[Presented at the 2017 Indiana University Department of Religion Graduate Student Conference, themed “Presence and Absence.”.]
Abridged version
We are, it has been said, what we remember.[1] An individual’s memory enables her to understand who she has been and who she is, and to imagine who she might be in the future. Yet, just as personal identity is constituted by an individual’s memory, communal identity is similarly constituted by a community’s constellation of shared memories. The cache of remembrances shared across a group—referred to by sociologists as collective memory—serves as the epoxy which bonds that group together.
Though the theory that has developed the concept of collective memory is new, the importance of remembering is discernible already in the Hebrew Scriptures, which enables the ancient Hebrew people to construct their religious, cultural, and national identity.[2] The narrative contained in the scriptures knits the Hebrews together. It enables the Hebrews to rediscover their identity as the people of God as they remember together what God has done for them in the past.[3]
This paper takes a closer look at the seminal moment in the Hebrews’ identity formation depicted in the fourth chapter of Joshua, in which the Hebrews cross the Jordan River at Gilgal and enter the Promised Land. In that passage, the Lord commands Joshua to direct the people to build a memorial at Gilgal to prompt their remembering of what the Lord did on that day. I offer three constructive observations. First, the passage conforms to a larger Biblical emphasis on communal remembering, which in turn also corresponds to findings in collective memory theory. Second, communal remembering often depends on external aides-mémoires, such as the mnemonic stones God commands the Hebrews to erect in Joshua 4. Thirdly, external aides-mémoires nevertheless pose a danger to communal remembering, insofar as depositing memory in objects rather than actively participating can diminish communal remembering. I conclude by considering a poignant and instructive example, located at the site of an important river crossing in the American South.
Collective Memory Theory and the Hebrew Bible
Before turning to the fourth chapter of Joshua, it behooves us to review what collective memory theory is. This school of thought was founded by a sociologist named Maurice Halbwachs, who suggested that memory is created and sustained by groups, and does not merely remain the provenance of the individual mind. “[I]t is in society,” Halbwachs wrote, “that people normally acquire their memories … Most of the time, when I remember, it is others who spur me on; their memory comes to the aid of mine and mine relies on theirs.”[4] Our remembering depends on one another. But remembering is not only a social practice; remembering is also constitutive of social relationships.[5] The communal eliciting of memories shared across a whole group solidifies the group’s relationships and demarcates the limits of that group; it provides a group with a sense of stability.[6] Jan Assmann thus follows Halbwachs by arguing that “[t]he past imparts togetherness. The group acquires its identity as a group by reconstructing its past togetherness.”[7] According to Assman, the relationships between members of groups are funded by their shared experiences of the past. These shared memories establish and preserve of a variety of present relationships and communal identities.[8]
The collective memory theorists’ claim that collective memory is constitutive of relationships is consistent with the outlook represented in the Hebrew Bible. Remembering figures centrally in that text: the word zâkar (זָכַר), meaning “remember,” appears there in various declensions at least 169 times.[9] The Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi thus affirms that “ancient Israel knows what God is from what he has done in history. And if that is so, then memory has become crucial to its faith and, ultimately, to its very existence.”[10] God’s relationship with God’s people is established in remembering.[11] For this reason, God repeatedly instructs the Hebrews to remember what God has done. [12] This is particularly visible in Deuteronomy. “Be careful,” repeats the refrain in Deut. 4:9, 6:12, and 8:11, “not to forget… the Lord.”[13] This remembering must not only be performed by those faithful to God, but it also must be taught to their children (Deut. 4:9, 6:7, 11:19).[14] Forgetfulness, on the other hand, is likened to sin in Deut. 32:18, and throughout the prophets.[15]
On the Banks of the Jordan
The same theme repeatedly appears in Joshua. In the fourth chapter of that book, God’s people are commanded to build a memorial, that they might remember those things that God has done for them in the past, and thereby solidify their relationship with God. Joshua gives the reasoning for this action :
In the future your children will ask, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them, ‘This is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes, and he kept it dry until you were all across, just as he did at the Red Sea when he dried it up until we had all crossed over. He did this so all the nations of the earth might know that the Lord’s hand is powerful, and so you might fear the Lord your God forever. (Joshua 4:21-24)
The stones prompt a retelling of the story, a transmission of collective memory to the next generations that enable them to be a part of the covenant formed between God and God’s people on Sinai. This passage “urges the audience to internalize its significance, to be moved by the story through a consciously created memory.”[16] In participating in the remembrance of that act, the audience can be inducted into the fellowship with God.
