The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible Volume 14

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.

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.