be explored. While such collections of colonial archival material are perceived as such after the social events that triggered them, it is possible to acknowledge them within the other productions of history. For example, in the emic narrative of the Hasmonean revolt Antiochus is infuriated by the news of Judas' defeat of Seron's army at Beth-horon (1 Macc 3:27). Such fury could have been triggered only by a written communication brought by a messenger. Message or messenger, written letter or oral communication gave rise to an individual's perception of what was happening in the Judean colony.

The historicity (or authenticity) of such social happenings is also related to the possibility that some forms of production are perceived as having more authority than others. Whatever facts are commonly acknowledged--minimally, that there was certainly a Hasmonean revolt in Judea--the written accounts of the period constitute an ethnographic account by participants or by writers who created a variety of representations and histories. Therefore Josephus' authority to write about the period can be contested on the grounds that he produced history at a later time and was not present during the Maccabean revolt. But his anthropological project of analyzing himself and others in his own context cannot be contested on the grounds that it is not sound as a historical project. It constitutes an experiential historical project rather than an "objective" project of "truth" telling.

Social Enactments and the Historical Present

As I have so far suggested, there are many representations and inscriptions of a particular period in the social history of a human community. In the case of the Hasmonean revolt, accounts of the period (accounts I consider ethnographic) have been produced. While there are other sources for the period, such as the "library of history" of Diodorus Siculus (ca. 80-20 BCE) and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I have chosen in this article to deal with fuller narratives rather than with fragmented passages still to be collated. Those interested in the historical reconstruction of the Maccabean revolt can make use of them to supplement the main sources--to understand those ethnographies I have explored in their production rather than in their "authenticity."

Precisely because those passages of history are ethnographies of the past, they are to be considered social histories or what I have called social productions of history. Other representations of the historical past are constituted by social enactments, either used in the form of narratives or socially constructed in the enactment of particular rituals. Further, narratives of the Hasmonean revolt have been used in the celebrations of Hanukkah as well as in Christian circles, where the Maccabees have been called Christian martyrs and saints.

A controversy and uneasiness have arisen, however, about the passages concerning martyrdom in the Second and Fourth Books of the Maccabees. Narratives such as those of Eleazar the scribe, Razis the elder, and the mother with her seven sons portrayed as dying noble deaths have been avoided, as they contradict the experience and understanding of some Jewish scholars after the Holocaust (Van Henten: 1-14).

Such production of history--a text--is therefore given a social value by later generations, later readers, and later traditions. Social histories such as the Hasmonean revolt are re-read, reinvented, reinterpreted, and re-inscribed once and again, suggesting that more and more readings and commentaries on them open a fixed text to contextual, cultural, and social situations, where history is socially reproduced and where the ethnographic material is not only read, but adapted, and in some way changed.

Conclusions: Rediscovering the Archaeology of Memory

Issues of history are certainly interrelated with issues of memory. What people remember and how they transcribe those memories are certainly valid areas of cross-cultural comparison and of inter-textual contestation. Whatever people remember, those memories shape their present and their future, so that after all "we are our memories," and "we draw a social portrait, a model which is a reference list of what to follow and what to avoid" (Tonkin: 1). As a result, a universal phenomenon of reliving the past becomes localized through the particular, experiential, and semantic memories by communities, and by individuals within and without those communities. Collective memories are vehicles of organic solidarity, as they are the product of individual voices that point to charismatic figures, i.e., individuals who create themselves and are created in return so as to symbolize collectivities and social histories.

What concerns biblical anthropology in all those parameters of historical perception, I would argue, is not what happened, but how such happening was perceived by those who witnessed the events, those who narrated them to others, and those who inscribed them in a text, in a myth, or in a social narrative. In other words, the event and its interpretations, rather than the event itself, constitute ethnographic material. Those ethnographic materials become an archaeology of memory, buried in the past, however relevant for the present and for the future of any given society or any community within a society. In this way, literary texts like those represented by the Hasmonean revolt become examples of such production of history and an archaeology of memory. An anthropological interest in such a text comes from the interest in those memories as ethnographic narratives by a particular group of people, a community, and indeed, a nation. If treated as ethnography and evaluated within the social history of a society, those texts give us clues as to why people remember, how they remember, and what they remember.

If historians have perceived the past as "another country" (Tonkin), biblical scholars can perceive the past as yet another ethnographic reality, yet another present in the archaeology of memory. Thus archaeologists of memory such as those dealing with biblical texts still need to be located within social memories in order to enhance our own understanding of contemporary processes of identity and ethnicity formation. Those processes of social formation are not too different from those expressed in social memories, known to us today as biblical books and biblical texts. The complementarity of other memories, understood as different perceptions, becomes important to our research because in asserting their memories, and therefore their ethnicity and their identity, the Israelites dealt with contradictions, such as using force on the Sabbath or trying to define their Jewishness by living in the "mythic," by using their "cognitive singularity" as a "cognitive resort" and as a "cognitive norm" (Rapport: 671).

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Mario I. Aguilar, S.T.B., M.A. (Leuven), M. A., Ph.D. (London), author of five books and several papers, is currently Chair of Ritual Studies at the American Academy of Religion. He lectures at the School of Divinity, St. Mary's College, University of St. Andrews, Scotland (e-mail: [e-mail]).