Yet the Hebrew scriptures prioritize communal remembering not only to sustain the Hebrews’ relationship with God, but also their relationships to one another. In the fourth chapter of Joshua, the Hebrews are not simply delivered from their bondage in a merciful act of God, but they also go through a “change of status” that transforms them from a “wandering band to… a nation.”[17] “The retelling of the story, which the stones elicit,” Hawk tells us, “will itself constitute a unifying activity by reminding the tribes of their common history and calling.”[18] Nelson’s reading of the passage, which corresponds precisely with the collective memory theorists’ claim that communal identity is constituted by shared memory, is worth quoting at length :
The act of retelling this story, something built right into the text itself, would perform the social function of reinforcing peoplehood… Telling and hearing this story would create self-understanding and identity. The audience would come to see itself as twelve tribes forged into a single nation. Understood in this way, the text is… an etiology for the group identity of Israel.[19]
Repeating the story inducts next generation into the historic deliverance God effected, and into Israelite identity. [20] The practice that is required of the Hebrews in the fourth chapter of Joshua, to be sure, is an active remembering which maintains their relationship with God and with one another.
Mnemonic Stones
What is significant about the fourth chapter of Joshua is not only its injunction to the Hebrews to remember what has happened, but also its encouragement that the Hebrews make use of external items to facilitate remembering. The stones that God commands the Hebrews to bring out from the Jordan are to serve as aides-mémoires for remembering what has happened. The Hebrews need the stones to them to remember what happened there at the banks of the Jordan.[21] Memory does not simply remain lodged in the collective mind of a group, but instead must be concretized in bodily practice and the use of external mnemonic aids.[22] There are many such aids: they can be “rules, laws, standardized procedures, and records… books, holidays, statues, souvenirs.”[23]
In the Hebrew Bible, the most commonly used external mnemonic devices are made of stone. Standing stones, or matstsêbvôth (מַצֵּבוֺת), appear throughout the text. Jacob is the first to erect such a matstsêbâh; at Bethel, he marks the place God provided for him (Gen. 28:18). Jacob erects another to serve as a boundary marker in Gen. 31:45, and he sets up a third to mark Rachel’s grave in Gen. 35:20. Of course, stone tablets bore the divine commandments (Exodus 31:18, 34:1). [24] Graesser points out that erecting standing stones was a common practice in the ancient Levant, and explains that these stones “served as markers, reminders, jogs for the memory.”[25] Such stones almost always indicated the place where an important thing had previously come to pass.[26]
In Joshua, memorials are particularly prominent: several different collections of set up stones help the newly founded Israelite nation to remember its foundational events (7:26, 8:29, 24:27).[27] In the fourth chapter of Joshua, God sustains the Hebrews’ memory of what happened at the banks of the Jordan by charging the Hebrews to erect a stone reminder for themselves.[28] According to the text, though they would not always in themselves elicit memory from the Hebrews, the erected monument would prompt children to ask questions about the stones, which would elicit the story from parents and elders.[29] There is thus something particularly remarkable about the stones brought out from the Jordan River, extracted to serve as a mnemonic device for the Hebrews. It appears that the stones are necessary for memory-making and communication, but in themselves are not sufficient: the stones do not bear any inscription or communicate any content. They cannot themselves “cry out” (cf. Hab. 2:11, Luke 19:40), but instead only prompt the Hebrews’ remembering by way of the rehearsal of past events which unite them to God. As Hubbard writes, “the silent stones bore merely mute testimony. They bore no inscription to report their history or to explain their meaning. Only the community, through an adult’s answer, removed their ambiguity. Only communal remembrance conveyed their meaning… from one generation to the next.”[30]
