Eric Mechoulan's essay, “What Is the Meaning of Jewish History?,” is a wide-ranging, learned, and challenging exploration of the modes and purposes of historiography, or the writing of history, especially Jewish history.
As for the Bible, to which Mechoulan turns early in his article, some of its historiography, especially in the book of Kings, falls into the annalistic mode, recording who ruled when and for how long. But most of the recording and invocation of the past in the Bible falls into the category of “memory” rather than history, if I may recur to an important distinction that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (among others) made and that Mechoulan develops.
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