This course explores how ancient religious communities and authors have imagined the past, and what these imaginations can tell us about the goals and identities of these communities and individuals. In addition to broad theoretical discussion of history and memory, we will read and discuss the historical consciousness embedded in various sections of the Hebrew Bible (such as Deuteronomistic History), Second Temple literature, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, Patristic writings, Rabbinic literature, and the Qur'an. The purpose of the course is to enable students to think about historical consciousness within a comparative framework and to utilize this concept as a productive analytical category in their research domains.