Dissertation Spotlight | Representing the Destruction of Jerusalem: Literary Artistry and the Shaping of Memory in 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel

Cathleen Chopra-McGowan, “Representing the Destruction of Jerusalem: Literary Artistry and the Shaping of Memory in 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel,” PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2019.

To write about Jerusalem’s destruction in 586 BCE seems, at first glance, like a redundant project. The city’s fate after the Babylonian siege is ostensibly well-understood: Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed, the elite were deported, and only a shell of the kingdom remained. For those who remained in the land, the suffering was acute, and for the exiled, the foreign context was a cultural shock. Like biblical literature itself, modern biblical scholarship has in turn regarded the destruction of Jerusalem as a ‘watershed’ moment that marks a distinct transition in the socio-political and religious life of Judah, and used it to demarcate historical periods in Israel and Judah’s history: monarchic/post-monarchic; pre-exilic/exilic/post-exilic.[i] Texts that describe Jerusalem’s destruction are ascribed a kind of “ideological unity,” [ii] with an underlying assumption that each of these texts is essentially describing a stable, single, event. I contend, however, that the impetus to reconstruct a historical account of ‘what really happened’ has significantly undertheorized the differing ways in which biblical texts both recount and shape the very idea of destruction of Jerusalem.

Methodological Approach and Assumptions

At the heart of the issue, the goal of scholars has largely been one of history, while the majority of the material they have to work with is literature. The impulse to reconstruct what really happened has thus obscured the individual narratives and the claims they make, especially with texts that “look like” history, such as the books of Kings. While biblical texts do engage and describe historical events, they do so with particular ideologies and goals, and it is this ideological coloring that my dissertation sought to illuminate. The idea that these texts are literary representations of an event demands that we interrogate our own assumptions about history writing, its interplay with memory, and the very idea of events.

Through reading 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel (each of which has a foundational building block in the effort to reconstruct Jerusalem’s fall), as works that each advance particular claims about the fall of Jerusalem, my study bridges the distance between memory and representation, narrative and history. Historical-critical inquiries have yielded important advancements in our understanding of the archaeological and linguistic picture of the destruction and the compositional history of these texts, but have yielded less in the way of analyzing how they act as literary exemplars of a subordinate polity’s experience of empire.[iii] This approach, focusing less on an assessment of compositional integrity or fidelity/infidelity to historical facts, offers access to the ideas and imagination that structure the material and insight into the conceptual worldview of the authors.

PART ONE (THEORIZING MEMORY-MAKING LITERATURE)

The first chapter of my dissertation argues that the stability of an event is a theoretical position. The shaping of the experience—how we talk about it and remember it­—is a constitutive, second-order move, and becomes the event. That is, our descriptions of something that happened frame and set the contours, ascribing to it a beginning, middle, and end. This constitutive power is also one that is repeatedly reenacted as interpreters engage the various tellings. I demonstrate, for example, that the abstracted story of Jerusalem’s downfall is frequently re-imagined through analogies to the Holocaust and September 11. In so doing, interpreters position themselves, often unconsciously, as standing in a long line of metaphorical reenactments of the fall. As I show, however, this theo-historical focus is only one possible approach to reading the biblical texts. To avoid the pitfalls that this approach often falls into, I suggest beginning with a literary analysis of each text on its own terms. This involves close reading of the work, accounting for why it looks the way it does before turning to other texts that treat similar topics. This literary lens allows for an identification of the internal logic of each narrative, its conventions, claims, and plot, before attempting to align or compare it to other descriptions of the fall.

Drawing on the theories of Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Halbwachs, and Anne Rigney, I argue that the fall of Jerusalem has become an “event type” to describe new destructions of cities and iconic infrastructure, visible during the Great War, the Holocaust, and 9/11. Put differently, the biblical accounts of Jerusalem’s fall generate a transnational mnemonic symbol that becomes the paradigmatic example of destruction, and thus acts as a kind of prosthetic for describing subsequent urban demolitions. At the same time, these biblical works highlight a kind of “memory war,” by presenting competing accounts of the past. This analysis looks forward to how biblical representations are reinterpreted in scholarship, but also backwards as a way of theorizing how the biblical texts themselves may have drawn on another mnemonic symbols and forms to develop their own narratives.

PART TWO (NARRATIVIZING DESTRUCTION)

In Chapters 3 through 5, I examine three case studies: 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel. One of the few points of consensus among biblical scholars is that Kings, in its description of Jerusalem’s end, is a kind of bedrock that provides the primary “historical” account of Jerusalem’s destruction. Its material has been largely treated as an imperfect mine from which to glean information about the historical fall of the city. It has not been taken by any scholar as a work of literary artistry, nor has any coherent ideology, with the possible exception of the longing for a Davidic throne, been found in it. In contradistinction to these studies, I argue that the author of this portion of Kings exhibits a familiarity with Babylonian imperial ideas and uses them within his work to construct a tightly structured, highly ideological text.

This chapter has three major components: the first establishes Nebuchadnezzar’s strategies of rule through an examination of the king’s imperial rhetoric, with attention to the portrayal of his role as protector of all people and benefactor of the Babylonian temples. This section also examines the portrayal of Babylon as the center of the world and seat of abundance to draw attention to how each of these elements formed a key part of the imperial self-portrait. Part II looks at how this portrait was received and engaged by people it ruled over. The third part provides a detailed examination of the correspondence of 2 Kings 24–25 with Babylonian imperial imagery along three axes: the portrayal of siege; the use of abundance imagery to highlight Judah’s diminished status and Babylon’s corresponding enhanced status; and the ways in which Babylonian practices infiltrated Judahite institutions, from installing kings and governors in power to changing the calendrical means of chronicling Judean time. I argue that the final two sections of Kings—the installation of Gedaliah and the restoration of Jehoiachin’s fortunes–—are not in fact appendices at all but the culminating proof of the author’s claim that Babylonian rule is necessary for Judah’s future.

