Constructions of Space IV: Further Developments in Examining Ancient Israel’s Social Space 9781472550354

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ABBREVIATIONS AB ABD AOTC ATD BA BAR BDB BEATAJ Bib BibInt BTB BWANT CBQ CC CHANE CSHJ CT CTA CurBS DJD ErIsr FAT FCB FOTL FRLANT HS HSM HThKAT HTR HTS IBC ICC IDBSup 1

Anchor Bible Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. 6 vols. New York, 1992 Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries Das Alte Testament Deutsch Biblical Archaeologist Biblical Archaeology Review Brown, F., S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford, 1907 Beiträge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des antiken Judentum Biblica Biblical Interpretation Biblical Theology Bulletin Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Catholic Biblical Quarterly Continental Commentaries Culture and History of the Ancient Near East Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum Corpus des tablettes en cunéiformes alphabétiques découvertes à Ras Shamra-Ugarit de 1929 à 1939. Edited by A. Herdner. Mission de Ras Shamra 10. Paris, 1963 Currents in Research: Biblical Studies Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Eretz-Israel Forschungen zum Alten Testament Feminist Companion to the Bible Forms of the Old Testament Literature Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Hebrew Studies Harvard Semitic Monographs Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament Harvard Theological Review Harvard Theological Studies Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching International Critical Commentary Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume. Edited by K. Crim. Nashville, 1976

viii Int ITC J JANES JBL JJS JSem JSJSup JSOT LHBOTS MT

NABU NCB NEchtB NICOT NRSV

OBO OBT OG OLA OTE P PEQ RevExp SAHL SBAB SBL SBLAIL SBS ScrHier SJOT ST STDJ STRev TCT TDOT ThWAT UF VT WBC WMANT ZAW

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Abbreviations Interpretation International Theological Commentary J (Jahwistic or Yahwistic) source Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Semitics Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Masoretic text Nouvelles assyriologiques breves et utilitaires New Century Bible Neue Echter Bibel New International Commentary on the Old Testament New Revised Standard Version Orbis biblicus et orientalis Overtures to Biblical Theology Old Greek Orientalia lovaniensia analecta Old Testament Essays Priestly source Palestine Exploration Quarterly Review and Expositor Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant Stuttgarter biblische Aufsatzbände Society of Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature Ancient Israel and Its Literature Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Scripta hierosolymitana Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Studia theologica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Sewanee Theological Review Textual Criticism and the Translator Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Edited by G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren. Translated by J. T. Willis, G. W. Bromiley, and D. E. Green. 8 vols. Grand Rapids, 1974– Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament. Edited by G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren.Stuttgart, 1970– Ugarit-Forschungen Vetus Testamentum Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Barrie Bowman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Shef¿eld, UK Cory D. Crawford is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies in the Department of Classics and World Religions, Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, USA Steed Vernyl Davidson is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Paci¿c Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, USA Michaela Geiger is Lecturer (Akademische Rätin) of Hebrew Bible at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany Mark K. George is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, USA Ann Jeffers is Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at Heythrop College, University of London, UK Victor H. Matthews is Professor of Religious Studies and Dean of the College of Humanities and Public Affairs at Missouri State University in Spring¿eld, Missouri, USA Gert T. M. Prinsloo is Professor of Semitic Languages in the Department of Ancient Languages at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa Alison Scho¿eld is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaic Studies at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, USA

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INTRODUCTION Mark K. George

Interest in the critical study of space continues to grow in both biblical and religious studies. In the six years since Constructions of Space I was published (2007), studies in critical space by biblical scholars have become more common, to the point where there now are sections dedicated to the topic in both the national and international Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, and books and articles in which space is a central focus are appearing with increasing frequency.1 This scholarship is beginning to bring some balance within biblical studies to the emphasis on time and history, by turning attention to the importance and presence of space and place within the biblical texts, ancient Israel, and the ancient Near East. It is doing so in part through its recognition that space is not simply the backdrop or neutral context within which the events of the past took place and the people of the past lived, moved, died, wrote, and over which they fought and celebrated. Rather, space is something societies create and produce in the physical world, and therefore space needs investigation and analysis. Space is a rich topic for investigation in the Hebrew Bible, and critical spatial theory is important for this work because it makes possible analysis of space in its various aspects. There is the physical, material aspect of space and the world in which ancient people and societies lived and which they manipulated, changed, adapted, and otherwise engaged as they related to it and were affected by it. The ways in which ancient peoples created their spaces depended on their ideas about space. Just like modern people, ancient peoples understood the world in certain ways, conceiving and thinking about it using abstractions, idealizations, systems, measures, and other logical means. They knew, for example, that throwing a mill stone off a city wall would result in that object 1. Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp, eds., Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography, and Narrative (LHBOTS 481; New York: T&T Clark International, 2007).

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falling toward the ground, rather than Àoating up to the sky, just as they knew human beings, whether or not they were prophets, did not normally ascend toward the heavens. Space also had meaning and signi¿cance. People, individually and corporately, give meanings to spaces as part of their interaction and relationship with it. These meanings are not merely logical expressions of space. They articulate something in addition to, or beyond, the logical and conceptual. A temple could be built according to a logical plan, for example, but the cosmological associations, representations, and signi¿cations it had for those who used it expressed social meanings beyond its physical materials and layout. From the beginning, biblical scholarship on space has been especially attentive to the physical, mental, and symbolic aspects of space. As scholars continue this work, they increasingly are attentive to other aspects, such as time and the temporal features of space. Part of what creates and produces space, marking it off from other spaces or other uses of the same space, is time, such as festivals, seasonal activity, and daily changes (morning, noon, sunset, night). So, too, do both the passage of time and anticipations of times to come create and produce the spaces people inhabit. Memory, whether individual or corporate, plays an important role in the production of space. The human body in space is another aspect receiving increased attention from biblical scholars. The spaces and territories societies create, produce, inhabit, destroy, and rebuild depend on the existence and presence of human beings in them. It is the human body that experiences the physical realities of space, such as light and darkness, heat and cold, rock or water, height and depth, up, down, left, and right. People use their senses and their minds to conceive of space and give it logical classi¿cations and organization. The meanings and signi¿cations of space emerge from the minds and emotions of human beings in space. People live by those meanings, and they react, promote, perpetuate, challenge, change, and reinterpret them. The critical study of space in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East does face certain challenges. Perhaps most signi¿cant is the limited nature of the materials being examined. Any examination of ancient Israel’s space that depends exclusively on textual evidence has no direct access to the ways in which ancient Israelites materially inhabited, adapted, practiced, and realized their spaces. At most such practices can be inferred; they cannot be observed. This absence of observable physical space is balanced by instances where archaeological evidence gives scholars a glimpse at how ancient peoples might have created, produced, and practiced physical space. In most cases, however, the meanings of those spaces for their inhabitants is not recoverable. Archaeologists may 1

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infer such meanings, but they are not, of course, the same as selfarticulations of them. Only Qumran, where texts and material remains of a community have been found together, presents a different situation. Beyond the evidentiary challenges lies the issue of what constitutes “space.” Scholars de¿ne space and place in different ways, as do different disciplines. Even when de¿nitions are stated, how space is classi¿ed poses certain challenges, since space is not a series of discrete, independent elements, but rather an interdependent whole. These de¿nitional challenges point up others, such as which theoretical work and theory bases inform the critical study of space. In biblical studies, the work of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, and that of the American geographer and urban planner Edward W. Soja, gained early prominence among biblical scholars.2 Additionally, the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau has been part of the discussion.3 Recently, the number of scholars providing theoretical grounding to the work of biblical scholars is expanding to include Gillian Rose, Martina Löw, Jeff Malpas, and Jonathan Z. Smith, among others.4 The work of all these scholars is represented in the essays in this volume. As a result, the ways in which the scholars in this volume view and approach their critical work is varied, with some analyzing the biblical texts for conceptual spaces, others for symbolic space and the meanings ascribed to them within the texts, and still others bridging material space, the body, textual conceptions of space, and the symbolic meanings of those spaces. The critical study of space in the Hebrew Bible offers new insights and understandings of the various ways in which biblical writers 2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas; Boston: Beacon, 1994); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27; Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 4. Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1506; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001); Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993); Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 1

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understood and experienced space, how their ideas and conceptions informed the texts they wrote, and the range of social meanings and signi¿cations spaces held for them. These insights and understandings extend beyond recognition, for example, that biblical authors shared with their ancient Near Eastern counterparts a tripartite cosmology, in which the created order consisted of the heavens, the earth, and under the earth, all of which was surrounded by the primordial waters. It includes how such cosmological notions were represented in the constructions of the vessels built by Noah and Njta-napišti during the Àood (Cory D. Crawford). Other insights also are possible, such as how daily routines of the body produce Israel’s identity and spaces (Michaela Geiger). Memory plays a signi¿cant role in the creation and habitation of space (Victor H. Matthews), and changes to a people’s memories of places can be vital to their continued existence (Barrie Bowman). Spatial ideas are shaped by social constructions of gender (Ann Jeffers), constructions that sometimes must be challenged if women in the Bible, in particular, are to have space of their own (Steed Vernyl Davidson). Analysis of space can shed new light on how a prophet embodies and demonstrates the prophetic message (Gert T. M. Prinsloo). And examination of space can reveal its social nature as part of a society’s (Mark K. George) or social group’s (Alison Scho¿eld) identity and existence in the world. The nine essays in this volume are by scholars who have been engaged in the critical study of space in Hebrew Bible and Qumran studies over the past several years. Their essays share perspectives, questions, themes, and approaches of various sorts. All of them, for example, presume the social nature of space and thus the idea that social issues, conÀicts, categories, and biases ¿nd expression in spatial practices, explanations, and signi¿cations. There also are other ways in which the essays link to one another, based on shared themes and foci. Four essays attend to issues of social formation, identity, and the social production of space. Crawford explains the differences between the vessels constructed by Noah and Njta-napišti in their respective Àood stories through a comparison of each vessel with temples in their respective cultures. He then engages critical spatial theory and modern architectural theory to explain the differences in the two vessels and why they would be so different. Geiger reads the Shema in Deut 6:4–9 as a programmatic statement by Moses for how individual Israelites may realize Israel’s social identity as the liberated people of YHWH in the Promised Land. Through their bodies, the buildings they inhabit, and their daily routines, the people create their own space, a process involving both imagination and action. George uses insights from the critical study of space to provide an answer as to how the book of Numbers is 1

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structured. He argues Num 1–4 set forth a socio-spatial organization for Israel that depends on both Israel’s covenant with YHWH and tabernacle conceptual space. Israel’s existence as the people of YHWH requires their acceptance of this socio-spatial organization, and the book of Numbers explores whether or not the people can do so. Social organization also is a concern of Scho¿eld, who examines how the Qumran community, the YaÜad, managed to maintain their identity as priests without a sanctuary. She argues that the spatial practices and right praxis of the YaÜad produced for them an alternative priestly space that served as a counterspace to the Jerusalem Temple. In each of these essays, questions of social identity and the space of society are at issue. Two essays focus attention on the relationship of gender and space. Jeffers examines how women tend not only to be written out of the Deuteronomistic History, but also out of Israel’s space, and thus are hidden from geographical view within the centralization program of the Deuteronomistic composition. The stories of the woman of Endor and Queen Jezebel, however, operate outside the spatial boundaries of nationhood portrayed in that composition, and thus break Deuteronomistic conceptual space. Their fates suggest serious consequences for women, both socially and religiously. Davidson takes up the question of gendered space in his reading of Jeremiah, especially Jer 44. Noting the generally negative portrayal of women, women’s experiences, and thus the spaces women are portrayed as inhabiting, Davidson argues Jer 44 presents an alternative space for women, one that simultaneously offers a different representation of women in the book. Located in Egypt, and thus beyond the space of Jerusalem, women participate in worshipping the Queen of Heaven and thereby challenge the prophet’s voice. In this way they also challenge and transcend the gendered space assigned to them by the book’s dominant voice. Jeffers and Davidson bring into the critical study of space in the Hebrew Bible awareness of feminist critiques of geography, of the gendered ideologies at work in biblical portrayals of space, and the social preferences that go unexamined within them. The three remaining essays address space and memory. Matthews and Bowman are explicitly concerned with space and memory. Matthews considers how memory affects the conceptual and symbolic aspects of a space or place. He is particularly interested in how memories associated with a space can be manipulated to serve various social, political, and economic purposes at later times. Spatial symbolisms in a society’s collective memory are malleable. The importance of memory and space also is central to Bowman’s work, as he argues Jeremiah uses the power of Israel’s memory of one place, Egypt, to replace it with a new place of 1

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power, Babylon. Bowman argues that, in Jer 1–24, the prophet gradually works to replace Israel’s memory of Egypt with Babylon, where the deity is doing a “new” thing. These essays bring to the fore the role and importance of memory in constructing symbolic meanings for space and the effects memories can have in shaping social identity. Memory plays a more subtle role in Prinsloo’s essay, in which he uses a spatial reading of Hab 1–3 to bring new perspectives on the prophet’s change from despair to a confession of trust. By examining the spaces inhabited by Habakkuk in these chapters, Prinsloo traces the prophet’s transformation and emotional journey. The spaces Habakkuk inhabits mirror his relationship to the deity. Initially in a space that is distant from Jerusalem and YHWH, his memories of the past help return him to renewed con¿dence and trust in YHWH in the space of Jerusalem and the Temple. As in Bowman’s paper, memories are important for the future, although in a way distinct from how they function in Jeremiah. The ancient Israelites did not just live in history. They also lived in space. Some of the spaces in which they lived were created and produced by the ancient Israelites. Others, such as Egypt or Babylon, were created and produced by other people, and thus were foreign to the Israelites. Within all these spaces, however, Israel learned to live, move, and survive. The critical study of space helps modern scholars better understand how they did so, as the essays in this volume demonstrate.

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NOAH’S ARCHITECTURE: THE ROLE OF SACRED SPACE IN ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN FLOOD MYTHS* Cory D. Crawford

In his 1991 article “What Ship Goes There: The Flood Narratives in the Gilgamesh Epic and Genesis Considered in Light of Ancient Near Eastern Temple Ideology,” Steven Holloway related the vessels built by Noah and by Njta-napišti to each other and explained their incongruent dimensions via an appeal to “ancient Near Eastern temple ideology.”1 He argued that the differences in the construction narratives of Gen 6–9 and Gilgamesh XI are the result of differing temple forms—but similar temple ideologies—in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. His groundbreaking work brings to light aspects of sacred space that have remained unrecognized, due in large measure to the misunderstanding of fundamental qualities of sacred space in the respective cultures. In the present study, I will ¿rst look at sources and outcomes of this misunderstanding in the academic approach to the Àood vessels, followed by a detailed comparison of each with their respective architectural analogues. I will use these as background for discussion of the suitability of “ideology” as a generative paradigm for describing the nature of the relationship between the texts and the cultures that produced them. It will become apparent that, while I agree with Holloway that the sacred architecture and structures described in Genesis and Gilgamesh are related, I do not see the connection as motivated by the mental process that the label * I am indebted to many individuals for productive conversations and helpful feedback on various aspects and earlier versions of the present study: Jon Levenson, Joel Baden, Baruch Schwartz, Irene Winter, Mark George, Bradley Parker, and Andrew George deserve mention. Thanks are also due the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Utah for providing a venue for the presentation of an earlier draft of this study. 1. Steven Holloway, “What Ship Goes There? The Flood Narratives in the Gilgamesh Epic and Genesis Considered in Light of Ancient Near Eastern Temple Ideology,” ZAW 103 (1991): 328–55. 1

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“ideology” implies. Rather, I look to the hermeneutical approach to architectural meaning expounded by Lindsay Jones, with its emphasis on superabundance of meaning and ritual-architectural events, to provide a model that better accounts for the evidence in both cases. In the end, the conversation that Holloway began opens the view toward a broader understanding of the inÀuence of sacred space in the ancient Near East than has yet been observed. Scholarly Treatments of the Flood Vessels The divine plans given to the ancient Near Eastern Àood heroes were curious indeed. In the Mesopotamian tale preserved in Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Njta-napišti recounts to Gilgamesh, who was himself on a journey seeking immortality, how he escaped the Àood and gained eternal life by listening to the god Ea’s surreptitious counsel to build a boat. This highly unusual boat was to measure 120 cubits (10 nindanu) long, wide, and high, to be divided into seven horizontal levels, with nine compartments for each level.2 As opposed to Njta-napišti’s boat, the Priestly image of Noah’s ark is rectangular with dimensions of thirty cubits high by ¿fty cubits wide by three hundred cubits long, to be made of three levels with a door in its side (Gen 6:14–16). Neither of the two Àood accounts that preserve the dimensions of the salvi¿c vessel3 displays a structure that accords with what we know of ancient nautical construction. No visual or other evidence survives that would authenticate either of the two dimensions or description. These dimensions are especially intriguing because of their existence in narratives acknowledged by scholars to be related at some level—the Àood narratives—but this connection also makes the divergent measurements all the more puzzling. It is this fact that led Holloway to describe the appearance of the vessels as a “scholarly embarrassment.”4 Scholars have occasionally attempted to explain the unusual nature of these constructions and their relationship to each other because, of the comparanda extant between the Mesopotamian literature and that of the Bible, perhaps none is so visible nor sensational as the Àood traditions. Since the recovery of Mesopotamian Àood narratives, the relationship 2. Gilgamesh XI 57–63; translations follow Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 3. Dimensions may well have been included in Atra¨asis, but the text concerning the construction of the vessel is badly damaged. 4. Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 328.

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between the biblical Àood account and its predecessors has been recognized, even if the details of transmission remain obscure.5 While in some features the congruence between the Bible and the Mesopotamian traditions is nearly exact, others are not explicable by the hypothesis of a direct borrowing of the currently extant materials.6 It is also apparent that each author adapted details to the exigencies of the narrative and tradition in which the stories are embedded.7 The analogous features of these two narratives have provided scholars not only with evidence of the broader cultural context of the stories, but also with a counterpoint against which to raise questions about the distinctive concerns of the respective authors. The parade example is the release of birds toward the end of the inundation: Njta-napišti releases a dove, a swallow, and a raven, while Noah releases a raven and two doves.8 Crucial to the understanding of both Àood narratives is the detailed description of the structure and construction of the boats. The comparison of the two has been made since George A. Smith realized he had found a tradition akin to that of the Bible in a cuneiform tablet from Nineveh. Since then, a variety of explanations for the apparent congruence have been proffered. Some scholars argued, for example, that the Bible exhibits a more realistic description of nautical construction in contrast with the outlandish Babylonian version. André Parrot’s popular treatment held that the biblical account “se rapprochent beaucoup plus de la nautique moderne” whereas the Babylonian vessel was “beaucoup moins apte à une vraie navigation.”9 Others, such as James F. Armstrong, considered the rendering of the Babylonian account in biblical texts to result in dimensions that “have distinctly more aesthetic and rational 5. Jacob J. Finkelstein remarks that the interrelation between the biblical and Mesopotamian Àood stories “is acknowledged on all sides,” and that “there appears to be some organic connection among all of them” (“Bible and Babel: A Comparative Study of the Hebrew and Babylonian Religious Spirit,” in Essential Papers on Israel and the Ancient Near East [ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn; New York: New York University Press, 1991], 355–80 [here 360]). 6. The similarities have been widely discussed since the nineteenth century. For a detailed exposition of parallels, see Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 224–60. For the unique contributions of the Atra¨asis epic to the understanding of the biblical account, see Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Atrahasis Epic and Its Signi¿cance for Our Understanding of Genesis 1–9,” BA 40 (1977): 147–55. 7. See E. Kraeling, “The Earliest Hebrew Flood Story,” JBL 66 (1947): 281 and passim; Frymer-Kensky, “The Atrahasis Epic.” 8. Or one dove, twice. 9. André Parrot, Bible et archéologie (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1970; repr. of Déluge et Arche de Noé [Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1952]), 50. 1

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appeal.”10 Raphael Patai, following rabbinic tradition, found idealized nautical dimensions in the biblical account. Like Parrot and Armstrong, he thought it evident that, as opposed to the “huge cube” in Gilgamesh, Noah’s tƝvâ was much more “shipshape”: “relations between the length, width, and height of Noah’s ark (30:5:3) are such as might be observed in ancient times at any seaport in which war galleys might be seen.”11 That is, the Israelite version accords more with maritime realities than does the Babylonian. Other attempts to explain the structure of Noah’s ark have emphasized its place within the Priestly (P) narrative of the Pentateuch, in which the natural point of comparison is of course the wilderness tabernacle. Gordon Wenham, for example, attempts to explain the dimensions of Noah’s ark as a proportional multiple of the tabernacle courtyard area.12 As Joseph Blenkinsopp points out, however, these types of arguments have not gained wide assent, to the extent that one must “renounce the attempt to draw any signi¿cant conclusions from a comparison of the dimensions of Noah’s ark with those of the wilderness sanctuary.”13 The lack of dimensional congruence, however, is less important for Blenkinsopp and others than are other af¿nities between ark and tabernacle: [S]ince the physical constructs—the ark of Noah and the sanctuary—are built according to divine speci¿cations, there is a certain correspondence between the spatial and temporal axes of the work. Thus the whole of reality, in its spatial and temporal aspects, is shown to rest on the word ¿rst spoken at creation.14

Wenham, too, notes that “in Exod 25–31, there are…parallels in phraseology with the directions for building the tabernacle and its furniture that suggest that both ark and tabernacle were seen as a sanctuary for the righteous.”15 Claus Westermann similarly argued that, since “the place 10. James F. Armstrong, “A Critical Note on Genesis VI 16 aĮ,” VT 10 (1960): 331. 11. Raphael Patai, The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4–5. 12. “The surface area of the ark was thus three times as much as that of the tabernacle courtyard” (Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 [WBC 1; Waco: Word, 1987], 173). 13. Joseph Blenkinsopp, “The Structure of P,” CBQ 38 (1976): 286. On the dif¿culties of determining the measurements of the tabernacle, see Michael Homan, To Your Tents, O Israel! The Terminology, Function, Form, and Symbolism of Tents in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (CHANE 12; Leiden: Brill, 2002), 142–67. 14. Blenkinsopp, “Structure of P,” 277. 15. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 172. 1

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where God allows his glory to appear [i.e. the tabernacle] is the place whence the life of the people is preserved,” the construction of the ark is consonant with it “because by means of it God preserved humanity from destruction.”16 It thus appears that there are two main trends when it comes to the explanation of the dimensions of Noah’s ark vis-à-vis the Gilgamesh comparanda: either to explain the divergences as the result of biblical demythologizing—favoring more realistic, “historical” proportions— or to suppress the comparison to Gilgamesh altogether in favor of a comparison to other P structures.17 Both are ultimately unsatisfying stances, for different reasons. In the ¿rst case, the comparative conclusions seem emblematic of the larger problem of comparison between the Bible and surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures: claims to uniqueness are sometimes not made only on the basis of a unique con¿guration of cultural symbols (which claims could obviously be made of any of Israel’s neighbors), but also on the requirement that Israel’s sui generis cultural constellation is superior to those of its neighbors.18 In the case of the proportions of the ark, biblical tradition is thus understood to manifest itself more technologically, rationally, and aesthetically appealing. We have so little evidence, however, of what would have constituted nautical aesthetic appeal for an ancient Israelite, much less of their maritime knowledge, that these conclusions are untenable.19 In the second 16. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11 (trans. John J. Scullion; CC; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 421. 17. More recent work on the use of ancient Near Eastern myth in the Hebrew Bible has tended to be more circumspect about the assignment of relative values to Israelite and broader ancient Near Eastern cultural processes. See, for example, Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 54–65, esp. 59. For an argument against demythologization and historicization altogether, see Bernard Batto, Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), in which he seeks to show that “myth permeates virtually every layer of biblical tradition from the earliest to the latest” (1). 18. On this, see the insightful comments of Jon Levenson (Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible [New York: HarperCollins, 1985], 10ff.) and Peter Machinist (“The Question of Distinctiveness in Ancient Israel,” in Ah, Assyria… Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor [ed. Mordechai Cogan and Israel Eph’al; ScrHier 33; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991], 196–212). 19. Ralph K. Pedersen attempted to bridge the gap between the ancient tales and our knowledge of ancient seafaring by an appeal to a “sewn-boat” type of nautical construction (“Was Noah’s Ark a Sewn Boat?,” BAR 31, no. 3 [2005]: 18–23, 55– 56). He went so far as to argue that Sîn-lƝqi-unninni, whom Pedersen thinks was 1

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case, as Blenkinsopp himself concluded, the dimensions of the ark are ultimately inexplicable on the basis of intra-P comparanda, the important observations on other similar features of tabernacle and ark notwithstanding.20 Ark of Noah and Temple of Solomon A third way exists, outlined in large measure by Holloway and already anticipated, if dismissed in the end, by Blenkinsopp: “in their basic design both Noah’s ark and Solomon’s temple reÀect the three-decker world of ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies, a feature which, for fairly obvious reasons, could not be reproduced in the wilderness sanctuary.”21 As noted above, Holloway would take this observation further, arguing that the ark “in Genesis was patterned on an idealized Solomonic temple.”22 A review of the details of the ark construction in P and of the Jerusalem temple in 1 Kings is important at this juncture. We recall that, according to Gen 6:14–16, the ark was to be made three hundred cubits long, ¿fty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. In 1 Kgs 6:2–10, the interior dimensions of the main hall of the temple are presented in the same order: sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. On the surface these dimensions overlap only in their height, but once one takes into account the thicknesses of the walls of the main hall as well as the width of the yƗÑîa! (“storied structure,” 1 Kgs 6:5) surrounding the hall on three sides, the full exterior length and width would be probably responsible for the addition of the construction details, “made an accurate record of the techniques of his time” (23). Though the attempt is novel and intriguing, especially as far as it opens the view toward different processes of construction, it ultimately fails to explain the more glaring dif¿culties of the narrative, such as the demonstrably non-nautical dimensions and divisions of the space of the Gilgamesh boat. Of course, Pedersen’s work is situated within a spectrum of scientists, specialists, and fundamentalists reading the Àood narratives with an eye toward discovering some external, veri¿able reality behind them, beginning perhaps as early as the fourth century C.E. and continuing into the twentieth century. See discussion in J. David Pleins, When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8–11. 20. One should not fail to mention here that, for their part, Assyriologists in recent decades rarely even comment on the relationship between the structures of the two vessels. 21. Blenkinsopp, “Structure of P,” 286. In a footnote to this citation he goes on to observe brieÀy that the tripartite structures of Solomon’s temple and Noah’s ark also use overlapping terminology. 22. Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 329. 1

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close to, if not exactly, one hundred by ¿fty cubits, thus making the temple and ark correlates in two of three dimensions.23 Further, the yƗÑîa! surrounding the temple is divided into three stories (1 Kgs 6:6): ta­tǀnâ (bottom), tîkǀnâ (middle), and šƟlîšît (third). These are cognate with the three decks of the ark (Gen 6:16): ta­tiyyîm (bottom), šƟniyyim (second), and šƟlišîm (third). Finally, often unrecognized is the relevance of the position of the door that leads to the temple stories. In 1 Kgs 6:8, the entrance to the three-decker structure is speci¿cally noted as being on the right side of the house, just as Gen 6:16 famously places the door of the three-decker ark in its side.24 The note in Genesis has perhaps most blatantly raised exegetical questions about the seaworthiness of Noah’s vessel. Westermann puts it most bluntly: “This sentence tells us very clearly that the ark that Noah is to construct is not a ship. The door is mentioned here because the entrance into and exit from the ark form important stages in the narrative.”25 The existence of the door, however, may be the result of more than literary constraint. First Kings also reports that the entrance to the storied structure of the Jerusalem temple, separate from the main hall, was on the (right) side. In these texts, both of which are spare in detail relative to other building accounts, it is striking that the side door should be clearly indicated in close conjunction with the cognate terminology. One also notes that this spatial congruence is manifest in the fact that both the ark and the storied structure surrounding the temple were made mostly of wood.26 Each of these structures is, furthermore, described using similar verbal patterns and processes, 23. See the reconstructions of Th. A. Busink and others in Busink, Der Tempel von Jerusalem von Salomo bis Herodes (2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1970), 705–10. This is also the measure for which Michael Chyutin argues (Architecture and Utopia in the Temple Era [trans. Richard Flantz; Library of Second Temple Studies 58; New York: T&T Clark International, 2006], 106, 109; see also 90–95), but Chyutin retrojects the information from Ezekiel onto the Solomonic temple, with some changes. Holloway also accepts this measure (“What Ship Goes There,” 348–49). 24. Holloway, who marshals the most detailed comparative evidence between the two texts, discusses the fact that both have doorways, but not that they are speci¿cally positioned in the side of the structures (“What Ship Goes There,” 349). 25. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 421. 26. That this has often been understood as serving a non-sacral purpose—owing to the note in 1 Kgs 6:6 that the structure did not penetrate the walls of the main hall and the LXX understanding of it as completely separate—has also likely contributed to its relevance for the ark construction narrative going almost entirely unrecognized. The closest ancient Near Eastern analogue to the temple of Solomon, the temple of Ain Dara in northern Syria, possesses such a surrounding structure that was adorned with wall reliefs, suggesting that the space did not serve mere administrative or storage functions. 1

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culminating in the so-called completion formulae, using the root klh in the Piel with object suf¿x immediately after the construction of the roof.27 Taken together, as Holloway notes, these structural homologies make it “unlikely that chance could account for the correspondence in dimensional proportions and structure between Noah’s ark and the Solomonic temple.”28 Njta-napišti’s “Ship” and the Ziqqurrat of Marduk at Babylon The connection above, between Noah’s ark and the temple of Solomon, is rendered more plausible by observations made, though not widely discussed, by Assyriologists regarding the congruence of Njta-napišti’s vessel and the ziqqurrat.29 Paul Haupt, Max Mallowan, and Jean-Jacques Glassner all (apparently independently) identi¿ed the homologies in Gilgamesh XI and texts describing Babylonian ziqqurrats.30 Glassner indicates the similarities, not only in the conjunction of cosmic geography and Njta-napišti’s ark, but also the metric relationship between ark and ziqqurrat.31 He calls attention to the Esagil tablet, a text concerned with the dimensions of Marduk’s temple precinct in Babylon, mostly with Marduk’s ziqqurrat.32 This text was composed at a time of competing standards of measure, viz. the Kassite/Early Neo-Babylonian and standard Neo-Babylonian, which Andrew George dates as early as the late eighth century B.C.E., even though the surviving copies are Late Babylonian.33 This text clari¿es the problem of the equivalent length, width, and height of the Àood boat in that it shows that total height could equal length and width without rendering an exact cube, as many have

27. See D. W. Gooding, “Temple Speci¿cations: A Dispute in Logical Arrangement Between the MT and the LXX,” VT 17 (1967): 143–72, esp. 148–50, and cf. 1 Kgs 6:9, 14 and Gen 6:16. The use of klh Piel with an object suf¿x, in the sense of completing a project, is rare in the Hebrew Bible. 28. Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 349. 29. Much of the following Assyriological ground has been covered by Holloway, though I update some of the bibliography and emphasize some different aspects for reasons that will become apparent below. 30. See discussion in Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 338–39. 31. Jean-Jacques Glassner, “La division quinaire de la terre,” Akkadica 40 (1984): 17–34 (here 19). 32. For edition, bibliography, commentary, and translation, see Andrew R. George, Babylonian Topographical Texts (OLA; Leuven: Peeters, 1992), 109–19, 414–34. 33. Ibid., 110. 1

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erroneously assumed the Mesopotamian Àood boat to be. The dimensions of the ziqqurrat are given in each standard of measure, ¿rst 10 × 10 × 10 nindanu (approx. 90 × 90 × 90 m) in the older (arû) standard.34 The next section gives the dimensions of six cellae that comprise the ziqqurrat-temple. Finally, in the last section before the colophon, the measurements of the entire ziqqurrat are given in the later standard (aslu). Each of the seven levels are listed, with increasingly smaller horizontal dimensions as one goes up. The bottom level is 15 × 15 and the sum of the heights of the seven levels is 15.35 Thus Etemenanki is not to be understood as an exact cube, but instead a familiar stepped pyramid with the horizontal measurements of the base corresponding to the total vertical rise.36 The connections between these texts made by Glassner are perhaps obvious at this point: in Gilgamesh, the dimensions of the Àood vessel are given by Njta-napišti as exactly those of the ziqqurrat of Babylon: 10 nindanu for length, width, and height.37 What is more, in each text the length, breadth, and height are said to correspond to each other, using the verb ma¨Ɨru in the Gt stem. The dimensional correspondence, moreover, is with the older (Kassite/Early Neo-Babylonian) standard, a fact highlighted by the lack of ma¨Ɨru (Gt stem) in the section of the Esagil text dealing with the dimensions of the later standard.38 The seven-tiered structure is obviously congruent with Gilgamesh XI.39 Glassner points

34. Ibid., 117. 35. The line for the sixth level is missing and has been restored by scholars. George discusses the reasons for favoring a restoration of the line between 41 and 42 in ibid., 431–32. 36. Of course, this presumes that the restoration is correct, which I take it to be for all the reasons detailed in George, Babylonian Topographical Texts. Without the restoration, the height still approximates the base lengths: 14 nindanu. 37. “L’arche et la tour ont donc mêmes dimensions, la seconde s’inscrivant dans le volume de la première” (Jean-Jacques Glassner, “L’Etemenanki, armature du cosmos,” NABU 32 [2002]: 32–34, here 34). 38. Where instead the correspondence is signaled by kƯ pî. 39. Although the explicit reference to seven levels of the ziqqurrat in the Esagil text is in the section with the measurements of the later standard, seven-level construction is known much earlier, as noted by Parrot, Bible et archéologie, 70–71. See also the treatment of a Neo-Sumerian “Ziqqurrat-Plan” tablet from Nippur, which preserves a top-down view of a seven-tiered structure, in Walther Sallaberger, “Der ‘Ziqqurrat-Plan’ von Nippur und exorzistische Riten in neusumerischer Zeit: Eine Anmerkungen,” in Ex Mesopotamia et Syria Lux: Festschrift für Manfred Dietrich (ed. O. Loretz, K. A. Metzler, and H. Schaudig; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002), 610. 1

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also to the nine-part division of each horizontal level as related to the 3 × 3 ÑuppƗn measure of the base of Etemenanki,40 and to the nine-part division of the world in Enki and Nin¨ursag.41 The similarity, then, in Gilgamesh and the Esagil tablet calls into question the designation of the Àood vessel as an exact cube—both make it clear, using closely similar terminology, that the length, breadth, and height correspond, but the ziqqurrat is not to be understood as a cube, as the Esagil text makes clear and as Holloway has demonstrated.42 Not only does Glassner draw the parallel between this text and the vessel of the Mesopotamian Àood tradition,43 but he also brings in evidence that it accurately reÀects a material Babylonian reality. The nindanu, approximately 9 meters according to the older standard, correlates closely with the base of the ziqqurrat excavated at Babylon: the north, east, west, and south faces measure 91.66 m, 92.52 m, 91.43 m, and 91.10 m respectively.44 The features common to Njta-napišti’s boat and to the ziqqurrat(-temple) of Babylon are, as argued for the biblical temple and ark, not coincidental, and the stronger Mesopotamian case strengthens the likelihood of the identi¿cation of at least some shared features of Noah’s ark and Solomon’s temple. Holloway seeks to strengthen these ties by an appeal to an ancient Near Eastern “temple ideology” expounded most systematically by John Lundquist.45 He begins with a selection of Lundquist’s propositions about the typological ancient Near Eastern temple and shows how the Àood “boats” are situated securely within these propositions and thus how they are “best seen as products of ancient Near Eastern temple ideology, expressing both general and acculturated ideals of design, function and mythology.”46 In each proposition, the close af¿liation of Àood myth and cosmogony brings Àood vessel and sacred architecture closer by de¿nition. In light of the ease of relation of this typology to Àood vessels, the shared structure and vocabulary seem all the more relevant and coherent. I shall have more to say about the problems of “temple ideology” below, 40. Glassner, “L’Etemenanki,” 34. 41. Glassner, “La division quinaire,” 19. 42. Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 339–42. 43. Glassner, “L’Etemenanki,” 34. 44. Ibid., 33. 45. Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” passim; John M. Lundquist, “What Is a Temple? A Preliminary Typology,” in The Quest for the Kingdom of God: Essays in Honor of G. E. Mendenhall (ed. H. B. Huffmon, F. A. Spina, and A. R. Green; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1993), 205–20. 46. Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 329. 1

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but for now it is important to point out that the relationship between ark and temple thus runs much deeper than their linguistic and structural parallels. Explaining the literary appearance of the Àood vessels as products of cultural notions of sacred space best accounts for the striking differences between the Àood vessels in each tradition. It allows the use of a similar conceptual framework—the congruence of Àood vessel and monumental sacred architecture—to be applied to different cultural forms, viz., Israelite temple and Babylonian ziqqurrat. This observation allows us to reject unequivocally the pejorative analyses of Mesopotamian ark construction discussed above, which saw little value in the “unrealistic” use of “fanciful” proportions and championed the biblical dimensions as more realistic than those in Gilgamesh. If the af¿liation of ark and temple is correct, the Mesopotamian and biblical texts exemplify equivalent phenomena: the different dimensions given in each are the result of different architectural realities, rather than some other aesthetic or nautical rationale. Were there any greater “realism” exhibited in Gen 6, it would be merely an accident of this phenomenon. The Function of Sacred Space in Gilgamesh XI and Genesis 6–9 If we admit the intentional relationship of ark and temple in the Àood traditions discussed above, the reasons behind such a relationship remain to be discussed. Treatment of this particular incorporation of sacred space in mythic narrative will not only Àesh out some of the narrative weight carried by the connection of Àood and temple, but it will also provide occasion to consider the relevance of and implications for current approaches to meaning in architecture. Gilgamesh In Gilgamesh, the Àood myth is central, at least thematically, to the Standard Babylonian version of the epic, wherein Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality is a prominent, if not the main thrust of the text. After the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh becomes preoccupied with death, and ventures out in search of the way to immortality. The climax of this search is his visit to the only mortal to have obtained eternal life: Njta-napišti, the Àood hero. Of the well-known details of the Àood, some are particularly relevant in this discussion. Ea tips off Njta-napišti to the intention of the gods to bring the deluge, and, as we have seen, tells him to build a boat, whose sides are equal and whose roof is like the apsû. Thus already an ontological connection has been made between Àood vessel and divine 1

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abode.47 Njta-napišti then asks what he shall say to those who ask what he is doing. Ea responds that he should tell them “‘For sure Enlil has conceived a hatred of me! / I cannot dwell in your city! / I cannot tread [on] Enlil’s ground! / [I shall] go down to the Apsû, to live with Ea, my master; / he will rain down on you plenty!’ ” (XI 39–43).48 Since this answer is supposed to satisfy the curiosity of the onlookers, one wonders whether it was understood that he needed a boat to reach the dwelling place of Ea, or whether, in light of the connection with the ziqqurrattemple, the boat, roofed like the apsû itself, indicated the solution to the fact that he could no longer tread Enlil’s ground by dint of its evoking a temple. More than one intended meaning was possible, Ea’s response being “loaded with double meanings”49 that have the effect of misleading the crowd as well as portending the coming doom. The formal connection between ziqqurrat (= divine dwelling) and ark may have fostered this deception among Njta-napišti’s interlocutors, but may have been well understood by an ancient audience. When construction began, the community assembled to assist in the building, and Njta-napišti rewarded them as construction proceeds with ample provisions: “They were celebrating as on the feast-days of the New Year itself!” (XI 75). The Babylonian New Year festival is connected with the victory of Marduk and the building of his temple, and though this may be more simile than allusion, Andrew George makes a comparison to a Neo-Babylonian text that describes similar events related, not to nautical construction, but to temple building.50 George concludes from this comparison that “Njta-napišti, like any king committed to a pious deed, wanted his new construction to be free from taint that would compromise its proper function.”51 The comparison also constitutes another point of connection between ark and temple. In this light, the celebration as at the New Year’s festival appears to be more than literary Àourish; rather, it further casts the boat in terms of temple building traditions. At the end of the Àood, after the calamity has passed, the gods must decide what to do with these survivors. Enlil himself enters Njta-napišti’s boat and brings out Njta-napišti and his wife. Njta-napišti tells Gilgamesh that Enlil “touched our foreheads, standing between us to bless us: / ‘In the past Njta-napišti was (one of) mankind, / but now Njta-napišti and

1

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

See also discussion of this “elaborate multiple entendre” in ibid., 341–43. All translations follow George, Gilgamesh Epic. Ibid., 511. For text and translation, see ibid., 513. Ibid.

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his woman shall be like us gods! / Njta-napišti shall dwell far away, at the mouth of the rivers!’ / They took me and settled me far away, at the mouth of the rivers” (XI 202–206). The entrance of the god already underscores the ark’s suitability for divine presence, and the apotheosis that follows is the culmination of the successful ark construction. The dwelling at the mouth of the rivers is itself consistent with divine habitation, as indicated in incantations that show the apsû to be located at the mouth of the rivers.52 In one case, the dwelling is indicated as being “between the twin mouths of the rivers” (ina birƯt pî narƗ[ti] kilallƗn),53 which reminds one of the West Semitic dwelling of El, “at the sources of the double stream / in the midst of the fountains of the double-deep” (mabbikê naharêmi / qirba apiqê tihƗmatêmi).54 Although no clear divinization occurs in the earlier Atra¨asis epic— on which Gilgamesh XI relies—the exaltation of the Àood hero is not original to Gilgamesh, though there it is most vital to the plot.55 Already in the conclusion of a Sumerian Àood narrative, the protagonist Ziusudra met a similar happy fate: after the Àood he “prostrated himself before An (and) Enlil / (Who) gave him life, like a god, / Elevated him to eternal life, like a god.”56 This tradition of apotheosis is also attested down to the third century B.C.E., as shown in the quotations of Berossus by Alexander Polyhistor.57 The names given the Àood heroes in both the Sumerian and Babylonian traditions point to their eventual immortality. 52. See discussion in ibid., 520. 53. CT 16 47, 197–98, quoted in ibid. For extended discussion of this and its geographic setting, see Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Mesopotamian Civilizations 8; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 103–6. 54. CTA 4.4.21–22; see F. M. Cross, “Prose and Poetry in the Mythic and Epic Texts from Ugarit,” HTR 67 (1974): 1–15 (here 4–5). 55. Lambert and Millard suggest that the apotheosis in Atra¨asis is simply lost in the damaged ending of the text (W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-ÑasƯs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969; repr. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999], 137). This position is certainly tenable given the fragmentary Ras Shamra tablet of Atra¨asis, which states in the seventh line, “I lived in the temple of Ea, my lord,” and in the last line before the colophon, the words spoken to Atra¨asis: “Life like the gods [you will] indeed [possess]” (ibid., 133). It is also possible that the absence of apotheosis is due to the fact that, in Atra¨asis, it seems that the reason for the efforts to control the human population in the ¿rst place arise from the fact that humans do not die naturally. It is only after the Àood that death is introduced among humans, and therefore Atra¨asis would be the only one not to experience it, with no apotheosis required. 56. Transliteration and trans. of M. Civil in ibid., 144–45. 57. For a concise summary and a translation of the relevant material, see ibid., 134–36. 1

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The epithet of the Àood hero in the ¿rst line of Tablet XI is Njta-napišti rnjqi, a direct rendering of the Sumerian zi.u4.sud3.ra4, both meaning “life of distant days.”58 The second part of Njta-napišti’s epithet, rnjqi, no doubt is explained in the Babylonian version when Njta-napišti is settled “far away” (ina rnjqi). This evidence shows abundantly that the equation of ark and temple is not at all out of place in Gilgamesh. Rather, its use supports and augments the (at least Standard Babylonian) epic’s main theme of the quest for immortality, playing on the microcosmic nature of the ark as well as on the eternal life of its inhabitants. The oft-discussed signi¿cance of temples as a world-in-miniature ¿ts well with the ark of Njta-napišti, who took aboard the ship everything necessary for the earth’s reconstitution. According to Glassner, the connection between ark and cosmos reveals its character as a microcosm: “Ce cube est une image du cosmos, l’arche formant, comme il a été souvent souligné, un microcosme, un univers condensé au sein d’un monde retourné au chaos.”59 He, however, divides the meaning of ark and ziqqurrat rather sharply: “Contrairement à l’arche, la tour n’est pas un microcosme,…elle en est l’armature ou l’ossature, sans laquelle le cosmos ne pourrait tenir ensemble.”60 I would adjust Glassner’s characterization, in the ¿rst place because, while there may be some ideal signi¿cance behind the seven- or ninepart division, the relationship to the material reality is broken: he understands both ziqqurrat and Àood vessel to be offshoots of an idealized vision of the cosmos, rather than reciprocally referential constructs, which the texts seem to indicate. It is dif¿cult to subscribe to the idea that the connection made to the ziqqurrat in Gilgamesh had little to do with the temple’s signi¿cation. At the very least one can point to the multiplicity of temple meaning in the sets of names given to particular sanctuaries in Mesopotamia. As George has remarked, there were at least two names by which temples were known in lexical lists: one that he calls “ceremonial,” used in hymns, incantations, and the like, and another used in more pedestrian contexts.61 These temples also had epithets, as evidenced by the very name E2-temen-anki. This was also an epithet of a temple at Eridu, and may have been borrowed for the ziqqurrat at

58. See George, Gilgamesh Epic, 152–53, for detailed discussion. 59. Glassner, “L’Etemenanki,” 33–34. 60. Ibid., 34. 61. See discussions in George, Babylonian Topographical Texts, 73–74 and in A. R. George, House Most High: The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia (Mesopotamian Civilizations 5; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1993), 2.

