Speaker: Dr. Julia Rhyder, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Harvard University
The Kwartler Family Lecture is presented by the Princeton Program in Judaic Studies. It will be held on Tuesday, October 21st 2025 from 4:30pm to 6pm in Louis A. Simpson International Building room A71. Kosher Refreshments will be provided.
Abstract:
“Commemorating war is such an integral part of the modern nation-state, and of the Jewish experience of the past century, that we might assume it played a similar role in antiquity. Yet the extent to which the calendar served to memorialize war, and specifically conflicts involving ancient Jews, remains an open question. While recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of war memory in shaping the physical landscape of the ancient Near East, remarkably little attention has been paid to its temporal dimension: namely, how calendars, and the festal events they prescribed, may have been used to recall military events. This talk presents an original history of how the memory of war shaped calendrical festivals in the Hebrew Bible. In the first part, I argue that early biblical festivals with martial themes did not commemorate the dates of actual historical battles but rather celebrated the cosmic victories of the Israelite God, worshipped as warrior and king. The second part then reveals a major commemorative transformation in the Hellenistic era (330–63 BCE): namely, new ceremonies that marked the dates of battles conducted by human agents. I conclude by considering the ramifications of this change for the emergence of the ancient Jewish calendar and the elevation of armed resistance to a central, though contested, place within Jewish collective identity.”