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The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Egyptian Bondage and the Song of the Sea

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Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

This essay situates the cultural memory of the Exodus in a dialectic between historical memory and ethnic self-fashioning. Memories of the Egyptian Empire in Canaan have been transformed into a memory of liberation from Egyptian bondage, with this political transition mapped onto the geographical space of Egypt and Canaan. The mnemohistory of the Exodus has roots in the LB/Iron Age transition, which has been narrativized as an ethnic myth of origins. The oldest expression of this ethnic myth, the Song of the Sea, transmutes the memory of Egyptian collapse into a song of the Divine Warrior, wherein Yahweh is the sole king and Pharaoh is chaos vanquished.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My thanks to Stephen Russell and Konrad Schmid for bringing most of the following to my attention. See Russell (2009: 108–109).

  2. 2.

    Propp (1998: 565) considers “the possibility that Psalm 78 constitutes our earliest commentary on the Song.” On the rationale for dating Psalm 78 prior to the fall of the Northern Kingdom, see Day (2004: 237–238).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Ronald Hendel

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  1. Ronald Hendel
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Correspondence to Ronald Hendel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, San Diego, California, USA

    Thomas E. Levy

  2. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Thomas Schneider

  3. University of California, San Diego, California, USA

    William H.C. Propp

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Hendel, R. (2015). The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Egyptian Bondage and the Song of the Sea. In: Levy, T., Schneider, T., Propp, W. (eds) Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04768-3_5

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