Holy Resilience: The Bible's Traumatic Origins

335 Pages·2014·1.679 MB·English

by  David M. Carr

HOLY RESILIENCE

HOLY
RESILIENCE
The Bible’s Traumatic Origins
David M. Carr
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip
Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Frontispiece: The ancient Near East, significantly adapted from “Israel and Ancient
Trade Routes,” in Oxford Bible Atlas, 4th ed., ed. Adrian Curtis (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 67.
Copyright © 2014 by David M. Carr.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.
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Designed by James Johnson.
Set in Walbaum Roman type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carr, David McLain, 1961–. Holy resilience: the Bible’s traumatic
origins/David M. Carr.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-20456-8 (hardback)
1. Bible—History. 2. Suffering—Biblical teaching. 3. Suffering—Religious
aspects—Judaism. 4. Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity.
I. Title.
BS445.C37 2014
220.6—dc23
2014009144
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to all haunted by suffering,
especially those haunted by experiences
of war
The spaces which are unwritten are anything but empty. They
are the places where deeper power lives, where the “more” of
living experience refuses to be ruled by the “less” of what can be
written. . . . These unwritten spaces pull with the power of a star’s
gravity, drawing everything into orbit around themselves. It is
around the unwritten spaces that the “texts” rotate. . . . The lived
world is stronger than the authorized world. It is around the lived
world that the texts of authorization revolve as lesser satellites,
although a Ptolemaic imagination believes otherwise.
—DOW EDGERTON,
The Passion of Interpretation
CONTENTS
preface ix
introduction 1
chapter one
Israel, Judah, and the Birth of Scripture 11
chapter two
The Birth of Monotheism 24
chapter three
Judah’s Survival 41
chapter four
Jerusalem’s Destruction and Babylonian Exile 67
chapter five
Abraham and Exile 91
chapter six
The Story of Moses 110
contents
chapter seven
The Return Home 128
chapter eight
Traumatic Crystallization of Scripture 141
chapter nine
Christianity’s Founding Trauma 156
chapter ten
The Traumatized Apostle 174
chapter eleven
The Traumatic Origins of Judaism and Christianity 195
chapter twelve
The Posttraumatic Gospel 225
epilogue 244
appendix
Contemporary Study of Trauma and Ancient
Trauma 253
notes 271
list of abbreviations 271
select bibliography on bible and trauma 303
acknowledgments 307
index 311
[ viii ]
PREFACE
I
offer this book as a synthesis of research on the Bible
and an experiment in supplementing such scholarship
with research on trauma and memory. Though I could
have added qualifiers to many more sentences in the
book, readers should just take note that the whole represents
my considered judgment on issues of continuing discussion.
The translations of Hebrew texts throughout are my own,
while translations of the Greek are drawn or adapted from the
New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
Writing this book, I felt surrounded by a cloud of witnesses
of people, near and far, who have been traumatized. Some
such traumas are named and known, while many others are
not. As a Quaker, I am especially conscious of those who have
suffered and are now suffering in war—the war on terror, the
[ ix ]