Trauma and the Failure of History : Kings, Lamentations, and the Destruction of Jerusalem

A theoretical and exegetical exploration of trauma in the Hebrew Bible David Janzen discusses the concepts of history and trauma and contrasts the ways historians and trauma survivors grapple with traumatic events, a contrast embodied in the very different ways the books of Kings and Lamentations react to the destruction of Jerusalem. Janzen's study warns that explanations in histories will tend to silence the voices of trauma survivors, and it challenges traditional approaches that sometimes portray the explanations of traumatic events in biblical literature as therapeutic for victims. Features: Exploration of history as a narrative explanation that creates a past readers can recognize to be true Examination of how trauma results in a failure of victims to fully experience or remember traumatic events. A case for why the past is a construction of cultures and historians David Janzen discusses the concepts of history and trauma and contrasts the ways historians and trauma survivors grapple with traumatic events, a contrast embodied in the very different ways the books of Kings and Lamentations react to the destruction of Jerusalem. History is a narrative explanation that creates a past readers can recognize to be true, and ancient Judean readers of the book of Kings could have seen it as a history, since it provides a narrative of the destruction of Jerusalem they would have been able to believe. Trauma, however, results in a failure of victims to fully experience or remember traumatic events. Because survivors cannot truly know the events that traumatized them, they cannot put them into an explanatory narrative, and so history fails in the face of trauma. Lamentations is an example of this narrative failure, as different voices suggest explanations for victims' sufferings, only for those narratives to be contradicted or drowned out in survivors' repetition of their pain. Janzen's study warns that explanations in histories will tend to silence the voices of trauma survivors, and it challenges traditional approaches that sometimes portray the explanations of traumatic events in biblical literature as therapeutic for victims David Janzen blends history theory and trauma theory to apply them to the books of Kings and Lamentations. Janzen argues that Kings tells a story that explains the horrific events of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, but Lamentations reflects the perspective of trauma survivors and rejects any explanatory narrative refusing to let the trauma be part of a past. Interpreters of the Bible and historians of ancient Israel should take this trauma into account, even though it can never be a part of the biblical histories they write.