The third and last case study of this book centers on how ruins are experienced foremost as indicating something about the future in the Hebrew Bible. To explore this prospective sense of ruination, it examines the many biblical references to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, both in terms of the impending ruin of the city and the hope that one day it would be in ruins no more.

Chapter one pursues a divide that will be consequential for the studies that follow. It begins by examining the ruined landscapes that would have been visible to the biblical writers in the 1st millennium BCE and how these remains are described, where references to ruins are many but descriptions of digging among them are absent. It then turns to the period when, quite suddenly in the 19th century CE, these same ruins begin to be excavated.

The introduction to this work lays out its guiding research questions and how this study will address them. Drawing on recent discussions in historical theory and phenomenology, it argues that the experience of ruins, above all, has to do with impressions of time. But these impressions and their attendant temporalities have transformed since the ancient period in which the biblical writers were active.

The conclusion to this book returns to the question as to why those in antiquity did not dig more extensively to learn about those who lived before and why we do. It argues that ruins are now about differences that appear in history, and to excavate is to better understand all that separates one era from the next, and us from those who came before. But for the biblical writers ruins were objects that overcame temporal distance and offered continuity in lived experienced. The temporalities of remembrance, presence, and anticipation are all centered on this abiding sense that past experiences preserved in material form bore directly on current ones.

Chapter three turns to different material remains described in the Hebrew Bible as persisting “to this day.” It connects this expression to recent theoretical discussions on how ruins can evoke a sense of the presence of the past, blurring the lines between what was and what is.

Chapter two begins a series of three case studies centered on temporalties of ruination expressed in the Hebrew Bible. The focus of this chapter is the ancient site of Shiloh, a settlement destroyed relatively early according to the biblical writers and which remained in ruins for an extended period in time. This study then connects the many biblical references to Shiloh long after its downfall to different modes of remembrance.