Thus, the stones themselves are like the stones at Stonehenge, in that they do not bear their own meaning. Archaeologists still have no definitive understanding of the purpose and meaning of Stonehenge, because the site requires an interpreter to mediate the meaning of the place.[31] The site that God calls the Hebrews to construct similarly does not bear its own meaning, but prompts and facilitate the communication of memory across the generations.[32] The stones are necessary, but not sufficient, for the remembering that constitutes the relationship between God and God’s people. They must be accompanied by an embodied remembrance, reincorporated in practice.[33]
The Danger(s )of Lieux de Mémoire
This interpretation underscores a danger that Pierre Nora draws attention to, when he warns us that mnemonic devices also become a kind of “prosthesis-memory,” devices that do all of the work of remembering for us.[34] Such depositories of memory, which Nora calls “lieux de mémoire,” separate us from the past by independently bearing the meaning of history, rather than encouraging us to embody the remembrance of past events to which we want to connect.[35] If Nora is right, it makes sense that God tells the Hebrews to leave the stones raised at Gilgal “mute.” Explanations borne on the stones themselves could preclude the children’s queries, which prompt the elders’ retelling and remembrance of the story. Thus, it is essential that the stones prompt, rather than bear, the remembrance for which Joshua explains these stones were commanded to be brought out (Josh. 4:6).[36]
Yet it must be noted that, in allowing the monuments to prompt the embodied remembrance of God’s deeds at the Jordan, the plain stones risk a different danger. As Graesser has shown, the mute matstsêbvôth involve a fluidity of meaning that allows them to be coopted by other individuals or generations. [37] The use of an unmarked matstsêbâh means the interpreter “depends on memory and oral tradition to preserve the precise terms” of the stone’s meaning.[38] Perhaps it was this very danger that led to the idol worship of matstsêbvôth denounced by Micah (5:12) and the Deuteronomistic Historian. Indeed, later in Hebrew history, the stones at Gilgal are later referred to as happesîlîm (הַפְּסִילִים֙), or idols, and a site called Gilgal is decried as a site of idolatry in Hosea and Amos.[39] This is the inevitable, though indispensable, danger of utilizing ambiguous mnemonic devices: they can too easily be coopted by foreign symbolic systems. Monument-making, it turns out, is tricky business.
How We Made it Over
It would be helpful at this point to apply what we have learned in the preceding review to a more contemporary example. To that end, we set our sights on the southeast banks of the Alabama River, just across the water from downtown Selma. There, on a Sunday afternoon half a century ago, several hundred demonstrators attempted a march from Selma to Montgomery demand voting rights reform. As they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, the marchers were submitted to unthinkable police brutality, and thus the day came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” As we know, the protestors did not relent. With the protection of federal troops and an outpouring of public support, which raised the demonstrators’ numbers into the thousands, they successfully crossed over the bridge on March 21, 1965, beginning the fifty-four mile march into Montgomery.
How would this watershed moment be remembered? Of course, many of us have seen the movie, or read books about the march. The memorial that locals and participants at the march organized and erected, I think, deserves our attention. Established in 2001, it stands in a small park on the south banks of the river, just past the Pettus Bridge. It is comprised of a pile of weathered boulders.[40] The face of the largest stone, in the shadow of the Pettus Bridge, bears the following inscription in plain font:
WHEN YOUR CHILDREN SHALL
ASK YOU IN TIME TO COME
SAYING, “WHAT MEAN THESE 12
STONES?” THEN YOU SHALL TELL
THEM HOW YOU MADE IT OVER
JOSHUA 4:21-22
Other than a list of nine names below the heading “Martyrs,” no other engraving, including any further explanation, is offered.