Written like history, the narrative is suffused with ideas of proper kingship, particularly in regards to justice, abundance, and protection. Although it is a story about a Judean king and the fall of Judah as a polity, it is not an unbiased or non-aligned text: its deft use of Babylonian imperial ideology suggests that it draws on a cosmopolitan world of ideas not only for the sake of endorsing them but also to actively generate a critique of Judean rulers. As a historiographic work, its form performs authority, and makes possible to generate a kind of “common core memory,” a portable narrative about the destruction of Jerusalem.

Chapter 3, Indicting Yahweh, offers one of the most consequential arguments of my project. Rather than attending to the troping of Jerusalem as female and the attendant associations of such characterization, this chapter analyzes the character of Yahweh and suggests that he is repeatedly and explicitly depicted as a royal male with all its attendant expectations, yet the characteristics ascribed to him suggest a complete failure of “good” masculinity. The repeated appeals to Yahweh in the work, I argue, should be interpreted as a sign that he is the one responsible for fulfilling these roles. In contrast to royal inscriptions in which a king boasts of his ability to fulfill these criteria of good rule, in Lamentations the (divine) king’s voice is entirely absent. Rather, the voices are of Jerusalem itself, the narrator, and for the third lament, a figure within Jerusalem. They draw on the same categories as royal inscriptions but invert them, using them as a standard to accuse Yahweh and to shame him for Judah’s pitiable condition.

By attending to Lamentations’ internal fields of reference, I arrive at significantly different interpretations than prior scholarship. Perhaps most importantly, I argue that the work is a singly authored composition with five accusative poems that catalogue divine failure. This in turn has bearing for how we interpret Lamentations 3, a poem that has alternately flummoxed and delighted its readers. In the middle of the third lament, which stands at the center of the work, the poem sharply pivots to an expression of faith and belief in Yahweh’s unfailing loyalty, before returning to its catalogue of grievances.  Rather than arguing, as every scholar has thus far, that this is the “pinnacle” of the work expressing true faith in God, I argue that it is not earnest speech but rather deeply sarcastic. The proclamation of continued faith in Yahweh contradicts the entire surrounding complaint, and indeed, the fact that the lament continues and reverts to its litany of sorrows suggests that this does not mark a turning point in the speaker’s response to the situation. A sarcastic reading also accords with the broader claims of the laments, namely, that Yahweh, the one who is ostensibly slow to anger, abounding in mercies and loyalty, can in fact not be counted upon to do what is expected of him.

The final case study turns to the representation of Jerusalem’s destruction in the Book of Ezekiel and attends to the ways in which Ezekiel-the-prophet’s locational memory fulfills overlapping functions and creates a world between destruction and restoration, one accessible only through the mind, whether through the visions themselves or the memories of visions.

Representing the Destruction of Jerusalem: Literary Artistry and the Shaping of Memory in 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel offers an alternative way of thinking about Jerusalem’s destruction by the Neo-Babylonian empire. While much of the focus of biblical scholarship on this topic has been how to piece together what really happened, a narratological analysis of the texts that identifies and frames the claims of each re-telling on their own terms has been lacking. This dissertation values these works as works of literature first and foremost. One of the main contributions of this dissertation is that it takes seriously the importance of genre as a vehicle for carrying particular forms of arguments, claims, and ideologies. The genre of city lament, for example, allows not only for the obvious “lament” function but also a way to diagnose failure. What is unique about Lamentations’ lament poetry, in contradistinction to other laments, is that it plays on the genre’s diagnosis of failure to catalogue the failure of the divine king rather than his people. It sits between elegy and prophetic lawsuit, and in so doing, creates an interpretation of the fall in which the deity could be held liable for the people’s suffering. It offers a striking counter argument to a widespread idea of divine abandonment and justification for punishment by reframing the issue as one of divine overreach.

Each of the texts analyzed in this dissertation establishes a unique relationship to its past, and creates a “post-memory” through its re-telling, offering to its readers a way of conceptualizing the destruction of Jerusalem.[iv] They are not direct, one-for-one, representations of the past presenting strongly competing claims, but read independently, they are tightly structured, argumentative works. The literary “carriers” for the memory of Jerusalem’s demise are numerous, and they have made for a lasting memory of the city, even as they commemorate its destruction.

Dr. Cathleen Chopra-McGowan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University.

[i] Miller and Hayes write, for example, “The fall of the city and the exile of many of its citizens marked a watershed in Judean history and have left fissure marks radiating throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.” See further J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, (2nd ed.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 479. See also James Pasto, “W. M. L. De Wette and the Invention of Post-Exilic Judaism: Political Historiography and Christian Allegory in Nineteenth-Century German Biblical Scholarship,” in Jews, Antiquity, and the Nineteenth Century Imagination (Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture; ed. Hayim Lapin and Dale Martin; Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2003), 33–52.

[ii] Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Winona Lake, In: Eisenbrauns, 2005).

[iii] I am not the first, of course, to attend to the broader question of how imperial powers appeared to their contemporaries and subjugated people. The works of Peter Machinist and David Vanderhooft have been particularly influential in my approach. See, for example, Peter Machinist, “Assyria and Its Image in First Isaiah,” JAOS 103 (1983): 719–37; David S. Vanderhooft, The Neo-Babylonian Empire and Babylon in the Latter Prophets (HSM 59; Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1999).

[iv] I borrow the term “post-memory” from Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).