Second paragraph of third chapter:

Judean answers, diverse as they were, emphasized the specialness of Jerusalem. Of course, ideas about Jerusalem’s specialness were not new. From the founding of the Davidic monarchy onward, kings had insisted that God dwelled in and would protect the royal city, often termed Zion in hymns still preserved in the Psalter. But this ancient “Zion theology” took a new turn during the reign of King Hezekiah. It became the main way Judeans explained the mysterious fact of their survival.

One of Anne’s theology books, looking at the writing of the Bible through the lens of trauma and suffering. When I was doing my Religious Education O-Level (for which I received the lowest mark of any subject) we had a module on ‘Suffering, Death and the Afterlife’, from a Catholic perspective of course, with almost no overlap with this book apart from the ‘Suffering Servant’ sections of Isaiah, so this was all new to me.

Carr makes a very powerful case for the centrality of the experiences of the exile to Babylon (in 720 BCE) and the destruction of the Temple (in 586 BCE) in the history of gathering together the scriptures that became the Old Testament, or at least the prophets and historical books. I had read some of the historical background in Barton’s A History of the Bible, but this set it out in a broader context, and also looks at the emotional complexity of the writers’ historical situations. It was fascinating stuff, and of course you can read forward from it to the events of today with little difficulty.

I was less convinced by his argument that the New Testament can be seen more clearly through a similar lens. His case is that the brutal execution of Jesus as a criminal was a traumatic historical event that early Christians needed to respond to; but it seems to me that, apart from the small number of survivors in Jerusalem itself, there would not have been many early Christians who had personal knowledge of it, whereas the depredations of the Babylonians and Assyrians between them affected every single Jewish family of the time. His extension of the argument to include Paul, who never met Jesus and did not become a Christian until several years after Jesus died, was even less convincing.

However, even that section has some interesting nuggets, so the whole book is recommended if you are into that sort of thing. You can get Holy Resilience here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next, not unrelatedly, is Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen.