Edelman & Ben Zvi/Leadership, Social Memory, 3. Memories of Judah’s Past Leaders

Propaganda is a messaging technique utilized by any given elite to obtain, maintain, and bolster their legitimacy, their privilege, their power, and their access to resources. This is accomplished through shaping and constructing an ideology that confers these advantages to the elite. The production of literature was one method of propaganda employed by the leadership of ancient Judah. In producing this propaganda, the scribal elite and their employers mined the Judahites' shared memories about their past and often reshaped them to serve their favored ideology. Cultural or social memory is thus a primary component of propaganda, and this paper seeks to examine how Judahite memories about their past leadership have been reshaped in the Persian period and beyond and employed for propagandistic purposes.