Elitær teologi og folkelig resonans i Patriarkfortællingen

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to define the relation between the elite and the public aspects in the Genesis story. My contention is that an ethnic (national) myth, in order to fulfill the purpose of creating a national sentiment, needs to hit “the deep popular cord,” or the element of longue durée, of “the long-term relationship between national past, present and future” (A.D. Smith). It is important to ask: How far, and by what means, is the national history of the Bible written for the public sentiment? At this point, I introduce modern research on ‘public/social memory’, as a still mainly virgin field of research that has good prospects of solving at least parts of this issue, given a broad memory research perspective that includes material and textual evidence as well as the surrounding culture and modern culture interpretation. I argue that one aspect of Gunkel’s tradition-historical approach, together with modern studies of public/ amily religiosity in Israel, and with modern folklore studies, may reveal the text’s relationship to this popular cord and a collective cultural identity. My main concern, however, is to show how the basic building block in this regard is a pool of folk motifs, which seem to appear when people express their ethnic or national identity and their claim of ownership to a piece of land.