This article explores the issue of history within post-structuralist social models of investigation applied to the biblical text. Within the context of a biblical narrative of Judean history, such as the Hasmonean revolt, the author assumes the necessary exploration of social voices, narratives, and even "controversial" texts, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Maccabean period. While historians have perceived the past as a reality to be reconstructed and collided, this article argues for the perception of the past as an ethnographic reality, where sociability and the authority of texts depend on conflicting memories. Narratives and historical narrations arise out of a concern for continuity and the future, more than out of the past and its singularity. Thus social and individual memories reflect social and individual experiences and cannot be discarded, even when they conflict with one another.
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