Professor You Bin's new book, Holy Book and Holy People: Historical Memory and Ethnic Construction in Ancient Israel in Chinese, is the latest research on ancient Israelite history by using the social scientific method in sociology, anthology and hermeneutics. The author proposes a social memory interpretation of the Hebrew Bible with the aim of transcending the quarrel between the maximalism and minimalism, and takes the biblical historical narratives as an open library of texts. The main content of this book is to analyze how the Israelites remembered their past in different period and life settings and how these memories were deposited in the layers of the biblical narratives, as well to discuss how these narratives influenced the formation of Judah-Israel ethnicity. A large number of references, proficiency in Hebrew, using new study method make this book become a landmark work in the Chinese academy of researching the ancient Israelite history.
