Memory and Tradition in the Book of Numbers

Review of the hardback: 'A new voice from the Wilderness! By focusing on the theme of memory in the book of Numbers, Adriane Leveen has found an important key to a biblical book that gets less attention than Genesis or Exodus but is every bit as fascinating. Scholarly readers will find in this book a sophisticated attempt to apply the concept of collective memory to a biblical text, an approach that yields many insights into biblical literature and ritual. General readers, drawn into the text by Leveen's lively, literate and accessible writing, will find it an illuminating guide through the book of Numbers. Both kinds of readers will close Memory and Tradition with a much better appreciation of Numbers' politics and poetics, and of how it fits into the larger historical vision of the Five Books of Moses.' Steve Weitzman, Indiana University, Bloomington

• 1. Desert bound; 2. Weaving by design; 3. Priestly purposes; 4. Variations on a theme: shaping memory in the wilderness; 5. Crisis and commemoration: the use of ritual objects; 6. Falling in the wilderness: politics of death and burial; 7. Inheriting the land.