The humble monument on the Alabama River puzzles visitors just enough to prompt a retelling of the story by someone more familiar with the historical episode. The location of the monument at the Alabama River, the site of the event to be memorialized, intensifies the pathos of the site. As a part of a walking trail in Selma, the stone monument encourages not only a verbal retelling of the events that happened there, but also a physical reenactment of the episode—as did the stones at Gilgal. Such reenactment enables new understanding and more effective remembering of the occasion the monument memorializes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the retelling and reenactment of the events at the Pettus Bridge, like the remembering encouraged by the monument erected at Gilgal, can establish and solidify communal identity. Because the monument prompts visitors’ incorporated remembering, it enables the story’s narrator to point out the ways the Selma marches affect and involve visitors unfamiliar with the 1965 events. The story of the Civil Rights activists, and of the communities on whose behalf they demonstrated, enters the memory of the inquisitive visitors, and can become part of their story. It thus draws them into relationship with those for whom the names of martyrs memorialized at the Civil Rights Memorial Park are all too familiar. Of course, it remains the case that this communal remembering is only possible insofar as there are witnesses that are able to interpret the monument at the Alabama River, to tell new generations how the brave marchers “made it over.”
A Sign Among You
It’s important to remember that memory “is always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous.”[41] But, as we have seen above, memory is also constitutive of relationships. Because of this, in the fourth chapter of Joshua, God commands the Hebrews to erect stones brought up from the Jordan which would serve as “a sign among you,” enabling God’s people to remember what God had done for them. This remembering allows the Hebrews to understand their relationships with one another and to maintain a relationship with God. As this essay has shown, the material presence of the stones pulled out from the Jordan is necessary—but not sufficient—for the collective remembering of the past. They prompt the communication of meaning, but do not themselves bear the memorial’s meaning. Yet there must also be an absence—in this case, an absence of textual overinterpretation—in order to avoid the dangers of the stones turning into bare lieux de mémoire, prostheses for the Hebrews’ faithful remembering of God’s redemption. This Biblical passage supports what the collective memory theorists teach us: relationships are sustained by the performed, collective remembering of the past, and material objects, such as stones from a river, serve to support that remembering.
[1] See the work of Nobel Prize winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel in Eric R. Kandel, “We Are What We Remember: Memory and the Biological Basis of Individuality” (Royal Society, London, April 22, 2008). Also consider Michael S. Roth, “We Are What We Remember (and Forget).,” Tikkun 9, no. 6 (1994): 41–42, 91., as quoted in Jan Assmann, “Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory,” in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark, ed. Richard A. Horsley et al. (Minneapolis: First Fortress Press, 2011), 67.
[2] Ronald S. Hendel, Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), ix.
[3] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).
[4] Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 38. As quoted in Alana M. Vincent, Making Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative, and Liturgy (Cambridge: Clarke, 2014), 25.
[5] Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, no. 69 (2000): 127–50. According to Klein, Halbwachs remained unfamiliar to many for decades, and collective memory theory was not a notable school of thought until the work of Yerushalmi and Nora in the eighties.
[6] Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 86.
[7] Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 94.
[8] Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10. Also Hendel, Remembering Abraham, ix–x.
[9] As Yerushalmi has put it, “there is… an almost desperate pathos about the biblical concern with memory.” Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 5, 10.
[10] Ibid., 9.
[11] Ibid., 5. The psalmist thus calls out to God to remember him (Ps. 25:7, Ps. 106:4). While the Psalmist does not equate forgetfulness with injustice on God’s behalf, he imagines that God’s memory of the covenant with Israel would prompt God to be merciful. Thus, communal remembering can even constitute a relationship between God and God’s people.
[12] Isaiah also implores God’s people to remember God’s goodness: “Do not forget this! Keep it in mind! Remember this, you guilty ones. Remember the things I have done in the past” (Is. 46:8-9).
[13] All scripture excerpts are offered in the New Living Translation, unless otherwise noted. I find that the NLT provides some very appropriate renderings of the Hebrew in the Joshua 4 passage and have therefore chosen to use it.
[14] Those who are uninformed are told to ask their father and their elders (Deut. 32:7).
[15] Isaiah cries out: “you have forgotten God your Savior; you have not remembered the Rock, your fortress” (Is. 17:10, cf. 51:13), while Ezekiel enumerates the disastrous consequences of Israel’s forgetfulness—likened to lewdness and prostitution in Ezek. 23:35 (cf. Ezek. 22:12). In Jeremiah, God laments that “my people have forgotten me, days without number” (Jer. 2:32). Even the Psalms deplore the people’s impious failure to remember (Ps. 78:11, 106:7, 21-22). This explains why Brueggeman, in a commentary on Deuteronomy, writes of “the threat of amnesia.” Walter Brueggemann, Deuteronomy, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 81.
