01_Biblica_Hong_Layout 1 08/07/13 12:54 Pagina 336 336 KOOG P. HONG Israel 62. True, northerners might have known Abraham, but perhaps as one ancestral figure of their southern neighbors—in other words, as their father, not necessarily as our father. After the fall of Samaria, the northern Jacob tradition was taken up and expanded by the Judeans. We do not know exactly how this acquisition was made 63. We do not know whether it was available in a literary form or was readily known through oral transmission. What we know is the fact that somehow southerners knew of this northern tradition and adopted it into their tradition — but not before decisively reformulating it. The identity reconstruction of Judeans after the fall of Israel and the ensuing revolutionary reception of the northern tradition laid the foundation for definitively rewriting the new memory of Israel’s past. Now Abraham shares not only a place in Israel’s ancestry as one of the fathers but the leading position in the rudimentary triad in Israel’s pedigree: Abraham-Isaac-Jacob. I call it a revolution — a revolution in Judeans’ self-identity. They no longer identified themselves as mere observers of the great Yahwistic heritage of their northern neighbor 64. They became the new Israel, the sole heir of YHWH 65. To be sure, a rewritten history may not have immediately af- fected the collective memory of the past. But when this reformula- tion of the ancestral history by the hand of southerners later formed the foundation of the Torah, as authoritative religious literature, it began to influence decisively those who conceived of themselves as Abraham’s descendants. Slowly and steadily, the once indepen- dent and competing fathers of Israel and Judah began to co-inhabit the memory as Israel’s common past 66. Cf. YOREH, The First Book of God, 78. 62 For the popular notion of the influx of northern refugees, see FINKEL- 63 STEIN – SILBERMAN, The Bible Unearthed, 243-245. For recent critique, see N. NAʼAMAN, “When and How Did Jerusalem Become a Great City? The Rise of Jerusalem as Judah’s Premier City in the Eighth-Seventh Centuries B.C.E.”, BASOR 347 (2007) 21-56; P. GUILLAUME, “Jerusalem 720-705 BCE: No Flood of Israelite Refugees”, SJOT 22 (2008) 195-211. FINKELSTEIN – SILBERMAN, The Bible Unearthed, 146-150. 64 N. NAʼAMAN, “The Israelite-Judahite Struggle for the Patrimony of An- 65 cient Israel”, Bib 91 (2010) 14-23; HONG, “The Deceptive Pen of Scribes”. In the apocryphal literature, the attention given to Abraham (33 times) 66 increased almost comparably to that of Jacob (43 times), and then, in the New Testament, Abraham occurs 69 times and Jacob 26 times. This perhaps sig- nifies a growing reputation of Abraham as the founding ancestor of Israel. © Gregorian Biblical Press 2013 - Tutti i diritti riservati