A new book by Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible Jacob L. Wright has been published by Cambridge University Press.
In War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible, Wright offers a fresh response to the question “Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible?” He contends that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel and shows how biblical authors constructed a new and influential notion of peoplehood in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined.
The book is also available via open access publication thanks to a digital publishing grant awarded to Emory University in 2016 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant is based at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and is directed by Michael Elliott, the dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Wright’s book is the second to receive funding and the fifth to be published through this grant. Learn more about the Digital Publishing in the Humanities Initiative at Emory University.