[16] Jerome F. D. Creach, Joshua, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 55.
[17] Ibid., 43–44. Nelson agrees: “To cross the Jordan boundary meant a transformation into nationhood.” In Richard D. Nelson, Joshua: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 68. Creach points out that the use of the word gôy (גּוֹי),meaning “nation,” in Joshua 4:1, in one description of the Jordan crossing, rather than ʿām (עָם), meaning “people,” already signifies this transformation in status, in Creach, Joshua, 52. It is to be noted that עָם is used throughout the passage, particularly in v. 24, but this serves to heighten the contrast between the identification of God’s chosen people and the ultimate ends of the Hebrews’ memory of God’s work.
[18] Ibid., 67–68.
[19] Nelson, Joshua, 68.
[20] A similar dynamic to the one Brueggemann witnesses in Deut. 6:20-25—where children inquire their parents with the pronoun “you,” and parents respond using the pronoun “us” in a way that comes to include the children—can be seen in Joshua 4 as well. In v. 6, the children’s question ends in lâkhem(לָכֶֽם), signifying the plural second person, but the answer parents are to give in v. 22 invites the children to identify with the Israelites who crossed the Jordan on dry ground. In Brueggemann, Deuteronomy, 92.
[21] Though it is Joshua—not God—who explains the function of the stones in v. 6, his use of the purposeful lemaʻan (לְמַ֗עַן, “in order that”) makes the Hebrews’ need for the mnemonic stones clear. Luther would be glad to acknowledge the need humans have for physical reminders of grace. “The Spirit cannot be with us except in material and physical things such as the Word, water and Christ’s body and in his saints on earth.” In Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Word and Sacrament 3, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, Luther’s Works 37 (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1961), 95.
[22] Connerton distinguishes between these two different types of memory practices. In incorporating practices, memory is transmitted and borne by bodily rituals; in inscribing practices, memory is impressed on external items which serve as aides-mémoires. In Connerton, How Societies Remember, 4. Assmann creates a similar typology of aides-mémoires, but separates the use of external texts from that of material objects. In Assmann, “Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory.”
[23] As quoted in Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” 130.
[24] Ibid., 38–39. When the Exodus records that Moses lifted up twelve matstsêbvôth representing the twelve tribes of Israel immediately after all the people swore to obey God’s law, it would make sense that these standing stones would serve as the “reminders” that Graesser understands them to be.
[25] Carl F. Graesser, “Standing Stones in Ancient Palestine,” Biblical Archaeologist 35, no. 2 (May 1972): 36.
[26] Graesser postulates four purposes for such stones: legal, memorial, commemorative, and cultic. In Ibid., 37. For the Hebrews, according to Graesser, the standing stones “marked both the relationship of each tribe to Yahweh and the fact that the relationship of the tribes was founded on their common commitment to Yahweh.”
[27] Pekka Pitkänen, Joshua (Nottingham: Apollos, 2010), 140.
[28] Though the word matstsêbâh is not used in this passage, it is clear that in the story, God encourages the Hebrews to extract stones to be used as aides-mémoires from the Jordan. According to Boling, the word for “sign,” ʼôwth (א֖וֹת) in its context verse 6, represents exactly that: it “refers to a physical reminder, a longstanding visual aid to historical memory.” In Robert G. Boling, ed., Joshua, The Anchor Bible 6 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 173.
[29] Hawk, Joshua, 59.
[30] Robert L. Hubbard, “‘What Do These Stones Mean?’: Biblical Theology and a Motif in Joshua,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 11, no. 1 (2001): 12.
[31] Graesser observes that, unlike the inscribed steles found elsewhere, standing stones “are mute. They offer no verbal hint of their meaning to the modem scholar, or for that matter to the ancient onlooker.” In Graesser, “Standing Stones in Ancient Palestine,” 35.
