Cultural Memory In The Old Testament

Cultural identity is a core element of remembrance, because it explains the cultural aspect of memory: depending from individual experiences, which are encouraged by analogue or similar family and peer experiences, core elements of these experiences became common memories, and, thus, parts of a memory culture or cultural identity of a ethnic or religious or other community.

Such process can be exemplified by the Jewish-Christian tradition, where the experiences of a group of Jewish slaves in Egypt, who could escape slavery, were remembered by following generations as the work of their God and of the man Moses. This remembrance became encouraged by later experiences of deliverance from imprisonment or exile. Core elements of this tradition (bread, passah, rules, narrations) were taken over by the Christian Eucharist tradition, and, thus, became an intercultural cultural identity. Therefore, the rendition of the exodus in the Old Testament is an excellent example of cultural memory – a remembered past that resulted in collective memories that maintained the actuality or relevance of the past, without getting bogged down in the never ending agonizing about the supposed ‘historical factuality’ of the past. In the Old Testament the exodus was remembered in diverging ways in different contexts and the ongoing need for identity and the influence of trauma were but two factors that influenced the manner

Therefore, cultural memory (re)produces a past with present relevance, and since the relation between the remembered past and the present shifts with every generation, this remembered past is continually revised to suit present circumstances, including political, religious, institutional, geographical, and family