Although Psalms 50 and 73 through 80, the Psalms of Asaph, contain a concentration of historical referents unparalleled in the Psalter, they have rarely attracted sustained historical interest. In Memories of Asaph, a volume from the Emerging Scholars series, Karl N. Jacobson identifies these psalms as containing cultic historiography, historical narratives written for recitation in worship, and explores them through mnemohistory, attending to how the past is remembered and to the rhetorical function of recitation in the cultic setting.
Jacobson describes mnemohistory at the intersection of memory and history, explores the singularity of the rhetorical and formals aspects of remembrance in the Asaph material, and discusses "residual mnemohistory," material that is not intentionally called to remembrance. He demontrates that Asaph "remembers" the past as a movement from henotheism to a more orthodox form of Yahwism as the core memory that informs a new historical situation for worship participants. By describing the "way Asaph remembers," the author highlights symbolic and individualized elements of the psalms' mnemohistorical work that earlier form-critical approaches failed to recognize.
