March 9, 2018, by Erin Snyder

Digital Arts: Virtual Exhibition Explores Jerusalem

A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

In 586 BCE, the city of Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian army and to its king, Nebuchadnezzar. Though Jerusalem was just one of many capital cities destroyed by the Babylonians, its destruction triggered significant changes in the intellectual, cultural, religious and political identities of the people associated with the city. The effects of these changes continue to reverberate in the modern Middle East and among the global Jewish, Muslim and Christian populations.

Together with Dr Jonathan Stökl from King’s College London, the Department of Theology and Religious Studies’ Dr Carly Crouch has launched a new virtual exhibition exploring the transformation of this small Iron Age city state into the world’s religious capital and an ethereal symbol of the imagination. Nottingham PhD student Cat Quine was a research assistant on the project.

‘The city of Jerusalem has held an unparalleled place in the imagination for more than two and a half millennia’, writes Crouch. ‘It has inspired countless authors and artists, as an object of mourning for the past but also as a focus of hope for the future. This exhibition seeks to illustrate for the viewer the reality of life in the ancient city and the trauma of its defeat, in order to illuminate the consequences of its destruction for the theological and artistic imaginations.’

Jerusalem: Fall of a City—Rise of a Vision is a project of the Society for Old Testament Study (SOTS), the society for the study of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament in Britain and Ireland, and has been undertaken as part of the Society’s centenary celebrations in 2017.

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