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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2006
Ronald Hendel's Remembering Abraham is a synthetic work that draws on diverse methodological approaches to tease out the interplay of past and present in the Bible's depiction of history. The plasticity of collective memory—the idea that a community's memory of the past changes as that community changes—is a key idea for this book, part of which is a study of the Bible's portrait of Abraham as a reflection of Israel's evolving identity. Hendel is no minimalist, however. For him, biblical history is not simply an invented memory without connection to what really happened, but a pastiche of memory and myth—a reflection of genuine historical experience framed within fictionalized representation. Remembering Abraham is something of a pastiche itself—several of its chapters reproduce previously published work—but the juxtaposition of these studies has value in its own right, offering students and general readers an accessible introduction to how a clear-headed and well-informed scholar distinguishes history from myth in the Bible—and why, in the end, the Bible resists such a distinction.