[32] Indeed, Yerushalmi affirms that “[n]ot the stone, but the memory transmitted by the fathers, is decisive if the memory embedded in the stone is to be conjured out of it to live again for subsequent generations.” In Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 10.
[33] When Connerton notes that memory may be practiced either with the aid of external mnemonic devices or in embodied practice, he acknowledges that there is no way the distinction between “incorporated” and “inscribed” practices may be absolute. All inscribing—even writing!—requires some bodily practice, at least at the outset. See Connerton, How Societies Remember, 76–77. As one Biblical scholar has noted, Deuteronomy “holds together inscribed and incorporated memories, seeing them as mutually supportive… in Deuteronomy it appears that inscribed memories only truly become possessed as memories when they are incorporated.” See Nathan MacDonald, Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University, 2008), 96. The passage containing the shema in Deut. 6:4-9, for example, encourages the Hebrews not only to remember the truth of those words, but also to place them as amulets on one’s forehead and post them on doorframes and city gates. Centuries later, Jesus of Nazareth commends these words also to be impressed upon the heart (Matt. 23:5).
[34] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7, 14.
[35] Ibid., 8.
[36] It thus makes very good sense that the embodied remembrance prompted by the stones from the Jordan River at Gilgal would bring to mind a liturgical form, as many scholars have suggested. Hawk admits of a “highly liturgical cast of the narrative” in Hawk, Joshua, 58. According to Barton and Muddiman, “the liturgical function of the actions performed is clear… the narrative is not merely relating events, but also instituting an act of worship for all future generations” in John Barton and John Muddiman, eds., The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 162. In this way, they claim, it resembles the first Passover—a claim that is enhanced by the connection between the crossing of the Jordan and the crossing of the Red Sea established by the naming of the date of the former crossing (4:19). Certainly, the purification that precedes the crossing (3:5) and the circumcision ceremony that follows it (5:3) adds to the sense of ritual. Boling has called the question and answer formation found twice in Joshua 4 to be “catechetical” in Boling, Joshua, 186. Frank Moore Cross has even attempted a reconstruction of what he imagines could have been a yearly festival held at Gilgal in the spring, in Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 103–4. The worship with stones at Gilgal mentioned in Judges 3:19—perhaps the same Gilgal as in Joshua 4, or perhaps another, similar site—insinuates that some kind of embodied practice might have recurrently taken place at the site of the Jordan River crossing. Admittedly, Nelson finds this scenario “unlikely” in Nelson, Joshua, 67. Nevertheless, his objection has to do with the fact that the oldest narrative level of the passage lacks priests and catechetical instruction. I wonder if liturgical practices could have been added thereafter the first layers of redaction?
In either case, even if the remembrance of the Hebrews’ crossing the Jordan did not continue to be practiced at Gilgal, scholars claim that the text itself can serve as the liturgical setting in place of the mnemonic touchstones. The text’s narrative structure effects a liturgy. Creach, for example, explains that the text serves to replace the memorial space at Gilgal in eternity in Creach, Joshua, 51. Nelson observes that the passage in Joshua 4 is recorded in a “narrative jumble” which crisscrosses the Jordan several times, and interrupts itself, in Nelson, Joshua, 65. Hawk, similarly, writes that “[i]nstead of a simple, linear crossing from point to point, the narrative goes around and around the river, before settling at a place appropriately named Gilgal (‘Circle’)” in Hawk, Joshua, 58. In some ways, this is the goal of practiced ritual, Hawk points out: the disorientation produced by ritual “takes the participant out of ordinary time and space into a sphere within which identity can be broken down and reconfigured,” in Ibid., 60. Even if Cross is wrong about the annual Gilgal liturgy he hypothesizes, Hawk’s reading of Joshua 4 suggests that the text itself prompts a ritualistic remembrance of the Jordan River crossing, even at a great distance from the marker at Gilgal. The text itself “evokes a sense of crossing”; see Ibid., 70.
[37] Graesser, “Standing Stones in Ancient Palestine,” 35.
[38] Ibid., 39.
[39] Hos. 4:15; 9:15; 12:11; and Amos 4:4–5, 15.
[40] See the cover of this paper.
[41] Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 5.