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Babylon.62 This basic evidence suggests there were multiple ways in which a given structure was conceptualized. In my view, then, if the ark is reÀective of the cosmos, it is so by means of its connection with the ziqqurrat. Furthermore, the text seems to take advantage of the possibility of plural signi¿cance in its adumbration of the ziqqurrat. The evidence discussed above, when taken together, shows that the close relationship drawn between ark and ziqqurrat in Gilgamesh enhances and elicits themes already extant in earlier narratives. It helps to dress the story—using terms and imagery relevant to ¿rst-millennium Babylonia— in an aura of the immortal by its clear nod to sacred space.63 Genesis 6–9 As noted above, one can observe a similar phenomenon operative in each text, but according to the cultural constraints manifest in each setting. As one should therefore expect, in the Àood account in Genesis we ¿nd themes and narrative thrust different from that observed in Gilgamesh. Genesis involves no quest for immortality, no ¿rsthand report of the Àood hero, no explicit apotheosis. The connection, however, is no less relevant in its own setting. To begin with, the Hebrew Bible demonstrates an operative ideal of temple as microcosm, as shown by, for example, Lawrence Stager and Jon Levenson in addition to Holloway.64 Stager argues that the temple mount and its environs became a “miniature cosmion,”65 and Levenson draws on biblical texts to show a bidirectional homology between temple and world, in which the temple represents creation and Yahweh’s creation, in turn, is conceptualized as a sanctuary. One of the ways in which this connection is manifest is in the relationship between the Priestly creation narrative and the construction of the tabernacle.66 Like Njtanapišti’s boat, the placement of all elements necessary for reconstitution of the world into a space structured after a microcosmic world enhances the story via a tacit reference to the temple. It can therefore be seen to take advantage of the complex of meanings centered on the temple.

62. George, House Most High, 149. 63. No doubt, this also had a reciprocal effect of reinforcing those conceptions that attached themselves to the temples; on this, see below. 64. For an excellent discussion and bibliography, see Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 78–99. 65. Lawrence Stager, “Jerusalem and the Garden of Eden,” ErIsr 26 (1999): 183*. 66. See table in Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 85–86.

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That temple and Àood are connected in Israelite literature is less surprising when other texts are brought to bear.67 Psalm 29 extols not simply Yahweh’s dominion over the waters, but reports that he is enthroned “over the Àood (lammabbûl).” According to Dennis Pardee, “it may be argued that mabbûl in v. 10 should be interpreted in a strictly Israelite sense, as indeed referring to the Israelite Flood tradition.”68 This suggests that the dwelling of Yahweh was a place not only with which the Àood was connected, but the Israelite space par excellence in which the Àood was evoked. Further correlation between creation, Àood, and temple is seen in the dates given in the Priestly source for the Àood and the building of the tabernacle, both of which occur on the vernal New Year.69 If Blenkinsopp is correct to draw on the nexus of Àood and Tabernacle in asserting that “for P the deluge served not just as a paradigm of judgment but also as the Israelite version of the cosmogonic victory of the deity resulting in the building of a sanctuary for him,”70 the recognition of a temple form in the center of the Àood narrative lends greater weight to the idea. Other overtones of sacred space are present in the narrative, especially with regard to the way Noah is portrayed. Although it is clear that he plays a role altogether different from that of Njta-napišti in Gilgamesh, reÀexes of dwelling in the presence of God may be manifest in the Àood story. Genesis 6:9 serves as P’s introduction: “These are the descendants of Noah: [Noah was] blameless (tƗmîm) in his age; Noah walked (hithallek) with God.”71 The identi¿cation of Noah as blameless in a P text suggests a close connection with the cult, as in P the adjective is used almost exclusively of items suited for cultic use. The verbal cognate of tƗmîm is also used in a completion formula that marks the end of construction on the shrine in the Temple. More interesting for the present discussion, perhaps, is the note that Noah walked with God. In light of our connections observed between the abode of God and the Àood hero

67. As pointed out also by Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 347–51. 68. Dennis Pardee, “On Psalm 29: Structure and Meaning,” in The Book of Psalms: Composition and Reception (ed. Peter W. Flint and Patrick D. Miller, Jr.; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 153–81 (here 171). He goes on to point out that this concept also can be extended to include Yahweh’s general mastery over the waters. 69. See extended discussion in Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 66–83; see also Holloway, “What Ship Goes There,” 350. 70. Blenkinsopp, “Structure of P,” 285. 71. I understand the phrase Noa­ iš Ñaddîq as belonging to J, not to P, owing to the note in Gen 7:1 (J): kî-ǀtkƗ rƗîtî ‰addîq lƟpƗnay baddôr hazzeh. Thanks to Baruch Schwartz and Joel Baden for helpful direction on this verse.

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in Gilgamesh, the statement that the biblical Àood hero walked with God does not seem trivial. Moreover, the use of the Hithpael is perhaps telling in this context since it is also used in the specialized, “cosmic” contexts of God’s walking in his garden (Gen 3:8), and in Job 22:14, where God walks the circle of heaven. It is also used in Ezekiel’s oracle against the King of Tyre, where both hlk Hithpael and tƗmîm are used in the context of the divine abode: “You were in Eden, the garden of God /…/ and you resided on God’s holy mountain / You walked (hithallƗktƗ) among stones of ¿re / you were blameless (tƗmîm) in your ways / from the day you were created” (Ezek 28:13–15).72 The connection between hlk Hithpael, blamelessness, and the divine abode thus is strong, and seems to be reÀected in our enhanced view of the Àood narrative in Genesis.73 Finally, although the name Noah is not related to those of his Mesopotamian counterparts, it does connect him with some of the themes mentioned above. Emil Kraeling discussed the names of Noah and the Babylonian Àood heroes already in 1929.74 He noted that, in the broader context of the primeval history, the etymology of Noah should be interpreted (i.e. in Gen 5:29, probably J) to mean that he would give Lamech and his descendants rest (yƟna­ămƝnû) from their labors.75 But in P, as Kraeling argues, there may be other af¿nities, ¿rst of all to the ark’s coming to rest (wattƗna­) in the mountains of UrarÓu.76 Psalm 132 preserves the connection with this root and the temple/divine abode: “Let us enter his abode (lƟmiškƟnôtƗyw) / bow at his footstool / Go up, O Yahweh, to your resting place (limnû­ƗtekƗ) / You and your mighty ark!” (vv. 7–8).77 The divine abode is certainly not the only connotation 72. Another important use of the two words in question, albeit without a clear connection to sacred space, is in P’s report of God’s command to Abraham, “Walk before me (hithallek) and be blameless (tƗmîm)” (Gen 17:1). One might argue that the relationship between the two words establishes the conditions for divine proximity—which seems to be operative in the covenant of Gen 17. 73. And, if Wenham’s analysis of the temple setting of the Garden of Eden is to be accepted, the likelihood increases of a shared context among the three: Gen 2–3; 6–9; Ezek 27; see Gordon J. Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism and the Garden of Eden Story,” in Proceedings of the 9th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1986), 19–25. 74. Emil Kraeling, “The Interpretation of the Name Noah in Gen 5:29,” JBL 48 (1929): 138–43. 75. And not that he should “comfort” them, according to the usual translation of the root n­m. 76. Kraeling, “The Interpretation of the Name Noah,” 140–41. 77. That this idea is preserved after the exile is indicated in Chronicles, when David designates the temple as a place of rest (1 Chr 28:2–3; cf. 2 Sam 7). 1

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of the word, and scholars have pointed to the importance of the idea of tranquillity in the Àood narrative. This is central to the biblical Àood story, and also certainly ¿gures into the Mesopotamian account.78 It has been noted frequently that temple building is often connected in the ancient Near East with the peace (rest) that follows victory in battle.79 The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture The “scholarly embarrassment” identi¿ed by Holloway that was the inability to account successfully for the form of the Àood vessel constructions was motivated in no small part by modern constraints on the possibilities of architectural meaning. Leaving aside for the moment the dif¿culties in understanding mythic literature that have sent people hunting for cedar beams on Mount Ararat or for realistic seafaring techniques in India, several forces conspire to inhibit a comprehension of the dynamics of meaningful architecture. Perhaps foremost is the idea that meaning is both singular and restricted to the intent and design of the builder, and is therefore unchanging. Though few consciously put this so starkly, many seem to work under the assumption that architecture and meaning exist in a one-to-one relationship that is universally determined. As Lindsay Jones puts it: We continue to hear with alarming frequency claims about the meaning of a particular pyramid, or the signi¿cance of some stairway and balustrade con¿guration, or the real message of some decorative element. The tacit (and dubious) assumption that the original meaning, that is, the explicit agenda promulgated by the initial designers, constitutes “the real meaning” of a building remains disturbingly resilient. The failure to problematize the meanings of buildings with suf¿cient rigor, the failure to appreciate fully the Àuidity of architectural meanings, remains the rule rather than the exception.80

This Àuidity of architectural meaning(s) should be already apparent to students of the ancient Near East, seen for example in the variety of epithets that could be applied to single sanctuaries, always with the thrust of understanding the building as something other than a simple, inanimate, spatial demarcation.81

78. See Frank Polak, “The Restful Waters of Noah,” JANES 23 (1995): 69–74. 79. See, e.g., Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 100–120. 80. Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000), 1:28; emphasis orig. 81. See, e.g., George, House Most High, passim. 1

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A second obstacle comes into view, however, that is more subtle but perhaps more inÀuential in modern approaches to the temple: the notion that architecture is an empty container of meaning, incapable of exerting inÀuence. This is perhaps most relevant here, as we deal with the typological approach of Lundquist and Holloway. In this approach, temples are, to be sure, credited with accessing a font of meaning that can never be fully expressed in a single construction—a concept with which Jones would agree—but they are rarely recognized actively as buildings whose meanings may change according to the particular occasion of use or reference. This approach also brings with it the danger of relegating the engagement with the buildings to a one-way mental process rather than a dialogue with the built environment, a move that fails to grasp the dynamic process whereby, in our case, a temple can stand in for a Àoating vessel in a mythic narrative. While the typological model remains a useful heuristic, as we have seen, a way forward is provided by critical spatial theory, speci¿cally as developed by Jones.82 The thrust of Jones’ two-volume work, entitled The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, centers on the idea of “the interpretation of sacred architecture in terms of dynamic ritual situations instead of, for instance, in terms of the supposed once-and-for-all meanings of buildings.”83 He argues for “hermeneutical inquiries into the concatenation of the various ceremonial occasions in which a work of architecture, together with shifting casts of human actors, has been an integral participant.”84 In order to accomplish this, he attempts to shift the focus toward the occasional nature of architectural meaning, toward those discrete situations (including literary production) that bring humans and buildings into active interaction, which he calls “ritual-architectural events.” In order to rectify the emphasis on once-and-for-all meanings of buildings, Jones explores a variety of critical avenues and ideas. One is reader-response theory, which dissociates the author (architect) from the audience (user) and sees meaning, which has no objective referent, existing in the conjunction of text and reader.85 Meaning is thus 82. Present limitations prevent a review of the history of critical thought on space, and in any case such is probably less a requirement given the audience of the present volume. For a helpful introduction, see the paper of Jon Berquist, “Theories of Space and the Construction of the Ancient World” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Boston, Mass., 20 November 1999), n.p. Online: http://www.case.edu/af¿l/GAIR/papers/99papers/jberquist.html?nw_ view=1332011859& (accessed 17 March 2012). 83. Jones, Hermeneutics, 1:xxviii. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 1:41–46. 1

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dependent, not on an objective external reality referred to by text (or building), but rather on the occasion of reading, which varies according to who, where, why, and how. While this variability is suf¿ciently acknowledged in several ¿elds, Jones contends that human interactions with architecture are “dynamic, open-ended, interactive processes (or events) in which both buildings and beholders make substantial contributions and both are signi¿cantly transformed.”86 Because of this, he goes on to say, such metaphors as “looking at buildings” are limited in their ability to grasp these processes. In the end, then, the readerresponse model is not quite suf¿cient because it does not account for the dynamic, to-and-fro manner in which experience feeds back into the conceptualization of buildings and inÀuences new ritual-architectural events. This would apply to our case involving ark and temple insofar as the connection was not simply drawing on a temple typology, formed in some ideal mind and then applied to various buildings and settings, but was rather actively constructed from discrete ritual-architectural events—in other words, a contributor to such a typology, not merely a recipient thereof. The metaphor of the text also, as Henri Lefebvre had already observed, contributes to the once-and-for-all attitudes toward meaning in the built environment: “[a]ny attempt to use [literary] codes as a means of deciphering social space must surely reduce that space itself to the status of a message, and the inhabiting of it to the status of a reading. This is to evade both history and practice.”87 What Jones proposes instead is an analysis that takes its cues from philosophical hermeneutics, speci¿cally in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and especially Gadamer. The advantage supplied by this tradition is its concern for the way humans form interpretive relationships with their world. Accordingly, it is futile to view buildings as having static meanings, because it is impossible to speak objectively of a world unmediated by hermeneutic reÀection.88 Thus Jones argues that, instead of attempting to interpret buildings as objects in an unmediated external reality, the only way to account suf¿ciently for the complexity of meaning is to interpret situations of architectural and 86. Ibid., 1:45. 87. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 7; emphasis orig. 88. Because surveys of hermeneutics are readily available for the study of architecture in general, and of ancient Near Eastern structures in particular, I will not rehearse the history except at those points relevant to the present study. See Jones, Hermeneutics, 1:2–20; see also J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol (SAHL 2; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 7–28. 1

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environmental engagement, the ritual-architectural event. In this light, the Gadamerian metaphor of conversation and play, or a dialogue that users have with the built environment, is more apt than a passive “readerviewer” model. In this analogy, “constituting the interpretation of sacred architecture…requires…serious consideration of all of the constituent elements of the circumstance.”89 These elements include, ¿rst, the material qualities of the building; second, “human beings, heavily burdened with expectations, traditions, and religious opinions”; and third, the ceremonial occasion, “which actually brings buildings and people into a to-and-fro involvement with one another.”90 One of these ceremonial occasions, which I would construe broadly, could include the textual adaptation of temple dimensions from one cultural matrix into another, such as in the present case. Subsequent to this reasoning is the fact that people are unable to comprehend the fullness of a building’s meaning in any given situation—the building is replete with meanings that can only be called forth in speci¿c iterations. Jones calls this the “superabundance” of architecture, following Heidegger in his idea that truth is to be found in the conjunction of revealment and concealment, that meaning is always withheld at the same time it is disclosed. According to Gadamer, who seized on Heidegger’s notion, this opposition results in an inexhaustible “ontological possibility” of any given work of art or architecture.91 Lefebvre once again had already begun to wrestle with the implications of this for understanding architecture: A monumental work, like a musical one, does not have a “signi¿ed” (or “signi¿eds”); rather, it has a horizon of meaning: a speci¿c or inde¿nite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action.92

The notion of the superabundance of architecture forces the academic to come to grips with speci¿c occasions, discrete revelations, and hidden meanings if one is to gain purchase on the richness of architectural signi¿cance. In the case at hand, it provides an alternative to the “temple ideology” explanation of the ark-temple af¿nities and yields insight into the dynamic ways the inÀuence of Israelite and Babylonian sacred architecture radiated beyond their walls.

1

89. 90. 91. 92.

Jones, Hermeneutics, 1:48. Ibid. See ibid., 1:22–23. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 222.

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That the ark, which came to rest on a mountain after the waters had returned to their ordered state, was homologized to the Temple, which was built on Mount Zion and sat “over the Àood” indicated by material water installations, should not surprise us. Rather, it manifests the Àexibility of meaning not often admitted in studies of ancient Near Eastern sacred space. The nature of the temple (and Babylonian ziqqurrat) was such that it inÀuenced mythic narrative directly, allowing a metonymic architectural reference to carry unspoken ideals about temple that enriched and invigorated the epic traditions while advancing the plot of the broader story. These references, furthermore, cannot but have had a reciprocal impact on the way the architecture itself was conceptualized; this connection contributed to the cache of potential meaning wrapped up in these buildings. The fusion of Àood and temple traditions, in other words, anchored the narrative in terms of contemporary material culture at the same time that it invested the architecture with an antiquity that reached back to the Deluge. The phenomenon argued for in this paper is thus not only instructive for the student of ancient Near Eastern Àood and temple traditions, but it also opens the way for a more careful look at the process by which sacred space is constructed and at the inÀuence that space can exert in ways the builders never intended nor foresaw.

1

SOCIO-SPATIAL LOGIC AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK OF NUMBERS* Mark K. George

One widely debated question in Numbers’ scholarship concerns the book’s structure. Martin Noth was famously skeptical about ¿nding any coherent structure in the book, while more recent scholarship on the question is more optimistic. As Jean-Louis Ska notes, both three-part and two-part solutions have been proposed. Three-part solutions tend to be structured geographically (Israel at Sinai, Israel in the wilderness between Sinai and the plains of Moab, Israel at the plains of Moab), while two-part solutions are structured in terms of generations (the exodus generation and the wilderness generation).1 In this essay, I want to propose a different solution, based on the social and spatial concerns running through Num 1–4. Numbers 1 classi¿es and organizes the tribes of Israel by means of a census. Numbers 2 prescribes the spatial arrangement of the twelve tribes, both around the tabernacle when encamped, and when marching. The account of Aaron’s lineage, the separation of the Levites as assistants to the Aaronide priests, the census of the Levites and their encampment and marching order, and their designation as substitutes for Israel’s ¿rstborn (Num 3), also involve social and spatial organization. Finally, the prescribed marching order of the Levites, who are responsible for carrying the pieces of the disassembled tabernacle (Num 4), corresponds to their previously stipulated encampment order (Num 1:17), suggesting the order: south (Kohathites), west (Gershonites), and north (Merarites). * An earlier version of this paper was presented in a session of the Place, Space, and Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean World Consultation at the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting at King’s College London in July 2011, where I received valuable feedback. I also received important suggestions on a subsequent draft from Thomas B. Dozeman and Dennis T. Olson, to whom I express my thanks and appreciation. 1. Jean-Louis Ska, Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch (trans. Pascale Dominique; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 35–38. 1

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The social and spatial concerns in these chapters are expressions of Priestly socio-spatial logic, which classi¿es and organizes Israel within the created world (the cosmos).2 From the perspective of spatial theory, it is not surprising that social concerns and spatial ideas are woven together in Num 1–4. Social space is something shaped, understood, and signi¿ed by people and societies.3 Space and society are inextricably intertwined; how a people think about and practice one directly affects how they think about and practice the other. Such is the case for the Priestly writers. In the census of Num 1, for example, “Israel” is de¿ned not simply by tribe, clan, and other social categories, but by spatial orientation. The tribes are grouped by cardinal orientation referenced to the tabernacle: Reuben, Simeon, and Gad on the south (Num 1:20–25); Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun on the east (1:26–31); Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin on the west (1:32–37); and Dan, Asher, and Naphtali on the north (1:38–43).4 Conversely, space in Num 1–4 is social, because embodied by particular tribes: east = Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun (Num 2:3–9); south = Reuben, Simeon, and Gad (2:10–16); west = Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin (2:18–24); and north = Dan, Asher, and Naphtali (2:25–31). What occurs in Num 1–4, in other words, is not merely a description of Israel’s membership, camping arrangement, marching order, and the like. It also is a statement about Israel’s identity, which asserts “Israel” is simultaneously a social and spatial entity. Social organization and classi¿cation, expressed via the census, is inseparable from spatial organization, expressed in Israel’s encampment and marching order. Furthermore, that socio-spatial identity is referenced to the tabernacle and dependent upon it, as a physical manifestation of it. For the Priestly writers, referencing Israel’s identity on the tabernacle is how it should be, because of Israel’s covenantal relationship with YHWH. That relationship focuses Israel’s identity both inwardly and outwardly. Inwardly, Israel’s identity is focused toward the presence of YHWH in the innermost tabernacle space. The people enter into a 2. I assume an exilic or early post-exilic date for the Priestly writers. 3. So, e.g., Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–110; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1506; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001); Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 4. The Levitical tribes are also organized by spatial orientation, as I argue below. 1

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covenant relationship with YHWH at Sinai that creates a new identity for them as the people of YHWH who have responsibilities toward this deity. That new identity brings with it a new social organization manifested in space with reference to the tabernacle. Simultaneously, Israel’s identity is focused outward, toward the rest of creation and the cosmos. Israel’s socio-spatial organization emanates outward, from the presence of the deity into the rest of the world.5 In this way, Israel’s identity is linked to the rest of creation and the peoples in it. When Israel leaves Sinai, it must understand itself in a new way, as the people of YHWH who have a particular socio-spatial organization. Whether or not it is capable of doing so provides a structuring narrative theme that helps give the book of Numbers unity. Understanding the socio-spatial organization of Israel created at Sinai requires a review of the tabernacle narratives in Exodus. In particular, the logic of tabernacle space must be reviewed, to explain the reasoning used by the Priestly writers to classify Israel socially and spatially in Num 1–4. It will become evident that the logic used by the Priestly writers to classify tabernacle space leaves room for interpretation and therefore conÀict. Two generations of Israelites, the exodus generation and their children, the wilderness generation, are confronted with the question of whether or not they will accept their identity as “Israel,” at least as that identity is expressed in the particular social-spatial organization articulated in the Exodus tabernacle narratives and Num 1–4. Entry into the Promised Land depends on their answer. Tabernacle Socio-Spatial Logic in Exodus The Priestly writers’ concerns with organization and classi¿cation are well known. They had a penchant for lists, something that contributed to Noth’s negative conclusion about the coherence of Numbers. Lists, however, come in many forms and accomplish a range of social functions.6 In Num 1–4, the lists used by the Priestly writers organize and classify people, ¿rst by means of a census, and then by means of space. These classi¿cations function hierarchically, and as such, bear comparison with taxonomic classi¿cation systems.

5. As expressed by the order in which tabernacle items are described in Exod 25–31. For a fuller explanation, see Mark K. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (ed. Benjamin D. Sommer; SBLAIL 2; Atlanta: SBL, 2009), 129–34. 6. On their range and uses see, e.g., Umberto Eco, The In¿nity of Lists (New York: Rizzoli, 2009). 1

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Taxonomic classi¿catory systems identify and arrange objects on the basis of their similarities and differences. Objects are classi¿ed by establishing an orderly, logical evaluation of properties and qualities ranked in an increasingly speci¿c series (i.e. hierarchically). Movement to a higher, more restrictive class presumes an object or individual possesses all the properties of the previous classes.7 Taxonomies of this sort provide a range of information about the objects they classify, including their typical properties, relationships with other objects in a category, and so on. They allow, for example, botanists to know what makes a blueberry different from a huckleberry. One problem with taxonomies is that they rely on monothetic, binary logic. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues, this system, based on Carl Linnaeus’ eighteenth-century work in botany, depends on the presence or absence of a single, particular feature or characteristic to distinguish between objects being classi¿ed.8 In light of evolutionary theory, scientists and other scholars have realized the dif¿culties created by the assumption of a single characteristic being present in objects over time, and have proposed alternative classi¿cation systems, including polythetic systems. Polythetic taxonomies classify objects based on a considerable number of objects in a class sharing a signi¿cant number of properties, qualities, or characteristics, even if no two objects in a class share all those properties.9 Assuming the class of objects is suf¿ciently large, each object can be arranged such that the two objects most closely resembling each another are placed next to each other. They then would be further away from those objects in the class with which they are less alike. At its extremes, objects in the class could be quite dissimilar, and ambiguous or disputed cases undoubtedly would be present.10 These contrasts between monothetic and polythetic classi¿cation systems are important to keep in mind when considering the logic by which tabernacle space, and the people who occupy and inhabit it, are organized. Menahem Haran signi¿cantly advanced scholars’ understanding of that logic with his arguments that the tabernacle is organized

7. See Jonathan Z. Smith’s clear explanation and examples of taxonomies; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (ed. Jacob Neusner; CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–18. See also Eco’s discussion of taxonomies; Eco, The In¿nity of Lists, 216–29. 8. Smith, “Fences and Neighbors,” 2–4. 9. Ibid., 4–5. 10. Ibid., 4. 1

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according to a system based on holiness.11 This system has three spatial divisions: most holy, holy, and court spaces. Most holy space, the innermost space of the tabernacle proper west of the pƗrǀket (curtain), is where the deity may be found.12 On the east side of the pƗrǀket, yet still within the tabernacle proper, is holy space. The court around the tabernacle proper also is holy space, which Haran argued was sub-divided into two types: minor holiness, which the congregation occupies, and higher holiness, which the priests alone may occupy. Objects, materials, and skills physically mark each space and the items created for it. The more holy the space in which an object is used, the more skill, quality, and cost used to create that item.13 Haran’s work is important because it demonstrated there is a logical system operating in tabernacle space, but it is not without limitations. Beyond the language of holiness, Haran does not explain how, or on what basis, distinctions between classes of objects or space are made in the system. Nor does he explain what characteristics are necessary for inclusion within a particular classi¿cation. Indeed, his logic appears to be circular. (Spatial) proximity to the deity determines the quality of holiness of an object, and an object’s holiness determines how close it can be (spatially) to the deity. Social characteristics, however, do explain how classi¿cations of spaces are made in the tabernacle, and they do so in a way comparable to how a polythetic classi¿cation system operates. A series of social characteristics operate at the boundary of each class of tabernacle space, and they explain how distinctions are made from one class of space to another. These characteristics determine who may enter each space (i.e. each taxonomic class), as well as the cultic quality (i.e. its holiness) of that space and the objects associated with it.14 Entry into tabernacle court space is permitted to both male and female members of

11. Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel: An Inquiry into Biblical Cult Phenomena and the Historical Setting of the Priestly School (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1985). See also the work of Frank H. Gorman, Jr., The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly Theology (JSOTSup 91; Shef¿eld: JSOT, 1990); Philip Peter Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (JSOTSup 106; Shef¿eld: JSOT, 1992). 12. “Tabernacle proper” refers to the tent structure within the tabernacle court. “Tabernacle complex” or “tabernacle” refers to the entire space, i.e., the tabernacle proper and the court. 13. Haran, Temples and Temple-Service, 149–88. 14. For a detailed explanation of this social system, see George, Israel’s Tabernacle, Chapter 4. 1

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the Israelite congregation (95).15 Only male Aaronide priests, however, may enter tabernacle holy space, at which time they must be wearing their priestly garments. Finally, only the high priest (Aaron or his heir) may enter most holy space, only on the Day of Atonement (Lev 16), when he must be wearing his high priestly garments. Social classi¿cation determines spatial classi¿cation. They are part of the same process and system, in which space expresses and reÀects social understandings and ideas. It is important here to understand how the logic of the system works. This is where comparison with polythetic taxonomic classi¿catory systems is helpful. Distinctions between persons and spaces do not depend on a single criterion that is both necessary and suf¿cient for inclusion in a class of objects. Tabernacle socio-spatial logic is not a monothetic, binary logic. On the contrary, distinctions are made on the basis of a set of characteristics, a signi¿cant number of which are shared by a considerable number of objects in each class or space. Inclusion in a class or space thus is somewhat ill-de¿ned. This situation is to be expected within the logic of a polythetic system, where no two objects in a class or space must share all the same characteristics. The question of who may enter tabernacle court space is a case in point. Entry to that space requires being a member of Israel. Such membership is not determined biologically or genealogically. Rather, it is determined by being part of the congregation, 95, a term that allows the Priestly writers to include more than just biological or genealogical descendants of Jacob. “Congregation” includes all those who departed from Egypt and were given instructions for Passover observance (Exod 12:38, 48). Both native and resident alien are members of this class. The same law (9CHE), statute (9BI), and regulation (or ordinance, A>; Exod 12:49; Num 9:14; 15:14–16, 29; 19:10) protect both. Of course, “resident alien,” C8, is ill-de¿ned. “Native,” ICK , appears to refer to genealogical descendants of Jacob, but “resident alien” is a more inclusive term.16 It is a class of persons in (some sort of) relationship with Israel and its deity, but can include many such persons. Thus the congregation, as a class of persons, and therefore tabernacle court space, are comparable to a polythetic category because its members share a large, though unspeci¿ed, number of characteristics, even if no two members share all the same characteristics. 15. Women may enter court space, according to Lev 10:14; 12:6; Num 18:18–19. Their access is also implied by Exod 35:22, 25–26, 29, where women are contributors to the materials and creation of tabernacle items. 16. Cf. Jacob Milgrom, Numbers (ed. Nahum M. Sarna; The JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 398–402. See also George, Israel’s Tabernacle, 115–16. 1

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Entry to tabernacle holy space is reserved for a different class of persons and requires additional social characteristics. Only male Aaronide priests may enter this space. Gender and family are added to the system in order to distinguish between persons and spaces. These characteristics are what distinguish the priests from others in the congregation and de¿ne the boundaries of the class, even while presuming membership in the previous class, the congregation. Nevertheless, although this class of persons in Israel and its taxonomic system might appear to be well de¿ned, the incident with Korah, in Num 16, suggests otherwise, as I will argue. Entry to the most holy space is reserved for the high priest alone (Aaron and his hereditary successor). This space corresponds to the social class that is most narrowly de¿ned in Israel. It presumes membership in the other two classes, the congregation and Aaronide priesthood, but then is distinguished by being a class of one: the high priest. This characteristic belongs to Aaron (and his successor) alone, as the designee of YHWH. Comparison of tabernacle socio-spatial logic with spatial theory and polythetic taxonomic systems provides an explanation of Priestly conceptions of Israel in the world. Israel has a particular social order, one inextricably bound up with the arrangement of tabernacle space. For the Priestly writers, social order informs and determines spatial order. Conversely, spatial access is determined by social classi¿cation. This being said, the classi¿cations of persons and space are not based on sharp, clearly de¿ned distinctions, such as would be expected if the system’s logic were binary. Rather, the underlying logic appears to classify persons and space on the basis of a signi¿cant number of persons in each class sharing a considerable number of characteristics or qualities. It is the rather ill-de¿ned nature of “considerable number” and “signi¿cant number,” however, that leaves room for interpretation and debate about the membership of an object in a class. As Smith notes, disputes are to be expected within such a system.17 Such an expectation of disputes is another reason why comparison with polythetic classi¿catory systems is useful for interpreting Numbers, where disputes over social roles and identities—issues of classi¿cation—are common. These disputes have great signi¿cance in Numbers because they relate back to Sinai and Israel’s covenant with YHWH. This linkage is made clear in Num 1–4, where the socio-spatial logic of the tabernacle is extended beyond the walls of the tabernacle complex into the world.

1

17. Smith, “Fences and Neighbors,” 5.

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Extending Tabernacle Socio-Spatial Logic into the World and Cosmos That social and spatial organization are an integrated system for the Priestly writers is evident in Num 1–4. Numbers 1 records the census of Israel. The deity commands the census be taken, and does so at Sinai, from the tent of meeting, a synonymous term for the tabernacle in the Priestly materials (1:1). This setting is the ¿rst narrative indication that tabernacle spatial logic, with its social organization, is active in Numbers. Not surprisingly, the census explicitly involves a series of classi¿cations, that is, taxons: the whole congregation (E5=), ancestral houses ()E3 EJ3), names (EH>), gender (male; CH 9? )JC  *3), and a social function (the ability to go to war; 34 4J=9 94B3). 23. E.g., Philip J. Budd, Numbers (WBC 5; Waco: Word, 1984), 120; Martin Noth, Numbers: A Commentary (trans. James D. Martin; OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), 84; Dennis T. Olson, Numbers (IBC; Louisville: John Knox, 1996), 61. 24. In Exod 14:2–3, YHWH tells Moses to have the Israelites turn back, so Pharaoh will think they are wandering aimlessly in the wilderness; no social order yet is apparent in the congregation. The “whole congregation” travels by stages from the wilderness of Sin (Exod 17:1). Later, on Moses’ command, Joshua chooses “some men” to ¿ght Amalek (17:9), which he does. Jethro suggests to Moses that he regiment the people into groups of thousands, hundreds, ¿fties, tens (Exod 19:21), because Moses is exhausted by the people’s legal needs (19:13). This proposed regimentation of the people as a whole is the ¿rst time those who left Egypt are given a social order or organization in the narratives other than that of family, clan, tribe, etc. 25. Milgrom, Numbers, 82. 1

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This divine action is interesting because it is spatial in nature. Rather than kill members of the congregation, as is typical for the deity, the ¿re burns a spatial zone. The signi¿cance of this zone is explained by tabernacle spatial logic. The edge of camp space marks the dividing line between Israel and the rest of the world. Thus the deity provides a warning of a particular nature for the people. Burning the edges of the camp reinforces the socio-spatial logic that de¿nes Israel and that was established at Sinai. It is no less a part of their identity, as the people of YHWH, than the covenant, and it is not something about which the deity will tolerate challenges. The next challenge to the social order comes from no less a person than Moses. The people complain about manna and express their desire for the dietary options they had in Egypt (Num 11:5).26 When, however, Moses hears their weeping, YHWH is very angry and Moses is displeased. What displeases Moses is the position in which the deity has placed him. Moses’ complaint—that he has been mistreated, burdened with the people, that he did not conceive them or birth them that he should be responsible for carrying them as their mother, that he has no meat for them (suggesting he is sympathetic to their complaint), and, again, that he cannot carry them (11:11–14)—derives from his social classi¿cation and position. His outburst is a damning rebuttal of his position as leader of the people, and he seeks a dramatic exit from it: “If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery” (11:15). The deity is not angered by this outburst and challenge, but does not allow Moses to change his position. Instead, his position is modi¿ed. The burden is shared with 70 elders, each of whom receives a portion of Moses’ spirit (11:14–30).27 Aaron and Miriam are the next to present a challenge to Israel’s sociospatial order (Num 12). The narrative begins by stating that Aaron and Miriam challenge Moses because of his Cushite wife (12:1), although their attention immediately turns away from this issue to that of social status and organization: “Has the LORD spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (12:2). Their claim is one of equal 26. This does not constitute a challenge to the social order. The presence of the “rabble” (NRSV) or “riffraff” (NJPS; ,DAD ) in Israel’s midst provides additional evidence that the composition of the congregation includes more than just members of the twelve tribes. 27. I am aware Num 11–12 typically are ascribed to earlier non-priestly traditions. The Priestly writers use these stories to make their own case about establishing and legitimating the social order for Israel expressed in tabernacle space. 1

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standing with Moses: they are in the same social (i.e. taxonomic) class with him. By the socio-spatial logic of the tabernacle, their claim is supported: they camp with Moses on the east side of the tabernacle (Num 3:38). Explained in terms of polythetic classi¿catory logic, Aaron and Miriam claim they share a signi¿cantly large number of characteristics with Moses, and therefore should receive the same privileges. The deity, however, Àatly rejects their claim as an attempt to transcend their social and spatial classi¿cation. The logic of polythetic taxonomies helps explain the deity’s answer. Aaron and Miriam do share certain (perhaps many) characteristics with Moses, which led to their assigned social status. They are prophets who know the deity through visions. Moses, however, has characteristics not shared with them: he speaks with the deity face to face (12:8), and is entrusted with the deity’s very house (12:7). Moses may occupy the same socio-spatial class as them, but they do not share all the same characteristics he possesses. Therefore, Moses’ social status is higher.28 Aaron and Miriam misunderstand how tabernacle classi¿cation works; they cannot transcend their social and spatial status. Miriam’s punishment, leprosy, requires her removal from camp space into space outside the camp (cf. Num 5:1–3), symbolizing her different social characteristics by a temporary change in them.29 The account of the spies in Canaan in Num 13–14 records another challenge by the people to the social order. It takes two forms. The ¿rst challenges the entire cosmological ordering expressed in tabernacle spatial logic. When the spies return from scouting the land of Canaan, they tell the people they cannot overcome the inhabitants of the land (13:31). Only Caleb appears to understand the social order of the cosmos, because he states Israel is “well able to overcome” (13:30) the land and its inhabitants. This statement not only expresses con¿dence in Moses and YHWH, but in the cosmological system itself. Israel has a special place in that order, has been promised this land by the deity who created the order, and therefore Israel can take the land, if it will go up.30 This spatial understanding also is encapsulated in the pleas of Caleb and Joshua to the people not to rebel against the deity (14:9), and in the 28. Cf. the comments of Levine, Numbers 1–20, 331. 29. Polythetic logic may also explain why, other than gender, Aaron is not afÀicted with leprosy: he is unlike Miriam in certain ways. He is the high priest, and thus has a different socio-spatial classi¿cation from her, symbolized by his ability to enter tabernacle holy and most holy space. Such distinctions would be possible for two persons in the same class of objects within a polythetic system. 30. For a fuller explanation of Israel’s role and social position in the cosmos, see George, Israel’s Tabernacle, 157–90. 1

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deity’s claim that his glory will ¿ll all the earth (14:21). Both statements reÀect spatial understandings involving the cosmos and how it is organized. The second challenge comes in the people’s complaint against both Moses and Aaron after hearing the report of the spies about the land of Canaan (Num 14:1–2). Desiring to return to Egypt, they call for new leadership (14:4), of their own choice.31 By this, they clearly reject the social order of the tabernacle that places Moses and Aaron in charge. Once again, the deity will have none of this and seeks to kill all the people, echoing his response in Exod 32. As in Exodus, they are saved by Moses, who intercedes on their behalf. In citing the deity’s reputation as the reason for not destroying the people, Moses plays on Priestly cosmology and the interconnectedness of all the peoples of creation, who evidently are in communication with one another (14:15–16). Presumably this is what prompts the deity’s reference to his glory ¿lling the earth (14:21). Nevertheless, salvation is temporary, for the people’s fate is eventual death in the wilderness (14:20–25). Only Caleb is spared, because he “followed me wholeheartedly” (14:24); he recognized and understood Israel’s place in the social order of the cosmos.32 The legal materials in Num 15 repeatedly stress the collective identity of the congregation, as consisting of both native Israelite and resident alien (15:13–16, 24–26, 29–30). Furthermore, when the Sabbath is violated by a member of the congregation, the people obey the deity’s verdict by taking the violator outside the camp and stoning him. Apparently the deity’s judgment on them in Num 14 resulted in the congregation again observing the social order and its spatial logic. This obedience and acceptance does not last long. Korah, Dathan, and Abiram challenge that order in Num 16. They claim that the entire congregation is holy (16:3), and therefore the social distinction between the congregation and Moses and Aaron is invalid. If all are holy, all should be able to approach the deity, not only the priests (16:5–11).33 Their claim is logical, accord31. Milgrom and Levine argue for an alternative understanding of the Hebrew in 14:4, that rather than “choose a leader,” the Hebrew,  C 9?E?, means “let us head back”; Levine, Numbers 1–20, 363; Milgrom, Numbers, 108. Levine notes the meaning of this phrase may be “forming a column.” If so, then the people claim to create their own social organization, which would also challenge tabernacle socio-spatial logic. 32. Joshua is also spared, a notation that may be the result of post-Priestly editing; Num 14:30. 33. On other spatial aspects of this episode, see Françoise Mirguet, “Numbers 16: The Signi¿cance of Place—an Analysis of Spatial Markers,” JSOT 32 (2008): 311–30. 1

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ing to tabernacle socio-spatial logic, and analogous to the claims of Aaron and Miriam in Num 12. The congregation has access to court space, a sign of their holy status as the people of YHWH, and the people are a priestly kingdom and holy nation (Exod 19:6). Additionally, the deity issued a command that they be holy to their God (Num 15:40). Therefore, because the challenge is logical, employs the very logic of the system to critique it, and involves the entire congregation, it is the most threatening one so far in Numbers. It lays bare the fact that, like a polythetic taxonomic system, the system is open to interpretation. Signi¿cantly, Moses responds to the challenge by rearticulating Korah’s understanding of the social order (Num 16:8–11). It is the deity, however, who makes the most de¿nitive statement about the social order. In the resulting test with the censers (Num 16:5–7, 16–19), the deity af¿rms the classi¿cations between the congregation of Israel and Moses, Aaron, Aaron’s sons, and the Levites.34 Initially, the deity does so by seeking to destroy the entire congregation, with the exception of Moses and Aaron (16:20–21). After being dissuaded by Moses and Aaron (16:22), the deity kills Korah, Dathan, Abiram and their families (16:23–33). The punishment, being swallowed by the earth, complements the spatial nature of the challenge, removing the challengers from the spatial plane on which tabernacle spatial logic operates. In case the divine af¿rmation of the social system is missed, the plague on the people and deliverance by Aaron’s censer (16:41–50), the budding of Aaron’s rod in Num 17, the reiteration of the responsibilities of the priests and Levites to protect the boundaries of the tabernacle (18:1–7), and the narration of the priests’ portion (18:8–32) drives the point home. The social organization of Israel expressed in tabernacle space will not be changed or altered. It has divine sanction, and the deity will defend it. A ¿nal challenge to the social order occurs at Meribah. There Moses challenges his social position when he strikes the rock without following the deity’s stated procedures for doing so (Num 20:8–11). YHWH rebukes Moses for his actions and punishes him with death in the wilderness with the rest of the Exodus generation (20:12).

34. Ironically, both the test with the censers and with the rods emphasize basic similarities between each person represented by the censer or rod. In polythetic classi¿catory terms, each of the members represented by these objects shares a signi¿cant number of characteristics with the other members of the category, hence the use of the same objects in the tests. This suggests the claims of Korah and the others are reasonable. Only by divine action is one object of the category, and therefore one member of the class, distinguished from the others. 1

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Numbers 20–25: Too Little, Too Late In Num 20:14–25:17, a series of external challenges confront Israel, and spatial logic is less readily apparent in them, although still at work. Against Edom and Ammon, the Israelites promise to remain on the King’s Highway, without turning to the right or left (Num 20:17–20; 21:21–23), which suggests enforceable social order and organization on the part of Israel. The reference to Edom being a brother (20:14), while based on Israel’s ancestral history (Jacob and Esau; Gen 25:24; 36:8–9), also infers tabernacle spatial logic and Israel’s interrelatedness with the other peoples of the cosmos. In his ¿rst oracle, Balaam says of Israel, “Here is a people living alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations!” (23:9). This statement captures one implication of the Priestly writers’ understanding of Israel, that Israel is set apart from the other peoples of the world, even while being related to them. When Phinehas drives a spear through the Israelite man and the Moabite woman (Num 25:7–8), he does so in the context of Israel participating in Moabite sacri¿ces and worshipping those gods, to whom Israel yokes itself (25:2–3). These actions are a ¿nal challenge to Israel’s identity, which is predicated on the tabernacle, the earthly dwelling of YHWH. Tabernacle socio-spatial logic is hierarchical, with the high priest and most holy space being at the apex of the system.35 The purpose of the hierarchy, and Israel’s existence, is service to YHWH, who dwells in tabernacle most holy space. Worship of Moabite gods constitutes a challenge to YHWH and thus Israel’s identity in the cosmos. The last possible means of challenging tabernacle spatial logic, in other words, is exercised by Israel. Phineas, in line to become the high priest, reestablishes that order by killing the couple. The success of his efforts is evidenced by the end of the plague (25:8). Israel’s actions with the Moabites, however, are the culmination of the exodus generations’ challenges to the social order of tabernacle spatial logic. Numbers 26: The Compliant Wilderness Generation Their challenges complete, the end of the exodus generation is signaled by the census of Num 26. In agreement with Olson, the census of the new generation in Num 26 indicates a change in Israel from the exodus generation to the one destined to enter the land (Num 26:64–65). This generational transition simultaneously marks the reaf¿rmation and restoration of tabernacle socio-spatial logic and its classi¿catory system. 35. This hierarchy, however, is not vertical, but horizontal, another way in which Israel’s relatedness to the other peoples of the world is expressed; cf. George, Israel’s Tabernacle, 126–35. 1

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Constructions of Space IV

The census enrolls the tribes according to the side of the tabernacle complex on which they camp (south, 26:5–8; east, 26:19–27; west, 26:28–41; north, 26:42–50). This new generation is socially and spatially organized as the Priestly writers envision it should be. Additionally, the census anticipates the entrance of this generation into the Promised Land, where tabernacle social and spatial organization will be applied. The deity informs Moses, after the census, that the land will be apportioned according to the number of names and the relative size of each tribe (Num 26:52–56). Because the census organizes those names spatially, using them to apportion the Promised Land indicates tabernacle socio-spatial logic and organization are to operate in it as well. The new generation accepts and adheres to tabernacle socio-social logic and organization to a degree unmatched by their parents. This is made clear in Num 27–36. At no point do they challenge the order, as did the previous generation. Rather, they appear to understand and accept it, with quite positive results and bene¿ts. In Num 27–30, various matters pertaining to Israel’s social organization are addressed. The daughters of Zelophehad case, in Num 27, reaf¿rms the full participation of women in the congregation. Although the social practice and assumption from the previous generation is that inheritance is a matter involving fathers and their sons (27:3–4), the daughters challenge that practice.36 Tabernacle socio-spatial logic provides a basis for their claim. Its social classi¿catory system gives women in the congregation equal status with men: both men and women may enter tabernacle court space. Thus, if women and men have equal social status within this classi¿cation, then the daughters have a right to inherit their father’s land (27:4). The logic and validity of their position is af¿rmed by the deity (27:7), who commands Moses to let them inherit and to clarify the laws of inheritance to reÀect their position (27:8–11).37 Following the case of Zelophehad’s daughters, Joshua is appointed Moses’ successor (27:12–23). Moses’ leadership position is ¿lled, albeit to a lesser degree, since Joshua receives “some” of Moses’ authority (27:20), indicating he will not have the same relationship with the deity 36. Cf. the more typical interpretations of Milgrom, Numbers, 230 and Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 21–36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 4A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 345–46. 37. The ability of women to make legally binding vows (Num 30) may be another sign of their shared classi¿catory status with men. The fact these vows may be nulli¿ed by fathers and husbands may be indicative of polythetic classi¿catory logic: making legally binding vows is a characteristic of this class that is not required for membership in it, since women do not possess it. 1

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as did Moses. But someone from the wilderness generation will lead Israel into the Promised Land. Social classi¿cation is not restricted to persons and space. Time is another aspect of this system. The restoration of tabernacle socio-spatial logic in the second generation’s census is one way in which the presence of time in the system is made manifest; a generation has passed. Another is through the schedule of offerings and the festal calendar prescribed in Num 28–29. As argued in the Baal Peor incident in Num 25, tabernacle spatial logic is structured toward the deity in most holy space. Israel’s social organization, in other words, is directed toward the worship and service of YHWH. The offerings and festal calendar af¿rm and support that organization. The battle against Midian (Num 31) reinforces Israel’s social classi¿cation and the wilderness generation’s acceptance of it. One thousand warriors from each of the tribes are selected to go to battle, during which they are accompanied by Phinehas, the priest (31:4–6).38 The equal number of warriors from each tribe symbolizes the tribes’ equality in tabernacle court space and their equal commitment to doing the work commanded them by YHWH. The fact that they join together as a ¿ghting force and are accompanied by a priest—Phinehas, who brings with him sacred vessels from the tabernacle (the exact identi¿cation of these vessels is not speci¿ed)—symbolically reproduces tabernacle socio-spatial logic in the battle, since items and persons from all three spaces of the tabernacle complex are involved in it. The commitment of the wilderness generation to tabernacle socio-spatial logic, represented by this ¿ghting force, provides clear, bene¿cial results for that generation. Not only are they successful in defeating the Midianites and collecting the spoils, but not a single Israelite warrior is killed in the battle (31:49). They are impure when they return, and Moses is angry with them for sparing women involved in the Baal Peor matter (31:13–20). But this anger and de¿lement do not constitute a challenge to Israel’s social order. Rather, the troops comply with the demands placed on them, purify themselves, divide up the spoils, and ultimately return to the camp. The request of the tribes of Reuben and Gad to occupy land in the Transjordan (Num 32) has the potential to challenge Israel’s social order and spatial logic. Moses suggests as much in his initial response to the request (32:6–15), when he invokes their father’s response to the spies 38. Milgrom comments that the number of warriors from each tribe is “highly unrealistic,” given the number of people in each tribe (Milgrom, Numbers, 256). The symbolism of the number is likely the most important aspect of the number, since it portrays equal involvement in the battle by the tribes. 1

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(Num 13–14). The tribes reassure Moses of their commitment to Israel and its conquest of Canaan (32:16–19), and Moses relents. Although the settlement of the Transjordan is not initially what was envisioned for Israel, the commitment of the second generation to the identity of Israel, as expressed in tabernacle socio-spatial logic, permits a change to be accepted, by Moses and the deity. Numbers 33–35 concern a review of Israel’s wilderness journey and prescriptions for the land they will occupy. The anticipated conquest of Canaan, establishment of its boundaries, allotment of the land by tribes and lots, and creation of cities of refuge all reÀect the classi¿catory logic of tabernacle space. The census of the second generation (Num 26) is invoked when the people are told Canaan will be apportioned by lot and clan size (33:54), and by the list of tribal leaders who will undertake that apportionment (34:16–29). Canaan is organized by its boundaries, to the south (34:3–5), west (34:6), north (34:7–9), and east (34:10–12). Within the land, cities are set aside for the Levites (35:1–5), including lands around them, which are measured outward along each of the cardinal directions, as was the case for tabernacle space (35:5). Tabernacle sociospatial logic is to be applied to Canaan. The question of daughters inheriting land is the ¿nal topic of Numbers. As was the case in Num 27, the full participation and status of women as members of the congregation is af¿rmed and acknowledged; the heads of the ancestral houses acknowledge the events of Num 27 (Num 36:2). Numbers 36 takes up the earlier ruling in light of the second census and extension of tabernacle logic to Canaan by recognizing that the apportionment of the land by the size of each tribe stands to change over time if daughters marry outside their tribe (36:3–4). The ruling on this matter, that the daughters must marry someone from their own tribe (36:5–9), is consistent with the logic of the census, and thus with tabernacle socio-spatial logic. Land apportionments are preserved. The daughters accept the ruling, demonstrating their acceptance of tabernacle socio-spatial logic, as is characteristic of their generation. Conclusion The structure of the book of Numbers is not easy to recognize, as the numerous proposals by scholars suggest. This is not to say that no structure is to be found. The social and spatial arrangement of the tribes and Levites, described in Num 1–4, provides one way by which structure is given to the book of Numbers. This socio-spatial organization is a consequence of Israel’s covenant with YHWH at Sinai, and is something to 1

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which the people must be faithful, as they are to be with the covenant itself. Whether or not they will, or can, is explored in the book. The exodus generation seems to recognize the system can be challenged, and they do so in every way they can manage, with the result that they die in the wilderness. Only after a new generation, born in the wilderness, arises with that socio-spatial system in place, and then accepts it, is Israel ready to enter the Promised Land. As a result, their lives are easier, and they are the ones to enter Canaan and possess it, as the people of YHWH.

1

CREATING SPACE THROUGH IMAGINATION AND ACTION: SPACE AND THE BODY IN DEUTERONOMY 6:4–9* Michaela Geiger

The literary conception of Deuteronomy is spatial in nature.1 Since the book is set up as a monologue of Moses to his people within a narrative frame, Moses’ audience stays at one single place throughout the whole speech, a location beyond the river JORDAN, in the land of MOAB (Deut 1:1–3; 34:1–8). The scene of Moses’ preaching and the people’s listening marks the end of the forty-year journey through the WILDERNESS (1:3). Thus, the whole book of Deuteronomy is located in a space in-between, which still belongs to the WILDERNESS but allows looking ahead to the LAND of promise. At this place Moses reminds the assembled people of past spaces like EGYPT, HOREB, and the WILDERNESS (especially in chs. 1–11), and outlines future spaces like HOUSE, WAY, GATES and, with special emphasis, the PLACE that YHWH will choose to put his name there (especially in chs. 12–26). Both past and future spaces merge in the covenant of MOAB (26:16–19; 29:1–14). The Deuteronomic conception of space is based on nouns: on toponyms, names of buildings or landscapes, and parts of the body, which are not described but frequently repeated in the Deuteronomic formulaic speech. To underline the conceptual character, I will put these spatial terms in capitals.2 * This essay evolved from a paper given in the “Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity Section” at the SBL Annual Meeting in Boston 2008. 1. The synchronic approach to the book of Deuteronomy ties in with the studies of Jean-Pierre Sonnet (The Book Within the Book: Writing in Deuteronomy [Biblical Interpretation Series 14; Leiden: Brill, 1997]), Karin Finsterbusch (Weisung für Israel. Studien zu religiösem Lehren und Lernen im Deuteronomium und seinem Umfeld [FAT 44; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005]) and various articles by Norbert Loh¿nk (Studien zum Deuteronomium und zur deuteronomistischen Literatur I–V [SBAB; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1990–2005]). 2. A more profound explanation of the Deuteronomic concepts of space may be found in my dissertation Gottesräume: Die literarische und theologische Konzeption von Raum im Deuteronomium (BWANT 183; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010), 51–58, which provides the basic research for this article. 1

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Although Moses addresses his people beyond the river JORDAN, the implicit readers of the book are located within the Promised LAND3 and thus are capable of ful¿lling the Deuteronomic commandments in their daily life. In this essay I will focus ¿rst on the production of space by everyday routines as conceptualized in Deut 6:4–9, combining daily spaces and the body. In order to grasp the speci¿c quality of the Deuteronomic conception of space, I then will introduce the spatial theory of German sociologist Martina Löw before illustrating the Deuteronomic spatial vision by analyzing the concept of the HOUSE. I then will focus on the body which serves as an interface in Deuteronomy’s spatial conception. The body’s quality of simultaneously being space and shaping space will be illustrated by the Deuteronomic concept of the HAND. In the ¿nal section, I will sketch the Deuteronomic spatial theology as it is condensed in 6:4–9. Space and the Body in the Shema Yisrael 4

Hear, O Israel! YHWH is our God, YHWH is one! 5 Love YHWH, your God, with all your HEART, and with all your SOUL, and with all your might. 6 These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be in your HEART. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit in your HOUSE and when you walk along your WAY, and when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as a sign on your HAND, they shall be ÓǀÓƗpǀt between your EYES. 9 Write them on the DOORPOSTS of your HOUSE and in your GATES.4

Within Moses’ second speech (Deut 5:1–26:19), the Shema Yisrael forms the introduction to the “commandments, statutes and ordinances” (5:31; 6:1, 2) starting with a call to attention, “Hear, O Israel!” (6:4; cf. 4:1; 5:1). The passage bears a strong imperative impact: seven consecutive 3. The expression “beyond the JORDAN” (b!Ɲber hayardƝn) in Deut 1:1, 5; 4:41, 46, 47 clari¿es that the implicit readers are imagined at the other side of the river, in the Promised LAND. When Moses uses the expression, he locates the Promised LAND consistent with his perspective “beyond the JORDAN” (b!Ɲber hayardƝn: 3:20, 25; 11:30). The only exception is 3:8. 4. Translation by the author. 1

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perfect forms and the repeated personal suf¿x -kƗ (“your”; 15×) perpetuate the opening imperative šƟma! in order to shape the addressees’ relationship to YHWH in everyday life.5 The focus is on their bodies (HEART, vv. 5, 6; SOUL, v. 5; HAND, v. 8; EYES, v. 8) and on the spatial structures they live in (HOUSE, vv. 7, 9; WAY, v. 7; DOORPOST, v. 9; GATES, v. 9). By means of the prepositions, bodies and spaces are closely connected. The iteration of b- (3×) underlines the corporal dimension of loving God (v. 5) as well as the temporal and spatial dimension in v. 7 (7×) and v. 9 with respect to the GATES. The preposition !al chains bodies and spaces together by aligning HEART (v. 6), HAND (v. 8) and DOORPOST (v. 9). In Deut 6:4–9, Moses commands at “this day” (v. 6) in MOAB patterns of behavior in order to map the future spaces within the Promised LAND. The Deuteronomic conception connects bodies and buildings by placing them in a theological frame: every space is inextricably linked to “these words” (v. 6), to the whole book of Deuteronomy, and ultimately to YHWH, “our God” (v. 4). Past, present, and future spaces become transparent for God, who brought Israel out of EGYPT, the HOUSE of slavery (5:6; 6:12, 21, et al.), and who will lead Israel into the Promised LAND. This process of merging places can be analyzed insightfully by taking Martina Löw’s sociology of space into consideration. Sociology of Space (Martina Löw) In her 2001 book Raumsoziologie (The Sociology of Space), Martina Löw de¿nes space as “a relational con¿guration of living beings and social goods at places.”6 Her idea of relational space is based on empirical 5. The addressees of Moses’ speech and the implicit readers of the book of Deuteronomy are adults having sons and daughters, and male and female slaves (5:14; 12:12; 16:14). As Frank Crüsemann (Die Tora: Theologie und Sozialgeschichte des alttestamentlichen Gesetzes [2d ed.; Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1997], 293) argues, the omission of the wife from the lists of participants cannot mean their exclusion from the respective rituals but must result from their inclusion in the addressed “you” (cf. Georg Braulik, Durften auch Frauen in Israel opfern? Beobachtungen zur Sinn- und Festgestalt des Opfers im Deuteronomium, in Studien zum Deuteronomium und seiner Nachgeschichte [SBAB 33; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2001], 59–81, 83; Karin Finsterbusch, “Die kollektive Identität und die Kinder. Bemerkungen zu einem Programm im Deuteronomium,” in Gottes Kinder [ed. Ingo Baldermann, Ernst Dassmann, and Ottmar Fuchs; Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 17; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2002], 99–112 [108]). 6. Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 271: “…eine relationale (An)Ordnung von Lebewesen und sozialen Gütern an Orten.” The book 1

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research and interdisciplinary reÀection that especially advances the ideas of Anthony Giddens7 and Pierre Bourdieu.8 Löw aims at developing a theory to explain the constitution of bodily spaces and cyberspace as well as the conception of global cities.9 She posits that space is constituted by two discernible processes, named spacing and synthesis. The term “spacing” refers to the process of creating and shaping space, which includes actions like building, furnishing, or arranging. “Spacing” means creating space by con¿guring objects or human beings. The second process highlights the importance of human perception and ideas. According to Löw, space is established by the observer, a person conceiving a certain arrangement of objects and human beings as space. This act of conception is called “synthesis.” Moreover, Löw differentiates “place” and “space”: although the existence of “places” does not depend on human imagination, places are the “target or result of an act of placement.”10 Since acts of spacing are carried out at “places,” they alter the respective place. Similarly, acts of syntheses turn places into (a potentially in¿nite number of) spaces. There is an interdependency and simultaneity of spacing and synthesis:11 acts of spacing can only be performed with a comprehension of the space to be created, and ideas of space derive from spatial experience. The conception of space is determined by social conventions. For instance, academics are used to conceiving of an arrangement of chairs in several rows facing a lectern as an auditorium. If the same arrangement had an additional table in front with candles and a cross, they would probably conceive of the same place as a chapel. Such arrangements can be called institutional spaces, because they evoke habitual patterns of behavior. People usually have a sense of how to behave in a church or in a football stadium. Each individual learns the appropriate behavior by repetition, and such repetitive behavior maintains the durability of the respective space as an institution. In Deuteronomy, the production of space proceeds according to Löw’s principles. Moses’ instructions to his audience in Moab include actions to create the future spaces and ideas to guide their perception. By frequent has not yet been published in English. Quotations are translated by the author and rendered in German within the notes. 7. Ibid., 36–44. 8. Ibid., 179–83. 9. Ibid., 93–108. 10. Ibid., 198: “Der Ort ist somit Ziel und Resultat einer Platzierung” (italics original). 11. Ibid., 159. 1

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repetition, both spatial actions and ideas are meant to create institutionalized spaces within the Promised LAND. Löw’s research also analyzes conditions of transforming institutionalized spaces: “Alterations of institutionalized spaces or spatial structures have to occur collectively with respect to the relevant regulations or resources.”12 If a spatial modi¿cation is meant to be established against a majority of people, a massive number of resources is needed to safeguard the execution (e.g. taxes, police, military forces). On the other hand, the transformation of an institutionalized space can succeed if a large number of people exercises a new spatial practice over a longer period of time—and the opposing structures are not resisting. The Berlin Wall serves as an example. The erection of the wall consumed an enormous amount of material, manpower, and military forces, not to speak of the lives of many citizens who resisted. The wall came down because the public space was claimed by the “Montagsdemonstrationen,” that is, demonstrations taking place every Monday evening in several cities by a growing number of people for a longer period of time. Due to the political changes in Russia, the government’s resources to repress the resistance were no longer suf¿cient. Spatial changes are more easily effected by a collaboration of people, structures, and resources, as at their best they can be moderated by democratic processes. Political instruments like plebiscites or participatory budgets may promote conjoint spatial transformations. Löw also points to other situations, in which spatial transformations may not occur voluntarily but are forced by external interference like natural catastrophes or wars. In this case, people have to develop routines to cope with the new situation.13 The ability to transform space is fundamentally bound to the access to social goods and to the knowledge about material components of space and their symbolic correlations.14 In some respect the sociology of space by Martina Löw combines well with the spatial theory by Henri Lefebvre,15 which is predominant in North American research on space.16 Löw’s concept of spacing resembles 12. Ibid., 272: “Änderungen institutionalisierter Räume oder räumlicher Strukturen müssen kollektiv, mit Bezug auf die relevanten Regeln und Ressourcen erfolgen.” 13. Ibid., 227. 14. Ibid., 212–13. 15. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. D. Nicholson-Smith; Malden: Blackwell, 1991 [orig. 1974]). 16. Cf. Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp, eds., Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography, and Narrative (LHBOTS 481; New York: T&T Clark International, 2007), and Constructions of Space II: The Biblical City and Other Imagined 1

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Lefebvre’s “perceived space,” sometimes also called “spatial practice.”17 In his book Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space, Mark K. George unfolds this idea:18 “Lefebvre was interested in social practices and how they resulted in practices in space, including not only the creation of physical space but even more importantly the habitual, common ways a society interacts with the world. It is those interactions with the material world that lead to a society’s producing its own space in (and on) the physical world.”19 Lefebvre’s concept, however, allows more than one interpretation. In her book Daughter Zion, Mother Zion, Christl M. Maier understands “perceived space” as topography and materiality of space.20 Löw’s concept of “synthesis” resembles Lefebvre’s second and third spatial perspective since it comprises a cognitive realization of space through plans or models (“conceived space”) as well as spatial experience and interpretation by individuals (“lived space”). In Lefebvre’s theory, the difference between the two perspectives not only pertains to the quality of the spatial perception; it ultimately stems from Lefebvre’s Marxist sociological grounding. While “conceived space” is dominated by interests and plans of the ruling class, “lived space” represents the spatial experience of the oppressed. It is “linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art,”21 and thus enables people to undermine the dominating spatial structures. Edward W. Soja developed Lefebvre’s idea of “lived space” further into his concept of “thirdspace.”22 With regard to these theoretical perspectives, the book of Deuteronomy may be understood as a large-scale project for the transformation of space: Moses does not choose a participatory way to succeed, but aims at convincing his audience by means of a monologue, one which displays a spatial conception that claims to grant material and spiritual bene¿ts for everyone belonging to Israel. The Deuteronomic vision of space Spaces (LHBOTS 491; New York: T&T Clark International, 2008), passim; Christl M. Maier, Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008); Mark K. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (ed. Benjamin D. Sommer; SBLAIL 2; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). 17. Lefebvre, Production, 38. 18. George, Tabernacle, 23–25, 45–48. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Maier, Zion, 35. 21. Lefebvre, Production, 33. Thus George, Tabernacle, rede¿nes Lefebvre’s term and uses “conceptual space” instead of “conceived space” (26, cf. 87). 22. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImaged Places (Malden: Blackwell, 1996). 1

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comprises the institutions of monarchy (17:14–20), priesthood (18:1–8), prophecy (18:15–22), and judiciary (12; 19:15–21), as well as all households and ultimately every individual (6:4–9). This conception of space intends to connect past, present, and future spaces, and to orientate every space to “YHWH, our God” (6:4). In my view, the sociology of space as de¿ned by Martina Löw is highly appropriate to grasp the speci¿c quality of the Deuteronomic conception of space. In the next section, I will exemplify my point using the Deuteronomic concept of the HOUSE. The Deuteronomic Concept of the HOUSE The Hebrew term bayit illustrates that the synthesis of a HOUSE depends on one’s perspective: bayit can refer to a building as well as to its inhabitants. Every ancient observer would combine perceived objects like walls, doors, or a roof, as well as the household members individually, to his or her concept of the respective HOUSE. Thus, the two aspects of the concept are intertwined: the inhabitants are conceived in spatial terms, and the idea of the HOUSE as a building incorporates its inhabitants. The synthesis of the HOUSE may be dominated by either aspect—depending on one’s perspective.23 In the book of Deuteronomy, HOUSES do not belong to the narrated present in the plains of MOAB. According to the plot narrated by Moses, Israel’s last experience with HOUSES refers to the “HOUSE of slaves” in EGYPT. Leaving this HOUSE of oppression resulted in gaining freedom and a new identity as a liberated people. This identity is foundational for Israel’s relationship to God, as stated in the opening of the Decalogue: “I am YHWH, your God, who brought you out of the Land of EGYPT, out of the HOUSE of slavery” (5:6). The anticipated transition of moving into HOUSES in the Promised LAND may therefore lead to a crisis for Israel’s identity. How can liberation be preserved, when Israel lives in HOUSES again? Following the recapitulation of the Decalogue, Moses foresees this problem and admonishes Israel: “When YHWH your God has brought you into the land […]—a land with ¿ne, large cities that you did not build, HOUSES ¿lled with all sorts of goods that you did not ¿ll […], take care that you do not forget YHWH, your God, who brought you out of the land of EGYPT, out of the HOUSE of slavery” (6:10–12). 23. For a more detailed analysis of the Deuteronomic concept HOUSE, cf. Geiger, Gottesräume, 155–60. 1

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Remembering the HOUSE of slaves shall lead Israel to preserve the gift of freedom and determine the future synthesis of the spatial concept HOUSE. The HOUSE is not only to be shaped by these memories of past experience in the HOUSE of oppression, but also by a series of activities: Moses gives precise directions how to deal with the building and its inhabitants. Following Löw, these actions can be understood as “spacing activities” that are intended to create the Deuteronomic concept of the HOUSE. Through frequent repetition, this spatial concept becomes institutionalized. One of Moses’ directions refers to the act of constructing a HOUSE: “When you build a new HOUSE, make a parapet around your roof so that you will not bring bloodguilt on your HOUSE, if someone falls from it” (22:8). A Àat roof to walk on seems to be part of the concept HOUSE, and Moses claims the owner’s responsibility for its safety. Erecting a parapet may prevent the HOUSE from being blamed for someone’s death. Otherwise this guilt would be incorporated into the concept of both the building and the members of the household. Thus, the concept HOUSE is created by acts of “spacing” like constructing the building and a parapet, and it is altered by incidents like a fall from the roof.24 To a still greater extent than the objects, every member of the household adds to the concept of the respective HOUSE. Several commandments deal with the question of entering a household as well as being excluded from it. In ch. 15, Moses reÀects upon the case of a slave who refuses to be released in the seventh year, “because he loves you and your HOUSE, since he is well off with you” (15:16). In this case the male or female slave shall become part of the household forever. Yet, this transition of status is not merely stated but performed by a ritual located at the DOORPOST, in order to express the af¿liation to the community bayit at the entrance to the building bayit. Similarly, an eventual exclusion of members of the household shall be executed at the entrance—or exit, in this case. According to the Deuteronomic law, a girl who is proven not to be a virgin when married has to face the death penalty, which is ordered to be executed at the entrance of her father’s HOUSE with the argument “So you shall purge the evil from your midst” (22:21). This reasoning illustrates that the illegitimate sexual conduct of one family member affects the whole household. According to Moses’ stipulation, order can only be re-established by ritual stoning of the offender at the doorpost.

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24. …or having tampered weights within the house (Deut 25:16).

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In ch. 12, a central passage about Israel’s religious duties, the community of the HOUSE is addressed as a whole during the feasts of sacri¿ce at the “PLACE that YHWH will choose to put his name there” (12:5): “And you shall eat there in the presence of YHWH your God, you and your HOUSE, rejoicing in all you put your HAND onto in which YHWH your God has blessed you” (12:7). In the following verses Moses elaborates whom he considers being part of the concept HOUSE: “you and your son and your daughter, your male and female slaves, and the Levites resident in your towns” (12:18). During these sacri¿cial celebrations, the HOUSE’s community is constituted by their relation to God: they shall eat in the presence of YHWH (lipnê yhwh) and rejoice. Apart from daily routines and hierarchies, the spatial distance from the HOUSE as a building enables the perception of the HOUSE as a community. Through this spatial distance, the idea of the community comes close to the past time of walking through the wilderness, without HOUSES to live in and without hierarchies. Moreover, during the celebration at the chosen PLACE the commonly acquired goods (literally, “all you put your HAND onto”) are experienced as the blessing of God (12:7; cf. the arguments about HAND below). The spatial distance from the HOUSE as a building allows Israel to perceive the HOUSE as a community constituted by YHWH, sojourning in his presence. Deuteronomy 26:13 argues that Israel’s answer to the gift of the land lies in practicing justice towards all members of the household. This synthesis of the concept HOUSE becomes habitual by frequent repetition during the celebrations at the chosen PLACE: building, community, and commonly acquired goods are tied to the chosen PLACE and interpreted from this center of God’s presence. This Deuteronomic understanding of the concept HOUSE is included in 6:4–9. With his exhortations, Moses addresses two levels: the level of action and the level of imagination. All of Israel (6:4) shall shape their HOUSES according to the Deuteronomic conception of space and thus bear witness to the fact that YHWH released Israel out of the HOUSE of slavery. By repeating Moses’ instructions, the acts of spacing become habitual and the synthesis is practiced so as to transform the HOUSE into a visible sign for Israel’s liberation by YHWH from the HOUSE of slavery. Bodies as Subject and Object in the Production of Space By explaining the Deuteronomic concept of the HOUSE I have demonstrated how Deuteronomic spatial concepts are created by theological ideas and corresponding acts of spacing. In the following I will focus on the relevance of the body within this conception, ¿rst with regard to the 1

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theory of Löw and then by unfolding the Deuteronomic concept of the HAND in the following section. Löw does not presume “two different realities—space on the one hand, social goods, human beings and their actions on the other,” but deduces space “from the structure of human beings and social goods.”25 Thus every body may be perceived as part of the “relational arrangement”26 called space—one’s own body as well as other bodies—and at the same time may be understood as a prerequisite for the production of space by acts of spacing: “Every approach to space in terms of action theory inevitably starts from the physical quality of human beings.”27 “The body” itself is a product of synthesis which combines the individual’s bodily perception and experience with cultural orientations to a concept “body.” Moreover, the spatial concept of an individual body is generated by actions and placements, by acts of spacing: by posture, gestures, the habit of eating and moving, vesture, and hairstyle. Besides, bodies are subject to acts of spacing produced by the environment, such as care or violence, wind or rain. The individually shaped body may become part of an inde¿nite number of spatial syntheses. Thus Löw understands bodies as both “objective and an expression of a relational arrangement of discourses and practices.”28 Within her spatial theory, Löw does not reÀect speci¿cally upon the body’s necessity for the human capacity to act. Even the creation of virtual spaces is bound to a minimum of bodily action like the movement

25. Löw, Raumsoziologie, 264: “Meine These ist, dass nur wenn nicht länger zwei verschiedenen Realitäten—auf der einen Seite der Raum, auf der anderen die sozialen Güter, Menschen und ihr Handeln—unterstellt werden, sondern statt dessen Raum aus der Struktur der Menschen und sozialen Güter heraus abgeleitet wird, nur dann können die Veränderungen der Raumphänomene erfasst warden.” 26. Ibid., 271: “relationale (An)Ordnung.” 27. Ibid., 128: “Jeder handlungstheoretische Bezug auf Raum setzt zwangsläu¿g an der Körperlichkeit der Menschen an.” In Löw’s view, the body cannot be called “natural” because “the body is always portioned, described, formed by ideas and images. Neither a sense of self nor scienti¿c scrutiny can advance to a pre-discursive body. Rather, research has to take into account the fact that the body of scienti¿c analyses of space is already space by itself” (“…sondern der Körper ist immer schon ein geteilter, beschriebener, in Vorstellungen und Bildern geformter. Weder die Selbstwahrnehmung noch der wissenschaftliche Blick darauf kann zu einem vordiskursiven Leib vordringen. Die Untersuchungen müssen vielmehr dem Faktum Rechnung tragen, dass der Körper wissenschaftlicher Raumanalysen selbst schon Raum ist”; ibid., 128). 28. Ibid., 127: “Körper werden als Ziel und Ausdruck einer relationalen Anordnung von Diskursen und Praktiken verstanden.”

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of tongue, ¿ngers, pupils, or cells within our nerve tracts. Every act of synthesis depends upon the brain as a physical basis. Lefebvre already described a twofold relation between body and space: …there is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s development in space and its occupation of space. Before producing effects in the material realm (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space.29

The spatial and space-producing quality of the body plays a decisive role within the Deuteronomic conception of space, and 6:4–9 focuses especially on the relation between body and space. The seven parallel summonses align bodies and buildings, tie them to “these words” (v. 6) and thus integrate them into the Deuteronomic conception of space. The body concepts HEART (vv. 5, 6), HAND, and EYES (v. 8) direct the reader’s attention to the signi¿cance of the body both being space and creating space. How Moses aims to increase the reader’s physical and mental capacity to transform his or her world, I will now demonstrate by analyzing the Deuteronomic concept of the HAND. The Deuteronomic Concept of the HAND In Deuteronomy, the HAND is the predominant body part (83×) that is combined with a variety of activities. The physical quality of the HAND is inseparably linked to its ability to exert power. The Hebrew word yƗd means “power,” “sphere of power,” “control,” or “force.”30 The Deuteronomic commandments utilize these basic abilities of the HAND (spacing) and interpret them according to the Deuteronomic conception (synthesis). Within a spatial perspective, the HAND is both a subject of spatial activities and an object of placements (like binding a sign on one’s HAND; 6:8). Moreover, the merging of Israel’s actions with YHWH’s actions is characteristic within the Deuteronomic conception, as 29. Lefebvre, Production, 170 (italics original). This quotation demonstrates how Lefebvre interfuses an absolute conception of space (“it produces itself in space”) and a relative one (“it produces that space”). Cf. Löw, Raumsoziologie, 24–35, about the categorial distinction of an absolutist and a relativist understanding of space. 30. Cf. Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropologie des Alten Testaments (with two appendices; rev. and ed. Bernd Janowski; Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2010), 108–9; Peter R. Ackroyd, Jan Bergmann, and Wolfgang von Soden, “jƗd,” ThWAT 3:421– 55, 435–37. 1

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it is performed at the “PLACE that YHWH will choose to put his name there” (12:5). The “statutes and ordinances” (12:1) are meant to curtail the HAND’s capacity for acts of violence (esp. chs. 19–21). The concept HAND is theologically founded in Israel’s liberation from EGYPT by YHWH’s “mighty HAND” (6:21). In ch. 15, the interrelation of Israel’s actions and YHWH’s actions is exempli¿ed by the topic of sharing the acquired goods. The respective commandments intend to impress the act of sharing as a central challenge to the concept of the HAND: in the year of the remission of debts, everyone is summoned to release the “claim of his HAND” (v. 2), or, addressing the HAND as subject, the HAND itself shall remit the debt (v. 3) and not be tight-¿sted in the face of the poor (v. 7), but opened wide (vv. 8, 11). The bounteousness of the HAND will result in YHWH’s blessing: “because for this YHWH your God will bless you in all your works and in all you put your HAND onto” (v. 10). Therefore YHWH’s blessing is both the effect and the source of the individual’s readiness to give (v. 4, 6): it provides the abundance in the Promised LAND and thus enables the people to share their goods. The Deuteronomic concept HAND thus implies a mindful, generous attitude, which is orientated toward the needs of others and sustained by the all-embracing HAND of YHWH. The mutual dependence of human actions and God’s blessing can be learned during the regular celebrations at the chosen PLACE. Besides other types of sacri¿ces, the addressed people shall bring the “heave offerings of your HAND” (12:6, 11, 17; cf. 16:10, 17; 26:4), consume them in the presence of YHWH and rejoice “in all you have put your HAND onto” (12:7), in order to conceive of the acquired goods as the blessing of YHWH (v. 7). The celebrations at the chosen PLACE intend to perform a blessing circle by integrating the pleasure in the achievements of one’s own HAND (vv. 7, 18), the same HAND’s offerings to YHWH (vv. 6, 11, 17), the experience of sharing within the household (vv. 12, 18), and the blessing of YHWH (vv. 7, 12) as the source of all riches. By frequent repetition, this act of synthesis becomes routine. It is meant to prevent a person from “say[ing] in your HEART: My power and the strength of my HAND have gotten me this wealth” (8:17). Moses tells his audience to remember YHWH, “for it is he who gives you power to get wealth” (8:18). The inherent power of the HAND implies also the responsibility for one’s actions: acts of spacing exert inÀuence on other spatial concepts and refer back to the concept of the HAND. Therefore neither goods put under the ban (13:18) nor blood guilt (21:6, 7) must stick to one’s HAND. Above all there are regulations concerning intentionally or 1

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unintentionally exerted violence. An accident by mishandling an axe serves as precedent for manslaughter (19:5) and is not punished by the death penalty (cf. Exod 21:13; Num 35:11). By contrast, premeditated murder (19:11) has to be punished by death through the HAND of the avenger of blood (19:12; cf. Num 35:16–21). In a similar way the socalled talion formula “HAND for HAND” (19:21) upholds the principle of equivalence between transgression and punishment.31 According to the Deuteronomic conception, Israel’s power is founded by YHWH’s single act of liberating Israel “from the HAND of Pharaoh, the king of EGYPT” (7:8). In Deuteronomy, the Exodus is attributed to YHWH’s “mighty HAND” (3:24; 6:21; 7:8; 9:26), often combined with the formula “…and outstretched arm” (4:34; 5:15; 7:19; 11:2; 26:8). While the Exodus was exerted by YHWH’s “mighty HAND,” entrance into the Promised LAND is facilitated because YHWH delivers the enemies into Israel’s HAND (2:24, 30; 3:2, 3; 7:24). After seizing the land, Israel’s power over his enemies will ever be bestowed by YHWH (20:13; 21:10). Although YHWH’s HAND acts in favor of Israel, it also de¿nes the boundary to Israel’s ambitions. When Israel breaks the covenant, the people will incur YHWH’s curse instead of his blessing on “all that you set your HAND to do” (28:20). The reversal underlines Israel’s absolute dependence upon its relationship to YHWH. If Moses summons his addressees in 6:8 (and 11:18) to tie “these words” to their HAND, the HAND itself becomes an objective of placement. “These words” are supposed to be bound physically to the HAND (cf. Gen 38:28; Josh 2:18, 21, et al.), but neither the precise wording32 31. Cf. Georg Braulik, Deuteronomium 1–16,17 (NEchtB AT 15; Würzburg: Echter, 1986), 144; Crüsemann, Tora, 176–77, displays the records from the book of the covenant, which interpret the intended equivalence as a ¿nancial restitution (Exod 21:18–19, 22, 29). 32. The Jewish tradition relating “these words” to the wording of the Shema in Deut 6:4–9 and putting this passage inside the te¿lin and the mezuzah was only institutionalized around 100 C.E. (cf. Othmar Keel, “Zeichen der Verbundenheit. Zur Vorgeschichte und Bedeutung der Forderungen von Deuteronomium 6,8f und Par.,” in Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes a l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire [ed. Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker; OBO 38; Freiburg (Schweiz): Universitätsverlag, 1981], 159–240, here 167). In the Samaritan and Qumran traditions “these words” are attributed to the Decalogue (cf. Keel, “Zeichen der Verbundenheit,” 160–71, 175–76), which precedes our passage, because the Decalogue reiterates the expression in its conclusion: “These words Yhwh spoke to all your assembly at the mountain” (Deut 5:22). In Christian interpretations there is a tendency to extend the reference of these words to the whole book of Deuteronomy since it begins with the statement “these are the words 1

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nor the exact way of binding can be identi¿ed.33 “These words” shall be understood as “signs,” a term connected to YHWH’s wonders during the Exodus from EGYPT (4:34; 6:22; 7:19; 26:8, et al.). The sign on the HAND may thus be interpreted as a “portable wonder,” which everybody wears daily as a bodily sign of memory. Moreover, the sign represents a corporal counterpart to the verbal commitment in 6:4, a “visible acknowledgment that Israel belonged to HIM and recognized this.”34 “These words” shall impress the concept of the HAND and remind their bearer that his or her own actions are enabled and limited by the “mighty HAND” of YHWH. Deuteronomy 6:4–9 as a Key to the Deuteronomic Conception of Space The analysis of the Deuteronomic concepts HOUSE and HAND through the lens of the spatial theory of Martina Löw has shown to what extent the spaces of everyday life are embedded in the Deuteronomic theology. In a summary reading of 6:4–9 I will now integrate the concepts HOUSE and HAND into the spatial conception of the Shema, which widens out in three interrelated dimensions: the corporeal, spatial, and social. By mentioning HEART, HAND, and EYES (lƝbƗb, vv. 5, 6; yƗd, v. 8; !ênayim, v. 8), every addressee is perceived in a corporeal dimension. The Deuteronomic concept HAND maintains that one’s own power is both facilitated and limited by YHWH’s power (cf. the previous section). The HEART appeals to a different physical reality. The ability to communicate is located within the HEART, which thus allows or hinders the relationship to YHWH: the addressees are summoned to love YHWH and serve him “with all your HEART” (10:12; 11:13). Simultaneously, the unconditional love of God is an act of decision which is situated within the HEART (30:1, 2). Moses distinguishes the appropriate attitude from dispositions of the HEART which disagree with the relationship to God: the HEART may avert (17:17), be too strong (15:7; 29:18) or too weak (28:28, 65, 67, in case of breaking the covenant). In sum, appropriate actions rise from the right attitude of the HEART (30:14). Finally, the that Moses spoke to all Israel…” (Deut 1:1; cf. Braulik, Deuteronomium, 56; JeanPierre Sonnet, The Book Within the Book: Writing in Deuteronomy [Biblical Interpretation Series 14; Leiden: Brill, 1997], 54–55). 33. Keel (“Zeichen,” 214) suggests a metal or leather band around the wrist or arm, practices which were widespread in the ancient Near East and Egypt. 34. Benno Jacob, The Second Book of the Bible: Exodus (trans. with an introduction by Walter Jacob in association with Yaakov Elman; Hoboken: Ktav, 1992), 313. 1

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EYES (v. 8) can be de¿ned as a physical place of synthesis, since two functions are attributed to them: witnessing and judging. The witness is generally situated in juridical contexts (21:7; 25:9), but Deuteronomy highlights the relevance of Israel’s witness to the powerful acts (“the mighty HAND”) of YHWH during the Exodus (1:30; 10:21; 29:1, 2, et al.). On the other hand, the ability to judge is ascribed to the EYES. It has a juridical relevance (16:19), but above all Israel is called to act not according to what is “right in your own EYES” (12:8) but rather to let YHWH’s perspective guide one’s actions (12:25; 13:19; 21:9, et al.) so as to avoid what is “evil in YHWH’s EYES” (4:25; 9:18; 17:2). According to 6:4–9, the bodily spaces HEART, HAND, and EYES shall be tied to “these words” in speci¿c ways. By acts of spacing, “these words” are meant to become Àesh, thus exerting inÀuence on the synthesis of the respective body part and guiding its actions. If the relationship to God is written “in one’s HEART,” one’s HAND cannot but act in tune with the Deuteronomic commandments. If YHWH’s judgments remain not only “under your EYES” but “between your EYES” (v. 8), they are so close that the individual is unable to see them. YHWH’s judgments thus become part of one’s own perspective. Moreover, “these words” on the forehead are visible for everyone and function as a sign of belonging to the people who are holy to YHWH (14:1, 2). The corporeal dimension is integrated into the spatial dimension of 6:4–9. First, the daily space of the HOUSE is mentioned (v. 7) as a manifest symbol for the liberation from the HOUSE of slaves. In the Promised LAND, every household is to be shaped in harmony with the relationship to God by the referred routines. In v. 7, the HOUSE is set in contrast to the WAY, which may comprise the difference between private and public or sitting and moving. Within the Deuteronomic understanding, the concept of the WAY retains the memory of the WAY “when you came out of EGYPT” (23:5; 24:9; 25:17), and combines it with the formulaic admonishment “to walk in his WAYS” (8:6; 19:9; 26:17; 30:16). Only a life in accordance with the Deuteronomic commandments can perpetuate the freedom that Israel received on its WAY out of EGYPT, within the Promised LAND—on all its WAYS. “These words” on the DOORPOSTS de¿ne the HOUSE from the threshold (Deut 6:9; 11:18), as both the building and the community shall be marked by them. With each entering or leaving of the building, the perception of the HOUSE is determined by remembering the words, that is, the Deuteronomic conception of space. Within a Pentateuchal perspective, the doorposts remind Israel at the ¿rst Passover ritual during the Exodus from EGYPT (Exod 12:7, 22, 23). At the same time, the spatial concept differs from the one in Exod 12: if Israel follows the 1

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Deuteronomic commandments within the Promised LAND, any threat that the sign at the DOORPOST could deter (Exod 12:12, 23) belongs to the past. In case of breaking the covenant, nothing can protect Israel against YHWH’s curses, which will pervert every spatial concept (28:15– 68). As a second difference, in Deut 16:1–8 the Passover ritual is not situated within the familial space of the HOUSE (like in Exod 12), but at the “PLACE that YHWH will chose to put his name there,” in order that all Israelite families may relive the Exodus experience that transformed them into a liberated people.35 Resembling the spatial concept of the HOUSE, the GATE (Deut 6:9) is constituted by the synthesis of building and community. In Deuteronomy, the GATE appears frequently in the formula “who are within your GATES” (ăšer biš!ƗrêkƗ), which places the responsibility for the Levites, sojourners, orphans, and widows (14:29; 16:11, 14; 26:12, 13, et al.) within the respective GATES of those addressed by Moses. Only through practicing solidarity with the marginalized people does the equality granted by the Exodus become real (Deut 5:14, 15). Through the court of the elders situated at the GATE the solidarity is preserved legally (17:5; 21:19; 22:15, 24; 25:7). The writing “in your GATES” ties the Deuteronomic commandments to a building that de¿nes the community in both spatial and juridical respects. More than the building, the community living within the GATE shall be impressed by “these words.” In the Deuteronomic laws, the signi¿cance of the GATES is provided and limited by their counterpart, the PLACE to be chosen (cf. Deut 12; 14, etc.). Every single GATE gains signi¿cance for all Israel, as it has to represent the liberation of the people within the local community. Also the plural form “in your GATES” points to the central perspective: it addresses the plurality of GATES (cities and their citizens) belonging to Israel.36 Therefore the concept of the GATES leads back to the starting point of 6:4: the community of Israel. Ultimately, the spatial conception is intertwined with the social dimension of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 6:4–9 starts with addressing every individual, who is summoned to pass “these words” on to his or her children (v. 7) and integrate the children’s questions (v. 20) into the spaces of his or her daily life (v. 7). The adults’ explanations are meant to tell

35. Cf. Michaela Geiger, “Der Befreiung Zeit einräumen. Die Zeitkonzeption des dtn Pessachgebots (Dtn 16,1–8),” in Zeit wahrnehmen. Feministisch-theologische Perspektiven auf das Erste Testament (ed. Hedwig-Jahnow-Forschungsprojekt; SBS 222; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010), 40–65. 36. Cf. Eckart Otto, “ša!ar,” ThWAT 8:358–403, here 376. 1

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the story of the Exodus so vividly as if they were real EYE witnesses (v. 22). Listening to their parents, the events become part of the children’s experience so that they may accept YHWH’s commands as addressed to them (note the difference between “our God” and “commanded you” in v. 20). Besides the children, the adults being addressed are also responsible for integrating the slaves belonging to their HOUSE into the Deuteronomic vision of liberation (5:14; 15:12–18). The community of the GATE draws a wider circle, which comprises the responsibility for the Levites, sojourners, orphans, and widows (14:29, et al.). If every individual within HOUSE and GATE ful¿lls the spatial routine prescribed in 6:4–9, it becomes an institution, so that ¿nally all Israel (6:4) will be imprinted by “these words.” At the PLACE to be chosen, every individual can relive during the celebrations (chs. 12; 16; 26) how the experience of the Exodus forms Israel’s identity as a liberated people. To conclude, 6:4–9 presents Deuteronomy’s conception of space in a nutshell. The whole book is permeated by spatial ideas and practices to such an extent that the theology of Deuteronomy may be called a theology of space.

1

REMEMBERED SPACE IN BIBLICAL NARRATIVE Victor H. Matthews

Memory lingers. It attaches itself to events, persons, and places creating a mental map that guides, consciously or unconsciously, much of our everyday activities and also allows us to make a virtual journey back in time. In the process of building spatial associations every culture accumulates a mental and physical set of landmarks associated with repetitive events, both mundane and momentous. Of course, signi¿cance is also manufactured in the production of space and then is captured in memory or commemoration. And, when memory is associated with space, it often supplies the only remaining link to locations that have been drastically transformed. It might well not be recognizable to persons who once lived and worked there. Recognizing the importance attached to space, leaders frequently work to associate themselves with particular locations and spatial dimensions. In this way they both enhance their own power base and authority over the community, and call on tradition as the basis for their actions and the legitimization of their elite position. During the course of these activities, memories of the various aspects of spatial characteristics can be and often are manipulated to serve political, economic, and social purposes in later periods of time. As Henri Lefebvre and others have noted, space can be described in terms of a triad: perceived, conceived, and lived.1 Perceived space (what Edward Soja calls “¿rstspace”2) comprises its physical properties that can be claimed, de¿ned in terms of its features, and transformed. Conceived 1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 33, 38– 39. Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), 181–92, provides a helpful summary of Lefebvre’s theoretical discussion of spatiality and especially the inÀuences of Heidegger and Marx on Lefebvre’s thinking process. A careful delineation of Lefebvre’s analysis of urban space can be found in Walter Prigge, “Reading the Urban Revolution: Space and Representation,” in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (ed. Kanishka Goonewardena et al.; New York: Routledge, 2008), 46–61. 2. For a description of Edward Soja’s concept of the “trialectics of spatiality,” see his work Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 74–82. 1

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space is found in the imagination and what can be thought about that space: on maps, in mathematics, and in the minds of urban planners and engineers. It is lived space (Soja’s “thirdspace”) that combines the physical features with the imagined character of the space as it is occupied, manipulated, and modi¿ed while at the same time being invested with meaning and symbolic value and identity.3 Expressed in this way, space is produced and reproduced as it becomes part of human consciousness. But, perhaps, it is still possible to slice the concept of spatiality once more in order to coin “fourthspace” as the receptacle of “remembered space.” Once space in all of its dimensions has become indelibly de¿ned through repetition of social practice as it serves its domestic, sacred, or of¿cial role, then the collective memory of the community tends to perpetuate that spatial conception as part of the “mental map” of their living and working space.4 Of course, that assumes a cultural continuity with the community that ¿rst made use of or produced the space or at least a well-developed retention of transmitted memory from one culture to another over time. Furthermore, the original mental image will function in different ways for different audiences or individuals.5 Subsequent “users” may attempt to mimic the original event(s) that ¿rst de¿ned and modi¿ed that space, but they are successors, not originators. While it can be said that the original mental image of that discrete space continues to function for the subsequent community over time, there will be subtle modi¿cations as new uses for the space are conceived and put into practice. In this study, various ways in which space becomes a part of human interaction will be examined and, in particular, how the memory attached to social space inÀuences later usage of that space. Spatial Landmarks and Authoritative Settings In reading the biblical narrative it becomes clear that the storytellers have certain conventions that they tend to use in describing events or providing spatial landmarks. Some rather obscure places are only mentioned 3. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 190; Soja, Thirdspace, 61. 4. See the discussion of “mental maps” and the perception of inhabited space being marked with the “notion of home” in Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 28–30. 5. Angelika Hartmann, “Mental Maps, Cognitive Mapping and Mental Space in Contexts of Near and Middle Eastern Societies,” in Authority, Privacy and Public Order in Islam: Proceedings of the 22nd Congress of L’Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Cracow, Poland, 2004 (ed. Barbara Michalak-Pikulska and Andrzej Pikulski; OLA 148; Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 330. 1

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once (Gen 35:8—the oak “below Bethel” where Rebekah’s nurse is buried). Other sites lack explicit landmarks but draw their signi¿cance from social activity. That is the case with the place in the “hill country of Gilead” where Jacob and Laban make a covenant and set up a pillar and heap of stones to mark the boundary between their territories (Gen 31:22–25, 43–54). While this ceremony provides the underpinning for Jacob’s establishment of his own household separate from that of his uncle,6 it also forms a spatial and memorial link to Jacob’s pillar erected near Bethel and God’s reference to that pillar in Gen 31:13. Then, once Jacob returned to Canaan, yet another pillar is set up in order to complete the inclusio of theophanic occurrences near Bethel (Gen 35:9–15).7 These multiple pillars function in much the same way as the multiple altars set up by Abram when he ¿rst entered the land of Canaan.8 They mark the boundaries of the Promised Land, reinforce the covenant promise of that land, and provide a visual marker, like boundary stones at the corners of a ¿eld signifying ownership.9 When very speci¿c dimensions and an exact location are included, a narrative trail of linked memories provides a means of tying generations together. For example, there is a narrative and a spatial memory associated with Abram’s original encampment by “the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron” where he constructed another of his altars to Yahweh (Gen 13:18; 14:13). Subsequent instances in which a particular location reappears as a landmark serve both geographic and narrative purposes. To be sure, a venerable stand of ancient trees could serve as a landmark for travelers or as a narrative “place holder” to indicate both where in physical space it occurs, as well as why a particular story element is important.10 Thus in Gen 18:1, Abraham is once again (or is still) 6. Charles Mabee, “Jacob and Laban: The Structure of Judicial Proceedings (Genesis 31:25–42),” VT 30 (1980): 194, explores the legal aspects of this encounter, with judiciary and executive realms of discourse. 7. See Benedikt Otzen, “Heavenly Visions in Early Judaism: Origin and Function,” in In the Shelter of Elyon: Essays on Ancient Palestinian Life and Literature in Honor of G. W. Ahlström (ed. W. Boyd Barrick and John R. Spencer; JSOTSup 31; Shef¿eld: JSOT, 1984), 200, for discussion of the “sanctuary legend or cult legend” associated with the placement of a temple or shrine. 8. Gen 12:7 at Shechem; Gen 12:8 at Bethel; Gen 13:18 at Hebron. 9. For a discussion of land deeds and boundary markers in the biblical text and in Mesopotamia, see Victor H. Matthews, Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 30–31. 10. See F. Nigel Hepper and Shimon Gibson, “Abraham’s Oak of Mamre: The Story of a Venerable Tree,” PEQ 126 (1994): 94–95, for the identi¿cation of this tree in the Hebron region as an oak (Q. calliprinos) rather than a terebinth, which occurs “in dry steppe type forest.” 1

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encamped “by the oaks of Mamre” when he encounters three visitors (divine beings) and is once again given the promise of an heir (v. 10).11 Is it simply coincidence that consecutive events in Abraham’s career occur in this place, or do they occur here because of the memory of its sacred character and the likelihood that God will appear here?12 It also raises the question of Mamre becoming a benchmark to which other important sites or events are linked. This usage seems to be implied when the of¿cial location of land in question is cited in Abraham’s real estate contract for the Cave of Machpelah (Gen 23:17). This place will become the burial spot for most of the ancestors, and is identi¿ed as “to the east of Mamre” (also see the same phrase in Gen 25:9 at the time of Abraham’s burial).13 A similar designation appears in Gen 23:19, in which the cave is said to be “facing Mamre (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan.”14 In that instance, however, it appears that Hebron and Mamre are simply equated. That is also, apparently, the case when Jacob comes to his dying father Isaac’s side “at Mamre, or Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron), where Abraham and Isaac had resided as aliens” (Gen 35:27). The latter part of the verse provides another aspect of memory that ties place to status or social condition. In this transition from Isaac’s status as head of the household and Jacob’s ascendance to that position, it may be important to tie Jacob to a place where he may have only lived as a child and in which both Abraham and Isaac spent considerable time, but in a diminished social role as “aliens.” Jacob has now returned to the Promised Land to take his

11. For a discussion of Mamre and its designation as a holy site by post-biblical writers (especially Eusebius and Sozomen), see Arieh Kofsky, “Mamre: A Case of a Regional Cult?” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and ConÀicts in the Holy Land: First Fifteen Centuries CE (ed. Arieh Kofsky and Gedaliahu A. G. Stroumsa; Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 19–30. 12. See Detlef Jericke, Abraham in Mamre: historische und exegetische Studien zur Region von Hebron und zu Genesis 11,27–19,38 (CHANE 17; Leiden: Brill, 2003). 13. See Meir Sternberg, “Double Cave, Double Talk: The Indirections of Biblical Dialogue,” in “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative (ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr.; Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 48–51, for a very careful discussion of the negotiating strategy employed by Ephron and the way in which he determined the exact dimensions of the purchase and its price. 14. For an examination of the rhetorical style of the ancestors in negotiating the purchase of the cave, see G. Brooke Lester, “Admiring Our Savvy Ancestors: Abraham’s and Jacob’s Rhetoric of Negotiation (Gen 23, 33),” Koinonia 15 (2003): 81–94. See also on burial customs, Nahum M. Sarna, “Genesis Chapter 23: The Cave of Machpelah,” HS 23 (1982): 17–21. 1

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place as the heir of the covenant, but he needs this spatial link to the past to complete the circle and further legitimize his position as the heir of the covenant. The link to Mamre is solidi¿ed when Jacob tells his sons that his ¿nal wish is to be buried “with my ancestors—in the cave in the ¿eld of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave in the ¿eld at Machpelah near Mamre, in the land of Canaan, in the ¿eld that Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite as a burial site” (Gen 49:29–30).15 Any biblical statement that includes so many quali¿ers (cf. Gen 19:4) generally serves a legal purpose.16 What the biblical writer is asserting (through Jacob’s speech) is an indisputable, legal claim to the land. For now “the ¿eld and the cave that is in it were purchased from the Hittites,” has become more than just real estate to the descendants of Abraham. It contains the remains of previous generations of their ancestors (vv. 31–32), and is free of any legal constraint or lien, and therefore belongs to the people of Israel in perpetuity.17 The fact that Jacob’s sons carried out his charge to them (Gen 50:12–13) and “buried him in the cave of the ¿eld at Machpelah, the ¿eld near Mamre, which Abraham bought as a burial site from Ephron the Hittite,” simply con¿rms this legal claim while solidifying the memory associated with that signi¿cant social space.18 A slightly different narrative device employed by the storyteller is found in those instances where it is possible physically and visually to demonstrate a king’s authority by placing him in a signi¿cant place (a throne room when palaces are standard [Jer 36:22], a city gate [2 Sam 19:8], or near sacred/remarkable trees when in the ¿eld). Thus an explicit image of King Saul is provided for the audience in 1 Sam 22:6, which has the monarch “sitting at Gibeah, under the tamarisk tree on the height, with his spear in his hand, and all his servants…standing around him.” Gibeah is of course Saul’s stronghold, but the inclusion of the tamarisk,

15. See Philip L. Culbertson, “Blessing Jacob’s Sons, Inheriting Family Myths,” STRev 37 (1993): 52–76. 16. See Gen 19:4 with its careful effort to point out that every male citizen of Sodom is outside Lot’s door. On this language, see Robert Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Gen 18 and 19 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 144–46. 17. See the treatment of this text in Gene M. Tucker, “The Legal Background of Genesis 23,” JBL 85 (1966): 77–84. Note also the legal parallel with Joseph’s burial site, “in the portion of ground Jacob had bought from the children of Hamor” (Josh 24:32). Here too it is purchase that provides the claim to the land. 18. Joshua Berman, “Identity Politics and the Burial of Jacob (Genesis 50:1–14),” CBQ 68 (2006): 19, points to the lengthy description of the site (52 words) and notes it is the ¿rst reference to the burial of the matriarchs at Machpelah. 1

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an unusual species to ¿nd in the Hill Country,19 is typical of those in authority, such as Deborah, who sits under a palm tree between Ramah and Bethel (Judg 4:5). Having his spear in his hand marks Saul as the war chief. The brandishing of his weapon on this occasion, as a substitute for a royal scepter, marks him as a leader at war. However, in this case his authority is called into question. Saul has grown suspicious of his “servants,” believing that they are conspiring against him in hopes of receiving land or leadership positions in a future Davidic regime (1 Sam 22:7–8).20 Most telling, however, in this narrative is the fact that Saul is sitting “on the height,” a likely spot for a sacred high place. Since neither is directly mentioned, it may be that the story depends on the emic understanding of the audience who would immediately form a mental picture of the function(s) of such a place.21 While it may serve as a vantage point from which to view the surrounding area, Saul attempts to transform it into social space by having it peopled with “all his servants” (= royal court/kin group followers), who are arranged around him at this assembly. The strategic arrangement of individuals in signi¿cant space creates a form of capitalization of space.22 Such an arrangement, “shaped by both the physical domain in which they are interacting and by the placement of their bodies,”23 and the speech that takes place within it has been referred to as an F-Formation, with the principal speaker dominating the 19. Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (2d ed.; WBC 10; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 223. There is an irony to the mention of the tamarisk in this scene since Saul will be buried initially by the men of Jabesh-gilead “under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh” (1 Sam 31:13). 20. At the very end of his career Saul is portrayed once again with a spear in his hand, but he is a despairing and exhausted king who now is “leaning on his spear” as his army is decimated by the Philistines at Gilboa and he faces capture or death (2 Sam 1:6). 21. See Anthony F. Campbell, “The Reported Story: Midway Between Oral Performance and Literary Art,” Semeia 46 (1989): 79, who points to the need to ¿ll out the narrative gap in the story for the modern audience if not for the more knowledgeable ancient one. 22. Ryan Centner ¿rst employs this terminology in his conference paper, “Spatial Capital: The Power to Take Place,” presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Online: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf viewer/pdfviewer?hid=9&sid=70d2395a–6cf2–463a-a490-cf2956fabf81%40session mgr10&vid=3. Centner has subsequently Àeshed out his argument in “Places of Privileged Consumption Practices: Spatial Capital, the Dot-Com Habitus, and San Francisco’s Internet Boom,” City & Community 7 (2008): 193–223. 23. Victor H. Matthews, More Than Meets the Ear: Discovering the Hidden Contexts of Old Testament Conversations (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 144. 1

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power potential of the group.24 As is so often the case in the Saul narrative, however, the monarch is very uneasy on his throne or, in this case, his vantage point. While the storyteller portrays Saul making use of the symbolic trappings associated with place, the scene never quite works for him. The back story of Saul’s ¿ts of madness and jealousy (also involving a spear that he had cast at David [1 Sam 18:10–11; and again in 19:9–10]) strips away the possibility of the king effectively producing space that will serve his purpose of restoring his authority. Transformation of Space and the Manipulation of Memory Modi¿cation of space is a multi-faceted process since it involves making choices on the use of and signi¿cance given to that space. For example, if the decision is made that an open meadow is needed as a ¿eld to grow grain for a household, then a conscious production process takes place that will transform that meadow and reformulate its purpose for the community. First, what had been an unfenced and perhaps unclaimed space must be marked off with boundary stones to signify ownership both of the land and what will be produced there. Then, in a series of orchestrated steps associated with agricultural activity, the land is plowed, sown, carefully maintained, and eventually harvested. In this way, space that had an original, physical character is transformed and literally repurposed. While it retains some of its former characteristics, the planning process that de¿ned its limits and the set of fresh actions that has occurred in this space reorders its function and value to the community. And yet, as long as that community remembers the ¿eld prior to its cultivation, then the memory of its former state lingers on and to an extent continues to at least partially de¿ne that space. In a similar fashion, if a de¿ned area of space with discretely drawn borders, desirable physical characteristics (elevation, slope, drainage), and perhaps past associations of occupancy by previous groups is deemed serviceable as the proper place for building a new house, then both physical and social transformation can commence. That space, which had physical qualities and a social reality associated with its use or its perceived use, becomes a newly designed product with new social possibilities associated with the persons who inhabit and use it.25 Note 24. Adam Kendon, “The F-Formation System: The Spatial Organization of Social Encounter,” Man–Environment Systems 6 (1976): 291–96. 25. See Christian Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic,” in Goonewardena et al., eds., Space, Difference, Everyday Life, 28–29. 1

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also, of course, that the house is not simply a shell, but serves as the focal point for all the complementary domestic tasks associated with the household, and in that way becomes working, rather than potential or remembered, social space.26 Lefebvre points to the fact that “social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information.”27 Thus every aspect of social interaction taking place within social space shapes the tenants, their guests, and those who come in contact with the house to exchange goods and services. Each social and economic transaction further de¿nes or extends the cognitive character of the space and its inhabitants. Turning from the abstract to a speci¿c example (in this case the threshing Àoor of Araunah in 2 Sam 24 discussed below), a ¿eld or a house or an agricultural installation such as a threshing Àoor can be conceived of and mentally transformed through the political process to serve the aims of a leader or a group of community leaders in either a rural or an urban setting. In his classi¿cation of space, Lefebvre refers to this as “spaces of representation,” in which a space obtains signi¿cance and is linked to some other factor such as a divine power.28 What I would add is the signi¿cance of memory that strengthens or perhaps revives that association. For as Edith Wyschogrod notes, “memory is not something apart from the ongoing experience of retrieval but the process of bringing back what was previously encoded.”29 It is that retrieval, whether accidental or intentional, that continues the process of producing space and meaning. When reformulation of space does take place, the original purpose(s) and knowledge of a place and subsequent events that had once occurred in that space may be either subsumed or melded into a new set of events and social imagery. As Lefebvre suggests, the city “centralizes” all of the

26. While Lefebvre (Production of Space, 120) considers a house to be a persistent memory that has a “merely historico-poetic reality rooted in folklore,” I choose here to see it in both its physical reality as a structure and the setting for a variety of social activities within and around the house that transform or mold its physical structure into social space. It is more than “nostalgia” (ibid., 122), but an ongoing process that may encompass past or remembered activities. It operates within a continuum as long as it possesses its original purpose as a dwelling place. 27. Ibid., 77. 28. Ibid., 117. Schmid, “Lefebvre’s Theory,” 37. 29. Edith Wyschogrod, “Memory, History, Revelation: Writing the Dead Other,” in Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism (ed. Michael A. Signer; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 23. 1

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different realities or former events so that their disparate natures can come together to create new identities and social relationships within “the urban situation.”30 In that same way, the collective memory or knowledge about particular social space, along with its previous associations, becomes a form of political “capital” when used to produce an effect on an audience or to serve the aims of the one who combines the manipulation of physical actions with social imagery attached to space.31 With this theoretical model in mind, it may be surmised that Araunah’s threshing Àoor, located near Jerusalem, is intentionally repurposed and rede¿ned by a series of events that transform it from a mundane agricultural installation into sacred space suitable for the construction of a temple to Yahweh.32 In both versions of this account (2 Sam 24 and 1 Chr 21–22), the plot of land in question literally becomes the nexus point, or ground zero, for a crisis in David’s reign. First, God’s wrath against Israel causes the deity to incite David to carry out a census.33 This royal act of counting his people precipitates a tragic set of events that result in a plague being inÀicted on the nation. Secondly, the crisis comes to a head when the plague angel is halted by divine command (24:16) as it reaches the threshing Àoor of Araunah.34 Note the ratcheting up of the scene in the Chronicler’s version that includes a group of elders, who, along with David, are wearing mourning garments (sackcloth) in 30. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (trans. R. Bononno; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 117–18. 31. See the discussion of information as knowledge and knowledge as capital in Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: ReÀections on Time (trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 62–64. 32. Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte: Etude de mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 144, describes how sacred places are formed from the collective memory of a culture and are attached to a general “legendary topography” of that culture’s domain. 33. Paul Evans, “Divine Intermediaries in 1 Chronicles 21: An Overlooked Aspect of the Chronicler’s Theology,” Bib 85 (2004): 545–57, provides an excellent analysis of the differences between the Deuteronomist’s Vorlage and the Chronicler’s reshaping of the narrative. In particular, his discussion of the evident sophistication of angelology and the role of Satan in the Chronicles account is helpful. 34. Obviously, the theophanic manifestation serves as one basis for de¿ning that previously mundane place as sacred space in much the same way that the burning bush signaled God’s presence to Moses and transformed that nondescript portion of the mountain into sacred ground (Exod 3:2–5). However, that is only the ¿rst step in a much longer narrative that is designed to demonstrate how Mt. Sinai is rede¿ned and repurposed into the mountain of God. Compare similar theophanic manifestations and subsequent construction of altars, or at least the expressed desire to build one, in Gen 28:10–22; Judg 6:11–24; and Mark 9:2–8. 1

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response to the plague’s devastation, and who now join the king in doing penitent obeisance (1 Chr 21:15–17).35 Not satis¿ed with simply relying on a divine presence here, the storyteller bolsters the sense of ultimate transformation when David, at the command of the prophet Gad, purchases the threshing Àoor as the site of a sacri¿cial altar (1 Chr 24:18; cf. 1 Chr 21:18–19). The subsequent transactional dialogue between David and Araunah (vv. 20–24) may well be intentionally reminiscent of the astute bartering between Abraham and Ephron the Hittite when the ancestor purchased the Cave of Machpelah in order to bury his wife Sarah (Gen 23:3–20).36 The web of social memory associated with proper behavior, including commercial activity, is thus able to link unassociated social spaces through narrative elements.37 Most critical to both stories is the fact that the only way that these particular spaces can be effectively transformed is for them of¿cially to change hands through payment.38 In both cases it is essential that the penitent pay the “full price” as set by the owner so that there can be no question of a transfer of ownership.39 With that established, the space can be rede¿ned legally, reused for new social purposes, and come under the purview of new traditions by a new people from that point onward.40 What is also remarkable is the manner in which these events are retold in the longer version found in 1 Chr 21. In that account of the theophany, this time including an angel with a ¿ery sword (21:16; cf. Josh 5:13), the sacri¿ce on the threshing Àoor of Ornan the Jebusite not only marks the end of the plague, but there is also a tacit acknowledgment that David is afraid to go to Gibeon where the ark of the covenant resides. He is not 35. Ken Ristau, “Breaking Down Unity: An Analysis of 1 Chronicles 21:1–22:1,” JSOT 30 (2005): 215–16, ties the interruption of the plague at this point in space to the Chronicler’s ideology of Jerusalem (1 Chr 21:16). Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles (OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 384, points out the use of similar literary components, including the “elders clothed in sackcloth” that also appears in the story of Sennacherib’s siege in 2 Kgs 19:2. 36. See H. G. M. Williamson, 1 and 2 Chronicles (NCB; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 149. 37. See Lester, “Admiring Our Savvy Ancestors,” 85–86 for an examination of Abraham’s attention to social protocol that both deeds the land to his household and prevents the loss of good will among the people of Hebron. 38. See Nicolas Wyatt, “ ‘Araunah the Jebusite’ and the Throne of David,” ST 39 (1985): 48, who sees the “absolute transfer” of the property in terms of a political maneuver with the granting of a “co-regency with the ‘Jebusite’ king over the city.” 39. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 386–87, puts particular emphasis on the use of the phrase “full price” since it “is otherwise peculiar to Gen. 23.” 40. See Victor H. Matthews, “Physical Space, Imagined Space, and ‘Lived Space’ in Ancient Israel,” BTB 33 (2003): 13–14. 1

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prepared at that point to inquire of the Lord in a place already set aside for divine–human contact (1 Chr 21:28–30).41 Then, as a sort of coda to the story and one that clearly serves the purpose of the Chronicler to reinforce Jerusalem’s primacy over all other sites, David is portrayed making the decision to construct Yahweh’s temple here rather than at any other place in Israel (1 Chr 22:1). He then puts events in motion, but leaves the ultimate task of completion to his son Solomon because he (David) had “shed much blood” in his wars (1 Chr 22:7–12). Clearly, space that has once functioned as the fulcrum for particular actions or events may lose that original purpose and be rede¿ned by the sale of the land, new construction, destruction of existing structures, or the reshaping of the space’s social role. As Angelika Hartmann puts it, “space is produced, reproduced, represented and adopted.”42 Over time it becomes clear that spatial character can and is manipulated by conscious efforts to spark the imagination and the alteration of mental mapping associated with that space. That, of course, suggests that space and the way it is perceived is Àuid. Coupled with what it may have been used for in the past, particular space can be adopted for other uses or identities while, in some cases, maintaining a cultural link to past associations.43 It is the ability of a recognizable space to retain previous associations that forms the heart of yet another example of this transformation process, in 1 Kgs 22. In this case reference is made to a threshing Àoor that had once existed as part of the extensive agricultural installations associated with the estate of Shemer. When Omri “bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer,” the founder of a new royal dynasty in the northern kingdom built his capital city on this prominent hill (1 Kgs 16:24).44 What is 41. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 388–89, suggests these verses constitute a “parenthetic passage” added as a priestly explanation, made necessary by concerns over the centralization of the cult, for David’s otherwise inappropriate sacri¿ce at any place other than at Gibeon where the ark was installed. She also points out how these verses (1 Chr 21:28–30) stand in diametric contradiction to the primary theme of the rest of the story, whose intent is to demonstrate that the choice of the threshing Àoor as the site of Solomon’s temple is Yahweh’s alone. 42. Hartmann, “Mental Maps, Cognitive Mapping and Mental Space,” 331. 43. See Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). 44. See the discussion of the archaeological excavations of the Iron Age levels at Samaria in Norma Franklin, “Samaria: From the Bedrock to the Omride Palace,” Levant 36 (2004): 189–202. In particular, she notes that Shemer’s estate was “not a small family holding but rather a major commercial enterprise” (194). In fact it is one that a monarch who is looking to enhance his revenues through large-scale oil and wine production would ¿nd a very desirable location for his capital (201). 1

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signi¿cant is that the space that had once comprised the threshing Àoor when this was a working farm was reused as the site for the city gate.45 It is of course possible that the threshing Àoor’s primary material aspects as an “open space” with suitable physical characteristics (a fairly broad, Àat area with prevailing winds to blow away the chaff as it was thrown into the air by winnowing forks) presented the city’s architect with the idea for placing the gate area here. However, the fact that the storyteller in 1 Kings chooses to evoke the memory of the threshing Àoor in relation to the city gate suggests that the value-added opportunity to couple appropriate physical space with the knowledge of ideological and socially symbolic space also played a part in the decision to build here. Put simply, the variety of social acts that previously had taken place on Shemer’s threshing Àoor made it not only a likely location but added authority (for reasons I will discuss below) to its social dimension as reformulated space. As long as the memory existed of its previous social purpose, when farmers, businessmen, elders, and others came to the gate area of Samaria, they would also associate it with its previous social incarnation as a threshing Àoor. As they conducted their various tasks or came to consensus on a commercial transaction or a legal matter in this place, they also maintained a temporal/cognitive link to the past. Thus it is unlikely that that particular space was chosen for the gate area of the city of Samaria simply because of its physical characteristics. Instead, it is the memory of the social activities that took place there that remain in the collective memory of the inhabitants. The practice of sitting in the gate (see Lot in Gen 19:1) is more than physical placement or convenience. It carries with it a social understanding implying the person’s social status (recognized merchant/businessman/elder) as well as an acknowledgment of that person’s right to sit in a place associated with business practice. The gate is also a place whose high “traf¿c” makes it desirable for those wishing to hawk their wares or meet business associates. Plus, the association of the threshing Àoor with business and legal matters in the village culture provides yet another reason (ideological rather than architecturally practical) for placing the city gate there. In that way, the social activities that had produced discretely

45. See Moshe Anbar, “L’aire à l’entré de la porte de Samarie (1 R XXII 10),” VT 50 (2000): 121–23, for a discussion of the arguments over whether the goren should be translated “threshing Àoor.” To be sure it would have been important for public gatherings to take place in an “open space” (BDB, 175), but in this case that physical, political, and economic necessity is enhanced by its associations with a working threshing Àoor. 1

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de¿ned space in that particular place are translated into its new function as the gate area of a city. Its former function in the village culture as a place for social gathering, business transactions, and legal proceedings continues, with only minor shifts, in the way that it is conceived in an urban setting. The memory of what that space had been for the village culture is reshaped into a newly conceived spatial understanding as the city displaces the village. It is unlikely that there would be any effort to extinguish the remembered dimensions of the space since its formerly perceived, conceived, and lived characteristics would add authority and legitimacy to the newly established function for that space. In fact, it is these remembered spatial associations that serve as the basis for Ahab’s attempt to control his confrontation with the prophet Micaiah. What he tries to do ¿ts Hartmann’s category of “placing oneself and others in spatial representations.”46 In this way, continuity with the authoritative associations of the past are maintained while new or calculated repurposing can be implemented in that space. The king’s intentional pattern of placement within this social space (the broad, open area before the city gates comparable to his royal audience chamber) also is intended to signify the relative importance or social status of the participants. As Pierre Bourdieu notes, “agents and groups of agents are thus de¿ned by their relative positions within that space.”47 Ahab and Jehoshaphat, whose rank places them at the pinnacle of this ancient society’s social ladder and who possess the largest share of cultural capital, are stationed at the very focal point of attention, within the gateway and sitting on their thrones so that no one could mistake their command of the space and its occupants.48 Strategically arranged around them are 400 court prophets who, by their large numbers and their physical placement, are intended psychologically to overpower and physically encircle the lone prophet of Yahweh who is brought within this demarcated space to speak to the kings.

46. Hartmann, “Mental Maps, Cognitive Mapping and Mental Space,” 335. 47. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory & Society 14 (1985): 724. 48. Interestingly, as John C. H. Laughlin, Archaeology and the Bible (London: Routledge, 2000), 133, notes, the excavations at Tel Dan have uncovered a paved plaza between the inner and the outer city gate area with “Proto-Aeolic capitals and an architectural fragment thought to be a base for some type of canopied structure.” An associated bench could have served of¿cials, including the king, as a suitable platform to hold court. See also on these features Avraham Biran, Biblical Dan (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1994), 237.

1

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What is curious is that after using all of these elements of space and placing his agents to create as powerful a setting as possible, Ahab, in his exasperation over Micaiah’s initial response, steps out of his magisterial mode of address and employs what Bourdieu calls a strategy of condescension.49 He breaks out of his authoritarian role as king long enough to cajole the prophet into telling him the true message given to him by God. Despite the staging of the event, the king really does not want Micaiah simply to parrot the sycophantic line of the court prophets, who were assuring the king of a military victory. In other words, Ahab, in his desperation to know the truth, condescends to speak directly to a social inferior in order to learn God’s intentions for the coming battle. In the face of conscious and physical usurpation of spatial areas, even transformed space that no longer retains its original physical characteristics (both perceived and conceived) may still contain a lingering memory of what once transpired there in the past. It is certainly possible to transport oneself mentally into the past in order to gain access to what has come before, regardless of what is currently occurring in that space. What has been can be recalled by word or image or staged ritual, but it cannot be materially and exactly reproduced once it has been superseded by new uses or events.50 Remembering Space: Concluding Remarks Memory is a storyteller’s and a character’s tool. It can be used to cue the audience, bringing to mind past events that provide a foundation for current actions. The object is to draw a link to social space as it was initially produced with its newly con¿gured character. Memory is sparked by the senses (a sound, a smell, a taste) or by movement into familiar or remarkably similar places. Suddenly, that space is ¿lled with the shadows of every person or event that has occurred there. These shadows provide the storyteller with opportunities to tie places and persons together in a common theme. In fact, every encounter with space, whatever its con¿guration, causes it to be shaped and reshaped. Every social act places new demands on that space that require it to ¿t each social occasion as well as all subsequent ones. Plus, every memory produced by social interaction leaves a residue of remembrance attached to space. These associated memories

49. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 16. 50. Wyschogrod, “Memory, History, Revelation,” 23.

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then can be conjured up to recon¿gure further the signi¿cance of discrete space. In other words, space is malleable. Space is Àexible in character and space is available as a link to the past and a key component in the production of social space in the future. Ultimately, space acquires associations while providing opportunities, based on its physical characteristics, its geographic location, and its orientation to other places.

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WICKED WITCHES OF THE WEST: CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE AND GENDER IN JEZREEL* Ann Jeffers

There was, O that there was (or there was not), in the oldest days and ages and times (and space), In a land far far away, a witch who lived on the Western shore of a lake.1

Introduction and Methodological ReÀections De¿ning the Field of Study Once upon a time, diachronicity, that is, historicity and its dual interests in the concepts of time and chronology, dominated academic endeavors.2 Doubtless these are important, and it is not my aim to devalue them here. Nonetheless, it is a sign of postmodernity to introduce space as another element in the previously predominant dichotomy of history and sociality. The aim of this paper is to explore connections between space, society, and the ideologies inherent in both, in order to develop an awareness of the subjectivity and interests involved in constructing concepts of space.3 * Papers on earlier stages of research on this topic were presented at the Research Seminar in Shef¿eld University on April 30, 2007. I wish to thank Professor C. Exum for her kind invitation to present my work. Another version of the material was read at the Research Seminar in Heythrop College, University of London on October 3 of the same year. 1. My thanks go to my husband Jerome who helped me compose this rhyme. 2. See, e.g., Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Realand-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 16, 165–67. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), and Soja, Thirdspace, are some of the main conceptual works dealing with space. Lefebvre, in particular, suggests in his introduction that space “represents the political…use of knowledge” (Production of Space, 8). See also Mark K. George’s work (Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space [ed. Benjamin D. Sommer; SBLAIL 2; Atlanta: SBL, 2009]) on the tabernacle and his division into “spatial practice,” “conceptual space,” and “symbolic space.” 1

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A related aim is to explore the relationship between the conceptualization of space and issues of gender.4 I will focus on two stories in the broad narrative that constitutes the so-called Deuteronomistic History, which as a result share a literary companionship: the stories of the woman of Endor (1 Sam 28) and of Queen Jezebel (1 Kgs 16–2 Kgs 9). These stories occupy a common ideological space, or “thirdspace,”5 within the Deuteronomistic composition,6 as well as taking place within the same geographical space of Jezreel.7 Space and Spatiality in the Ancient World A number of preliminary remarks are called for here. First, it is fair to say, following Jonathan Z. Smith and Cornelius Loew, that ancient 4. Feminist geographers have embraced issues of gender and space; see, for instance, Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). See also Soja, Thirdspace, 107–25, for a presentation of feminist spatial critiques. Although writing about a later period, Jorunn Økland offers an insightful analysis of gendered space in the Corinthian community of the ¿rst century C.E. in her Women in Their Place: Paul and the Corinthian Discourse of Gender and Sanctuary Space (London: T&T Clark International, 2004). 5. “Thirdspace,” a term used by Soja, refers to the production of space as a socially and politically imbued notion; it principally derives from the ideas expressed by Lefebvre in his Production of Space. Although the latter’s thinking is predominantly based on contemporary urban spaces, the categories he uses are transferable, with adaptation, to conceptualizations of space in ancient societies, particularly his “conceptual triad”: “spatial practice,” “representation of space,” and “representational space.” Lefebvre’s more user-friendly terms of “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” spaces (Production of Space, 38, 41) have been reprised by Soja who credits Lefebvre with these terms (Thirdspace, 10, 65). These categories will be adopted in the present study. The notion of “hegemony,” with reference to the production of space, is equally important for both ancient and (post)modern societies and will be appealed to in due course: space is controlled by a class with a clear ideology. The latter will clearly vary from society to society. The importance of the notion of “hegemony,” with its underlying notion of “repressive violence,” in the production of space cannot be underplayed in the ancient world, and in particular in the texts produced and controlled by the Deuteronomistic historians (cf. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 10). Thirdspace is also used to refer to “spaces of representation.” The latter refers to “mental inventions (codes, signs, ‘spatial discourses,’ utopian plans, imaginary landscapes, and even material constructs such as symbolic spaces…)” (Økland, Women in Their Place, 79). 6. I shall call this space “conceived space.” This space “encompass[es] all of the signs and signi¿cations, codes and knowledge, that allow such material practices to be talked about and understood” (Økland, Women in Their Place, 79). 7. Ibid: “Material spatial practices refer to the physical and material Àow.” 1

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man’s symbolic religious systems are marked by “cosmological conviction, ” whereby men share “the conviction that the meaning of life is rooted in an encompassing cosmic order in which man, society and the gods all participate.”8 Second, space is always a social construct: “Spatial forms…[are] produced by human action…[they] express and perform the interests of the dominant class… They…express and implement the power relationships of the state in a historically de¿ned society. They [are] realized and shaped by the process of gender domination…”9 Therefore space is also dialectical: patriarchal man creates boundaries and borders. His created world, that is, his cosmology, inÀuences society, and at the same time society shapes the cosmos. Third, the word “man” has been used so far on purpose. If women are famously written out of history, are women similarly hidden from geography?10 By positing a patriarchal nature of society, feminist theory has long established that different spaces (i.e. “public” and “private”)11 work to the advantage of men, who de¿ne relationships of unequal power. In practical terms, men control where women function and what they do. These boundaries are both spatial and social.12 They de¿ne who belongs to a place and who may be excluded.13 Finally, space is also temporal. It is historically inherited and, as such, dynamic and subject to change. Indeed, it could support new and possibly subversive interests, as has been shown by contemporary feminists.14 8. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 132. 9. M. Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 311–12. 10. See Rose, Feminism and Geography, 41. This thought is also well represented in Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of space (cf., e.g., P. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination [trans. Richard Nice; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001], 107–8). 11. The categories of “public” and “private” as we know and use them in postmodern discourse do not always correspond to the use of such categories in the ancient world (cf. Økland, Women in Their Place, Chapter 3). 12. Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 4. 13. See Teresa de Lauretis’s de¿nition of feminism as “the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations. I think of spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power–knowledge apparati.” Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 25. 14. For further references, see the sources cited in nn. 5, 12, and 13. While the immediate context of these reÀections is the contemporary world, and in particular capitalistic structures, these reÀections are broadly applicable to the ancient world. 1

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We shall see that these factors are reÀected in ancient Jewish cosmologies. They too represent “stability and persistence,” but they also reÀect transformation, thus rede¿ning social factors and possibly gender relations. “Thirdspace” as Mythical Space in the Ancient Near East According to Yi-Fu Tuan, mythical space “is the spatial component of a world-view, a conception of localized values within which people carry on their practical activities.”15 Tuan conceives of two types of mythical spaces: the ¿rst type, as I understand it, refers to the imaginary world associated with a particular space (Tuan refers here to the “myths” associated with the neighborhood beyond our own); the second type which will be examined here may be best described as “worldview.” Worldview is understood as “a set of meanings related to the structure of the world that serves to locate human existence in the cosmos and give meaning to that human existence.”16 Ancient Near Eastern worldview is represented as a tri-partite universe inhabited by God(s) above, spirits of the dead below, and the realm of humans on inhabited land. This is signi¿cant for our argument, since I will show below that the Maqlû ritual functions to create mythical space, an imagined space where witches can be identi¿ed, hunted down, and eliminated. Space and Place:17 The Shared Geography of Jezreel The two narratives under consideration, while sharing a number of other features in common, take place in the geographical area of Jezreel.18 The name Jezreel (“God sows”) refers both to a large valley separating Galilee from Samaria, and serves as the location of Endor and two other

15. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Arnold, 1977), 86. See also Lefebvre on the history of space and mythical space (Production of Space, 236–41). 16. Frank H. Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time, and Status in the Priestly Theology (JSOTSup 91; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1991), 16–17. Gorman uses “world view” as a dynamic concept, made up of cognitive elements, ideology, and ritual action. 17. Hilda Kuper, “The Language of Sites in the Politics of Space,” in The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (ed. Setha M. Lowe and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 228: “Space is a situational context constructed by and for human action, and places are centers for human signi¿cance and emotional attachment.” 18. See Melvin Hunt, “Jezreel,” ABD 3:850. 1

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towns. One of them is the political center referred to in the Jezebel narrative, which hosts the winter palace.19 Both narratives also feature women who break the conceptual space of Deuteronomy: the two women are outside the spatial boundaries of nationhood. The woman of Endor has no name or genealogy20 and is visited “by night” (1 Sam 28:8), while Jezebel is a “foreigner” (cf. Deut 7:3; 1 Kgs 16:31). Both Àaunt accepted covenantal behavior. The woman of Endor practices divination, which is against the rules set out by Deut 18:9–11. Jezebel worships foreign gods (cf. Deut 6:14; 1 Kgs 18:19); her actions also are described as “harlotries and sorceries” (2 Kgs 9:22). Lastly, they both occupy the mythical space of the Maqlû ritual. This ritual will shape the imaginary landscape undergirding the stories of both the woman of Endor and of Jezebel. The Maqlû ritual is a famous anti-witchcraft ceremony, performed in a lengthy nocturnal ceremony and completed the following morning. This ritual is performed at the end of the month of Abu, a time of year when “ghosts” return from the netherworld. This is a time of judgment in this world performed by the heavenly and netherworld deities who have power over the dead.21 The purpose of the Maqlû ritual is to judge, punish, and expel all witches. Dead witches are unearthed and held captive, live witches are killed. All are destroyed. The destruction of a witch’s body is achieved by burning, being fed to animals, or, alternatively, by the removal of her bones from her grave.22 The witches are thus expelled and permanently deprived of the possibility of reburial. Hence they are prevented from ¿nding a place in the netherworld and permanently eliminated from the cosmos. There are a number of parallels between this ritual and certain narrative elements of the Deuteronomistic History. First, both have a shared cosmology. Ancient Mesopotamian religious space is that of a tripartite

19. Ibid. 20. When Pseudo-Philo, centuries later, affords the woman necromancer a genealogy and makes her the daughter of a Midianite diviner who led Israel astray with sorceries, he highlights her further marginalization as a foreign woman (the Hebrew Bible does not specify her ethnic identity); cf. Cheryl Anne Brown, No Longer Be Silent: First Century Jewish Portraits of Biblical Women: Studies in Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities and Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities (Gender and the Biblical Tradition; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 185. 21. Tzvi Abusch, “Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Literature: Texts and Studies. Part I, the Nature of Maqlû: Its Character, Divisions, and Calendrical Setting,” JNES 33 (1974): 251–62, here 252. 22. Ibid. 1

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universe: heaven, earth, and netherworld. Its accompanying myth focuses “on issues of vegetation and fertility.”23 Abusch argues that “gods of life and death, of the earth and the netherworld might once have even been aspects of the same power and possessed a unitary identity.”24 Initially, Mesopotamian religious thought recognized the Àuidity, as well as the cyclical nature, of the movement between the terrestrial realm of the living and the realm of the dead. These two realms form a continuum, and thus movement back and forth between the world of the living and the dead was possible and even part of the natural order. Later, a sharp distinction was drawn between heaven, earth, and the netherworld.25 There was an increasing “strati¿cation” and a “¿rming up” of boundaries and a loss of the Àuid movement reminiscent of natural Àux. “Fluid movement now constituted a threat to the more rigid cosmic structure and could easily lead to the breakdown of that structure.”26 Since both societies share a similar worldview, it is of no great surprise that this development is mirrored by ancient Israelite cosmology.27 Second, both the Maqlû ritual and the Deuteronomistic History share a legal setting. The legal contract, or covenant, is one way in which a society may be ordered and boundaries created. While most scholars have commented on the Deuteronomistic historian’s active concern for boundaries, and how they function on the “horizontal” level, I suggest that the Maqlû ritual also provides a cosmological framework to help understand the establishment of the Deuteronomist’s spatial and cosmic boundaries. The Deuteronomistic History’s conceptual, mythological space has implication for gender and in particular for women functioning as religious practitioners. I do not wish to draw a distinction between magic and religion.28 Indeed, the case of divination illustrates how the power to access and mediate knowledge passes, in ancient Near Eastern societies, from a broad range of people without distinction of gender, to a

23. Tzvi Abusch, “Ascent to the Stars in a Mesopotamian Ritual: Social Metaphor and Religious Experience,” in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane; SUNY Series in Religious Studies; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 15. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 16. Heaven, earth, and the netherworld are now regarded as separate. 26. Ibid. 27. J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 28. See Ann Jeffers, “Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel,” Religion Compass 1, no. 6 (2007): 628–42, and “Interpreting Magic and Divination in the Ancient Near East,” Religion Compass 1, no. 6 (2007): 684–94. 1

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select group of male priests. The Maqlû ritual will provide the intertext through which I will look at the spatial context of the woman of Endor and Jezebel in the Deuteronomistic corpus. The Spatial Contexts of 1 Samuel 28:3–25 Spatial Practice: Making Sense of the Geography of 1 Samuel 28 Another way of exploring some of the issues raised by this text is through the concept of “mental mapping”: “mental maps are constructs” made along “shared national, cultural and religious viewpoints.”29 I will select examples from the story to illustrate this point. First, the name “Endor,” as the place where the events of the necromantic consultation take place, has occasioned more than a few comments. Scholars regularly try to locate it.30 Although it was likely situated in the southern portion of the Jezreel Valley, near the Kishon River, there is a marked geographical dislocation. In 1 Sam 29:1, the Philistines are still at Apheq in the Sharon Valley, and they do not arrive in the Jezreel Valley until 29:11. Thus, chronologically, the Endor episode would ¿t more logically after chs. 29 and 30.31 Another possible investigation looks not at the geographical location but at its etymology and associations. The word “Endor” is a recognized Semitic word meaning “living area”; Ugaritic dr suggests “the assembly of the Gods,” which could provide the original meaning of En-Dor as “the spring of the oracular sanctuary.”32 My contention is that attempts to identify Endor cartographically fail because the story is intended to be read as mythical geography.33 With its riddle of a place which is not where it is supposed to be, with a name echoing mythical divine places of oracular communications, Endor is clearly a place belonging to the “periphery.” This is further emphasized by its association with a “pit.” The pit, like Sheol, is a well-known designation for the realm of the dead in Hebrew.34

29. Peter R. Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (2d ed.; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1986), 90–94. 30. See Jeffers, Magic and Divination, 176 n. 186 for references. 31. Bill T. Arnold, “Necromancy and Cleromancy in 1 and 2 Samuel,” CBQ 66 (2004): 199–213, here 206 n. 29. 32. O. Margalith, “Dor and En-Dor,” ZAW 97 (1985): 109–11. 33. I am very grateful for Sean Ryan for bringing to my attention Kelly Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: “No One Has Seen What I Have Seen” (JSJSup 81; Leiden: Brill, 2003). 34. See Philip S. Johnson, Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2002). 1

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Second, spatial orientation in 1 Sam 28 is essentially vertical.35 The necromantic ritual is designated by the recurring use of language to “bring up” or “raise.” In 1 Sam 28:8, Saul asks the woman “to bring up Samuel” (NRSV). Likewise, in 28:11, she asks the king, “whom shall I bring up for you?” When she describes the prophet in 28:13, she sees him “coming up out of the ground,” and, in v. 14, “an old man is coming up…” Finally Samuel’s words repeat the imagery: “why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Note that the phrase “out of the ground,” in Hebrew, can express departure from the netherworld, the realm of the dead.36 Conceptual Space: The Conceptual Space of Deuteronomy 18:9–11 and of the Centralization of the Cult Lying behind the narrative is a crafted rhetoric concerned with the rede¿nition of boundaries and access to power, as outlined in the body of Deuteronomy, in particular through the centralization of the cult (Deut 12–16). The spatial centralization of the cult mirrors the centralization of cultic personnel: knowledge, power, and space intersect.37 The story of the woman at Endor reÀects a time of transition: it is both a transition in the life of the Israelite monarchy (Saul has been sidelined by his unfaithfulness to Yahweh and shortly will be replaced by David) and a transition in its religious life. The latter is exempli¿ed through Saul’s ban on a whole range of divinatory techniques, which suggests there was a time when they were legitimate. The ban is reÀected in other parts of the Hebrew Bible (Lev 19:31; 20:6; 27), in particular in the encoded theological/conceptual manual that is the book of Deut 18:9–12, esp. v. 11. 35. Tuan, in his work on mythical space, suggests that “man is the center of a cosmic frame oriented to the cardinal points and the vertical axis” (Tuan, Space and Place, 88). 36. There are many examples of necromantic practices in the ancient world. For examples in ancient Greece, see J. S. Morrison, “The Classical World,” in Oracles and Divination (ed. Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1981), 87–114, who analyses a number of sources dealing with raising the dead, i.e., necromantic practices. The most famous story is that of Odysseus’s sacri¿ce of a bull in order to raise Teiresias from the realm of the dead (Od. 11.13ff.) and Aeschylus’s Persae (619f.) where the ghost of Darius is raised to give guidance to his queen. For discussion of examples among ancient Near Eastern peoples, see both Johnson, Shades of Sheol and Brian B. Schmidt, Israel’s Bene¿cent Dead: Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition (FAT 11; Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr; repr. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1996). 37. This is a classic Marxist formulation developed by Lefebvre, Production of Space, 8. 1

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The Conceptual Space of Religious Practitioners (Priests and Prophets) and the Women Question The presentation of the woman at Endor as a necromancer immediately situates her within the forbidden realms of magic and divination. Although it is not my aim here to re-evaluate the place of magic and divination in ancient Israel, I will examine its conceptual space.38 The rhetoric of the narrative is also important as it will manipulate our perception of events and characters, and will promote certain views about power relations and identity. When it comes to gender issues, the caricature of women as having little part to play in the important business of religion, a domain best reserved for men, is in need of reassessment. In a seminal article, Phyllis Bird showed that the literary evidence suggests a movement away from Àuid and varied forms of religion and rituals where women had a plurality of religious functions.39 The centralization of the cult advocated by the book of Deuteronomy, such as it was, marked a point of no return as far as women’s participation in the cult is concerned. It noticeably restricted women’s access to various events and festivals. Bird also posits that there was a move towards a reorganization of the cult toward hierarchical relations: priesthood and laity, men and women. The material culture of ancient Israel also witnesses to the religious participation of women in the daily life of the community. Gender roles were possibly complementary rather than hierarchical. Meyers, for instance, advocates the anthropological concept of “heterarchy.”40 Indeed, there are many texts concerning women’s involvement in religious practices that include divination.41 However, the fate of women diviners followed the same fortune as the fate of popular religion vis-à-vis the rise 38. I have done this elsewhere; Jeffers, “Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel,” and “Interpreting Magic.” 39. Phyllis Bird, “The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus,” in Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (ed. Patrick D. Miller, Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 397–419. See also the work by Carol Meyers cited in the next note. 40. Carol Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 70. “Heterarchy,” Meyers observes, is a type of society that sees women, as well as men, controlling aspects of economic and religious life, to the extent that “well developed and complex lateral and parallel relationships are formed” (71). 41. Apart from 1 Sam 28, other women diviners include Deborah in Judg 4:9, recipient and transmitter of the predictive word of God. Other relevant texts are Ezek 8:14 (lamenting Tammuz) and 13:17–23 (prophetesses); Jer 7:18 (offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven) and 44:17, 21 (ibid.); Isa 57:3–13 and 65:3–7. 1

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of Yahwism. The control of the priestly caste extended to the whole of ancient Israelite life, and speci¿cally its religious forms, with devastating results for the religious (non-Yahwist) women practitioners who were now branded as practicing prohibited divinatory rituals. The Symbolic Space: From Heterotopia42 to Monotopia Much has been written on this episode, and although it is dif¿cult to summarize the main lines of interpretation here, nonetheless the majority view may be stated succinctly: the story presents Saul as doomed as a consequence of Yahweh’s decision. Hence it shows, in the following episode, Saul’s death is not the result of David’s failure, but rather is the consequence of Saul’s rejection by Yahweh. Not only is it Yahweh’s doing, but according to 1 Sam 28:17–19a it is the outcome of Saul’s own failure to obey.43 The ideology inherent in the text is provided by the Deuteronomistic editors of the text, who not only legitimize David as king, but also establish him as an ideal paradigm for all future kings of Israel. This contrast is illustrated by the broader context in which David’s multiple divinatory inquiries gain ready answers (1 Sam 22:10, 13, 15; 23:2, 4; 30:8; 2 Sam 2:1; 5:19, 23). The narrative is intent on contrasting “legitimate” modes of enquiry with “illegitimate magical ritual.”44 Where exegetical readings have focused on the woman necromancer, interpretations have been surprisingly tame: all but one previous study focuses on her womanly solicitude and compassion towards Saul.45 One feminist interpreter suggests that the woman necromancer manipulates the situation with considerable skill, using her sexuality and, when that fails, using the binding ritual of a covenant to ensure her survival.46 42. Heterotopia can juxtapose “in one real place several different spaces…places where many different spaces converge and become entangled” (Soja, Thirdspace, 160); also, heterotopias “presuppose a system of opening and closing” (161). The concept of “heterotopia” was introduced by Foucault and is presented and discussed in ibid., Chapter 5. The principles of heterotopia are to be found on pp. 159–61. 43. See, e.g., Anthony F. Campbell, 1 Samuel (FOTL; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 291. 44. Arnold, “Necromancy and Cleromancy,” 211. 45. E.g., S. Uriel, “The Stern Prophet and the Kind Witch,” in “Wünschet Jerusalem Frieden”: Collected Communications to the XIIth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Jerusalem 1986 (ed. Matthias Augustin and Klaus-Dietrich Schnuck; BEATAJ 13; Frankfurt: Lang, 1988), 281–87, and S. Piggot, “1 Samuel 28—Saul and the Not So Wicked Witch of Endor,” RevExp 95 (Summer 1998): 435–44. 46. P. T. Reis, “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor,” JSOT 73 (1997): 3–23. 1

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Although all these interpretations are cogent, I propose to add an additional layer to them by reading in mythical and cosmological space. The woman necromancer stands in a clear cosmology, one shared with that of other ancient Near Eastern societies: a tripartite universe divided into the heavens, earth, and netherworld. Communication with the dead is effected through access to the netherworld: a pit, a river, or a well are all effective means of access. The “mythic map” that lies behind the story of 1 Sam 28 also recalls the mythic geography of the Maqlû ritual.47 There are parallels between the ritual and the ceremony at Endor, most of all their nocturnal setting. The woman necromancer in all her liminality (she is a woman on the edge literally and metaphorically: her social status is ambiguous, she has no name, she lives on her own, and there is no mention of relatives) echoes the story of the expelled witches of the Maqlû ritual. Through this association, she is demonized. Finally, the story of the woman necromancer of Endor hints that the universe has become hierarchical: divination from below the ground is now condemned and rejected as “bad” and indeed illegal.48 One cannot escape the conclusion that a hierarchical mode of divination, rede¿ned as “divine knowledge,” also mirrors the introduction of a gender hierarchy. The status of women who associate themselves with chthonian manifestations are devalued and moved from being religious practitioners to women at the periphery, with all the dangers that this suggests. There is a parallel between the fate of women and that of the underworld: both are given a decidedly negative moral value at best, both are demonized at worst. By providing an unambiguous and monolithic worldview, the Deuteronomistic rede¿nition of the cosmos, and the move from heterotopia to monotopia, have been successful: everyone knows their practical, conceptual, and symbolic place. 47. For a fuller discussion of the Maqlû ritual, see Tzvi Abusch, “The SocioReligious Framework of the Babylonian Witchcraft Ceremony Maqlu: Some Observations on the Introductory Section of the Text, Part II,” in Mesopotamian Witchcraft: Toward a History and Understanding of Babylonian Witchcraft, Beliefs, and Literature (Ancient Magic and Divination 5; Leiden: Brill Styx, 2002), 249–70. I would like to propose the West as a cardinal point where one can situate the scene. In the ancient world, the idea of the “West” is vastly different from the contemporary North American conceptual world of “Indians and cowboys” (Tuan, Space and Place, 75). Instead, the West is the place of the setting of the sun, where the daily downward path from East to West is from the fertile Nile to sterile desert and is thus associated with the realm of the dead. 48. See the verse at the beginning of the story where it says that Saul “banned” necromancy. 1

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The Demonization of Jezebel, Western Queen (1 Kings 16:31–2 Kings 9) The scholarly literature on Queen Jezebel is vast.49 Feminist interpretations have highlighted various agenda underlying the text. For instance, they have noted her characterization as “other” from the onset of her presentation in 1 Kgs 16:31.50 Her “foreignness,” allied with her worship of Baal and Asherah, sets her out as a marked woman. Conceptually, Queen Jezebel’s power is doomed, in view of the Deuteronomistic reorganization of conceptual and symbolic space as a patriarchal and hierarchical monotopia and owing to the “law of the king” (Deut 17). The conceptual space of Deuteronomy is de¿ned by the law excluding foreigners from the land, the “law of the king” (Deut 17), and the law centralizing religious power in the hands of prophets and Levites.51 There can be little doubt that Jezebel’s story belongs to a construction of gender which puts women, especially powerful and assertive women, ¿rmly in their place.52 It does so by portraying the female body as a symbolic construction of a place caught in the process of “othering” and of boundary building.53 I think another reason why Jezebel has attracted such “visceral hostility”54 is because of her conceptual, cosmological association with demons. Indeed, while these rich analyses have much to commend them, they do not directly address the crucial spatial aspects of the story. It is my intention to focus now on these neglected facets. There are a number of elements in the narrative of 1 Kgs 16:31–2 Kgs 9 which have direct bearing on its spatial framework. At the level of language, explicit references to “sorceries” (2 Kgs 9:22) connect the conceptual space of Deuteronomy with the mythical space of the cosmic 49. Cf. Janet S. Everhart, “Jezebel: Framed by Eunuchs?,” CBQ 72, no. 4 (2010): 688–98; David Ussishkin, “Jezreel: Where Jezebel Was Thrown to the Dogs,” BAR 36, no. 4 (2010): 32–42; Eleanor Ferris Beach, The Jezebel Letters: Religion and Politics in Ninth-Century Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); and Judith E. McKinlay, “Negotiating the Frame for Viewing the Death of Jezebel,” BibInt 10 (2002): 305–23, to cite just a few of the more recent contributions. 50. McKinlay, “Negotiating the Frame.” 51. Brenner suggests that Phoenicia followed the Mesopotamian practice of appointing the king’s daughter as the high priestess; Athalya Brenner, The Israelite Woman (Shef¿eld: JSOT, 1985), 24. 52. McKinlay, “Negotiating the Frame,” 307. 53. Judith E. McKinlay, Reframing Her: Biblical Woman in Postcolonial Focus (Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2004), 84. 54. Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 166. 1

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ritual of Maqlû. The terminology of curse is present in both the Maqlû ritual and in the story of Jezebel.55 In the Maqlû ritual, as I have noted earlier, the main celebrant is an exorcist, someone whose work it is to restore the universe’s order by reinforcing boundaries between earth, the netherworld, and the heavens. One of his functions is to ascend to heaven to enlist the help of gods against the witches: “as a star, he is a power,”56 since he can see the witches and they cannot see him. This heavenly position means that the witches can no longer attack him, nor hide, nor escape, as indeed is the case with Jezebel, who is trapped in her high chambers and betrayed by her own. The parallel with 2 Kgs 9 is clear: Elijah is conceptually and mythically present as the celebrant, the asipu who eventually brings Jezebel—the witch, the breaker of earthly, legal, Deuteronomistic, and cosmic order—to judgment. His instrument of justice is embodied in the person of Jehu, to whom Jezebel’s death is predicted (2 Kgs 9:6–10). In terms of spatial location I would like to make three remarks. First, Jezebel is a Phoenician princess, daughter of “Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians.” Abusch has suggested that the geographical location of the cities of Tyre and Sidon, which incidentally are situated to the west of Jezreel, form the backdrop to the Maqlû ritual. In fact, Abusch draws strong parallels between the socio-political situation of the coastal Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon in the seventh century B.C.E. and some of the themes of the Maqlû ritual. There was a problem with the control and taxation of the harbors and quays of those cities and especially with sailors who tried to enter the harbor and quays to take over the city during the reign of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon.57 The mythological transformation of this socio-political problem involved the demonization of its sailors who are now portrayed as “the enemy from the depth [of] the netherworld,” “witches” who bring witchcraft from foreign lands and therefore need to be con¿ned to the quay.58 The particular signi¿cance of this location is now clearer and enables the reader to identify Jezebel, princess of Tyre, with the witches, those who defy boundaries and introduce chaos within the socio-political and cosmic economy of the world (cf. Isa 14; Ezek 28). Second, at the time of her death, Jezebel is located in Jezreel, a fertile valley in the northern kingdom. Jezreel is also the winter capital of the 55. The setting of the Maqlû ritual is legal, hence the language of oath (mamitu) and curse should not surprise us. See also 2 Kgs 9:6–10, 34. 56. Abusch, “Ascent to the Stars in a Mesopotamian Ritual,” 36. 57. Abusch, “The Socio-Religious Framework,” 267–69. 58. Ibid., 269.

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Israelite kingdom.59 This may be of signi¿cance since it indicates that Jezebel was staying in its capital, and so the episode relating to her death might well be portrayed as taking place during the winter season. In view of the scarcity of temporal references in the story, the signi¿cance of this detail is obvious when we recall that the Maqlû ritual takes place at the end of the month of Abu. Third, Jezebel, in the last moments of her life, is standing at a window high up from the ground. She is “framed up”: all made up, with her hair done up, looking down at Jehu driving through her city with his horsedrawn chariot (2 Kgs 9:30). Scholars have noted the parallels between her representation and that of the goddess Hathor and Asherah; through Jezebel’s death, judgment against “foreign” deities is executed.60 But there are yet other aspects to the story which can be brought out from looking at the mythological and cosmic context provided by the Maqlû ritual. Heterotopia in the Story of Jezebel It is interesting to note that some of the details of the death of Jezebel make sense within the cosmic context of the Maqlû ritual. First, her positioning at the window, her verticality (we know she is high up, for when she is Àung down, her blood splatters the walls and the horses; 2 Kgs 9:33) may be associated with one element of the Maqlû ritual: witches should be prevented by all conceivable means from reaching the heavens where they might gain refuge. Second, Jehu, after Jezebel’s gruesome death, goes “to eat and drink.” The text then records his command to bury her: “See to that cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter” (v. 34). Nothing tells us exactly when the order was given and how much time has elapsed between her death and the actual command to bury her. It is easy to imagine that Jehu, after wiping out mother and son, the remaining rulers of the house of Ahab, will want to celebrate all night long. The next verse (v. 35) reads: “When they went to bury her.” This temporal notice is vague and does not differentiate between the command to bury her and the action itself. I suggest here that the servants do not come to execute their orders until dawn. Indeed, even though Jehu gives the order to have her body buried (“for she is a king’s daughter”), it would take dogs a few hours before the main parts of the body are consumed. And so it is dawn when the guards ¿nd the remains of her body. This would ¿t in well with the last part of the Maqlû ritual (VII 58–VIII), which is performed at

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59. Hunt, “Jezreel,” 3:850. 60. McKinlay, “Negotiating the Frame.”

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dawn.61 When the ritual of puri¿cation is over, “representations of the witch in an edible form are thrown to the dogs.”62 The witch is then unable to return to the netherworld and is utterly destroyed. In the case of Jezebel’s story this particular detail is striking: it is presented as a result of the “curse” uttered by the prophet, but it is reinforced by the cosmic framework of the Maqlû ritual. Jezebel’s body is not to be found; her burial cannot take place. She is banished from the face of the earth, without even a place of rest in the netherworld. Her “otherness,” noted by feminists, is not only geographical and synonymous with foreignness through her association with the Phoenician western cities of Tyre and Sidon, but also cosmic: she is the wicked witch of the west. As in the Maqlû ritual, the Deuteronomistic historians’ ritual positioning of the exorcist and the witch against one other, while trying to ¿nd a place for the witch in the exorcist worldview,63 sets in motion a process of polarization. This polarization provides the rationale for pairing off these two narratives. First Samuel 28 witnesses a double and simultaneous process of polarization: the cosmos is organized into two distinct realms, earth and the netherworld/Sheol, and religious practitioners are organized into a controlled hierarchy where women’s religious practices are excluded and devalued. First Kings 16–2 Kgs 9 appeals to the spatial mythological heterotopia of the Maqlû ritual to reorganize the political world of ancient Israel: a powerful woman is identi¿ed with witches. The identi¿cation is made through the subtle yet deadly means of superimposition of spaces: geographical, conceptual, and mythological. Strict gender boundaries now have been drawn in both the political and the religious worlds, thus leaving the reader in no doubt as to what happens to those who transgress it. Conclusion Ancient Israelite women’s roles are de¿ned by a cosmology based on ancient Near Eastern spatial systems. While sharing a sense of cosmic order, they are gendered: they impact on the space occupied by women— their social, political, and religious boundaries—thereby showing complex interactions between cosmology, gender, access to knowledge, and power. 61. Tzvi Abusch, Mesopotamian Witchcraft: Toward a History and Understanding of Babylonian Witchcraft, Beliefs, and Literature (Ancient Magic and Divination 5; Leiden: Brill, 2002), 16. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 14.

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The establishment of boundaries, which is the recurring theme of studies on Deuteronomy and related literature, needs to take into account the spatial context. We have seen how the use of the mythological space of the Maqlû ritual might provide an insight into the process of demonization of women in the sphere of religious intermediation (the woman of Endor and Jezebel) and in the political realm (Jezebel). Looking at the conceptualization of space in both narratives is instructive as it highlights ideological and spatial shifts. First Samuel 28:3–25 witnesses the re-de¿ning of spatial religious boundaries and a narrowing down to a single cosmology (monotopia), controlled by a powerful minority. This way of reordering the world establishes a much tighter control over the life of its people and will have serious consequences for the social and religious situation of women, in particular by controlling access to knowledge.

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THE PLACE OF THE PAST: SPATIAL CONSTRUCTION IN JEREMIAH 1–24 Barrie Bowman

The Exodus from Egypt is one of the paramount ideas in the imagination of the Israelites as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Few other stories enjoy the same popularity or lasting remembrance as that of Moses leading the people out of the land of Pharaoh.1 The book of Jeremiah is no different in this regard, as it includes passages concerning the Exodus. Yet, Egypt plays an interesting role in the book as it is both a place of celebrated remembrance of what Yahweh did and also a place that Israel will forget in the future. This essay will examine the ways in which the text uses the places of the past, particularly Egypt, in order to construct a new realm of imagination. Before delving into the text, it is necessary ¿rst to review some of the critical theory regarding landscape, memory, and place. To read the past through landscape interpretation one ¿rst needs to know how people associate meaning to place. The building blocks of place creation are experiences. According to Yi-Fu Tuan, place is “a center of meaning constructed by experience.”2 Space is location devoid of experience. Place, on the other hand, is space imbued with meaning through experience. As Kent Ryden rightly states, place is a part of space.3 Experience necessitates that space become place. Thus, as Rockwell Gray states, every experience incorporates place.4 In other words, experience becomes the launching point for representation and imagination. Whenever we experience something it is a given that the place becomes associated with the experience and so meaning becomes attached to that place. 1. Michael Fishbane, “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” JBL 99 (1980): 343–61. 2. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Place: An Experiential Perspective,” Geographical Review 65 (1975): 152. 3. Kent Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 37. 4. Rockwell Gray, “Autobiographical Memory and Sense of Place,” in Essays on the Essay: Rede¿ning the Genre (ed. Alexander Butrym; Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 53. 1

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Another important facet of interpretation is memory. Memory can be individual but it can also be collective or cultural (which will be the focus in this essay). Place and experience are the backbones of memory. The meaning constructed makes the remembering worthwhile. Ryden maintains that it is impossible to separate place from time and memory.5 This is of vital importance to the study of the construction of space in ancient Israel since the texts of the Hebrew Bible reÀect a particular way of remembering. According to Ryden, “The landscape of a place is an objecti¿cation of the past, a catalyst for memory.”6 So, to interpret the construction of space within a text is to understand the ways in which memory was shaped by placed experience. Memory, as the product of place and experience, forms identity. According to Edward Relph, the places which people construct are derived from their past experiences, their memories.7 So, if place is a construction of meaning through experience, then the memory that comes from the synthesis of the two creates identity. Ryden af¿rms that places become deeply infused within identity.8 Thus, one dimension of identity formation is incorporated through the triad of place, experience, and memory. The two streams of place and memory, which are united through experience, thus are the key to interpreting the representation of landscape and its by-product of identity. Of course, in the case of the historical geographer studying the landscape of the past, in contemplating the place of the past we contemplate the people of the past. Indeed, Martha Adams Bohrer is right to claim the study of history is inseparable from the study of place.9 Scholars have noted that certain foundational experiences tend to inÀuence all later experiences of place. Gray states that, though many of the characteristics of our own experiences belong to a wider whole, still everyone has a way in which they imprint their own experiences to create a unique version of how things started and progressed.10 He concludes that these foundational experiences always link themselves in some way to later experiences.11 Similarly, Relph points out, certain experiences 5. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape, 39. 6. Ibid. 7. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1984), 43. 8. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape, 39. 9. Martha Adams Bohrer, review of Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities, Modern Philology 99 (2002): 650. 10. Gray, “Autobiographical Memory and Sense of Place,” 54. 11. Ibid.

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prove to serve as the view¿nder through which we see our environment and ourselves.12 Thus, particular experiences imprinted with our own interpretations exude worldview-shaping properties. Remembering the Story: Egypt, the Exodus, and the Wilderness The memory of the Exodus from Egypt is present in the text of Jeremiah as a residue. The text uses the power of the place-memory of Egypt in order to replace it with a new place of power, namely Babylon. This essay will demonstrate how the replacement and transferral of the motif occurs gradually, over the ¿rst half of Jeremiah, in order slowly to deconstruct Israel’s cherished past and prepare the reader for the “new” thing that the text presents Yahweh doing. The passages of focus shall be split into three groups. In the ¿rst, Jer 2:6, the biblical author recalls the history of the Israelites with speci¿c reference to the wilderness period. The second group includes 7:22–25 and 11:4–7, which make reference to the covenant at Sinai. Finally, the third group, 16:14–16 and 23:7, marks the beginning of the replacement as Jeremiah foreshadows the people forgetting the Exodus and instead remembering Babylon. The Wilderness The wilderness13 is a place deeply rooted in Israel’s psyche. The motif of wilderness is intimately attached to the Exodus. It is in the story of Israel’s wilderness wanderings that Israelite imagination comes alive. Within this imagination there seems to be a romanticization that occurs as the wilderness becomes an idyllic place. In Jer 2:1–3 there are two metaphors used to describe Israel: the ¿rst as a devoted bride and the second as a ¿rst-fruits offering consecrated for Yahweh. So then, in 2:2 Yahweh states, “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.”14 Anyone who has read the Exodus narrative knows that this picture of Israel as a devoted bride following Yahweh is not quite the entire picture (Exod 15:24; 16:2; 17:3; 32:1–6). Israel is often portrayed as grumbling, complaining, and longing to return to Egypt. Yet, this text expresses Yahweh’s memory as that of a loving bride, which followed obediently. 12. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 43. 13. The wilderness is attached to the Exodus as it was a major part of Israel’s journey after leaving Egypt. It is distinct as a different place from Egypt yet they are joined through Israel’s journey. As shall be demonstrated, Jeremiah separates the two in order to associate particular meanings to his contemporary situation. 14. The NRSV is used for all biblical quotations. 1

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There has been a fair amount of discussion among scholars as to what exactly Jeremiah is presenting in 2:1–6.15 The question revolves around whether or not there is a romantic wilderness ideal in the ideology of the text. Karl Budde was one of the ¿rst to make the claim for a “nomadic ideal,” though his focus only touches on the Rechabites along with bits of Hosea and Isaiah, with little treatment of Jeremiah.16 M. Soloweitschik and J. W. Flight were among the ¿rst to emphasize the signi¿cance of Jer 2:1–6.17 Soloweitschik makes the claim that this passage celebrates Israel’s origins in the wilderness.18 Fox notes the early commentators were unanimous in this way in their interpretation of the passage. For example, Rudolph says, “…in the desert, where Israel and its God was alone, where no foreign inÀuences took from it, there was an ideal time, as Israel really was the property of Yahweh.”19 Talmon and Fox have since challenged the idea of the “desert ideal.”20 Talmon argues against the theory and concludes by stating the wilderness is merely an uncomfortable stepping-stone to Israel’s optimal state of settlement in the Promised Land.21 It must be noted that Talmon is unable to discount completely Jer 2:2 and is led to concede that it does hint at another view of the wilderness.22 However, in a subsequent article, Talmon, inÀuenced by Fox, changed his position to state that no passage

15. Ronald E. Clements, Jeremiah (IBC; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 23. Clements makes the bold declaration that Jer 2:1–3 covers all Israel’s “territory, social institutions and history.” 16. Karl Budde, “The Nomadic Ideal in the Old Testament,” The New World 4 (1895): 726–45. 17. M. Soloweitschik, “Ha-Midbar be-Toledotaw we-Hashqafat Olamo shel !Am Jisrael,” Devir 2 (1923): 16–45; and J. W. Flight, “The Nomadic Idea and Ideal in the Old Testament,” JBL 42 (1923): 158–226. 18. Soloweitschik, “Ha-Midbar,” 39. 19. W. Rudolph, Hosea (KAT 13/1; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1966), 12: “…in der Wüste, wo Israel mit seinem Gott allein war, wo keine fremden EinÀüsse es abzogen, da war die ideale Zeit, da war, Israel wirklich das Eigentum Jahwes” (my translation above). 20. S. Talmon, “The ‘Desert Motif’ in the Bible and Qumran Literature,” in Biblical Motifs (ed. A. Altmann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 31–63; Michael Fox, “Jeremiah 2:2 and the ‘Desert Ideal’,” CBQ 35 (1973): 441–50. 21. Talmon, “The ‘Desert Motif’ in the Bible and Qumran Literature,” 37. 22. Ibid., 53. He suggests that Jeremiah mixes the motifs of “love in the drift” and “desert trek” and this is how the “desert ideal” motif was created. As Fox notes when critiquing his analysis, “Talmon must claim that Jeremiah did not understand the implications of his literary usages” (“Jeremiah 2:2 and the ‘Desert Ideal’,” 442). 1

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in the Hebrew Bible reÀects positively on Israel’s relationship with Yahweh while in the desert.23 Fox’s article attacks the notion of a nomadic ideal, speci¿cally re-interpreting Jer 2:2. The crux of Fox’s interpretation centers upon 5DI. He argues that 5DI never involves mutuality but is always received by a weaker party through the favor of the party of power.24 Most commentators see Jer 2:2c as referencing Israel’s 5DI, but based on Fox’s de¿nition that would be impossible. Fox then concludes that the verse “does not describe what Israel’s putative 5DI consisted of, but rather de¿nes the time and the (dif¿cult) circumstances in which God’s 5DI was revealed.”25 Fox concludes, “Thus Jer. 2:2 cannot be regarded as a deviation from the usual desert motif, and certainly not as an expression of a ‘desert ideal’—even of a purely ‘literary’ nature.”26 Scholars have been quick to point out problems in Fox’s argument. Michael DeRoche is representative of the scholarly response.27 He notes, “When Jeremiah wants to say that Yahweh led Israel he uses the Hiphil of (=9 (2:6, 17). When he wants to stress Israel’s following of a god, he uses the Qal of (=9 (2:5, 8, 23, 25). The use of the Qal in 2:2c, therefore, suggests that here too Jeremiah is stressing Israel’s following.”28 This ¿nding makes doubtful Fox’s argument that 5DI in 2:2b refers to Yahweh’s heart towards his people since the parallel of 2:2c would be in direct contradiction. However, DeRoche agrees with Fox’s interpretation of 5DI, and so concludes “philological arguments reach an impasse.”29 Thus, in both cases a special exception has to be made either for the use of the Qal of (=9 in 2:2c or the use of 5DI in 2:2b. DeRoche instead approaches the text through looking at its structure and focuses on the uses of speci¿c terms in forming patterns.30 He ¿nds the following pattern in Jer 2:

23. S. Talmon, “Wilderness,” IDBSup 946–49. 24. Fox, “Jeremiah 2:2 and the ‘Desert Ideal’,” 443. This is in contrast to N. Glueck, Hesed in the Bible (trans. A. Gottschalk; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1967). 25. Fox, “Jeremiah 2:2 and the ‘Desert Ideal’,” 445. 26. Ibid., 448. 27. Michael DeRoche, “Jeremiah 2:2–3 and Israel’s Love for God During the Wilderness Wanderings,” CBQ 45 (1983): 364–76. 28. Ibid., 366. 29. Ibid. 30. He notes his reliance on Holladay’s work. He uses what Holladay calls the “harlotry cycle” in Jer 2:2–4:4 which they understand to form a distinct unit within the book. 1

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Israel loved (39 ) Yahweh and followed ((=9 Qal JCI ) him. Israel followed ((=9 Qal JCI ) worthlessness. Yahweh led ((=9 Hiphil) Israel. Israel followed ((=9 Qal JCI ) worthless things. Yahweh led ((=9 Hiphil) Israel. Israel followed ((=9 Qal JCI ) the Baals. Israel loved (39 ) and will follow ((=9 Qal JCI ) strangers.

He concludes that the entire structure points toward past devotion and present negligence.31 He further notes the pattern that occurs when focusing on the term C35>: A B C B A

2:2 2:6 2:24 2:31 3:2

Israel loved Yahweh in the C35>. Yahweh led Israel in the C35>. Israel is a lustful ass lost in the C35>. Yahweh is not a C35> to Israel. Israel is waiting for lovers in the C35>.

Once again, the A clauses paint the situation of Israel’s past in contrast with their present. He notes, “the two B clauses thus contrast what Israel claimed of Yahweh, and what Yahweh actually did.”32 DeRoche then works through the rest of the “harlotry cycle” to demonstrate that Jeremiah was familiar with a devoted Israel narrative.33 He concludes that Jeremiah uses this knowledge to justify his complaint against Israel’s wandering from Yahweh and demand a return to obedience or else face judgment. Thus, DeRoche carefully reasserts the presence of a reminiscent view of the wilderness wanderings.34 Therefore, DeRoche concludes, devotion to Yahweh occurred during the wilderness period but was supplanted by idolatry after settlement in the land.35 It follows then that he denies Fox’s de¿nition of 5DI in Jer 2:2 and proposes this verse represents a deviation from the norm.36 His view of 5DI is

31. DeRoche, “Jeremiah 2:2–3 and Israel’s Love for God,” 368. 32. Ibid., 369. 33. Ibid., 372. 34. Similarly, Wijngaards understands the wilderness narrative as positive memory that fueled Israelite worship for subsequent generations. He has argued that the formula, “I brought you up ((=9 Hiphil) from the land of Egypt,” incorporates Israel’s testimony of the settlement of the land, in addition to the Exodus and the wilderness experience, as part of their liturgical confession. John Wijngaards, “Hosi and Heelah: A Twofold Approach to the Exodus,” VT 15 (1965): 91–102. 35. DeRoche, “Jeremiah 2:2–3 and Israel’s Love for God,” 374. 36. DeRoche argues that a similar exception is found in Neh 13:14, based on Sakenfeld’s interpretation, who says Nehemiah’s eviction of Tobiah from the temple and the re-establishment of the Levitical order represents Nehemiah’s responsibility

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supported by Sakenfeld’s study, which af¿rms that the word underwent a series of nuances that were often utilized by the prophets. She notes ¿ve movements that allowed this development: As behavior of the community toward God, ­esed could be stretched to apply (despite God’s power of reprisal and lack of need) because (1) as in secular tradition it was only God who punished; (2) although ­esed was not needed, it nevertheless was desired and yet could not be forced out of the people; (3) ­esed did in secular contexts refer to ful¿lling of covenant responsibilities (even though from a position of power) and this is what was desired of Israel; (4) the bidirectional use of other covenant language may have lent impetus to the development of a religious usage; (5) the abstracting toward “faithfulness,” by association with the closely related words emet and hasid, made the content of the word more appropriate for describing Israel’s relationship to God.37

Though DeRoche rejects Fox’s interpretation he still agrees that the “desert ideal” motif does not exist within Jeremiah. He points out that it is not the desert which is the ideal for Jeremiah but the attitude and affection of Israel during that period.38 In summary, DeRoche has contended that each theological stream paints their picture of the wilderness in relation to their circumstance. He concludes: Jeremiah is concerned with combating the rise of Baalism and preventing the destruction of the nation. To this end he harks back to a more faithful time and tries to persuade Israel to return to it. By the time Ezekiel prophesies Israel has already fallen. In order to justify the collapse he claims that there was no time at which Israel truly and whole-heartedly followed Yahweh. In one way or another Israel was always in a state of rebellion.39

Wilfred G. E. Watson’s arguments on Jer 2 strongly support the view that the author is concerned with presenting the strikingly contrasting toward God which is his ­esed. Katherine D. Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry (HSM 17; Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978), 152. 37. Sakenfeld, Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible, 180–81. 38. DeRoche, “Jeremiah 2:2–3 and Israel’s Love for God,” 375. It is debatable whether a separation can be made between the wilderness and the attitude of Israel. For a place to be an ideal, obviously it must necessarily be a place where attitudes are ideal. The problem for Jeremiah is a problem of place. Israel’s love affair with the land has ruined their love affair with Yahweh, which they had in the wilderness. Thus, there is some sense in which the wilderness is the “desert ideal” which most commentators have seen. 39. Ibid., 376. 1

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picture of Israel and Yahweh’s relationship, past and present. Watson notes the symmetry of masculine and feminine words in Jer 2:1–3.40 He argues that this ¿ts with Jeremiah’s metaphor of Yahweh as faithful husband and Israel as the promiscuous spouse, and concludes that this gender difference increases the contrast of Israel and Yahweh.41 Watson’s analysis is insightful since it echoes DeRoche’s arguments, but from a fresh perspective. Even at the minute details of the gender of words Jeremiah is focused on contrasting faithless Israel with faithful Yahweh. In addition, the contrast also parallels Israel’s past successes with their current failures. One criticism of the view that the wilderness is viewed positively in Jeremiah is that it has little support elsewhere in the Bible, especially the Pentateuch. As previously noted, few readers would fail to see the grumbling and complaining of Israel to Yahweh as that of an “ideal” relationship. Yet, there are also positive aspects within the memory of the Exodus. After crossing the Red Sea the people feared and believed Yahweh (Exod 14:31). The Israelites are so eager to build the Tabernacle that they must be ordered to stop bringing supplies (Exod 35–36). DeRoche notes that Yahweh is not abandoned until they enter the land at Beth Peor.42 He argues that the main concern for Jeremiah and Hosea is idol worship and they view the grumbling of Israel as a lover’s quarrel.43 Here he alludes to a key point that he fails to bring to its fullness. If Jeremiah views the relationship between Israel and Yahweh as that of a wife and husband, then any of the complaints and murmuring of Israel in the wilderness still occur within the con¿nes of their exclusive relationship. Indeed, the murmuring can be viewed positively as a natural part of a loving relationship. If it is correct that the worship of other gods is the primary concern of Jeremiah, then it is in his best interest to look for the period when Israel was untainted by outside inÀuences. To this end the Exodus and wilderness experience provide a suitable example. Though the relationship during this period is not Àawless, it is one characterized by ¿delity to Yahweh, even if at times that ¿delity was expressed through discontent.

40. Wilfred G. E. Watson, “Symmetry of Stanza in Jeremiah 2,2b–3,” JSOT 19 (1981): 107–10. 41. Ibid., 108. 42. DeRoche, “Jeremiah 2:2–3 and Israel’s Love for God,” 376. Cf. Num 25 and Hos 9:10. 43. Ibid., 376.

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Other Biblical Views of the Wilderness Scholars have noted the divergent views of different biblical authors in viewing the wilderness experience. The two camps of interpretation are made up most explicitly by Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos, on the one hand, and Ezekiel, Pss 106, 128, and 136, on the other, though other texts could undoubtedly be added to either group. How we are to understand the divergence of interpretation? First, before we look at the interpretation of other prophets, there needs to be some clari¿cation about how Jeremiah presents the wilderness experience. Denis Baly argues the wilderness is seen as signi¿cant but not desirable.44 Yet he seems torn as he con¿rms Jeremiah’s view of the wilderness as “a honeymoon.”45 If Jeremiah does view it as a “honeymoon” period, as he suggests, does that not imply an aura of nostalgia? Brueggemann echoes this sentiment when commenting on Jer 2, arguing it is not only a fond memory, but also a reason for praise.46 There is an aspect of this “honeymoon” period which points to the extreme devotion of Israel in the midst of such harsh conditions. Baly notes that the phrase “in a land not yet sown” elucidates the reality of the wilderness as a world devoid of agriculture.47 William Holladay likewise notes the parallel with the area unable to produce sustainable crops due to lack of rainfall.48 Therefore, it follows, as Holladay rightly states, that Israel’s devotion to Yahweh under such harsh circumstance is undoubtedly a devotion to be emulated.49 This loyalty was at least partially a result of the surroundings. As Gerhard von Rad asserts, the absence of alternatives required total abandonment to Yahweh.50 The least idyllic place imaginable became, in the imagination of Jeremiah, the place of Israel’s greatest devotion. We can conclude with von Rad, commenting on Jeremiah’s reÀection on the wilderness period: “…the wandering in the wilderness was the time when the relationship was at its fairest, the time of the ¿rst love of Jahweh and Israel. At that time—‘in a land unsown’—Israel was completely thrown upon Yahweh.”51 So then, for 44. Denis Baly, The Geography of the Bible (London: Lutterworth, 1974), 110. 45. Ibid. 46. Walter Brueggemann, To Pluck Up, to Tear Down: A Commentary on the Book of Jeremiah 1–25 (ITC; Edinburgh: Handsel, 1988), 31. Cf. Deut 8:2–4. 47. Baly, The Geography of the Bible, 110. 48. William Holladay, Jeremiah 1 (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 84. 49. Ibid. 50. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology. Vol. 1, The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions (repr. London: SCM, 1975), 281–82. 51. Ibid., 1:282. 1

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Jeremiah the wilderness is the place of true romance where the affections of Israel were completely for Yahweh. It is apparent that there is signi¿cance to the midbar seen in many of the prophets. The primary authors with views similar to that of Jeremiah are Hosea and Amos. For example, Hosea pictures it as a place of love and hope (Hos 2:14–15). Amos likewise sees the light of the wilderness experience (Amos 5:25). Guy P. Couturier and Artur Weiser note this connection between Jeremiah and Hosea.52 Couturier concludes that the idyllic desert period seen in Jeremiah is a continuation of the stream found in Hosea and Amos.53 There is, then, a tradition that saw the wilderness as a location of devotion, devoid of distraction and full of potential. Not all of the biblical authors saw the wilderness this way. In fact, some saw it in completely the opposite light. Von Rad notes the view of Jeremiah, then goes on to mention the other strand of viewing the wilderness, which he sees in Pss 124, 136, and 106, and its fullest expression in Ezek 20. Here, he argues, the focus is on the failure of the people.54 Instead of a celebrated period of devotion, it is a dark picture of beginnings of rebellion. Psalm 106 claims the Israelites failed to remember Yahweh’s love but instead rebelled at the Red Sea (v. 7). This stands in stark contrast to the account in Exod 14:31 where they feared and believed Yahweh. Instead of viewing the wilderness murmuring as a lover’s quarrel, this psalm sees it as Israel putting God to the test (Ps 106:14). The most pessimistic view of the Exodus is found in Ezek 20. Here the prophet exclaims that Israel rebelled against Yahweh by maintaining their idolatry toward Egyptian idols (20:8). They continued this rebellion in the wilderness by failing to walk in the statutes that were given to them and profaning the Sabbath (20:13). Ezekiel’s picture is one of rebellion in abandonment. In the view of this prophet, Yahweh never experienced a “honeymoon” period full of devotion. Instead, their relationship was characterized by unrequited love from the outset. How are we to understand the presence of such divergent interpretations? Von Rad describes these two strands as a balance of “Yahweh’s 52. Guy P. Couturier, Jerome Biblical Commentary, vol. 1 (London: Chapman, 1968), 305–6; Artur Weiser, An Introduction to the Old Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 220. 53. Couturier, Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1:306. He also provides a different reading of ­esed in which it refers to their mutual exchange of love and not to one party. He asserts ­esed “refers to their mutual faithful and merciful love, made concrete in the covenant.” 54. Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 1:283. 1

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gracious control of history and Israel’s behaviors.”55 Similarly, Horst Dietrich Preuss notes the two wilderness strands and argues they both aid in the revelation of Israel’s self-identity and the relation of their deity, Yahweh.56 Yet these claims do little to explain why such divergent interpretations existed. How can they claim “Yahweh’s gracious control of history” when the very texts revealing the deity’s character paint such a different picture? Which picture of Israel is to be preferred by readers? Holladay articulates a more useful way of seeing the discrepancy. He notes that the prophets were willing to go against the Àow of normal interpretation.57 ReÀecting on the disparity between Jer 2:1–3 and Ezek 20:13, Holladay posits that perhaps each prophet found the raw materials in Israel’s story to build their own interpretation of the event.58 Thus, Jeremiah and Ezekiel both found examples of their outlook within Israel’s memory of the Exodus. Jeremiah focuses on the positive aspects of the tradition, while Ezekiel sees the negative. As noted earlier, this is likely due to the particular circumstances of each prophet.59 Jeremiah is concerned with the worship of foreign gods within Israel and so reminisces about the wilderness where they had no other gods to corrupt their worship. In contrast, Ezekiel’s society was already under judgment for their rebellion, so he recollects how Israel’s depravity had roots even in their infancy period after the Exodus. Jeremiah still hoped for success, but for Ezekiel that hope had long passed. Thus, the past became a place to ¿nd the origins of failure in the imagination of Ezekiel. Holladay sums up the other view: “Jeremiah’s picture of the pristine purity of Israel: Israel had been faithful, and therefore successful, in the past.”60 The aim of both prophets is the same: the purity of Israel in their relationship with Yahweh. The approach they have for achieving this aim is drastically different. Jeremiah and the Exodus It is clear that the memory of the Exodus was of paramount importance to the Israelites. In many ways, it became the de¿ning storyline of their history. But, as we have seen, the storyline was often interpreted in 55. Ibid. 56. Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1 (trans. Leo G. Perdue; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 80. 57. William Holladay, Jeremiah: Spokesman Out of Time (Philadelphia: United Church, 1974), 33. 58. Ibid. 59. DeRoche, “Jeremiah 2:2–3 and Israel’s Love for God,” 376. 60. Holladay, Jeremiah: Spokesman Out of Time, 33.

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different ways, with different authors emphasizing and drawing out particular aspects. Jeremiah aims to shape the imaginative geography, the way places are represented, of his hearers. One of the ways this is done is through his representation of the past. As has been shown, Jer 2:1–6 portrays the wilderness period after the Exodus as a time of loyalty and love between Israel and Yahweh. There is a sense of nostalgia in the words of the prophet when he says, “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” The author chooses to create an imaginative geography of the wilderness in order to challenge his contemporary setting. The next important facet in the study of Jeremiah’s space is the role of experience. If experience is what leads people from space to place, then it is signi¿cant that Jeremiah chooses to base his argument around the experience of Israel and Yahweh in the wilderness. Since Jeremiah urges the reader to view the experience positively it brings the creation of this positive place to the forefront. He implores his hearers to ask the question, “If the wilderness was so good, then what is the problem of our current situation?” The imagination within the text makes the places associated with the Exodus into a type of utopia, which is created through the recollection of experience as interpreted though the eyes of Jeremiah. As we have seen, memory is a product of place and experience that forms identity. Thus, it is Jeremiah’s telling of the story of the Exodus that suggests to the Israelites they reshape their notion of place. The land, which was so precious to the Israelites, was not as precious as they might have hoped, according to Jeremiah’s interpretation. He argues that their identity should not be rooted in the land, which they were given, but in the wilderness. Of course, Jeremiah’s real concern is not the particular place but the attitude and affections of Israel, yet he chose to frame it within the context of a different space. Therefore, one way of seeing Jeremiah’s reminiscence is as an attack on Israel’s identity. He chooses to recall the past experience of the Exodus in order to recreate place and memory in the minds of the Israelites. This is done in order to form a new identity away from the land, which was profaned and de¿led through the worship of other gods. After a thorough analysis of the content in Jer 1–23, Brueggemann concludes that the problem of land with which Jeremiah is concerned centers on its de¿lement, attached to Israel’s failure to keep the covenant.61 Brueggemann points out how Jeremiah emphasizes Israel’s failure 61. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith (2d ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 101–15. 1

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to remember and call upon Yahweh by leading the reader through speci¿c events in their memory.62 This leads him to make the striking claim that Jeremiah “tells the whole story of Israel as the story of land.”63 In my view, Jeremiah not only tells the story of Israel as the story of the land, but also uses landscape as a tool through which to re-orient the people back towards Yahweh. Jeremiah’s use of history also shows how place and history are intertwined. Jeremiah’s interpretation of history alters to some degree the picture presented in Exodus, which in turn alters the view of the places associated with that experience. From Egypt to Babylon Early on in Jeremiah, speci¿cally 2:6, the audience is reminded of the story of the Exodus. This remembrance focuses on reminiscing a place where Yahweh was obeyed, which stands in direct contrast to the society presented in the text. In Jer 7:22–25 and 11:4–7, the second group of texts in my argument, Jeremiah draws upon a different aspect of Israel’s Exodus memory: the covenant at Sinai. These two passages both focus on the importance of the phrase, “obey my voice.” In Jer 7:22–25 and 11:4–7, this point is made explicit. Again Jeremiah takes the reader back to the formative place of the Exodus narrative. Whereas previously the focus centered on the idyllic behavior of Israel in the wilderness, this time the focus is on the failure of Israel to maintain that level of obedience. The phrase repeated in both texts, “obey my voice,” represents one of the chief criticisms of Jeremiah against the people. It was covenantal failure that was the problem. Jeremiah chooses to frame the command for obedience within the context of the failure of those brought out of Egypt. Jeremiah uses the place of the past in different ways, depending on whichever will serve the speci¿c context of his prophecy. In contrast to the previous instance in Jer 2, here the text remarks on the failure of the post-Exodus Israelites to obey. Though in Jer 2 the wilderness after the Exodus is elevated, which by proxy elevates Egypt in the reader’s memory, in these passages the perfection of wilderness obedience is challenged. Egypt and the wilderness are places of paradox for Jeremiah. They represent places of obedience but also places of disobedience. This is not an accident within the book, but a rhetorical strategy to deconstruct Israel’s places. The memory of the Exodus is shaped in a way that instills the importance of covenantal obedience to Yahweh, in that both instances

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focus on calling Israel to obedience. Yet, simultaneously Jeremiah insists on the failure of Egypt and wilderness as places that create full and lasting obedience. The text slowly brings the readers to the realization that a new place is needed in order to draw the people back to Yahweh. This new place is introduced gradually throughout Jer 1–24. Speci¿c references to Babylon do not appear in the text until ch. 20. In its place, the text introduces the motif of the North or the North Country. In contrast to the absence of Babylon, the motif of the North appears ten times within the ¿rst nineteen chapters.64 The introduction of this new place occurs alongside the discussion of the old places and they even appear to Àow together through Jer 1–15. So, the North Country motif occurs roughly before and after texts on Egypt and the Exodus. This continues until ch. 16, when the two themes are brought together. Jeremiah 16:14–15 marks the unambiguous revelation of the spatial reconstruction occurring within the text. Here the plan of the text is clear. Jeremiah argues that a reconstruction of Israel’s spaces is underway. The old place of Egypt and the memories linked to it will be replaced by the creation of a new place with new memories. That place will be the North Country, the speci¿c naming of which has still to be revealed in the text. Egypt will be forgotten in the light of what Yahweh will do through the North Country. The mention of Babylon eight times within chs. 20–22, before Jeremiah’s announcement is restated in its twin text, Jer 23:7–8, serves to connect the North Country to Babylon before the culmination of this revelation in Jer 24.65 The texts concerning Babylon prophesy its victory over Israel and its conquest of Jerusalem. The reiteration of the spatial reconstruction in 23:7–8 closes the movement of preparation for it. This then leads to Jer 24, which proves a pivotal chapter for book. Jeremiah 24 represents the of¿cial introduction to the Exile in the book. It opens the reality of exile to the reader in v. 1 by setting the reader in the context of Nebuchadnezzar having taken the king, the of¿cials of Judah, and the craftsmen to exile in Babylon. Previous to this all discussion of exile or being taken away from the land was presented as a prophetic vision of the future. Jeremiah sees two baskets of ¿gs, one good and the other rotten. The good ¿gs represent Babylon while the bad ¿gs are those who choose to dwell in Egypt or remain in the Land. The full vision of Jeremiah’s spatial construction now comes into view. Egypt, the place of former salvation and celebrated as a key memory in 64. References to “the North” in Jeremiah: 1:13–15; 3:12, 18; 4:6; 6:1, 22; 10:22; 13:20; 15:12; 16:15; 23:8 (23:8 is the exception to the rule). 65. Reference to Babylon in Jeremiah: 20:4–6; 21:2, 4, 7, 10; 22:25. 1

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Israelite imagination, will become a curse. In turn, Babylon, the North Country, shall become the stepping-stone for blessing. This phenomenon suggests a portion of the text of Jeremiah and the structure of the book as a whole is pro-Babylonian. Babylon is the place to be. There is no other option. Anyone anywhere else will not survive. Thus, submission to the hegemony of the Babylonians is encouraged as the will of Yahweh. Therefore, Jer 24 represents the explicit declaration of exile, which ful¿lls the previous warnings about judgments. In short, it opens the reality of exile to the reader. In addition, it introduces the broader scope of future themes, such as life in exile, return to the land, and false prophecy. These themes then become the focus of the following chapters, although analysis of them is beyond the scope of this essay. Jeremiah 24 explicates the Exile as a reality and incorporates Yahweh’s construction of sacred space in Babylon. Myths and Thirding: Jeremiah Meets Tuan and Soja Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese-American geographer, wrote one of the seminal works on space and place. His work, entitled Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, is a widely recognized and important book for anyone interested in the subject. One of the main premises of the book is that the longings for place and space are in constant tension.66 Tuan furthermore states that, if space is freedom, a state in which time moves and Àows, then place is a pause, and those pauses are opportunities for a location to be changed from a space into a place. Another important conclusion is that, though space is more abstract than place, the meaning of space is often connected to that of place, as unknown space usually becomes transformed into place as familiarity grows and value is attached. Tuan thus concludes that “the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for de¿nition.”67 In other words, they are codependent. One way of understanding Jeremiah’s spatial construction of the Exodus is through Tuan’s notion of mythical space. He observes two types of mythical space. The ¿rst is “a fuzzy area of defective knowledge surrounding the empirically known,”68 and the second is “the spatial component of a worldview.”69 These two types are related to each other, 66. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 3. 67. Ibid., 6. 68. Ibid., 86. 69. Ibid.

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but function in different ways. The ¿rst functions on the natural level (and will be the focus of this essay). It is the area of spaces that we presume to know but are, in actuality, unperceived. Tuan gives the example of a man, playing with his dog in his study, who maintains a mythical realm in the back of his mind about what is beyond the study. Since it is unperceived, this space abounds with errors, yet the “fuzzy ambience of the known” generates con¿dence.70 The mythical space, according to Tuan, is “a response of feeling and imagination to fundamental human needs.”71 One of the primary needs the mythic realm satis¿es is the need for security, which is gained through a “fuzzy” familiarity. Tuan makes this clear when he asserts, “the construction of a mythical realm satis¿es intellectual and psychological needs; it saves appearances and explains events.”72 In short, the mythical realm is a loose understanding of our environment, which is created to bring comfort. Tuan’s mythical space aids our understanding of Jeremiah’s spatial construction. In light of the events described in the text and the need for survival, Jeremiah constructs a mythical realm concerning the Exodus. As we have seen, this included the paradox of both celebrating obedience and at the same time lamenting disobedience. This reÀects the “fuzzy” nature of mythical space, as Jeremiah is able to utilize the “defective knowledge surrounding the empirically known.”73 But Jeremiah’s reminiscence also had another purpose. It was a reminder of what Yahweh had done previously to save the people and ensure their survival. It reminds the reader of what had been done, the story of the Exodus, in order to explain what had happened, the Exile. So, in Jeremiah, the Exile is the movement from space to place, but the text utilizes the mythical space of the Exodus to facilitate that progression. Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us it has become place.”74 In Jeremiah’s situation, that which had become place, that which was familiar, was deconstructed to become space. Familiarity was conquered by Babylon and replaced by disorientation within Jerusalem and Judah. The cherished places of Israel had been conquered by Babylon. The need for security necessitated the construction of a new place. In Jeremiah, this is done not through familiarity, but through the attachment of value. Babylon is prized as the place of Yahweh’s will, the place where they belong.

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70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Ibid., 87. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 3.

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Tuan further remarks, “Space is transformed into place as it acquires de¿nition and meaning.”75 In our text, this occurs as Babylon is declared as the place of survival. Thus, Babylon, the real place of exile, also takes on a mythic space through its attachment to Egypt. Jeremiah 24 marks the place where this mythic transferral of space is ¿nished. As has been demonstrated, the vision of the basket of ¿gs can be explained through the message of the previous chapters. The Land and Egypt are no longer going to be remembered. In the future, Babylon will be the place where glory is displayed. As argued, the rise of Babylon occurs slowly in the text, through the use of the North Country motif. In this way, the Other is crafted into the story with the purpose of subversively deconstructing Israel’s notion of place. The North Country appears ¿rst, as that was the direction from which the Babylonians were to attack. Yet, the failure to name the enemy is clearly a conscious move within the text. The mystery surrounding the oppressive power from the North acts subversively to attract the reader through intrigue and, as seen above, the attachment of mythic spaces. Once ch. 24 opens, the scene has been set so the Other will appear to be the only option. After the land that was cherished and prized had been lost and all other options rendered void, the only way was to follow the Other. A helpful way of seeing Jeremiah’s spatial construction is as a Thirdspace theology. Edward Soja follows his mentor, Henri Lefebvre, in arguing three levels of space. Firstspace is perceived space, Secondspace is conceived space, and Thirdspace is lived space.76 The ¿rst two spaces relate to discussions on space and place, with Secondspace being the location in which place is created. Soja’s creation of Thirdspace is a postmodern, postcolonial space that both encompasses, but is distinct from, First- and Secondspaces. Thirdspaces are spaces of representation. They are theorized as separate from First- and Secondspaces and yet

75. Ibid., 136. 76. Berquist succinctly summarizes Soja’s spatial trialectics as follows, “Firstspace (geophysical realities as perceived), Secondspace (mapped realities as represented), and Thirdspace (lived realities as practiced).” Jon L. Berquist, “Critical Spatiality and Construction of the Ancient World,” in Imagining Biblical Worlds: Studies in Spatial, Social, and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan (ed. David M. Gunn and Paula M. McNutt; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2002), 20. Flanagan offers the different labels of material space, designed space, and lived space as another way of de¿ning Lefebvre’s and Soja’s trialectic. James W. Flanagan, “The Trialectics of Biblical Studies” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the SBL, Denver, Colo., November 19, 2001).

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at the same time inclusively altering them.77 Paula M. McNutt states, “Lived space embodies the real and imagined lifeworld of experiences, emotions, events, and political choices.”78 Soja notes the strong political nature of Thirdspace, declaring them to be “spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning.”79 This is related to the concept of Othering, which I believe is a major force within the text of Jeremiah. Soja articulates what he calls a “critical strategy” labeled “thirding-as-Othering.” Claudia Camp argues that Thirdspace is full of freeing potential to challenge hegemony in Secondspaces.80 Within the text of Jeremiah, the dominant power is clearly Babylon. How Jeremiah responds to and uses Babylon is fascinating. If my analysis is accurate, then Jeremiah challenges the dominant theology of Israel’s “right” to the land through the symbol of exile, which is expressed through the perception and conception of Babylon within the text. The perception of Babylon in the text is thus its gradual introduction through the North Country motif and its conception as the mythic spatial construct. Thus, the prophetic visions of Jeremiah touch the realm of Thirdspace. They are sparks of imagination that express reality. Babylon becomes Thirdspace in the text of Jeremiah as the history of exodus, the reality of exile, and the imagination of the prophet merge to create a lived space that paradoxically pulls together the harsh physical reality of Babylon and the place of the Land. Conclusion It has been demonstrated that Tuan’s understanding of mythical space can help us to understand the way in which Jeremiah incorporates the Exodus into the text. The mythical space that is created serves to remind the reader of Yahweh’s salvation in the past while simultaneously af¿rming that future. It is tensions like these that are held within Soja’s notion of Thirdspace. Babylon paradoxically becomes both the place of punishment and provision. It is the place of current pain and future hope. 77. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 67. 78. Paula M. McNutt, “‘Fathers of the Empty Spaces’ and ‘Strangers Forever’: Social Marginality and the Construction of Space,” in Gunn and McNutt, eds., Imagining Biblical Worlds, 35 (italics original). 79. Soja, Thirdspace, 68. 80. Claudia Camp, “Storied Space, or, Ben Sira ‘Tells’ a Temple,” in Gunn and McNutt, eds., Imagining Biblical Worlds, 65.

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Thus, while Jer 24 literally opens the Exile, by being the ¿rst text to state it happened, it also metaphorically opens the Exile. It does not just introduce the reality of exile and close the door, but rather it opens the door, illuminating the way of return. According to Jeremiah, the only road back to Jerusalem leads through Babylon. Perhaps Jer 24 is a subversive text if it is interpreted as submission to Babylon in order to return. Or perhaps the hope of return is dangled as propaganda from Babylon to support its hegemony. The possibility could even be suggested that it seeks to maintain the position of the elites who had been exiled to Babylon. Whatever the motivations may have been, it is clear that Jer 24 expresses an ideological shift that af¿rms the Babylonian Exiles as a basket of good ¿gs that are ripe and ready to eat. The places of the past, however, were long past their use-by date.

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“EVERY GREEN TREE AND THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM”: COUNTER CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDERED SACRED SPACE IN THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH Steed Vernyl Davidson

Like most prophetic texts, the book of Jeremiah’s handling of gender remains ambiguous at best. The book features a series of metaphors that invoke women’s experiences of giving birth (6:24), marriage (2:32), divorce (3:1), and sexual encounters (2:33–36) for Judah’s covenantal failures. Evidently, these metaphors provide a biased look at the daily life of women in ancient Israel and thereby communicate a view of women’s experiences as being highly irredeemable. Throughout the book a presumed type of “woman,” in the way that Judith Butler speaks of gender as a set of performances,1 bears the weight of these metaphors and consequently the national sin of idolatry. The text not only implicates and indicts women in acts of idolatry but also excludes their participation in sacred space, locating women’s religious activities in spaces seen as illegitimate and desacralized. Were it not for ch. 44, a query of gendered space production of the book of Jeremiah may not reveal anything new. Despite the production of space that privileges men, ch. 44 offers another representation of space for women, as well as a counterspace of representation of women. In the chapter, set in the context of refugees in Egypt, the voice of women challenges the prophet. In this space beyond Jerusalem, women assert their participation in religious activities, albeit the worship of the Queen of Heaven. Yet in the representation of sacred space in honor of this goddess, women produce space that transcends the gendered space assigned to them by the dominant voice of the book. The geographer Gillian Rose offers that women’s resistance to “the territory of gender” requires transcending the Àat two-dimensional space of masculinist 1. Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader (ed. Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski; Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005), 502. 1

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construction in order to occupy “spaces structured over many dimensions.”2 Among these dimensions she envisages is a space of “exile” where women escape the gendered prison of their societies to construct spaces of difference. The Egyptian setting of the chapter, the theme of idolatry and divine punishment, the implication of women’s religious activity, as well as the links between this chapter and ch. 7 make for a complex interaction of gender, space, and sacrality. Gillian Rose’s work in feminist geography serves as a useful guide to understand these factors in the book. In this essay, I explore the production of sacred space from the perspective of gender, noting how women are excluded from the central space of the temple and located in other marginal spaces deemed as illegitimate. While I view the women’s voice in ch. 44 as offering a contestation to this production of space, I deal more with how this oppositional voice in the text counterproduces sacred space for women. Obviously, the location of this interaction in Egypt serves as a factor in this counterproduction. The text’s invocation, both directly and indirectly, of the notion of the temple as the center of sacred space enables me to show how the reproduction of space by the women’s voice works on the level of what Rose regards as plurilocality. The essay begins with an examination of Rose’s description of the masculinist nature of the ¿eld of geography and a look at how she sees women resisting these spatial constructions. Mapping of the gendered space production of the book of Jeremiah, paying attention to sacred space and religious activities as relating to women, follows next. In the book this gendering of space, more often than not, includes the feminization of religious activities. I will then draw these insights together to show how the book represents the space for women’s bodies in Butler’s sense, inÀuenced by Foucault, of a culturally inscribed object.3 An exegetical analysis of ch. 44 forms the basis for my attention to the women’s voice in the chapter as an instantiation of Rose’s notion of women moving beyond the territory of gender. Gender and Space Like most academic disciplines, the ¿eld of geography reÀects male biases. Rose points to the inability of the ¿eld to identify the construction of space that excludes women, and geography’s masculinist tendencies. 2. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 151. 3. Butler, “Gender Trouble,” 497.

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Paying attention to these aspects of Rose’s critique helps to frame this analysis along Henri Lefebvre’s dual axes of representation of space and spaces of representation and as Roland Boer applies Lefebvre’s theories to the reading of 1 Samuel.4 Following the lead of Michèle Le Doeuff, who views the term masculinist as the claim to total coverage that omits women because its concern lies with men,5 Rose critiques the ¿eld of geography, and the sub-discipline of time-geography, of treating a “singular space” as universal. She observes that time-geography presumes the location of the performance of daily tasks and reveals “the constraints on an individual’s mobility,” thereby ignoring the experiences of women, since the tool reports on how patriarchal society orders the activities of women.6 Although Rose points out the limitations of timegeography, given its masculinist predisposition to proving the differences between men and women, she still thinks time-geography can reveal “women’s routines” and their “resistances.”7 Theorizing the relationship between gender and space, Rose points to the notion of the natural, as applied to feminized bodies. Since both the notion of woman and social arrangements are culturally constructed, gender and space exist in a relationship where they produce and reproduce each other. Therefore, to naturalize feminized bodies in certain locations represents a cultural construction of space. Further, this naturalized location functions as a constraint upon feminized bodies, since the implication of a gendered location suggests restricted access on the basis of gender to non-naturalized spaces. Rose interprets this limitation as one of time-geography’s many ironies, given that time-geography speaks of space as unbounded while ignoring the reality of social constraints, at times enforced by violent social action, that limit access based upon gender, sexuality, and race. She believes that what time-geography de¿nes as public and universal space is really dominant space occupied and de¿ned by men’s interests. The resultant bifurcation of space not only by gender but also into public/private and natural/unnatural represents a mechanism of enforcement that excludes women from certain spaces. Rose maintains: “The space of time-geography, then, seems to be 4. Roland Boer, “Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space in I Samuel,” in Constructions of Space II: The Biblical City and Other Imagined Spaces (ed. Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp; New York: T&T Clark International, 2008), 90. 5. Rose, Feminism, 4. 6. Rose (ibid., 21–30) cites Törsten Hägerstrand’s research conclusions that capability, coupling, and authority constrain women. Rose notes that what Hägerstrand sees as women limiting their participation in facilities represents the limits masculinist spaces place upon women. 7. Ibid., 25. 1

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the dominant space of patriarchy: public, masculine space… The ability to act in the public sphere, as opposed to breed in the private, is a privilege violently reserved for men, and the human agency produced in time-geography also speaks only of this masculine sociality and its public spaces.”8 The (re)productive relationship between gender and space also holds implications for understanding the social arrangement of space. Building from the work of Michel Foucault, Rose insists that space also impacts women’s power and knowledge. In de¿ning the spaces allowed for women in modern society, Rose argues that this space has been reduced to: “[the] everyday geography of kitchens and bedrooms and streets and workplaces and neighbourhoods—[this] is the geography of many women’s spatiality.” To prove the point of gendered spatiality, Rose uses the parable as told by Marilyn Frye of a woman who maps her living space and discovers that she only gets angry in the kitchen, somewhat less angry in the living room, but never in the bedroom. The woman relates the level of her anger to the lived spaces where she is perceived to be in control, that is, dominant in the kitchen, less so in the living room, but subservient in the bedroom.9 Rose argues that the intersection of space, power, and knowledge in the daily experiences of women de¿nes the notion “woman” in an oppressive way that excludes women from public space. In terms of the representation of space from a gendered perspective, Rose looks at two aspects, the feminization of space and the representation of landscapes. She observes the tendency to regard certain locations as feminine and to invest these locations with particular feminine qualities, such as warmth, caring, and nurturing. At its best, this tendency evokes “a fantasized woman” that Rose argues reveals masculinist ideas of “woman,” whereby patriarchy invests the qualities of the ideal woman in particular locations as the means of enjoining those qualities upon all women.10 However, the opposite can happen where certain attributes and activities are discouraged in women and feminized bodies can be denied access to certain spaces. Secondly, Rose shows how landscape portraits function as another representation of feminized space. These, she indicates, serve as a “visual ideology” where “social power structures”11 are embedded in the

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8. Ibid., 30–38. 9. Ibid., 142. 10. Ibid., 57. 11. Ibid., 87–89.

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representation of the physical landscape. In general these landscape portraits tend to conÀate women with nature, either indicating qualities such as wild, unruly, and untamed, or perhaps the opposite, of domesticated, tamed, and controlled. They also evoke associations of fertility and sexuality by connecting the feminine to nature and thus excluding it from the aspects of “culture” seen as more reÀective of settled existence. Rose concludes that this representation places women in the “natural” environment while excluding women from “the built up spaces” marked by community and temple.12 That Rose focuses on modern societies and theories about space enables rather than limits my concerns. In characterizing modern space construction as oppressive for women, restricting women’s access in violent ways, Rose exposes the enduring effects of patriarchy. I am interested in the mechanisms of exclusion in the construction of space that can be gleaned from the book of Jeremiah. Gendered Space Production in Jeremiah Many scholars advise against reconstructing ancient Israelite society from the data in the Bible.13 In terms of the application of spatial theories to the Bible, Boer concludes that the value of this tool of enquiry only provides secondary knowledge since biblical texts “can then speak only in a secondary manner about spatial practice, or rather, there is a spatial practice of the text that refers to the spatial practice of whatever social formation it comes from.”14 Extending Boer’s view further, given the extended history of the growth of Jeremiah, this means that the book partially mirrors the construction of space in the communities associated with the book. Therefore, readers’ presumptions about the spaces where the text locates women reÀect some historical reality. More importantly, the ability to feminize actions or to render negative traits as feminine

12. Ibid., 96. Sherry B. Ortner (“Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?,” in Feminism: The Public and the Private [ed. Joan B. Landes; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 27) accepts that women are indeed “closer” to nature than men, but views the notion that women are “‘merely’…closer to nature than men” as oppressive. 13. Philip R. Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel” (new ed.; London: Continuum, 2006), 11–20; Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), 22. 14. Boer, “Henri Lefebvre,” 90. 1

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reÀects masculinist notions of reality and society.15 In general, the book feminizes and sexualizes the practice of idolatry and locates this practice in spaces outside of the central sacred space of the temple. In so doing, the book develops a schema indicating that everything has a place and there is a place for everything. Jonathan Z. Smith regards this as a “locative map” or “an imperial map of the world.”16 Apart from ch. 44, few parts of Jeremiah deal with women in their own right.17 The book instead metaphorizes and at times allegorizes the worship of other deities through women. Mary Shields observes that using women as subjects in these metaphors raises the image of the marginal ¿gure, normally excluded from discourse as both dangerous yet attractive, an effective strategy in a patriarchal society.18 Between chs. 2–4 the prophetic discourse variously images Israel as male and female. The text locates Israel as a female engaging in practices “on every high hill and under every green tree” (ĭĚĭĘ ėėĔĕ ėĥĔĕČğĞČğĥ Ģģĥī ĨĥČğĞ, 2:20; 3:6, 13; also 17:2).19 That these spaces facilitate sexual and presumed religious deviance from a social norm indicates that they fall outside of the central sacred space. Shields observes that, after situating feminized Israel “on every high hill and under every green tree” in 2:20, a series of images of overstepped boundaries emerges in the chapter. While ch. 2 includes social boundaries, geographical boundaries also appear.20 In addition, the associations of sexuality and fertility, while used here to indicate the nature of religious activity, also evoke Rose’s notion of the conÀation of nature and fertility to represent women in landscape portraits.

15. On sexualized metaphors in Jeremiah, see Mary E. Shields, “Circumcision of the Prostitute: Gender, Sexuality, and the Call to Repentance in Jeremiah 3:1–4:4,” in Prophets and Daniel (ed. Athalya Brenner; FCB 2d Series 8; London: Shef¿eld Academic, 2001), 122–23. 16. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 292. 17. Childbirth appears ten times in the book as a metaphor for the anguish of divine punishment (4:31; 6:24; 13:21; 22:23) and to emasculate men, especially soldiers (30:6; 48:41; 49:22, 24; 50:43). Only 31:8 references childbirth as a part of women’s experiences. 18. Shields, “Circumcision,” 126. 19. All scripture references are to the NRSV unless otherwise indicated. 20. Shields (“Circumcision,” 125) observes these boundary transgressions: the breaking of the yoke and bonds (2:20), lack of sexual boundaries (2:24), teaching of the art of prostitution to other women (2:33). The chapter ends with Israel deported to Egypt; ejected from the central sacred space produced by the book. 1

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The book consistently produces subject positions for women in nature participating in practices that subvert the social norm. As a young bride, Israel displays devotion in “the wilderness” (īĔĖġĔ, 2:2). The addition of the phrase “in a land not sown” (ėĥĘīę ēğ ĨīēĔ, 2:2) to the description of the space increases the indication of an untamed and newly discovered space. Similarly, feminized Israel in 2:23–34 receives doubled descriptors and locations as a wild animal in heat in the open land. The lack of a speci¿c location of “the valley” (ēĜĕĔ, 2:23) places this space in undiscovered and unnamed territory. The location of “the wilderness” invoking an uncultivated space appears again in 2:24 and 3:2. Other references indicate how the book locates and equates feminized bodies in nature. The discussion on divorce in 3:1 equates the wayward wife with polluted land and then places her engaging in sexual trysts in locations outside of built up space, namely on “the bare heights” (ĠĜħŘČğĥ), at “the waysides” (ĠĜĞīĖČğĥ), and in “the wilderness” (īĔĖġĔ, 3:2). Conversely, in the one instance where Israel takes on a masculine identity, the text locates the ¿gure in the context of the home, more precisely in the context of settled existence, and questions Israel’s inverted state as plunder, “Is Israel a slave? Is he a homeborn servant? Why then has he become plunder?” (ęĔğ ėĜė ĥĘĖġ ēĘė ĭĜĔ ĖĜğĜČĠē ğēīřĜ īĔĥė, 2:14). As male, Israel properly belongs to the space of cultivated society, while nature serves as the space for Israel as female. The declaration at 6:2 underscores the feminization of space in the book of Jeremiah: “I have likened daughter Zion to the loveliest pasture” (ĢĘĜĩČĭĔ ĜĭĜġĖ ėĕģĥġėĘ ėĘģė). The equation of daughter Zion and pasture21 feminizes not only the nation-state, as is common in the ancient world, but also produces the fantasized woman as at home in nature. Naturalizing the woman in this way, especially through the invocation of the maternal archetype “daughter Zion,” enforces the categorization of women’s activity in prescribed spaces. This verse produces women as nurturing and nourishing even in light of the destructive images contained in 6:3–4. Apart from the natural function of childbirth, two female tasks or professions appear in the book: the professional mourner and the wise woman (9:17 [9:16 MT]). The instruction from YHWH to summon these women, rendered as ĭĘģģĘĪġğ and ĭĘġĞĚė in Hebrew, indicates the dire plight of Jerusalem, since it appears that these females serve as a court of last resort. The two female functions seem to be performed away from the community given that the verbs “call” and “send” (9:17 [9:16 MT]) 21. NRSV translates the Pual feminine participle ėĕģĥġėĘ as “pasture” based upon 6:3.

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remain ambiguous about the spatial distance separating these women from the source of divine guidance. That these functions ¿nd no place within the temple as the center of sacral activity indicates their peripheral nature and presumably the marginalized location of these women.22 In 9:20 (9:19 MT) women receive divine instruction to teach other women a dirge about the city’s plight. The text restricts this teaching function to daughters and women and implies that the unusual circumstances require these functions by women. These functions appear to be performed in private rather than public space, and if they occur in public, only women and girls serve as the target audience. Although it may seem that the text produces space for female professions not inherently tied to nature and sexualized acts in locations close to built up areas, the text offers no corresponding space for these professional women to be included in the daily affairs of the community. In Jeremiah the temple stands as central sacred space. The book, however, tends to use the more euphemistic term “house of the LORD” rather than “temple” which only appears in six verses (7:4: 24:1; 38:14; 41:5; 50:28; 51:11). In terms of understanding sacred space, Jonathan Z. Smith draws upon Mircea Eliade, who describes sacred space as being more than simply the experience of holiness but a “point of communication” that can be repeated. Presumably, several locations can be adjudged as sacred space. Yet, as Smith points out, sacred space more often than not gets narrowly de¿ned into a central location. This center of sacred space is marked by two attitudes of accessibility, which enables the replication of the center in several locations, and by inaccessibility that restricts access to the central sacred space to an elite.23 As Smith understands the development of the center of sacred space, this location breaks up the homogeneity of space and sets it apart from other space. When imbued with the attitude of inaccessibility, central sacred space exercises at once dominance over its own space as well as devaluing other sites outside of the center. The production of the temple in Jeremiah ¿ts this notion of inaccessible central sacred space. In Jeremiah, not surprisingly, the temple never seems to be a space open to women in their own right. While the text may refer at times to collectives entering the temple, the speci¿c mention of women never occurs. For instance, 17:26 describes the gathering at the temple with details given of the places of origin of those who shall gather. No speci¿c subject for the verbal form ĘēĔĘ appears in the text, leading most translations to assume “people,” presuming all genders. This verse lists a

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22. See the wise woman from Tekoa (2 Sam 14:1–24). 23. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 94–95.

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series of offerings that shall be brought by the people indicating the central and sacred nature of the temple. The list of these offerings includes burnt offerings (ėğĘĥ), sacri¿ces (ĚĔęĘ), grain offerings (ėĚģġĘ), frankincense (ėģĘĔğĘ), and thanksgiving offerings (ėĖĘĭ). Two items in this list appear again in 41:5, grain offerings (ėĚģġĘ) and frankincense (ėģĘĔğĘ), as part of a ritual sacri¿ce at the temple by eighty men. The text indicates by these lists the speci¿c items that conform to the sacrality of the temple. Specifying the bearers of the offerings as men (41:5) reveals an easy access to the temple by men with no corresponding speci¿c mention of women. Chapter 7 provides further insight into the masculinist space production of the temple as central sacred space. The sermon addresses an audience using largely second masculine plural verb forms, presuming a male listener. The list of offenses in 7:9, consisting exclusively of in¿nitive absolutes and mirroring a portion of the Decalogue, implies a male offender. Further, if part of the burden of the sermon lies with offenders dishonoring the temple by their presence, then the text suggests that only men access the sacred space of the temple. In instructing Jeremiah not to intercede on behalf of the people, YHWH points Jeremiah to further offenses committed outside of the precincts of the temple. Here the text speci¿es the offenders by both age and gender, with each family member responsible for a particular religious activity (7:18). In spaces outside of the temple, women perform idolatrous ritual activity. In giving the list of these activities, the text produces those spaces outside of the temple as desacralized space because none of the items mentioned in 7:18 reÀect the list of offerings in 17:26 and 41:5 as legitimate worship practices at the temple. Women, speci¿cally mentioned, turn up in sites outside of the temple associated with apostasy. The book produces the temple as a central public space for the community. The temple serves as the staging ground for Jeremiah’s activities because, presumably here, he gains access to the public. At the entrance to the temple, the prophet’s words can reach a wide audience, described on two occasions as “the cities of Judah” (26:2) and “all the people in Jerusalem and all the people who came from the towns of Judah” (36:9). Similarly, the confrontation between Jeremiah and Hananiah occurs in the temple before a group described as “in the presence of the priests and all the people” (28:1). Essentially, the temple in Jeremiah stands as public space with open access to a wide group of people. That this includes women remains in doubt. Although the temple appears as open public space, the book indicates that men control it. Pashhur, the priest, imprisons Jeremiah for speech offensive to the temple (20:1–12) and delivered within its precincts 1

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(19:14), presaging similar controls on speech in the temple in ch. 26 by a male elite. The authority to control temple space is spelled out in Shemiah and Nehelam’s letter to Zephaniah the priest instructing him to curtail Jeremiah’s actions (29:24–28). Ultimately in 36:5 Jeremiah acknowledges his restricted access to the temple when he sends Baruch to read the scroll. Despite this, King Zedekiah sets up a surreptitious meeting with Jeremiah that allows him access to the temple precincts (38:14). And Jeremiah conducts the obscure group of Rechabites to an inner chamber of the temple (35:2–4). While the speci¿c instance of restrictions on space features Jeremiah, the public space of the temple remains under the control of men dedicated to maintaining the sacrality of that space. Since the religious activities of women as indicated in the book do not coincide with those of the temple it might be presumed that the book implies a similar restriction on the access of women to the public space of the temple. A map of sacrality in the book of Jeremiah would reveal the temple at the center and at the periphery the generic places referred to as the “cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem.”24 This nondescript location emerges several times in the book of Jeremiah, at times as sites of salvation (7:34; 32:44), but more often as the site of divine wrath (1:15; 4:16; 10:22; 11:12). More importantly, even with the acknowledgment from Georg Fischer that the phrase indicates a pervasive worship practice in various locations,25 this site stands as the generic location of idolatry. It serves as the contrast to the temple in ch. 7. Idolatrous activities take place outside of the central space of the temple in this peripheral area. That YHWH takes Jeremiah aside to indicate this to him suggests the location of this site as the margins of sacrality in the book (7:17), an identi¿cation reinforced by the discussion of this site in ch. 44 as the site of idolatrous activity (44:17, 21). While the issue of the gender of the speaking voice of these verses will be taken up in the next section, it remains suf¿cient to say that the text acknowledges the “cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem” as an equal opportunity location for apostasy by both men and women. The text lists actions in this site as “offerings” (īěĪğ) and “libations” (ĠĜĞĤģ) with the further details from the voice of women of “cakes for her, marked with her image” (ėğ ĘģĜřĥ ėĔĩĥėğ ĠĜģĘĞ, 44:19). This list is consistent with the description of idolatry in 7:18 where libations (ĠĜĞĤģ) and the mention of cakes (ĠĜģĘĞ) 24. For Christl Maier this is a standard Dtr expression; see her Jeremia als Lehrer der Tora: Soziale Gebote des Deuteronomiums in Fortschreibungen des Jeremiabuches (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 333. 25. Georg Fischer, Jeremia 26–52 (HThKAT; Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 444.

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occur. Both lists concur on the agency of women in this site as well as on the nature of their activities. Therefore, when the text deals with the subject position of women in terms of sacrality, it locates women outside of the center, on the margins. While it may seem that the “cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem” differs from previous locations in nature, this location is nondescript, thereby indicating a “no place” as compared with the central sacred space of the temple. That the term “cities of Judah” refers to areas outside of Jerusalem remains clear from the general use of the term both in the book of Jeremiah and in other books. The reference to “streets of Jerusalem,” while containing an aura of a public space, could just as well speak to an open space, open country, exterior space. The book produces space for women located in nature and away from built up areas where women engage in apostasy. Represented in these spaces, women appear as complicit in the downfall of Jerusalem. In contrast, the book produces the temple as a central sacred space populated and controlled by men. Smith argues that, since biblical texts emerge from a temple elite, the “locative map” in these texts reÀects a “self-serving ideology”26 that determines the spaces particular bodies can access. Women’s bodies hardly emerge in the legitimate sacred space in the book but instead in marginal spaces, the site of divine wrath. Jeremiah 44 as a Space for Women’s Voices Like several parts of the book of Jeremiah, ch. 44 de¿es simple delineation of its geographical27 and historical28 contexts and ultimately its ideological29 and theological commitments.30 Despite the purported presence 26. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 293. 27. Karl-Friedrich Pohlmann (Studien zum Jeremiabuch: Ein Betrag zur Frage nach der Entstehung des Jeremiabuches [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978], 168) notes that the addressees of 44:1 stand as an expansion of 43:7 as a means of masking the lack of a speci¿c geographical context to prove complete coverage of Judeans in Egypt. 28. Fischer (Jeremia 26–52, 434) places the actual historical context later than the purported post-587 B.C.E. period. William McKane (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 2 [ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996], 1084) accepts the historical inconsistencies since the chapter reads as “a deplorably long and inconsequential pastiche on ‘idolatry.’ ” 29. Carolyn J. Sharp (Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose [OTS; London: T&T Clark International, 2003], 79) assigns 44:1–4, 11, 27 to Judah-based groups anticipating the destruction of Judah and Judeans in Egypt. She attributes 44:7, 9–10*, 12–23, 26, 28–30 to a progolah group open to the idea of the survival of a repentant remnant. 1

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of details there exists limited con¿dence about its reliability.31 Dealing with the fractured nature of the chapter and its tendentious quality enables a plausible way of recovering the voice of women. Given that one of the challenges happens to be the variants between the MT, the Old Greek, and other manuscripts on the issue of women, failure to engage these different text traditions in favor of the MT participates in the silencing of the women’s voices.32 Determining where women stand in relation to the gathered community and the issues raised by Jeremiah serves as a starting point for reading the chapter. The question as to whether the gathered community in 44:15 exists as a subset of all Judeans in Egypt or refers to residents in Pathros distracts from the speci¿c mention of women in the community.33 Whether 44:15 intends responding to Jeremiah remains lost with the author of the verses. As it stands currently in the MT, the verse reads as a united front responding to the critique of the prophet.34 The verse describes the united front as including men and women, and grants it the status of a sizable religious assembly (ğĘĖĕ ğėĪ), located in Pathros. The MT includes women as part of this assembly that responds to Jeremiah, and as Fischer points out, the use of the participial form of the verb Ėġĥ indicates that women play an important role as active participants or providing service to others.35 The Old Greek, however, missing an equivalent form of ĭĘĖġĥė, reads as if the women constitute a subset of the larger gathering, essentially giving the impression of the veneration 30. Most scholars agree on the Dtr character of the chapter; see R. E. Clements, Jeremiah (Int; Atlanta: John Knox), 239; Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 731; Maier, Jeremia als Lehrer, 332. 31. Pohlmann (Studien zum Jeremiabuch, 174) thinks the chapter reÀects typical context-pretext distortions of the book. Clements (Jeremiah, 242) doubts the words are Jeremiah’s despite the summary of Jeremiah’s essential message. 32. William McKane (Jeremiah II, 1080) and J. Gerald Janzen (Studies in the Text of Jeremiah [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973], 108) accept the Old Greek as more original. 33. Douglas Rawlinson Jones, Jeremia (New Century Bible Commentary; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 481; William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah Chapters 26–52 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 303. Renate Jost (Frauen, Männer und die Himmelskönigin: Exegetische Studien [Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1995], 228) critiques overlooking the women in 44:15 as sexist. Angela Bauer (Gender in the Book of Jeremiah: A Feminist-Literary Reading [Studies in Biblical Literature; New York: Lang, 1999], 150) points to scholarship that omits the women based upon other manuscripts. 34. Fischer (Jeremia 26–52, 442) indicates that the triple use of “all” emphasizes the response in 44:16–19 as a community consensus. 35. Ibid., 443. 1

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of the Queen of Heaven as an exclusive female religion that the men may be aware of and who now defend their wives at this gathering. As Jost points out, most commentators resolve the tension between these two text traditions not on exegetical grounds but on their perceptions about the worship of the Queen of Heaven as either a family-based religion or a national organization. Jost notes that given the issue as to whether an early Vorlage of this chapter featured a debate simply between Jeremiah and the women, the extent to which women are afforded prominence in an assembly as described in 44:15 governs the extent to which commentators are open to an original conÀict that only involved the women and Jeremiah.36 The material available in the biblical texts remains insuf¿cient to conclude the precise nature of the worship of the Queen of Heaven during the period up to and after the reforms of Josiah, particularly whether it existed as a female only organization.37 For the purposes of this essay, an examination of the presentation of the Queen of Heaven cult in Jeremiah, the only biblical book that mentions this deity, remains important. Yet even within Jeremiah tensions exist on this presentation, namely the picture of a family activity in 7:18 versus widespread national involvement up to and including the monarchy in 44:17. Nonetheless, the book portrays the worship of the Queen of Heaven and other idolatrous activities as occurring outside the temple. These take place in the usual generic location of “towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem” (44:9, 17, 21)38 and in Egypt (44:8). Whether the veneration of the Queen of Heaven can be equated with the worship of Asherah, Astarte, Tammuz, or even the Hosts of Heaven, as some scholars suggest, based upon references in other biblical books,39 a comparison of the material in the 36. Jost (Frauen, Männer, 225). Jost (ibid., 32) wonders, if the religion is really a female cult and men are seduced by their wives to participate, why does Jeremiah argue with the men? Fischer (Jeremia 26–52, 442) names Num 30:7–17 and Deut 13:7–12 as presumed by this chapter. 37. Morton Smith and K. Koch think it continues up to 587 B.C.E.; see Morton Smith, “The Veracity of Ezekiel, the Sins of Manasseh, and Jeremiah 44,” ZAW 87 (1975): 16; K. Koch, “Aschera als Himmelskönigin in Jerusalem,” UF 20 (1988): 97. Yair Hoffman and Jost date the suppression during Josiah’s reforms; see Yair Hoffman, “History and Ideology: The Case of Jeremiah 44,” JANES 28 (2001): 49; Jost, Frauen, Männer, 238. 38. Only 44:19 uses “land” (ĨīēĔ) instead of “town” (ĜīĥĔ) for this phrase, the only instance of this change in the book. 39. Susan Ackerman, “‘And the Women Knead Dough’: The Worship of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth-Century Judah,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (ed. Peggy L. Day; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 116; Koch, “Aschera,” 108. 1

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books of 2 Kings and Ezekiel reveals that Jeremiah refuses to produce the temple as a space that admits the worship of a deity apart from YHWH. Ezekiel locates veneration of the goddess Tammuz by women in the temple (Ezek 8:14–15). Vessels dedicated to the worship of Baal, Asherah, and the Host of Heaven are placed in the temple and later removed by Josiah (2 Kgs 23:4). Unlike these texts that admit to the de¿ling of the sacred space by the veneration of other deities, Jeremiah reveals only once the presence of religious activity to other deities in the temple. The brief mention of the presence of “their abominations” (ĠėĜĩĘĪŘ, 7:30) in the temple with a doublet in 32:34 switches focus to activity at Topheth. The text provides few details on the nature of the abomination, lacking speci¿city as to whether it was a cult object to another deity, an authorized practice like unclean food, or whether the abomination venerates another deity and if so which one.40 This single instance ought not to detract from the main point that when Jeremiah deals with the de¿ling of the temple space it focuses more on covenantal failures and the anger that bodies that occupied de¿led space inhabit the temple (7:8–10; 11:15). The text, on the other hand, locates speci¿c mention of apostasy in spaces outside the temple (5:7; 7:31–32; 13:27; 19:1–13; 32:29, 35). Since the book’s “locative map” excludes the veneration of any deity other than YHWH at the temple, it effectively excludes the bodies of women as active leaders and/or participants in religious activity in sacred space. Since the book predominantly constitutes female subjectivity in marginal spaces, allowing female subjectivity to come to voice in 44:16–19 is not inconsistent with the book’s spatial map. While 44:15 enables the acknowledgment of the bodies of women in the assembly, 44:16–19 reÀect the voices of women. As McKane argues, based upon Bernhard Duhm’s notions, the content of 44:16–19 ¿ts a single voice rather than being divided between men and women.41 An obvious tension exists if 44:16–18 belongs to men and 44:19 comes from women, namely that the

40. William L. Holladay (Jeremiah 1: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah Chapters 1–25 [Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986], 267) understands “abominations” (ĠĜĩĘĪŘ) as “idolatrous images.” Carroll (Jeremiah, 221) thinks they are unclean objects. 41. McKane, Jeremiah II, 1077. This appears to be a standard reading of the English text. Jan de Waard (A Handbook on Jeremiah [TCT 2; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003], 171) notes that English translations are “not suf¿ciently transparent” of the translators’ decisions in this regard. 1

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women provide information already supplied by the men and af¿rmed by the narrator in 44:15. Assigning the response to the women’s voice can eliminate this discrepancy. That only the Syriac manuscript attests the inclusion of the phrase, “and the women said,” when manuscripts such as the MT, Greek, and Vulgate do not ¿nd it necessary to amplify this verse in the chapter, suggests that these traditions read the entire response of the community as the voice of the women. The strength on which the Syriac supplies the insertion rests with the contents of 44:19, speci¿cally the mention of “our husbands” (ĘģĜŘģē). To discount the possibility of women’s voices in 44:16–18 on the basis of the ¿rst common plural verbs and suf¿xes suggests that women are unable to speak on behalf of a group, even a group of women, and certainly not on behalf of a mixed group. Jost labels such a view sexist, not so much because it elevates the place of women, but because it renders the men as emasculated.42 Apart from a cultural bias, no grammatical construction exists in 44:16–18 that would rule out a female speaking voice. The case for viewing 44:16–19 as the women’s voice ¿nds support from the voice of Jeremiah. When Jeremiah sums up the response he receives in 44:25, he echoes the conclusion of the community in their commitment to the Queen of Heaven. The quoted speech and his direct address, marked by feminine verb forms such as ĖĭĘėģīĔ, ĜĪĭėģġ, and ĭĥřėģĜ, suggest that he replies to the women’s voice. Since Jeremiah’s reply in 44:25 quotes 44:19, the women’s voice, and 44:17 that could be the women’s voice, Leslie Allen’s contention that the present MT rules out the women’s voice as intended by an original Hebrew text holds merit,43 given that the Old Greek reads ŧļėË ºÍŸėÁ¼Ë, directly addressing the women.44 Accepting that these verses represent the voice of women need not imply an exclusive female organization or one with exclusive female leadership, since data are unavailable. Assigning these verses to women’s voices acknowledges how the voice of women emerges in space produced as marginal. Importantly it allows for the production of space occupied by women’s bodies. To be sure this space, while

42. Jost, Frauen, Männer, 31. 43. Leslie C. Allen, Jeremiah: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 448. McKane, Jeremiah II, 1080; Bauer, Gender, 156. Pohlman (Studien zum Jeremiabuch, 173) places 44:15–19 and 44:25 in the same strata and joined to 44:1–13 and 26–30. He remains unclear as to whether the current tensions result from the joining of these two strata or from editorial reshaping of the original material. 44. De Waard (Handbook, 173) views the MT as the more dif¿cult reading. 1

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populated with women’s bodies, does not remain exclusively female space. Clearly men inhabit that space as well. This space simply admits to the presence of women, unlike the temple-produced space that restricts access to women. The claims from the community in Egypt in ch. 44, voiced through women, redraw the map that the book enforces. The claim in 44:17–18 that includes national leaders in the space where the veneration of the Queen of Heaven occurs points to this reclamation of space. The assertion of the participation of the royal family expands the reach of this practice. The words of Jeremiah restrict this worship to a family activity (7:18); however, the counterclaims raise it to a more widespread phenomenon. While the book details apostasy as transcending all social classes, 44:17 and 21 challenge the limits of the Queen of Heaven worship to the family. Given that Ackerman’s conclusion, that 44:17 and 21 prove the worship of the Queen of Heaven in the king’s “private chapel,”45 the temple, may be debatable, this claim does reframe the space deemed illegitimate and occupied only by female bodies to being occupied by the bodies of powerful men. De¿ning the space for the veneration of the Queen of Heaven as productive space also challenges the locative map of Jeremiah. Contrary to the claims of the invalidity of other deities, the community response notes that their worship in this space results in prosperity (44:18), a claim that goes unchallenged. Essentially, the community’s response counterproduces the space “the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem” as a point of communication in Smith’s sense of sacred space, therefore turning the space desacralized by the prophet into sacred space. The description of religious activities that take place in the space—vows, offerings, and libations—constitute the space as a locus of worship. More than being a worship space, the responsiveness of the Queen of Heaven to their supplications (44:18) demonstrates the ef¿cacy of the space as a point of communication with the deity. Walter Brueggemann observes that the level of loyalty displayed here makes sense, since the Queen of Heaven “delivers the goods.”46

45. Ackerman, “Women Knead Dough,” 117. See also Koch, “Aschera,” 109, and Karel J. H. Vriezen, “Cakes and Figurines: Related Women’s Cultic Offerings in Ancient Israel?,” in On Reading Prophetic Texts: Gender-Speci¿c and Related Studies in Memory of Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes (ed. Bob Becking and Meindert Dijkstra; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 253. 46. Walter Brueggemann, To Build, to Plant: A Commentary on Jeremiah 26–52 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 197. 1

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The response of the community voiced by the women also redraws the locative map of the book by replicating sacred space with an attitude of accessibility (in Smith’s terms). Unlike the temple, marked by an attitude of inaccessibility, the space that the dominant voice produces for the religious activity it counts as illegitimate reÀects accessibility, therefore ensuring, as Smith outlines, that it can be replicated in many locations. In other words, for this community central sacred space transcends a singular location. The location of the bodies of men and women in this space demonstrates its attitude of accessibility. This accessibility emerges in the inclusiveness of the community as described in ch. 44 and as can be reconstructed in the text. To the extent that a Hebrew Vorlage reÀected a confrontation between Jeremiah and women in 44:17–19, then it describes a community inclusive of women’s bodies and voices that cover several generations. Further, the voice of women that emerges in 44:19 reÀects not a uniquely female operation or one that coerces the participation of men, but an inclusive community.47 This response of the community, voiced by women, describes the space occupied by women, paying attention to women’s subjectivity in the spaces produced by the text, namely “the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem.” But the voice of women emerges not in this space; instead, it emerges in Egypt. This provides opportunity for the exploration of Egypt as the site that lies beyond the “territory of gender.” Space Beyond the Territory of Gender Egypt represents a complex site in the Bible. At once a place of refuge, the site of redemption, and also the territory of an enemy of Israel, Egypt takes different forms in the Bible. The book of Jeremiah shares this ambivalence toward Egypt and produces it in these various ways. In ch. 44, Egypt as the setting impacts the shape of the narrative. As Louis Stulman offers, “Egypt is so palpably present that it de¿nes the story.”48 In ch. 44, Egypt serves as the space of exile, rather than deportation. Unlike the Judeans in Babylon, which the book characterizes as deported, either by divine power (29:4, 7, 14, 20) or the hand of the Babylonian 47. Ruth Fidler (“A Wife’s Vow: The Husband’s Woe? The Case of Hannah and Elkanah [1 Samuel 1,21.23],” ZAW 118 [2006]: 380) shows how Duhm views 44:15–19 as privileging the female voice, but argues that this voice defended the interests of a “fertility cult” concerned with kitchen gardens and childbearing. Fidler instead argues that even though recovery of the Vorlage is impossible, the ability of women to make vows proves critical for reading this verse. 48. Louis Stulman, Jeremiah (AOTC; Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), 343. 1

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king (20:4–6; 24:1; 27:20; 29:1), the Judeans in Egypt intentionally select this as a space of refuge from the Babylonians (chs. 42–43). Egypt breaks out of the binary of the narrative of exile that moves between Jerusalem and Babylon and functions as what Edward Soja, inÀuenced by Homi Bhabha, regards as third space.49 As third space, Egypt, therefore, ¿ts with Rose’s description of a space beyond the territory of gender than enables women liberation and the ability to “imagine somewhere beyond capture.”50 The dominant production of Egypt in Jeremiah happens to be as the site of redemption. Almost ¿fteen times throughout the book Egypt is invoked as the place of redemption (2:6; 7:22, 25; 11:4–7; 16:14; 23:7; 24:13; 31:32; 32:20–21). By comparison, Egypt as an enemy (23:7; 24:8) and a site that represents Israel’s faithlessness (2:18, 36) appears less frequently. When the narrative context shifts to Egypt in ch. 43, a heightened vitriol against Egypt and its worship practices becomes the norm up until the oracle against Egypt in ch. 46. Before the oracle in ch. 46, Egypt is never represented as feminized space. As with the feminization of other national spaces, including Zion (4:31; 6:2, 23; 14:17; 31:22), Moab (48:18), Ammon (49:4), and Babylon (50:42; 51:33), an archetypal woman known as daughter Egypt appears (46:11, 19, 24). The representation of Egypt in ch. 44 combines these perspectives, making it dif¿cult to hold a one-dimensional view of Egypt. When it comes to Egypt, the center does not hold, and things fall apart. Resistance to the prophetic word regarding Egypt begins in ch. 42 and reaches its climax in ch. 44. While the prophetic word casts Egypt as a space destined for destruction, the community embraces it as a site of refuge. The prophet insists on the illegitimacy of religious activity in Egypt. The community, through the voice of women, disrupts this position. The elusiveness in the production of Egypt places it in the context of what Rose de¿nes as a paradoxical space; a space “which straddles the spaces of representation and unrepresentability.”51 Egypt participates in 49. Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 177) identi¿es a “third term” as resolving the competing claims of the colonizer and colonized. I view Egypt here as third space that resolves, without eliminating, the tensions between Jerusalem and Babylon. Rather than a settled space, Egypt becomes contradictory space even as it escapes the control of other spaces. Soja’s “thirding-as-Othering” is a disruption of “totalization” that pushes “the production of knowledge beyond what is presently known”; see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 61, 139–44. 50. Rose, Feminism, 143. 51. Ibid., 154.

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both representation and unrepresentability in the way the site enables an easy mapping of locations as outlined in 44:1, yet proves ambiguous as to whether the community in Pathros is exemplary of the Judeans in Egypt, or simply an aberration. Even de¿ning the gathering at Pathros as a local event or the site of a mass conference of all Judeans in Egypt heightens the slippery nature of the site. While the discourse of the prophet seems focused on Egypt in an undifferentiated way, the narrative maintains a focus on Pathros. Similarly, the discourse of the women creates a continuity between activities in the generic and undifferentiated site, “the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem,” and the organization of their life in a new and named community. That is to say, women transform the undifferentiated produced space handed them by the dominant voice into a site of difference. These conÀicting streams gather in the chapter around Egypt. As a paradoxical space, both represented and unrepresentable, Rose offers that a space produced like Egypt in this chapter enables “the possibility of radical difference.”52 The radical difference on display in ch. 44 appears in the voice of the women and their open de¿ance of the prophet. While some interpret this action as proof of the charge of stubbornness against the people of Israel,53 this voice of resistance may well represent a level of frustration with not only the threats but also the empty promises from the prophet. In this confrontation, as McKane notes, the women turn the words of Jeremiah on him and invert his argument, and they emerge as the winners in that debate, effectively attributing the disaster to the suppression of the worship of the Queen of Heaven rather than the veneration of the goddess.54 In space known as a site of refuge, the orthodox message of the prophet no longer holds sway, given the paradoxes that mark the site. The activities surrounding the worship of the Queen of Heaven do not change in Egypt, but the ability of women to come to voice changes, and it occurs in sites of marginalization when women embrace their subjectivity. Facing the textual realities that show traces of the voice of women in the text, but also at the same time its suppression, Fidler imagines the men voicing the women’s vows and intentions; essentially, the women speak through the mouths of the men, that is, the men ultimately adopt the women’s vows as their own.55 Fidler’s imagined scene may defy logic, but she exposes the paradox of the chapter, where women come to

1

52. 53. 54. 55.

Ibid. Brueggemann, To Build, 196. McKane, Jeremiah II, 1089. Fidler, “Wife’s Vow,” 381.

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voice but not speak. Such is the paradox of the space of Egypt that enables a radical difference. The space of Pathros in Egypt reÀects the overlap of both the center and the margin. In relation to Jerusalem and the center of sacred space, Pathros lies on the margins, and the women as participants in the worship of the Queen of Heaven occupy that marginal space as well. But Pathros serves as a new center in the constituted map that places the worship of the Queen of Heaven in previously marginalized spaces as a point of effective communication with the deity. In Pathros the women voice their embrace of the worship of the Queen of Heaven, certainly news to the prophet. This declaration puts them in the open about their religious activities while at the same time excludes them from orthodox Yahwism. Rose analyzes these paradoxes in terms of race and sexual orientation, where black women, who serve as domestic workers, share intimacies with a family as insiders yet at the same time stand as outsiders to that family. So too lesbians who come out become visible and invisible, at once belonging to a community and yet ejected from a community.56 Pathros serves as that space where women emerge from the closet to embrace their heterodoxy that at once shuts them out of orthodox Yahwism. Rose refers to this as creating a subjectivity for women that makes them both prisoner and exile, occupying space that is multiple and contradictory.57 Pathros, as a moniker for a region of Egypt infamous for heterodox religion,58 serves as a marker for the challenge to orthodoxy and the space that makes it possible for women to voice resistance to the prophet. Beyond the symbolic value of the space, Rose shows how such spaces of paradox become necessary “to articulate a troubled relation to the hegemonic discourses of masculinism.”59 The value of the resistant voice of women in Pathros as counterspace lies in being heard in a way that cannot happen in the central sacred space. In Pathros Jeremiah acknowledges the ability of women to make vows in their own right even though this may lead to their destruction. This recognition adds to the possibility that the women function as priestly ¿gures in the worship of the Queen of Heaven, a possibility that Jeremiah embraces when he speaks of the women baking cakes in 7:18, and reaf¿rmed by the women in 44:19 56. Rose, Feminism, 151–52. 57. Ibid., 155. 58. De Waard (Handbook, 170) explains that “Egypt” signi¿es “Lower Egypt (or Northern Egypt)” while Pathros indicates “Upper Egypt (or Southern Egypt).” Also Fischer, Jeremia 26–52, 443. 59. Rose, Feminism, 159.

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without opposition from the prophet.60 The response of the prophet acknowledges the subjectivity of women and perhaps faces the limits of masculinist ideology fully to produce space for women and their subjectivity. Conclusion In concert with other texts produced by a patriarchal culture, the book of Jeremiah evidences the production of masculinist space. Male bodies easily occupy the central sacred space of the temple, which appears off limits to female bodies. However, ch. 44 of the book reveals a challenge to this totalizing view in the ability of women to come to voice in the counterproduced sacred space of the worship of the Queen of Heaven and the space of refuge in Egypt. The temptation remains real to overstate the liberatory inclinations of certain biblical texts as proof of the Bible’s emancipatory quality. The writers of the Bible deploy gender as a strategic category in its production. To the extent that a temple-based male priestly elite produced the text, their ideological commitments emerge in the text. Jost and Rose employ appropriate caution in relation to their respective area of expertise. Jost recognizes that surfacing the women’s voice in ch. 44 does not suggest an increase in the power of women, especially in the religious sphere in that space and time.61 Rose, similarly, takes a sober view of the ability of paradoxical space to function as a liberatory tool in every situation of gender oppression since space is “insecure, precarious and Àuctuating.”62 The representation of spaces of liberation in the Bible merely points to the work of liberation in real time and space.

60. Vriezen (“Cakes,” 261) translates ĠĜģĘĞ as “¿gurines” viewing it as Hebrew instead of Akkadian. She concludes that the work requires a specialized skill. Jost (Frauen, Männer, 238) offers that baking cakes makes the women the religion’s employees and sees resemblances between the vow in 44:25 and acceptance of priestly of¿ce. 61. Jost, Frauen, Männer, 238. 62. Rose, Feminism, 160. 1

FROM WATCHTOWER TO HOLY TEMPLE: READING THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK AS A SPATIAL JOURNEY* Gert T. M. Prinsloo

Introduction In its present literary form, Hab 2 represents a turning point between despair (Hab 1) and unconditional confession of trust (Hab 3).1 What brings about this dramatic change in the perspective of the prophet? To rephrase the question in spatial terms: What moves the prophet Habakkuk from the despair of Hab 1 to the unconditional faith of Hab 3? My working hypothesis is that a spatial reading of the book will provide new perspectives on the question. Spatial analysis will illustrate why (and how) Hab 2 constitutes this turning point. The presence of temporal terminology, especially in Hab 2, elicited analysis of the book’s eschatological character and the importance of the temporal tension between present reality (1:1–17), past salvation (3:3–15), and future hope (2:1–20).2 However, the equally prominent occurrence of spatial terminology attracted very little attention in the book’s interpretation. To test my hypothesis I brieÀy discuss theoretical approaches to the concepts of space and place and contextualize it in the ancient Near Eastern milieu. I then analyze spatial concepts and spatial orientation in the book of Habakkuk and contextualize the analysis against the historical, social, and ideological background that can be construed from the book. Implications of this reading for the interpretation of the book are brieÀy discussed. A deliberate choice is made to read the book as a * This study is a revised edition of a paper read at the Philipps Universität Marburg (June 2008). I thank Professor Dr. Christl Maier for her cordial invitation. I am deeply indebted to her for the crucial role she played as co-organizer of the “Place, Space and Identity Program Unit” of the 2009–2011 SBL International Meetings. 1. Cf. Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Reading Habakkuk as a Literary Unit: Exploring the Possibilities,” OTE 12 (1999): 515–35 (528). 2. J. Gerald Janzen, “Eschatological Symbol and Existence in Habakkuk,” CBQ 44 (1982): 394–414. 1

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literary unit, as a narrative with a clear plot, a de¿nitive beginning, body, and conclusion. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the spatial story of the book and to illuminate the imagined journey of a prophet who departs from a physical and metaphorical off-center position far from the saving presence of YHWH (Hab 1:1–4), but arrives at-center, acutely aware of YHWH’s saving and vitalizing power (3:19). ReÀections on Space and Spatiality It has been claimed that “(s)pace is the everywhere of modern thought.”3 This complex concept has indeed been studied by a large spectrum of scholars.4 Remarks by two “key thinkers” on spatiality provide a rationale for investigating the subject: Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted. When we think about them, however, they may assume unexpected meanings and raise questions we have not thought to ask.5 My objective in Thirdspace can be simply stated. It is to encourage you to think differently about the meanings and signi¿cance of space and those related concepts that compose and comprise the inherent spatiality of human life: place, location, locality, landscape, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.6

The present study aims to “think about” space and place in the book of Habakkuk because “unexpected meanings” might be discovered and “questions” might be raised that “we have not thought to ask” before. Habakkuk shares with modern readers the “inherent spatiality of human life” and challenges us “to think differently about the meanings and signi¿cance of space.” It is surprising (indeed disappointing!) that developments in spatial thinking have not been adequately recognized or addressed in exegetical approaches to the Bible. Spatial concepts played an important role in the 3. Mike Crang and Nigel J. Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (Critical Geographies; London: Routledge, 2000), 1. 4. Including geographers, anthropologists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, political theorists, and linguists (cf. Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers on Space and Place [London: Sage, 2004]). 5. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 3. Cf. Paul Rodaway, “Yi-Fu Tuan,” in Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers, 306–10. 6. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 1 (italics in this and other quotations are present in the source text). Cf. Alan Latham, “Edward Soja,” in Hubbard et al., eds., Key Thinkers, 269–74. 1

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authors’/redactors’ of the Hebrew Bible’s conception of the self and the orientation of the self in his/her household, group, community, country, and the world at large.7 Related to place/space are notions of boundaries, the demarcation of “foreign” and “own” space, and the importance of concepts such as holy/unholy, clean/unclean, safe/unsafe. Recent initiatives in biblical scholarship focus attention upon the role of place/space in the ancient world and in the Bible.8 There is still a paucity of spatial studies of larger corpuses of the Hebrew Bible,9 but spatial analyses of biblical texts create the expectation that such readings of larger textual corpuses would make a contribution towards their interpretation and provide a window into the social world of their author(s)/redactor(s).10 This study is an experiment in a spatial reading of a biblical book. It does not claim to be a systematic analysis of space in the book, and does not pretend to contain a systematic spatial theory. It is a tentative step toward the development of an approach that can illuminate the spatial experience and ideology of the authors/redactors of the Hebrew Bible.11 Three perspectives on space dominate my spatial reading of Habakkuk. The ¿rst perspective depends on the insights of “critical spatiality.”12 Yi-Fu Tuan observes that there is a direct link between spatial conception 7. Nicolas Wyatt, Space and Time in the Religious Life of the Near East (The Biblical Seminar 85; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2001), 35. 8. Cf. Jon L. Berquist, “Critical Spatiality and the Construction of the Ancient World,” in “Imagining” Biblical Worlds: Studies in Spatial, Social and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan (ed. D. M. Gunn and P. M. McNutt; JSOTSup 359; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2002), 14–29. 9. For two notable exceptions, see Christl M. Maier, Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space and the Sacred in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008); Mark K. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (SBLAIL 2; Atlanta: SBL, 2009). 10. Cf. Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp, eds., Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography, and Narrative (LHBOTS 481; London: T&T Clark International, 2008); Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp, eds., Constructions of Space II: The Biblical City and Other Imagined Spaces (LHBOTS 490; London: T&T Clark International, 2008); Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen W. Wenell, eds., Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred (LHBOTS 540; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, forthcoming). 11. Cf. Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “The Role of Space in the ĭĘğĥġė ĜīĜĬ (Psalms 120–34),” Bib 86 (2005): 457–77; Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Še ôl ĺ YerûšƗlayim ĸ ŠƗmayim: Spatial Orientation in the Egyptian Hallel (Psalms 113–18),” OTE 19 (2006): 739–60. 12. Berquist, “Critical Spatiality,” 15, de¿nes critical spatiality as “those theories that self-consciously attempt to move beyond modernist, mechanistic, essentialist understandings of space. Critical spatiality understands all aspects of space to be human constructions that are socially contested.” 1

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and experience.13 A spatial reading of Habakkuk will provide clues to the prophet’s spatial experience. Henri Lefebvre rejects positivistic notions of space as an objective entity.14 He aims “to discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘¿elds’ which are apprehended separately… [F]irst, the physical—nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social.”15 Lefebvre emphasizes that “(social) space is a (social) product,”16 hence every society has “its own spatial practice.”17 Space is a “conceptual triad”18 entailing the spatial practice of a society (perceived or physical space), representations of space (conceived or abstract space), and representational spaces (lived space, the actual spatial experience of different members of any given society).19 Representational space “is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.”20 My spatial reading of Habakkuk focuses on space as experienced and imagined by the prophet. He experiences space as negative (Hab 1), but imagines it as ¿lled with new possibilities (Hab 2) and a soon to be realized and experienced positive future (Hab 3). For this “trialectics of spatiality”21 Edward W. Soja coined the terms Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace. The boundaries between the spatial dimensions are not ¿xed—any reference to place/space simultaneously hints at all three dimensions. Thirdspace is “the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces,’ spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning.”22 The predominance of Thirdspace leads to the notion of “Thirding-as-Othering.” It is “more than a dialectical synthesis… Thirding introduces a critical ‘other-than’ choice that speaks and critiques through its otherness… Thirding produces what may best be called a 13. Cf. Tuan, Place and Space, 8–18. 14. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. D. Nicholson Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1–3. Cf. Rob Shields, “Henri Lefebvre,” in Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers, 208–13, for Lefebvre’s contribution to spatial analysis. 15. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 11. 16. Ibid., 30. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. Ibid., 33. He is opposed to “binary” spatial theories which are “entirely mental, and [strip] everything which makes for living activity from life, thought and society” (ibid., 39). Cf. Soja, Thirdspace, 60–65. 19. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38–39. 20. Ibid., 39. 21. Soja, Thirdspace, 53. 22. Ibid., 68–69. 1

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cumulative trialectics that is radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge.”23 Different sets of rules govern the perceptions and actual spatial experiences of various social classes and social groups.24 My reading of Habakkuk will be a thirdspatial reading with emphasis upon the prophet’s “lived space as a strategic location from which to encompass, understand, and potentially transform all spaces simultaneously,” as his “space of radical openness, the space of social struggle.”25 Impetus for the second perspective on space is provided by the observation that “thinking about space occurs through the medium of language,” and that there is “no world that is not already spoken and written.”26 Narrative literary theory emphasizes that space is a constitutive element of a narrative, present in the narrative even if it is not explicitly mentioned.27 The reader constructs space in the process of reading or deduces it from objects mentioned and the relationship between characters and objects.28 A narrative creates a world of words, a space that primarily exists inside the narrative without direct bearing on actual, physical space. The world “created in the Bible is not to be confused with the ancient world in which it arose. The Bible reports on a ‘more fantastic country,’ which has its own time and space and in which action is limited in different ways from our world.”29 Three perspectives on space play a role in narrative analysis: narrator’s space (the milieu of the narrator), narrated space (the world created by the narrative), and

23. Ibid., 60–61. Cf. James W. Flanagan, “Ancient Perceptions of Space/ Perceptions of Ancient Space,” Semeia 98 (1999): 15–43; Paula M. McNutt, “‘Fathers of the Empty Spaces’ and ‘Strangers Forever’: Social Marginality and the Construction of Space,” in Gunn and McNutt, eds., “Imagining” Biblical Worlds, 32–37; Victor H. Matthews, “Physical Space, Imagined Space, and ‘Lived Space’ in Ancient Israel,” BTB 33 (2003): 12–20. 24. Matthews, “Physical Space,” 12. 25. Soja, Thirdspace, 68. 26. Crang and Thrift, Thinking Space, 4. 27. Cf. Ernest van Eck, Galilee and Jerusalem in Mark’s Story of Jesus: A Narratological and Social Scienti¿c Reading (HTS Supplementum 7; Pretoria: Promedia, 1995), 129. 28. Cf. Mieke Bal, De Theorie van Vertellen en Verhalen: Inleiding in de Narratologie (Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1986), 101–5; André P. Brink, Vertelkunde: ƌ Inleiding tot die Lees van Verhalende Tekste (Pretoria: Academica, 1987), 107–9. Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Janua Linguarum Series Maior 108; Berlin: Mouton, 1982), 32–33. 29. Leonard L. Thompson, Introducing Biblical Literature: A More Fantastic Country (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice–Hall, 1978), 4. 1

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narrating space (the world of the reader or hearer).30 Modern readers discover the biblical world mainly through words. Three worlds interact in the interpretation of biblical stories: the socio-historical milieu from which the work arose, the world of the reader or hearer, and the world created in the work itself.31 Interpreters of ancient texts should be critical of Soja’s classi¿cation of “language, discourse, texts, logos” as products of Secondspace, and thus as spaces of “power and ideology, of control and surveillance.”32 The written nature of biblical material cannot predetermine the classi¿cation of its spaces. Narrative literature “potentially supplies both a model for thinking Thirdspatially and a site of Thirdspace from which lived First- and Secondspatial possibilities can be abstracted and analysed.”33 In Habakkuk, the prophet creates an imagined world of words that reÀects his spatial experience in his socio-historical context. The third perspective on space departs from Lefebvre’s observation that “every society…produces a space, its own space.”34 Spatial readings of biblical texts should be contextualized within ancient Near Eastern worldview(s), conceptions of space, and spatial orientation.35 Broadly speaking, spatial orientation can be plotted along two axes. On the horizontal plane, orientation is towards the east.36 “In front” is east, “behind” is west, “right” is south, “left” is north. “Far” and “near” are key concepts. To be “far” is negative; to be “near” is positive.37 East– west orientation represents the temporal dimension. One moves “backwards” towards the future, with the past receding in front of you. As the past becomes remote, it becomes the realm of myth. The south–north orientation represents the moral dimension. “Right” (south) is associated with “good,” and “left” (north) with “danger.”38 On the vertical plane, the imagined universe is geocentric and usually consists of three building 30. Brink, Vertelkunde, 109–12; Prinsloo, “Role of Space,” 459. 31. Thompson, Introducing Biblical Literature, 3–4. 32. Soja, Thirdspace, 67. 33. Claudia V. Camp, “Storied Space, or, Ben Sira ‘Tells’ a Temple,” in Gunn and McNutt, eds., “Imagining” Biblical Worlds, 68. 34. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 31. 35. Cf. Bernd Janowski, “Das biblische Weltbild. Eine methodologische skizze,” in Das biblische Weltbild und seine altorientalischen Kontexte (ed. B. Janowski and B. Ego; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 3–26; Angelika Berlejung, “Weltbild/ Kosmologie,” in Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe zum alten und neuen Testament (ed. A. Berlejung and C. Frevel; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 65–72. 36. Cf. Wyatt, Space and Time, 35–36. 37. Cf. ibid., 38–39. 38. Cf. ibid., 36. 1

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blocks: heaven, earth, and netherworld. Upwards, the extremes of the vertical axis crosses the boundary to “heaven,” and downwards the boundary into the “netherworld.”39 “Heaven” is the realm of the gods, “earth” is meant for humans, while the “netherworld” is an entirely negative space, the realm of the dead. Earth “generally lies as a Àat plate…horizontally at the center of a great sphere. Outside this sphere, above, below, and around…lies the ‘cosmic ocean.’”40 “Up” and “down” are key concepts. To “ascend” is positive, entering the realm of the gods. To “descend” is negative, entering the netherworld, and terminating contact with the divine sphere.41 The cosmic center of the universe is located at the intersection between the horizontal and vertical axes. It is usually thought of as a mountain where the temple of the high god is located.42 The cosmic center “is reality… It is seen as the source of all bene¿ts, and a point of intersection of all dimensions of the world. It is the point of access to heaven, and the place at which bene¿ts may be drawn up from the underworld.”43 It is the most sacred space, the meeting point of the divine and human spheres.44 In the Hebrew Bible the temple in Jerusalem is regarded as the spatial center. On the vertical plane, to be at the temple implies being in harmony with YHWH; to be away from the temple means being in disharmony. To ascend to the temple is positive. It is

39. Ibid., 40; Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Mesopotamian Civilizations 8; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998), xii; Othmar Keel, Die Welt der altorientalische Bildsymbolik und das Alte Testament am Beispiel der Psalmen (Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1972), 21–29. 40. Wyatt, Space and Time, 55. 41. Cf. ibid., 40. 42. For the concept of the “center” of the cosmos in traditional societies, see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. W. R. Trask; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 36–42. 43. Wyatt, Space and Time, 147. 44. Cf. ibid.; Menahem Haran, “Temple and Community in Ancient Israel,” in Temple in Society (ed. M. V. Fox; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1988), 17–26; Bernd Janowski, “Die heilige Wohnung des Höchsten. Kosmologische Implikationen der Jerusalemer Tempeltheologie,” in Gottesstadt und Gottesgarten: Zu Geschichte und Theologie des Jerusalemer Tempels (ed. O. Keel and E. Zenger; Quaestiones Disputatae 191; Freiburg: Herder, 2002), 24–68. The temple becomes heaven upon earth (Janowski, “Die heilige Wohnung,” 26–27). Jerusalem thus imagined could function as a source of hope for the people of Judah even during the exile (cf. Klaus Seybold, “Jerusalem in the View of the Psalms,” in The Centrality of Jerusalem: Historical Perspectives [ed. M. Poorthuis and C. Safrai; Kampen: Pharos, 1996], 7–14). 1

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associated with YHWH and his deliverance. To descend is negative, to leave YHWH’s saving presence, to sink into the depths of Še ôl.45 On the horizontal plane, to be in Jerusalem is to be in the center, to experience peace and life; to be far from Jerusalem is to be on the periphery, in the realm of chaos and death.46 Proper orientation of the self in this universe is important. “Proximity to the self as ‘center’ implies reality, commonly expressed as holiness… Distance from the self means a progressive approach to the ‘end of the world,’ where reality breaks down.”47 The world created by the Hebrew Bible is peculiar in the sense that it “realistically represents the life of humankind with all his limitations, but brings that world into dialogue with a construct of the religious imagination that passes beyond those limits.”48 Humankind is represented from one of two perspectives: “man at-center properly orientated to his world, or man off-center in chaos and disorientation.”49 To be off-center is, in thirdspatial terms, to be in negative space, to experience distress, illness, persecution, moral failure, divine judgment, to live in the presence of enemies, in the face of death, far from the presence of YHWH. To be at-center is to be in positive space, to experience harmony, health, peace, reconciliation, to live in the presence of YHWH and in harmony with the community of the faithful. A Spatial Journey Through the Book of Habakkuk Important Thirdspatial Markers Three important thirdspatial markers give direction to a spatial reading of Habakkuk. First, the presence of two superscripts (1:1 and 3:1) has (third)spatial implications and suggest a change of perspective.50 Habakkuk 1:1 acts as superscript for Hab 1–2 and is classi¿ed as a ēĬġ (“oracle”; literally “burden”). It occurs in superscripts to prophetic oracles sixteen times, carries undertones of judgment, and implies that YHWH is about to intervene in the history of the nations and/or his 45. Cf. Thompson, Introducing Biblical Literature, 59–60. 46. Cf. Janowski, “Die heilige Wohnung,” 42–46. 47. Wyatt, Space and Time, 39. 48. Thompson, Introducing Biblical Literature, 13. 49. Ibid. 50. Marvin A. Sweeney, “Structure, Genre, and Intent in the Book of Habakkuk,” VT 41 (1991): 63–83, here 64. Cf. also Sweeney, “Habakkuk, Book of,” ABD 3:3; Mária E. Széles, Wrath and Mercy: A Commentary on the Books of Habakkuk and Zephaniah (ITC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 7–9; Francis I. Andersen, Habakkuk (AB 25; New York: Doubleday, 2001), 14–19. 1

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people.51 In Hab 1:1, the object of the ēĬġ is not identi¿ed, a signi¿cant factor in the prophet’s spatial journey. The mode of revelation is classi¿ed as ėęĚ, “he saw.” ēĬġ and ėęĚ occur together only in Isa 13:1; Nah 1:1; and Hab 1:1. In all three cases the following material contains military images where a foreign power is crushed by YHWH, depicted as a mighty warrior. Habakkuk 1:1 suggests a thirdspatial environment where Israel/Judah are oppressed and marginalized by a foreign political power. YHWH, however, controls their destiny. Habakkuk 3:1 suggests a different thirdspatial context. This section is classi¿ed as a ėğħĭ “prayer.” ėğħĭ occurs six times in superscripts to poems.52 These poems consistently contain an urgent prayer of someone in distress, but who is convinced that YHWH will hear the prayer and save the petitioner. Habakkuk’s ėğħĭ creates the expectation that YHWH will intervene and suggests a shift in Habakkuk’s thirdspatial context and experience. Second, the book’s “story” is told from a ¿rst person singular perspective, an “I” who is in constant interaction with YHWH. In Hab 1, the ¿rst person singular forms (cf. 1:2–3) are suggestive of negative lived space.53 In Hab 2, the ¿rst person singular forms (cf. 2:1–2) imply a change in the prophet’s lived experience. The inactive and absent YHWH of Hab 1 becomes an active and answering deity.54 Habakkuk 3 suggests a radical change in perspective. First person singular forms occur in 3:2, 7, 14, and 16–19. Habakkuk 3:2 contains an urgent prayer that YHWH should intervene in “the midst of years.” Habakkuk 3:3–7 recalls the great acts of YHWH in the past, and closes (3:7) with a ¿rst person singular statement suggesting that YHWH has heard this plea and that YHWH’s enemies are trembling.55 In Hab 3:14, a ¿rst person singular suf¿x (“they storm to scatter me”) occurs in a context where YHWH destroys the wicked. It suggests a reversal in the spatial experience of the prophet. First person singular forms abound in the description of the prophet’s awe at the destruction of the wicked (3:16) and in the closing confession 51. Isa 13:1; 14:28; 15:1; 17:1; 19:1; 21:1, 11, 13; 23:1; Nah 1:1; Zech 9:1; 12:1 (against foreign nations); Isa 22:1; 30:6 (against Judah); Mal 1:1 (against religious leaders in post-exilic Jerusalem). In Hab 1:1 the recipient is not mentioned. Cf. Sweeney, “Structure, Genre, and Intent,” 65–66. 52. Pss 17:1; 86:1; 90:1; 102:1; 142:1; Hab 3:1. 53. The prophet desperately cries for help (1:2), while YHWH does not listen or save (1:2), and indeed makes the prophet look upon trouble and just stares upon suffering (1:3). 54. In 2:1, the prophet waits upon an answer from YHWH, and the answer is indeed announced in 2:2. 55. Cf. 3:7 “Under iniquity I saw the tents of Kushan, the dwellings of Midian are trembling.” 1

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of faith (3:18–19). By following in the footsteps of the “I,” the reader is transported from the depths of despair (1:2–4), through anxious waiting (2:1–4), to unconditional trust (3:17) and the heights of salvation (3:18– 19). The experience of this body in space plays an important role in a spatial reading of Habakkuk. Third, the book has a decidedly visual character.56 The verb ėęĚ, “to see,” occurs in 1:1 and the related noun (ĢĘęĚ) in 2:2–3. Habakkuk’s prophetic activity (1:1) implies making YHWH’s message visible (2:2–3). The verbs ėēī and ěĔģ occur repeatedly. In Hab 1:3, YHWH forces the prophet to look upon trouble (Ĝģēīĭ) and passively stare upon suffering (ěĜĔĭ). In Hab 1:5, an unidenti¿ed second masculine plural subject is called upon to look (Ęēī) among the nations and see (ĘěĜĔė) YHWH’s incomprehensible act of causing the Chaldeans to “rise up” (1:6). The description of the Chaldean army’s approach (1:6–11) contains vivid visual imagery. The two verbs appear again in Hab 1:13. YHWH is too pure of eyes to see (ĭĘēīġ) evil and not able to look upon (ěĜĔė) trouble. Yet he looks upon (ěĜĔĭ) treacherous ones! Habakkuk 1:14–17 contains a graphic description of the Chaldeans’ violent behavior. In Hab 2:1, the prophet prepares himself to receive a visual divine message: ėħĩēĘ ĜĔČīĔĖĜČėġ ĭĘēīğ (“I want to watch out to see what he will answer me”). YHWH’s answer (2:2–20) is a “vision” (ĢĘęĚ; 2:2–3) that must be written down and enables those who read it to run (ĘĔ ēīĘĪ ēīĘĪ ĨĘīĜ Ģĥġğ; 2:2c).57 Habakkuk 2:5–20 contains numerous visual images as does the description of YHWH’s theophany in 3:3–15 (cf. the repetition of ėēī in 3:6, 7, 10). Visual terminology suggests a shift in the prophet’s experience. What is seen in Hab 1 is entirely negative. Seeing then becomes the visual expression of YHWH’s trustworthy promise that the wicked will be destroyed (Hab 2). In Hab 3, the prophet sees YHWH’s powerful saving acts. The reader experiences Habakkuk’s lived space through his eyes and participates in his journey from negative to positive space. Spatial Orientation in Habakkuk Although complex redactional processes might have preceded the book’s present form, in this study I read the book as a literary unit with spatial orientation on the vertical and horizontal axes as my main interpretational key.58 56. Carl A. Keller, “Die Eigenart der Prophetie Habakuks,” ZAW 85 (1973): 156–67. 57. Cf. Isa 40:31; Jer 8:6; 23:21; Pss 19:6; 119:32; 147:15; John Marshall Holt, “So He May Run Who Reads it,” JBL 83 (1964): 298–302. 58. For an overview of the book’s interpretational problems, see Sweeney, “Habakkuk, Book of,” 3:1–6; Oskar Dangl, “Habakkuk in Recent Research,” CurBS

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Habakkuk 2: An off-center prophet… arrives at center! Habakkuk 2 holds the key to the understanding of the book. It represents the turning point between lament and accusation (Hab 1) and prayer and unconditional confession of trust (Hab 3). It is the literary and spatial center of the book at the same time! A decidedly off-center prophet lamenting his negative lived space (1:2–17) arrives at center (2:20). Spatial orientation in Hab 2 is primarily vertical. At crucial points in the spatial narrative (cf. 2:1, 5, 14, 20) speci¿c spatial locations are mentioned. Intertextual allusions link these verses to passages emphasizing YHWH’s power and/or the destruction of wicked forces. Habakkuk 2:1 plays a crucial role in the prophet’s spatial experience. It constitutes the transition between negative space (Hab 1) and YHWH’s answer (2:2–20). The prophet deliberately situates himself (ėĖġĥē; ėĔĩĜĭē) at a speci¿c location (ĜĭīġĬġČğĥ; īĘĩġČğĥ) in preparation for divine intervention.59 The combination of terminology (Ėġĥ; ĔĩĜ; ĭīġĬġ; ėħĩ; ėēī) suggests a military context, is reminiscent of the metaphor “prophet as watchman” (cf. Isa 21:6–12; Jer 6:17; Ezek 3:17; 33:7; Mic 7:4), implies an impending threat, anxious waiting, but also the promise of deliverance at dawn (cf. Ps 130:5–8). This Motivkonstellation occurs elsewhere only in Isa 21:6–10, where imminent doom is pronounced upon Babylon (Isa 21:9–10).60 ĭīġĬġ and īĘĩġ suggest vertical elevation, 9 (2001): 131–68; Beat Huwyler, “Habakuk und seine Psalmen,” in Prophetie und Psalmen: Festschrift für Klaus Seybold zum 65. Geburtstag (ed. B. Huwyler et al.; AOAT 280; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2001), 231–59. For Habakkuk as redactional anthology, see Jörg Jeremias, Kultprophetie und Gerichtsverkündigung in der späten Königszeit Israels (WMANT 35; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1970), 55–110; for Habakkuk as cultic liturgy, see Paul Humbert, Problèmes du Livre d’Habacuc (Neuchatel: Université de Neuchatel, 1944), 247–48; for Habakkuk as literary unit, see Marvin A. Sweeney, The Twelve Prophets, vol. 2 (Berit Olam; Collegeville: Liturgical, 2000); idem, “Structure, Genre, and Intent,” 80–81; idem, “Habakkuk, Book of,” 3:3–5; Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Petu­ot/Setumot and the Structure of Habakkuk: Evaluating the Evidence,” in The Impact of Unit Delimitation on Exegesis (ed. R. de Hoop et al.; Pericope 7; Leiden: Brill, 2009), 196–227. 59. ĭīġĬġ can refer to the obligatory service of temple personnel (cf. Num 1:53; 3:8–38; 4:27–32; 8:26; Neh 13:30; 2 Chr 7:6; 8:14; 35:2; Jeremias, Kultprophetie, 185). It also occurs in military contexts (cf. 2 Kgs 11:5–7; 1 Chr 9:27; Isa 21:8). Parallels with Isa 21:6–10 call to mind the image of a prophet waiting upon a revelation from YHWH. It was his task to warn the people of coming danger and to comfort them in times of distress (cf. Sweeney, Twelve Prophets, 456). 60. Motivkonstellation refers to a combination of terms occurring in limited but signi¿cant contexts (cf. Ulrich Berges, “Die Knechte im Psalter. Ein Beitrag zu seiner Kompositionsgeschichte,” Bib 81 [2000]: 153–78). Intertextual links between Habakkuk and Isaiah’s oracles of doom against Babylon (cf. Isa 13:1–14:23; 1

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the promise of positive space, and the security of a walled city. The expression ĭĘēīğ ėħĩēĘ, “I want to watch out to see,” suggests anxiety and imminent danger, but allows for meticulous scrutiny of the “outside world,” the ability to really “see,” and the promise of unexpected deliverance.61 This evidence suggests, at the very least, the imagined presence of the prophet in Jerusalem. From this elevated position, the answer of YHWH propels the prophet on a journey into the vertical (2:2– 20) and horizontal (1:2–17; 3:2–19) dimensions. The prophet anxiously looks to the future to see ĜĔČīĔĖĜČėġ, “what he will answer me” (2:2–20), anticipates his own reaction upon YHWH’s answer in Hab 3 (ĔĜĬē ėġĘ, “and how I should react”), and alludes to his accusation of YHWH as absent, inactive, and unfair in Hab 1 (ĜĭĚĞĘĭ, “my protest”).62 The prophet ¿nds himself at a crossroads in space and time! YHWH’s voice is heard for the ¿rst time in the introductory formula to 2:2–20 (īġēĜĘ ėĘėĜ ĜģģĥĜĘ).63 Habakkuk 2:2–4 introduces YHWH’s answer with the command to “inscribe the message, make it plain upon tablets, so that whoever reads it may run” (2:2; cf. Deut 27:8; Josh 8:30–32). The book of Isaiah (cf. Isa 8:1–4, 16–17; 30:8) provides important intertextual comparative material for Hab 2:2.64 The written message validates YHWH’s word as reliable when its promises are realized at some point in the future. YHWH’s answer (a “vision,” ĢĘęĚ; 2:2–3)65 is “a witness to the end” (ĖĥĘġğ) and “a testi¿er to the consummation” (ĨĪğ), “it does not lie” (3:3).66 The realization of the ĢĘęĚ is expected in the eschatological future, hence the promise: “if it tarries, wait for it” 21:1–10) merit detailed investigation and provide suf¿cient reason to regard the Babylonians as the wicked in Habakkuk (cf. Sweeney, “Structure, Genre, and Intent,” 73–78). 61. Cf. Isa 20:6, 8; 52:8; 56:10; Jer 4:5, 19, 21; 6:17; 48:19; Ezek 3:6–21; 33:2– 9; Hos 8:1; 9:8; Amos 3:6. 62. Cf. Ps 38:15; Job 13:6; 23:4. 63. Cf. Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Life for the Righteous, Doom for the Wicked: Reading Habakkuk from a Wisdom Perspective,” Skrif en Kerk 21 (2000): 621–40. 64. Cf. ibid., 632. 65. ĢĘęĚ can be regarded as a technical term for a prophetic message with speci¿c application to future events (cf. 1 Sam 3:1; 1 Chr 17:15; Isa 1:1; 29:7; Jer 14:14; 23:16; Ezek 7:13, 26; 12:22, 23, 24, 27; 13:16; Dan 8:12, 13, 15, 17, 26; 9:21, 24; 10:14; 11:14; Hos 12:11; Obad 1; Mic 3:6; Lam 2:9). 66. ĖĥĘġ: a speci¿c point in future which has been determined by YHWH (cf. Ps 75:3; Dan 10:14; 11:27, 35); ĨĪ: a termination point (cf. Gen 4:3; 8:6; 41:1; Exod 12:41), the end time when YHWH will intervene in history on behalf of his people to end violence and destruction (cf. Ezek 21:25, 29, 34; 35:5; Dan 8:17, 19; 11:35, 40; 12:9). 1

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(ĘğČėĞĚ), “for it is sure to come, it will not delay” (2:3). This eschatological future should be approached by “running” (ĨĘī; i.e. to be steadfast in pursuit of righteousness) and “waiting” (ėĞĚ; i.e. wait faithfully and patiently on YHWH’s intervention; 2:2–3).67 As reliable witness (ĘĭģĘġēĔ; 2:4), the ĢĘęĚ distinguishes between the ğħĥ, “arrogant,” whose innermost being is ėīĬĜ ēğ, “not right,” and who consequently faces imminent disaster (2:5), and the ĪĜĖĩ, “righteous,” who will live.68 In spatial terms there is no movement in 2:2–4. In temporal terms the prophet’s gaze (2:1) is cast into the eschatological future, a future that can be approached with con¿dence because YHWH’s trustworthiness guarantees life for the righteous. Habakkuk 2:5 suggests vertical movement downwards into the extremities of negative space. After the initial assurance that lust for power is deceitful (ĖĕĘĔ ĢĜĜėČĜĞ ĦēĘ, “moreover, wine is deceitful”)69 and ultimately will lead to the downfall of the īĜėĜ īĔĕ, “presumptuous person” (2:5ab), the prophet’s gaze is metaphorically drawn into the depths of ğĘēĬ (2:5). The “presumptuous person” is likened to Še ôl with an insatiable appetite to devour nation upon nation (1:6). This depiction of Še ôl is well known in the ancient Near East.70 It emphasizes that the arrogant Babylonians caused negative lived spatial conditions for all conquered nations. But the prophet’s location at-center (2:1) implies that Še ôl will be rendered helpless. The nations being devoured will “lift up” (ēĬĜ) a ğĬġ, “proverb,” and a ĭĘĖĜĚ ėĩĜğġ, “derisive riddle,” against the presumptuous person (2:6).71 The verb ēĬģ suggests ascending into positive space. The “derisive riddle” of the nations is contained in the 67. Cf. Isa 40:31 and the discussion in Prinsloo, “Life for the Righteous,” 626. 68. Cf. J. Gerald Janzen, “Habakkuk 2:2–4 in the Light of Recent Philological Advances,” HTR 73 (1980): 53–78. Prov 6:19; 12:17; 14:5, 25; 19:5, 9 provide the intertextual context for Hab 2:2–4, emphasizing the difference between trustworthy and false witnesses (cf. Prinsloo, “Life for the Righteous,” 630–34). The feminine ėğħĥ could be an early scribal error inÀuenced by the following phrase (ėīĬĜ ēğ ĘĔ ĘĬħģ). My proposed ğħĥ, “an arrogant person” (cf. Num 14:44), is antithetically parallel to ĪĜĖĩ, “righteous.” The theme of arrogance is picked up in 2:5 and condemned in the woe-oracles (2:6–20; cf. Sweeney, “Structure, Genre, and Intent,” 74–76). 69. Cf. Isa 51:17, 21–22; Jer 13:12–14; 51:7–8; Ps 75:9 (Prinsloo, “Life for the Righteous,” 633). Jer 51:7–8 is a relevant intertext. Babylon is the golden goblet in the hand of YHWH, all the peoples have to drink its wine; but suddenly Babylon lies shattered. 70. Cf. Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Historical Reality and Mythological Metaphor in Psalm 124,” in Psalms and Mythology (ed. D. J. Human; LHBOTS 462; London: T&T Clark International, 2007), 181–203. 71. For the combination of terms, cf. V. Hamp, “ėĖĜĚ,” TDOT 6:320–23. 1

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¿ve woe-oracles. They are “derisive” because they constitute an elaborate funeral song about the demise of the presumptuous person who has just been likened to death itself.72 He who is “like Še ôl” will end up in Še ôl —the ultimate spatial irony! But they contain a “riddle” because the presumptuous person is never explicitly identi¿ed. The context leaves little doubt, however, that the woe-oracles are ultimately directed against the Babylonians.73 In each woe-oracle, the violent behavior of the Babylonians is turned against them. In the ¿rst oracle (2:6–8), the violent self-enrichment of the wicked (2:6) is overturned when his creditors “arise” (ĘġĘĪĜ) and his disturbers “awake” (ĘĩĪĜ; 2:7), words with spatial implications suggesting an ascending movement for the downtrodden nations, and a descending movement for the Babylonians. Because he “plundered many nations,” the nations will now plunder him (2:8). This will be done “because of the bloodshed of humanity, and violence done to a land, a city and all its inhabitants” (2:8). The land and city are not explicitly identi¿ed, but taking the imagined location of the prophet into account, it can be regarded as a veiled reference to Babylonian violence against Judah and Jerusalem. The second woe-oracle (2:9–11) condemns the haughtiness of the wicked. He used “wicked pro¿t” to ensure his own safety by setting “on high his nest” (ĘģĪ ĠĘīġĔ ĠĘĬğ) in order “to escape the hand of evil” (2:9). In spatial terms, the wicked wants to secure a position exclusively reserved for the divine sphere. It will be to no avail, because he will be shamed and his violent behavior will be turned against him (2:10). The phrase “the stone from the wall will cry out, and the beam from the timber will answer it” (2:11) can be interpreted as a veiled accusation of violence against Jerusalem. The third woe-oracle (2:12–14) has special signi¿cance. It constitutes the center of the ¿ve woe-oracles. The focus shifts from the wicked (2:12) to YHWH (2:13–14). The wicked is condemned for building “a city with blood” and “a town with violence” (2:12). “City” and “town” here refer to Babylon, in Babylonian spatial imagination a place that guarantees safety in their quest for world dominion. However, the building is done by “blood” and “violence.” It is a Secondspace evaluation of the city (cf. notions of power and control) and a Thirdspace account of someone who has been subjected to the Babylonians’ violent behavior. However, their labor is in vain because ĭĘēĔĩ ėĘėĜ controls the destiny of all nations (2:13). The expression ĭĘēĔĩ ėĘėĜ is especially associated

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72. Cf. H.-J. Zobel, “ĜĘė,” TDOT 3:359–64. 73. Cf. Sweeney, “Habakkuk, Book of,” 3:3–4.

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with divine kingship.74 The following, 2:14, contains a crucial spatial observation: ĠĜČğĥ ĘĤĞĜ ĠĜġĞ ėĘėĜ ĖĘĔĞČĭē ĭĥĖğ Ĩīēė ēğġĭ ĜĞ, “for the earth will be ¿lled with the knowledge of the glory of YHWH as the waters cover the sea.” Habakkuk 2:14 seems to be a conÀation of Num 14:21, Isa 6:3, and 11:9.75 The focus falls upon YHWH’s overwhelming divine presence. It ¿lls the earth and negates space to wicked behavior! In the center of the woe-oracles, the prophet imagines a universe ¿lled with the presence of YHWH, a universe where there is no room for wicked and presumptuous behavior! The fourth woe-oracle (2:15–17) picks up the theme of the ¿rst. The wicked is denounced for being an evil host intoxicating his neighbors with drink “in order to look at their nudity” (2:15). What seemed like an insatiable appetite for wealth and power now becomes an insatiable appetite for shame (2:16)! The tormentor will become the tormented who must drink the cup of wrath “from the right hand of YHWH” and experience ultimate disgrace (2:16). Speci¿c locations are named when the reasons for the wicked’s downfall are given: the “violence done to the Lebanon will overwhelm you, and the devastation of the beasts will terrify you” (2:17). In Isaiah, both Babylon (14:8) and Assyria (Isa 37:21 // 2 Kgs 19:23) are accused of harvesting trees from the Lebanon for their building projects. The reference to “violence” done to the Lebanon thus provokes a de¿nitive Thirdspace scenario, namely that of a conqueror exploiting the riches of the conquered. The oracle is concluded in identical fashion to the ¿rst (cf. 2:17 and 2:8). The “land” and “city” once again refer to Babylonian violence against Judah and Jerusalem. The ¿fth woe-oracle (2:18–20) differs from the other four in structure and content.76 The folly of idolatry (2:18–19) is condemned. The notion of idols as ĠĜġğē ĠĜğĜğē, “dumb godlets” (2:17), has echoes in many other texts (cf. Lev 19:4; 26:1; Isa 2:8–20; 10:11; 19:1–3; 31:7; Ps 97:7), while the notion of idols’ inability to be of any help to their worshippers (2:18–19) is reminiscent of Deutero-Isaiah’s denouncement of idols (cf. Isa 44:6–20; 45:16–17, 20–21; 46:5–7; cf. also Pss 115:2–9; 135:15– 18).77 I argued above that Isa 21:6–10 is an important intertext for Hab 2:1. Signi¿cantly, the contrast between the powerlessness of idols in YHWH’s presence is also touched upon in Isa 21:8. 74. Cf. H.-J. Zobel, “ĭĘēĔĩ,” TDOT 12:215–32. 75. Cf. O. Palmer Robinson, The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 195. 76. Cf. Sweeney, “Structure, Genre, and Intent,” 72–73. 77. Cf. also Deut 4:28; Jer 10:1–16; Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Psalms 114 and 115: One or Two Poems?,” OTE 16 (2003): 669–90, esp. 686–87.

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Habakkuk 2:20 plays a crucial role in the book’s spatial narrative and in the prophet’s spatial journey. The contrast between the impotence of idols (2:18–19) and the omnipotence of YHWH in his “holy temple” (ĘĬĖĪ ğĞĜėĔ ėĘėĜĘ) indicates that the prophet arrives at a new destination in his spatial journey. Amid the turmoil of his lived experience as victim of violence (1:2–17) and spectator of incredible hardship (2:5– 17), his imagined space becomes one of hushed reverence and peace (ĨīēėČğĞ ĘĜģħġ Ĥė). He has arrived at-center! Intertextual links between 2:20 and other texts suggest that more than the physical building in Jerusalem is at stake here. Habakkuk 2:20 refers to YHWH in his ğĞĜė ĘĬĖĪ, “holy temple” (cf. Pss 5:8; 11:4; 65:5; 79:1; 138:2; Isa 6:1; Jon 2:5, 8; Mic 1:2). YHWH’s presence on his heavenly throne manifests in his presence in his earthly abode (cf. Ps 11:4). The expression emphasizes YHWH’s kingship and dominion over the created universe.78 The temple becomes “the true center of creation in the universe according to the prophet,” and the entire earth is called to hushed reverence “as YHWH’s presence is manifested in the holy Temple”79 (cf. Zeph 1:7; Zech 2:17). The prophet experiences a remarkable vertical journey. He departs by deliberately situating himself in an elevated position, anxiously looking forward to divine intervention (2:1). Through YHWH’s ĢĘęĚ he learns to “run” (2:2) and “wait” (2:3). YHWH urges him to cling to the eschatological promise that the destruction of the Babylonians, despite their appetite for violence being as insatiable as Še ôl, is imminent (2:5). This eschatological hope projects his gaze from the depths of Še ôl, through the expectation that YHWH’s glory will ¿ll the earth and thus negate “space” to wicked behavior (2:14), to the presence of YHWH in his “holy temple” (2:20). The off-center prophet arrives at-center, in YHWH’s presence, experiencing contentment and peace (2:20). From this location at-center the prophet “looks out to see” (2:1). Habakkuk 1 and 3 can be read from this perspective through the eyes of the prophet at this location. Spatial orientation in Hab 1 and 3 is then primarily horizontal. From his watchtower the prophet sees two armies approaching the center of his universe. The ¿rst is the victorious army of the conquering Chaldeans marching from the north(east) (1:9). It threatens stability at-center and causes suffering (Hab 1). The second is the victorious army of YHWH the warrior marching from the south(east) (3:3). He engages in an eschatological battle against the wicked (Hab 3).

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78. Cf. M. Ottoson, “ğĞĜė,” TDOT 3:382–88. 79. Sweeney, Twelve Prophets, 478.

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The thirdspatial location of the prophet turns the Firstspace reality of Babylonian dominion into an eschatological victory for YHWH and enables the prophet to walk on his high places (3:19). Habakkuk 1: Confronted by harsh reality.80 Habakkuk 1 explains why the prophet elevated himself upon his watchtower. It is because he is confronted by harsh reality. That reality does not reÀect the calming presence of YHWH in his holy temple! On the contrary, the prophet experiences extreme hardship (1:2–4). With typical lament terminology he accuses YHWH of not hearing when he cries for help, not saving when he cries out “violence!” (1:2). YHWH is not only absent, but seemingly actively involved in enhancing the prophet’s hardship. YHWH forces him to look upon trouble and only stares upon suffering. The result is a total breakdown in the moral ¿ber of society. Plundering and violence, strife and contention confront the prophet (1:3). The law becomes ineffective and justice breaks down completely. The righteous experience extreme negative lived conditions, being surrounded by the wicked in a society where justice goes forth perverted (1:4). Compounding these extreme negative lived experiences, YHWH seems to be actively stirring up the Chaldeans, a nation renowned for its utter disregard for other nations (1:6). This is a cause for bewilderment (1:5)! The Chaldeans seem to ¿ll the whole universe with their violence as they march to the ends of the earth to take possession of dwellings not belonging to them (1:6). They acknowledge only their own justice and stature (1:7), thereby treating all other nations with utter contempt (1:10). The prophet might stand on his watchtower (2:1), anxiously waiting upon the rising of the sun and divine deliverance, but what he actually experiences is the mighty Chaldean army approaching (1:8) like a scorching east wind with only one purpose in mind: violence (1:9). Nobody can withstand their attack. They sweep by like a wind (1:10), acknowledging only their own power as god (1:11). 80. Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Habakkuk 1—a Dialogue? Ancient Unit Delimiters in Dialogue with Modern Critical Interpretation,” OTE 17 (2004): 621–45. I do not regard Hab 1 as a dialogue between the prophet and YHWH with the Babylonians designated in 1:5–11 as YHWH’s instrument to correct inner-Judean social atrocities (cf. Lothar Perlitt, Die Propheten Nahum, Habakuk, Zephanja [ATD 25/1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004], 56–57). Hab 1:2–17 is a single lament about the destruction of the moral fabric of society caused by the violent behavior of the Babylonians and YHWH’s inexplicable act (1:5) of causing this nation to “rise up” (1:6; cf. Prinsloo, “Habakkuk 1,” 631–32; idem, “Petu­ot/Setumot,” 213–15; David Cleaver-Bartholomew, “An Alternative Approach to Hab 1,2–2,20,” SJOT 17 [2003]: 206–25). 1

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The prophet renews his lament in 1:12. The unthinkable is happening: YHWH his God, his Holy One, the guarantor that his people will live, is actually using this wicked army in a parody of justice to rebuke the injustice lamented in 1:2–4 (1:12). YHWH who should be too pure of eyes to see evil, is actually passively looking on and keeping silent when the wicked swallows those more righteous than himself (1:13). In an orgy of violence the wicked, metaphorically described as a ¿sherman dragging net upon net of ¿sh to the shore, exults in his catch and sacri¿ces to his own power (1:14–16). These are indeed actions of the ğħĥ, “arrogant” (2:4), and the īĜėĜ īĔĕ, “presumptuous person” (2:5). The chapter ends with a desperate question: “Will he then empty his net, continually, to slaughter nations without showing pity?” (1:17). This is one part of the reality that the prophet sees—the harsh reality that confronts the righteous in the face of a mighty nation against whom even YHWH seems powerless. This is what the prophet is reminded of when he asks “and what shall I answer upon my protest?” (2:1). Habakkuk 3: Today—yesterday—tomorrow.81 No doubt the clash between the harsh reality of Hab 1 and the mainly eschatological promise of the destruction of the wicked in Hab 2 is uppermost in the mind of the poet of Hab 3. In this chapter the tension between today and tomorrow is ironically resolved by yesterday! Habakkuk 3:2 is dominated by this tension. On the one hand the prophet confesses: “YHWH, I have heard of your fame, I stand in awe” (3:2). The positive space suggested by the physical location of the prophet in 2:1, the presence of YHWH in his holy temple in 2:20, and the promise of the earth that will be ¿lled with the knowledge of the glory of YHWH (2:14) is, however, still imagined space, seen only by someone who regards YHWH’s ĢĘęĚ (2:2–3) as trustworthy (2:4)! Therefore the prophet urgently prays: “YHWH, your work—in the midst of years call it to life, in the midst of years, make it known, in turmoil remember mercy!” (3:2).

81. Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Yahweh the Warrior: An Intertextual Reading of Habakkuk 3,” OTE 14 (2001): 475–93; idem, “Reading Habakkuk 3 in Its Literary Context: A Worthwhile Exercise or Futile Attempt?,” JSem 11 (2002): 83–111; idem, “Petu­ot/Setumot,” 217–18; Jörg Jeremias, Theophanie: Die Geschichte einer alttestamentliche Gattung (WMANT 10; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1977). The prophet (3:2, 7, 14, 16–19) incorporates fragments of older hymns (3:3– 6; cf. Deut 33:2; Judg 5:4–5; Pss 68:8–9 and 3:8–13, 15; cf. Exod 15:8; Pss 18:16– 17; 74:13–14; 77:17; 89:10–11; Nah 1:4) into his prayer (3:2) and confession of trust (3:16–19). By commemorating YHWH’s victory over enemies in the distant past, the prophet actualizes YHWH’s imminent victory over present enemies. 1

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In the imagined space where YHWH is present and the prophet experiences him at-center, YHWH’s work can indeed be called to life. This is done by means of remembering the past, the great theophany of YHWH at the mythic birth of the nation in the south-eastern desert. When the prophet “looks out” from the elevated vantage point of his watchtower (2:1), he sees the mighty Chaldean army advancing from the (north)east (1:9). But at the same time he sees ėĘğē, “God,” advancing from Teman, and the “Holy One” from the mountain of Paran (3:3) advancing from the (south)east, his mighty presence covering the heavens and ¿lling the earth (3:3). And if his presence ¿lls the entire universe, the wicked have no choice but to disappear.82 His coming brings the advent of light in the darkness of today’s harsh reality (3:4) when he, accompanied by his royal retinue (3:5), causes the earth to tremble and the nations to be startled, the mountains to be shattered and the hills to bow down as he travels along his age-old ways to wage battle against all forces of chaos (3:6). Thus the prophet “sees” the enemies of Israel (“the tents of Kushan” and “the tent curtains of the land of Midian”) trembling before God’s onslaught (3:7).83 The purpose of YHWH’s advance becomes clear in Hab 3:8–13. In mythological terminology typical of the battle between a divine being and the powers of chaos (cf. references to “rivers” and “waters” in 3:8), YHWH is depicted as a victorious warrior. Armed with his bow, mace, and arrows, he attacks the powers of chaos and subdues them (3:9). His attack has cosmic implications: neither rivers nor earth, neither mountains nor abyss, neither sun nor moon, are left unaffected by YHWH’s power (3:10–11). The purpose of the attack becomes clear in 3:12–13. YHWH tramples the earth and threshes the nations with one purpose in mind: “You go forth for the salvation of your people, for the salvation of your anointed. You shatter the head of the house of the wicked to lay him bare from foundation to neck” (3:13). With the same ¿erceness that the Chaldeans attack the nations (1:6–11), they are now attacked by YHWH. There can be no doubt on the outcome of this battle! In Hab 3:14 the cosmic battle reaches a climax: “You pierce with his own weapons the head of his warriors, while they storm to scatter me. 82. Cf. Henrik Pfeiffer, Jahwes Kommen von Süden. Jdc 5; Hab 3; Dtn 33 uns Ps 68 in ihrem literature- und Theologiegeschichtlichen Umfeld (FRLANT 211; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 83. For Kushan, cf. Judg 3:8–10; for Midian, cf. Judg 6–8 (cf. Elizabeth Achtemeier, Nahum–Malachi [IBC; Atlanta: John Knox, 1986], 57). Victories against YHWH’s enemies in the past become the paradigm for the prophet’s urgent prayer in 3:2 that YHWH’s work should be called to life in the “midst of years.” 1

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Their rejoicing is as one who devours the poor in hiding.” It is stated in mythological terms in 3:15: “You tread on the sea with your horses, the froth of the mighty waters.” In the cosmic battle the wicked is ¿nally destroyed! This recalling of YHWH’s victory over the enemies of his people in the past is at the same time a promise of their future salvation. This realization causes the prophet to react in awe while he waits “for the day of distress to come for the people who are attacking us” (3:16).84 Despite critical negative lived space (3:17), the prophet can now confess: “yet I will exult in YHWH, yet I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. YHWH my Lord is my strength, he makes my feet like those of the hinds, on my high places he makes me walk” (3:18–19; cf. Ps 18:34). Habakkuk 3:19 contains an important spatial perspective. “High places” suggest elevation, and thus movement into positive space. In the closing confession the prophet ¿nds himself “on high places,” in the presence of “the God of my salvation.” His spatial journey indeed took him from the depths of despair (1:2–4) to the heights of salvation (3:18–19). The Ideology of Space in the Book of Habakkuk From the spatial reading of Habakkuk, a number of conclusions regarding the ideology of space in the book can be drawn.85 It has been argued that the references to physical locations in Hab 2 (cf. especially 2:1, 14, 20) are crucial for the interpretation of the book. Anxious looking (2:1) becomes quiet faithfulness (2:20). YHWH is in his holy temple; therefore the destruction of the wicked is assured. Whether the 84. For a comparable reaction by a prophet, see Isa 21:3–4. 85. Dating the book of Habakkuk is notoriously dif¿cult (cf. Sweeney, Twelve Prophets, 454). I regard the crisis of the destruction of Jerusalem and the early exilic period as plausible historical background for the book. Intertextual links with the book of Isaiah con¿rm this date (cf. Janzen, “Habakkuk 2:2–4,” 72–78; Walter Dietrich, “Habakuk—ein Jesajaschüler,” in Nachdenken über Israel, Bibel und Theologie: Festschrift für Klaus-Dietrich Schunk zu seinem 65. Geburtstag [ed. H. Michael Niemann et al.; BEATAJ 37; Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994], 197– 215; but note the skepticism of Jacques van Ruiten, “‘His Master’s Voice’? The Supposed InÀuence of the Book of Isaiah in the Book of Habakkuk,” in Studies in the Book of Isaiah: Festschrift Willem A. M. Beuken [ed. J. van Ruiten and M. Vervenne; Leuven: Peeters, 1997], 397–411). My suggestion is deliberately vague and stated mainly in the form of questions. Important issues, e.g. the distinction between “prophet” and “book”; redactional processes in the book; the book’s role in the redactional growth of the “Book of the Twelve” (cf. Paul L. Redditt, “Recent Research on the Book of the Twelve as One Book,” CurBS 9 [2001]): 47–80) cannot be addressed here.

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reference to physical space should be regarded as Firstspace (real) locations is not at all clear. If the reference to the rising of the Chaldeans in 1:5 is taken literally, it is possible to locate the prophet in pre-exilic Jerusalem and YHWH thus in the physical temple. However, there are many indications that the references could be regarded as Secondspace (imagined) locations reÀecting Thirdspace experience. From Hab 1 one gains the impression that the violent conduct of the Chaldeans has in actual fact been experienced by the prophet, that he gives an eyewitness report of their behavior, that the wicked has indeed swallowed those more righteous than himself. The impression is enhanced in ch. 2 by the reference to the bloodshed of humanity, and the violence done to the land, the city and all its inhabitants (2:8, 17). The “stone from the wall” crying out and “the beam from the timber” answering it (2:11) suggest an already destroyed city. It seems that Jerusalem had already drunk the cup of wrath offered by the Chaldeans and stood naked before them (2:15). Chapter 3 also hints at the experience of excessive violence and suffering. The prophet is “in turmoil” (3:2) and associates himself with the “poor in hiding” who has been scattered by the wicked (3:14). This observation has radical implications for the lived space experience of the prophet. Might he have experienced the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, might he even have been an exile in Babylon who could only experience the presence of YHWH in his “holy palace” by “waiting” (2:3) and “running” (2:2) because he clings to the “reliability” (2:4) of YHWH’s ĢĘęĚ (2:2–3)? The book shows a curious reluctance to identify the wicked. Habakkuk 1:1 classi¿es the following material as a ēĬġ, but never reveals against whom it is directed. The reference to the Chaldeans in 1:6 creates the impression that their advance is still expected, something of the future. Yet the vivid descriptions in 1:6–11 and 1:13–17 suggest an eyewitness report. In 2:4, where life is explicitly promised to the righteous, the condemnation of the wicked is curiously ambiguous. The woeoracles of 2:6–20 foresee a reversal in the fortunes of the defeated nations, the “death of Death” (2:5–6) so to speak. Yet their reaction is called a ĭĘĖĜĚ ėĩĜğġ, “derisive riddle,” and the object of their scorn, the “dead body” of the wicked, is never clearly identi¿ed. The wicked remains a mysterious character. Yet there are hints that the Babylonians are the object of the scorn, the nation on whom imminent doom is pronounced. The main indicator is the many parallels between Hab 2 and oracles of doom in Isaiah directed against the Babylonians (cf. Isa 13– 14; 21:1–10). Might the reluctance to identify the wicked be an indication that the lived space of the prophet is severely threatened, might he even be in exile, among the very people whose violent behavior is 1

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repeatedly condemned? Might it be an indication that covert identi¿cation of the wicked has been necessitated by their proximity to the prophet? My spatial reading suggests that the prophet’s lived space is extremely negative. He ¿nds himself in the margins, a victim of oppression and violence, abandoned by the very deity who, according to conventional wisdom, should be the guarantee that ĭĘġģ ēğ (“we shall not die”; 1:12)! Edward Soja’s notion of “Thirding-as-Othering” explains how Habakkuk could utilize “lived space as a strategic location from which to encompass, understand, and potentially transform all spaces simultaneously,” as his “space of radical openness, the space of social struggle.”86 By positioning himself at the imagined center of his universe (2:20), Habakkuk could radically resist both the notion of YHWH’s absence and impotence and the life-threatening violent behavior of the Babylonians. To Habakkuk, “proximity to the self as ‘center’ implies reality.”87 By situating himself on “his watchpost” (2:1) and allowing his gaze to “ascend” vertically from the depths of Še ôl (2:5), Habakkuk experiences YHWH’s ĖĘĔĞ ¿lling the earth (2:14) and becomes aware of his presence in his “holy temple” (2:20). Thus the horizontal threat to the center, the crisis at-center, is resolved. Babylonian violence against the entire universe (1:2–17) becomes a cosmic battle against YHWH the warrior (3:1–19). Habakkuk experiences a remarkable journey, from harsh reality, via eschatological hope, to unconditional faith. The off-center prophet indeed arrived at-center! Conclusion In this study I revisited the question: What moves the prophet Habakkuk from the utter despair of Hab 1 to the unconditional faith of Hab 3? Taking my cue from Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion that “space and place are basic components of the lived world,”88 and Edward W. Soja’s observation that “the inherent spatiality of human life”89 compels us to think about the meanings of place and space, I engaged in a spatial reading of the book of Habakkuk. I took the literary structure of the book as my point of departure and suggested that Hab 2, from both a literary and spatial point of view, constitutes the center of the book.

1

86. 87. 88. 89.

Soja, Thirdspace, 68. Wyatt, Space and Time, 39. Tuan, Space and Place, 3. Soja, Thirdspace, 1.

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A spatial reading suggests that the marginalized prophet departed on a vertical journey from his “watchtower,” through the depths of Še ôl, to the holy temple (2:1–20). This journey enables him to see the real and life-threatening danger posed by the mighty Babylonians to his location at-center in cosmic-eschatological perspective (1:1–17). YHWH the warrior wages battle against the wicked and enables the prophet to walk on his “high places” (3:1–19). Habakkuk creates a world of words where negative lived experience could become a site of resistance against despair and despotism at the same time. In his imagined universe, the death of Death becomes a reality, and the sovereign power of ĭĘēĔĩ ėĘėĜ (2:13) the guarantee for life. My spatial reading suggests that the book of Habakkuk can be read as a spatial narrative against the background of the Babylonian threat against Jerusalem and the temple and the early years of exile. In the process I reconstructed the spatial story of the book and illuminated the journey of a prophet who departed from a decidedly off-center position far from the saving presence of YHWH (1:1–4), but arrived at-center, acutely aware of YHWH’s saving and vitalizing power (3:19).

1

THE EM-BODIED DESERT AND OTHER SECTARIAN SPACES IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Alison Scho¿eld

Signi¿cant advances have been made in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls since the earliest manuscript discoveries in 1947. Given the richness of manuscript ¿nds, it is not surprising that for the ¿rst half century, scholars reveled in historical and textual questions, while neglecting the spatial awareness found in the texts themselves. Yet space, an important dimension of the human experience, is ripe for study in the Dead Sea Scrolls.1 In a rare combination of both textual and material evidence, the Judean Desert has yielded the fragments of nearly 900 manuscripts from 11 scroll caves, in addition to architectural and material remains at Qumran and related sites. The evidence strongly points to some relationship between these ruins, caves, and manuscripts.2 In this way, scholars are presented with signi¿cant questions about the spatial existence of this movement, self-named the YaÜad, and, analogously, the social and power relationships encoded therein. It has long been assumed that these priests, led in large part by their Teacher of Righteousness, removed themselves or were expelled from the Jerusalem Temple, and this longstanding assumption has persisted in the absence of evidence to the 1. A few have begun to ¿ll this void. See the recent studies by Liv Ingeborg Lied, “Another Look at the Land of Damascus: The Spaces of the Damascus Document in the Light of Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace Approach,” in New Directions in Qumran Studies: Proceedings of the Bristol Colloquium on the Dead Sea Scrolls, 8–10 September 2003 (ed. Jonathan G. Campbell, William J. Lyons, and Lloyd K. Pietersen; London: T&T Clark International, 2005), 101–25, and, in the same volume, Jorunn Økland, “The Language of Gates and Entering: On Sacred Space in the Temple Scroll,” 149–65. 2. Despite the relatively great exposure of a few voices, the general consensus among scholars is still to recognize de¿nitive links between the Scroll caves and Qumran (e.g. Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], esp. 44). 1

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contrary. As such, particularly relevant questions are raised about the YaÜad’s spatial identities: Can a priest still be a priest without a sanctuary? Or, if they were in conÀict with the Jerusalem priesthood, did they re-create a new priestly identity in space? Further, in what ways, if any, did their sectarian spaces respond to socially contested space, primarily that of the Jerusalem Temple in the late Second Temple period? Spatial identities are always multiple, un¿xed, and contested, a reality no less true for these Jewish sectarians as for subjects of spatial analysis today. This brief study addresses these questions from the perspective of one dimension of the YaÜad’s spatial existence, namely experienced or lived space. Such an approach necessarily examines the spatial praxis of these sectarians, and to do so I rely on conclusions made primarily by Henri Lefebvre and his interpreters, as well as some geographers and philosophers of space.3 Of Lefebvre’s contributions to the study of space is his recognition of the fact that space functions on many levels, from its physicality to its conceptual or symbolic value. These multivalent layers work in concert such that, in the words of Mark K. George, social space is never purely a “neutral substance or medium within which the events of human history play themselves out. It is a human creation and project, reÀecting social ideas and practices.”4 As a human product, space “reÀects, or re-presents, the society that produced it,”5 and in this way, social spaces are meaningfully encoded to reÀect the underlying social and cultural processes and values at work. Neither were the spaces of the YaÜad a neutral backdrop for the events and persons reÀected in the Dead Sea Scrolls; rather, they functioned as highly signi¿ed products of this same Jewish sect, ones which we modern scholars may begin to decode through a relevant theoretical framework. In this brief study, I approach the spatial identities of the

3. For instance, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Henri Lefebvre and Michel Trebitsch, The Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (London: Verso, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (4th ed.; Paris: Anthropos, 2000); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 4. Mark K. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (SBLAIL 2; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 19. 5. Ibid., 20. 1

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YaÜad by maintaining, in line with other critical spatial theories, that (social) space is (socially) produced,6 or as Tilley reaf¿rms, “Space is created by social relations, natural and cultural objects. It is a production, an achievement, rather than an autonomous reality in which things or people are located or ‘found’.”7 Space was not a passive backdrop for the YaÜad communities, but rather was produced by them. And, as any cultural object, their space was not static, but constructed through a dynamic social geometry of power and signi¿cance. Second, I assume that this sect, as other social groups, must have necessarily produced their own unique space. Lefebvre questions whether new social or revolutionary forces can persist if the relevant actors are unable to reproduce themselves in language, daily life, and space. Or, as George emphasizes, if “new con¿gurations of society, are to survive as more than mere slogans or ideas, then they must be capable of creating their own social space, at least insofar as they claim to be ‘real’ and have a social existence.”8 To have survived for at least a century or two, the YaÜad sectarian movement must have established new social space(s) for itself. Yet it was not necessarily with architecture that the members of the YaÜad rede¿ned their priestly identity. Indeed, as far as we can tell, no altar or sanctuary space was ever constructed within the Qumran community.9 Rather, it is argued here that with a new spatial practice, the YaÜad members produced a new priestly space for themselves, one that functioned as a counter-site to the Jerusalem Temple. Living out collective “right” praxis—understood to be halakhically sound and revealed by God through Torah study—the sectarians produced a new type of social space that reproduced and simultaneously contested the cultic center in Jerusalem. Conceived of as desert “camps,” these regimented spaces allowed the sectarians to translate mundane spaces into a new hierarchical priestly realm.

6. “L’espace [social] est un produit [social],” in Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 35. 7. Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 10–11. 8. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space, 42, following Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 66. 9. With very few exceptions (e.g. Jean-Baptiste Humbert, “L’espace sacré à Qumrân,” RB 101 [1994]: 161–214), most agree that no remains of an altar have been found at Qumran (cf. Jodi Magness, Debating Qumran: Collected Essays on Its Archaeology [Leuven: Peeters, 2004], 93). 1

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Reading Ancient Spaces Critical spatial studies have brought some needed balance to previous emphases on historical time in biblical and related studies, or, as Soja describes of Lefebvre’s aim, the “theoretical rebalancing of spatiality, historicality and sociality as all-embracing dimensions of human life.”10 The study of historical time has overwhelmingly dominated Scrolls’ scholarship, and further studies on the spatial existence of the YaÜad would Àesh out much of what is still less clear about this particular Jewish group. Indeed, as David Harvey recognizes, not even time can be assigned meaning independent of material processes and its spatial results.11 In this regard, Lefebvre’s spatial triad, or in Soja’s terms, a “trialectics of spatiality,” is a useful tool through which one may analyze “the perceived space of materialized Spatial Practice; the conceived space he de¿ned as Representations of Space; and the lived Spaces of Representation (translated into English as ‘Representational Spaces’).”12 Lefebvre’s ¿rst category, spatial practice (la pratique spatiale), includes the physical reality of space and describes the (re-)production of spatial relations between objects and producers. To look at these practices, one gains insight into the way in which a society imprints itself upon its physical environment and the means by which this takes place. Yet spatial practice is informed and driven by conceptual space, Lefebvre’s representations of space (les representations de l’espace). Primarily written or verbal spaces, representations of space are “tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations.”13 These are the discursive practices of space, spaces of the mind (“thought things”), and epistemologies.14 Finally, we are left with the third dimension of 10. Soja, Thirdspace, 10. 11. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 203–4. 12. This is Soja’s description of Lefebvre’s spatial triad (Thirdspace, 10); however, Soja misses the nuances of Lefebvre’s descriptions of space. There seem to be two complementary spatial triads at play in Lefebvre, namely his spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces, yet elsewhere he also classi¿es space in three dimensions he labels perceived space (l’espace perçu), conceived space (l’espace conçu), and lived space (l’espace vécu) (The Production of Space, 38–39; La production de l’espace, 48–49). The two triads are not dissimilar and are interconnected, but not entirely the same. 13. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33. 14. Soja calls this space “entirely ideational, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived or imagined geographies” (Thirdspace, 79). 1

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social space, spaces of representation (les espaces de representation). These are less coherent spaces, as they operate on the level of images and symbols and hold different meanings for individuals over time. Lefebvre identi¿es these as the experienced spaces of the “inhabitants” and “users.”15 This third category is roughly equivalent to what he calls elsewhere, lived space (l’espace vécu), Soja’s “Thirdspace.”16 In any case, Lefebvre rejects a Cartesian binary model of “ideal space” and “real space.” Rather, for him, space is a product of both; it is a physical reality that simultaneously “operate[s]…on processes from which it cannot separate itself because it is a product of them.”17 For the YaÜad, their real spaces existed somewhere between this discursive space and their physical world. The Making of a Jewish Sect Spatial practice constituted a distinguishing marker for the YaÜad, just as it did for all Jewish groups in the late Second Temple period. In the broader Jewish context, legal, or halakhic, practices in general—rather than beliefs—were the subject of religious division in the Second Temple period. As such, the identity of these Jewish “sects” rested primarily on questions of orthopraxis rather than confessional stance, to which the label “sectarian” was originally related in the context of the Christian Church.18 Under a contextually appropriate de¿nition, the YaÜad functioned as a Jewish sect through the marking of its own ideological boundaries from the Jewish “other” through practice. Previous studies about the uniqueness of this Scrolls’ sect have focused on their understanding of time and their arguments about the Jewish calendar, which were undoubtedly important in the self-de¿nition of the YaÜad. Their literary and calendrical texts attest to the fact that they were, after all, careful to show that they were the correct timekeepers. Yet other lived practices also set them apart, such that the sectarians understood their collective praxis to constitute the whole of 15. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. 16. See n. 12, above. 17. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 66. 18. Following a contextually appropriate de¿nition, a Second Temple Jewish sect separated itself by setting ideological boundary markers against the Jewish other, primarily lived out through halakhic practice. Compare the discussions of sectarianism in this period in Albert Baumgarten, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (JSJSup 55; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 7; Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), esp. 125. 1

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authoritative priestly activity. The YaÜad authors were explicit about the ways their lifestyle differed from that of other priests. A letter to their contemporaries was found in multiple copies (MiqÑat Ma!ase ha-Torah or MMT) and records a long list of legal regulations that they insist should be followed in Jerusalem and the Temple.19 On the scale of individual practice, the writer emphasized that the placement of certain objects can affect purity; for example, he insisted that streams of liquid can transfer impurity from its receiving container back up to its pouring vessel (4Q394 8 iv 5–7). Or, from a larger geographical perspective, the author emphasized that dogs should be prohibited from entering the “holy camp” (that is, Jerusalem) as they might eat some of the bones from the temple with the Àesh still on them (4Q394 8 iv 8–9). The point the author makes of these and other legal complaints is that the sects’ members are separate and distinct from their Jewish contemporaries: “[And you know that] we have segregated ourselves from the rest of the peop[le and (that) we avoid] mingling in these affairs and associating with them in these things.”20 Quite simply, the YaÜad and the Jerusalem authorities may have disagreed on elements of theology or belief, but it was the living out of two opposing legal systems that ultimately drove the YaÜad to separate from their peers. Spatial Awareness in the Community Rule Imaginations of space generally underlie and inform spatial practices. As such, it is useful here ¿rst to explore some of the conceptual spaces in the Scrolls before reÀecting on the lived spaces of their authors. By stepping into the mental space (representations of space) reÀected in these texts, we sample a taste of how they thought about space. Similar to Foucault’s discursive ¿elds of knowledge, these texts represented the “thought things” or their discourse of space.21 The most illustrative 19. Three major groups are mentioned in the letter: “us,” “you,” and “them.” The traditional interpretation of this letter was that it derived from an early period of the sect and that it was written by the Teacher of Righteousness to another group of priests (presumably in the Temple), who were being accused of being too lax in their adherence to cultic practice and the law. For other interpretations, see John Kampen and Moshe J. Bernstein, eds., Reading 4QMMT: New Perspectives on Qumran Law and History (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). 20. Following the composite translation in Florentino García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 77–79. 21. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith; London: Routledge, 2002). Cf. also Soja, Thirdspace, 79. 1

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source is The Community Rule, which describes not only their social regulations, but also the self-identi¿cation and the theological underpinnings of the YaÜad as a whole. This charter text also reÀects an acute spatial awareness, and in it, the sectarians describe that spatial context to be that of a desert, or wilderness,22 appropriating biblical constructs of this space (1QS 8:1–16a; 9:3–10:8; cf. Jer 2; Hos 2; Isa 35; 40; etc.).23 For example, in an important section on their self-understanding, known as The Manifesto, the authors list a number of community regulations and then add: And when these have become a community (ĖĚĜğ) in Israel in compliance with these arrangements, they are to be segregated from within the dwelling of the men of sin to walk to the desert in order to open there His path. As it is written (Isa 40:3): “In the desert, prepare the way of ****, straighten in the steppe a roadway for our God.” This is the study of the law wh[i]ch he commanded through the hand of Moses, in order to act in compliance with all that has been revealed from age to age… (1QS 8:12– 15, emphasis mine)24

The authors ignore the beginning of Isa 40:3 (“A voice is calling,” ğĘĪ ēīĘĪ) and start their citation with “in the desert” (īĔĖġĔ), refashioning this lemma and its spatial imagery to ¿t their own locational understanding. The vision of the desert is the starting point of their exegesis and the pivot around which they build their theological self-understanding. Second Isaiah’s description of the passage of the LORD from Babylon through the desert provides the perfect divine backdrop to legitimate the activities of the sect in the mind of the writers. They fashion their own calling to prepare after that call in Second Isaiah, who sets the conceptual backdrop to divinely sanctioned activities as the wilderness. The YaÜad further narrate their spatial context, specifying it to be a desert (path)way, which itself evokes forms of movement. Encoding particular meaning in this choice of lemma, the sectarians use this verse to ground the metaphor of their own self-identity as wilderness dwellers, preparing to receive torah, one which is very praxis-based (those who “study,” “walk,” and “comply”), in spatial terms. The metaphor of life as 22. Both English translations are appropriate for the Hebrew term, midbar. 23. The description of the desert calling in 1QS 8:12–15 is preserved only fragmentarily in other fragmentary copies (4QSd 6:6–7, which lacks the citation of Isa 40:3, and in 4QSe 3:17–19). 24. Unless otherwise noted, all translations generally follow Florentino García Martínez and Eibert Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). 1

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a journey is not uncommon, but their “path” is speci¿cally one of right practice.25 Indeed, locomotion is further emphasized in the Community Rule, when Isa 40:3 is alluded to again later in the text. After offering an extensive list of regulations and rules for conduct, the authors re-emphasize that the actions of the sect are to be carried out in such a space: These are the regulations for the Instructor by which he shall walk with every living being in compliance with the regulation of every period…so that they [the YaÜad] walk perfectly, one with another, in all that has been revealed to them. This is the time for making ready the path to the desert and he will teach them about all that has been discovered so that they can carry it out in this moment so they will be detached from anyone who has not withdrawn his path from all injustice. (1QS 9:12–21, emphasis mine)

Their desert pathway is metaphorically constructed through the study of the law and actions compliant with biblical legislation (“that revealed from age to age,” 1QS 8:15; “in compliance with the regulation of every period,” 9:12). Indeed, the very term used for “path” (ĝīĖ) elsewhere takes on a semi-technical meaning for the law-centered lifestyle lived by the community.26 From a Foucauldian perspective, this highly disciplined existence suggests that the sectarian body was the object of the YaÜad’s institutional power. It was the medium through which the sect’s hierarchy could act upon and control their followers and simultaneously reinforce their own standing as priestly elite.27 As space is part of the ordered relationships between people and things, the way in which they conceived of space is necessarily analogous to the way it was controlled.28 As we shall see below, traversing this “right” pathway was necessarily limited, delimited, and regulated by those in power. The literate producers of these texts themselves were likely the elite of the community, who regulated access to knowledge and the epistemologies of space created through this written word. The authors describe and therefore prescribe that one “walk perfectly” (9:19) on this desert path, incorporating the 25. Note the similar wording found in Jub. 23:26. 26. 1QS 1:13; 2:2; 3:10, 20; 4:2, 15, 17, 22, etc. They also frequently call themselves the “Perfect (ones) of the Way” (ĝīĖ ĜġĜġĭ) (i.e. 1QS 4:22; 8:8.10–11, 22; 1QM 14:7; 1QHa 9:36; 4Q511 frg. 10, 8; frg. 63, iii 3; etc.). 27. Foucault considers the body objectively, as something acted upon and shaped by institutional powers (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [New York: Vintage, 1995]); further, this closely ties the production of bodies with discursive formation (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Routledge, 2002], and related discussions). 28. Foucault, The Order of Things. 1

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root hlk (“walk”), which is likely a play on the term halakhah. Using clever word-play, they contrast their own regimented lifestyle with that of the Jewish “other,” presumably the Pharisees, for whom halakhic questions were also of central concern.29 More importantly, they produced a conceptual space that reproduced the very hierarchy from which this text originated. In the mental spaces of the authors, the desert becomes part of the imaginative geography of the sect, where their past biblical heritage and their present are superimposed. In this way, earlier scholarly presuppositions that these references to the desert in 1QS are solely mimetic representations of the landscape at Qumran are no longer viable;30 rather, the desert forms a multifaceted and contested part of their spatial identity, both imagined and lived, effectively forming a piece of their epistemology of space. Because space is no passive background, and therefore is never neutral, this conceptualizing of desert is part of a legitimizing of the sect itself. This understanding of desert space is meant to authorize the sect and its exegetical activities, primarily through its loose spatial connection with the Sinai desert. But in the shadow of the Jerusalem Temple, the appeal to the spaces of the Israelite wilderness generation would not be without dispute. Desert Space The sectarians’ representations of space concerning the desert necessarily drew from the dynamics of wilderness within a broader cultural exchange of ideas. Midbar, usually translated as wilderness or desert, today is generally de¿ned in climatological terms as a place of limited precipitation. Indeed, dryness was characteristic in many of the areas of midbar in the early biblical narratives, but not exclusively so.31 Rather, at its essence, midbar reÀects a lack of habitation or human settlement, to the degree that it came to symbolize anti-civilization in the Bible as in 29. Ideally, those who walk perfectly in the desert-way are held in great regard; they are described in similar terms as those who “walk in perfect holiness” in The Damascus Document (CD 7:4–5; 20:2, 5, 7), which may refer to those who lived a celibate lifestyle. 30. See similar challenges raised by John J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 31. Even forests could be midbar, e.g., 2 Bar. 77:14. See also Shemaryahu Talmon, “The ‘Desert Motif’ in the Bible and in Qumran Literature,” in Biblical Motifs, Origins and Transformations (ed. A. Altmann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 41. 1

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the ancient Near East.32 This de¿nition is not unlike the Latin origins of the English term “desert” from dƝsertum, originally “an abandoned place” (from dƝsere). In the biblical narratives, desert was subsequently viewed to be a place of chaos, whose forces threatened the order of creation, or by transference, the order of human civilization. Here is the haunt of evil spirits, wild animals, and other lawless elements, menacing the “built” territory of the human city (cf. the oracles against Babylon in Isa 5:6; Zeph 2:9; etc.).33 Thus, the symbolic overtones of this space had less to do with any essential physical quality, than it did with its effect produced in the Hebrew imagination. Just as in the wilderness wandering narratives, desert was a feared and dangerous place, feared as a place of the uncontrolled. From this perspective, midbar could represent a number of physical landscapes. For example, such a view was held in 2 Baruch, which describes Jerusalem after the apocalyptic destruction of its population as a “forest of wilderness” (77:14). Of this example, Liv Ingeborg Lied states: Note that the term “wilderness” comprises several different landscapes. As 10:8 suggests, the term includes waters in various forms, forests and arid landscapes such as deserts. This means that wilderness can be arid, densely forested, and Àooded at the same time. The common denominator of all the landscapes on earth that constitute the wilderness is that they are not inhabited. The wilderness is the uninhabitable world.34

A similar understanding of the symbolic aspects of the desert lurks behind the Scrolls narratives. Like the backdrop to the Israelites in the desert camp, this sect found themselves to be situated against the forces of chaos and anti-creation. Yet, equally attractive for these ancient writers, from the dust of empty places one could also refashion a new site, a “counter-city,” produced through the very actions of the sectarian members. 32. For a small sampling, see Shemaryahu Talmon, “Midbar, ‘Arabah,” ThWAT 4:663–66; and Alfred Haldar, The Notion of the Desert in Sumero-Accadian and West-Semitic Religions (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1950). 33. In general, the desert is a place full of “poisonous snakes and scorpions” (Deut 8:15; Philo, Alleg. Interp. 2.84) and where wild beasts threaten (T. Ab. 12). The wilderness comes to symbolize a “trackless” place of lawlessness, where God is not known (Wis 5:7; 11:2) and was extended to indicate a place lacking certain spiritual qualities, as Jerusalem herself is described as a “wilderness” according to 1QM 1:3 and 1 Macc 1:39 (cf. 4Q179 1 i 12; Luke 21:20; Matt 24:15; Mark 13:14). 34. Liv Ingeborg Lied, The Other Lands of Israel: Imaginations of the Land in 2 Baruch (JSJSup 129; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 113–14 (emphasis added). She also cites Jer 2:6; 26:18; 1 En. 28:1; 77:4. 1

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The Desert Camp Thus, the desert functioned also on the symbolic level for the Scrolls sectarians, which Àavored their very experience of space. This dimension to space would be roughly equivalent to Lefebvre’s third ¿eld of social space, spaces of representation, or “what makes a house a home.”35 For them, the experience of the desert was experienced in the form of a “camp,” calling upon the biblical wilderness narratives. They could navigate the uncontrolled, chaotic forces of the desert through their own counter-sites, taking on the language and imagery of the biblical wilderness camp. Not only did they visualize their communities as organized into subunits of 1,000, 100, 50, and 10 (cf. Exod 18; 1QS 2:21–22; CD 13:1),36 there are also liturgical texts discovered in the caves that celebrate the biblical wilderness wanderings and Mt. Sinai in the ¿rst person: “[O Lord,] it is You who is in our midst in the pillar of ¿re and in the cloud; [ ] Your [hol]iness goes before us, Your glory [dwells] among [us]” (4Q504 6 10–11, emphasis mine). They took on the identity of the desert dwellers of old, appropriating the biblical language of “camps” (ĭĘģĚġ; cf. Num 1–2), used nearly 30 times to describe their own social arrangements (CD 9:11; 10:23; 14:3; 4QDa 11 17; 4QDe 7 ii 14, etc.; cf. 4Q511 2 i 7; 1QM 7:6–7). The desert became accessible to them on a symbolic level as highly signi¿cant space. Lefebvre describes his third category of space, spaces of representation (cf. Soja’s Thirdspace) as “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’… It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs.”37 These spaces are less coherent because, at the symbolic level, any place, such as the Israelite “desert camp,” is overlaid with different meanings for various social groups over time. At its representational level, the desert camp is oversigni¿ed, and therefore 35. Perhaps this is better understood as the sum of its physical qualities with the mental understanding of that place, a space which becomes oversigni¿ed, as it is encoded with diverse meaning for individuals who encounter it. See George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space, 28, 177. 36. See N. Wieder, “The ‘Law-Interpreter’ of the Sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Second Moses,” JJS 4 (1953): 158–75; Hartmut Stegemann, The Library of Qumran (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 165; and Frank M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), esp. 70–71. 37. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. 1

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necessarily represents contested space, as no constructed meaning works monolithically or univocally over time. Further, the sectarians themselves utilize this vision of the desert camp to respond to another contested space at the time, namely the Jerusalem Temple, at least on the symbolic level. Couching their disagreement in geographical terms, the authors of MMT address what they consider to be a laxness in holiness regulations in Jerusalem, which they re-term “the holy camp.” Appealing to earlier biblical legislation of the Tabernacle and comparing the Israelite camp to Jerusalem, they state: “We are of the opinion that the Temple [ĬĖĪġ] [is the ‘Tent of Meeting’] and that Jerusalem is the ‘camp’, and that ‘outside the camp’ [is outside Jerusalem], that is, the encampment of their settlements…” (4QMMTa [4Q394] 3–7 ii 29–31).38 The authors justify their stricter regulations against the transfer of impurity or dogs entering Jerusalem, and so on, by recon¿guring Jerusalem as a sacred camp. The power of this new social space worked both on the conceptual and symbolic levels, as camp was described in language and invoked for its symbolic sacred powers. What is at stake in this letter, then, is not simply theological or ideological positioning, but rather orthopraxis. And this proper behaviour was authorized through the production of a new symbolic space— somewhere between that imagined and that actually lived on the ground. The proper—and more ef¿cacious—priestly experience for them is that which took place for the Israelite community in the wilderness, rallied around the Tent of Meeting.39 In this way, the sectarians could challenge the ¿xed and enduring center of the Land by re-terming it a “camp,” a label that conjures up images of impermanence and whose relevance taps into the priestly language of the Pentateuch itself. The symbolic capital of this desert camp and its associations with Sinai were powerful enough that the rules dictated there would trump anything that was currently enacted in the Jerusalem Temple. As Lefebvre describes a space of representation, this is the space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. And perhaps given the relatively disempowered position of the YaÜad priests, they could most easily contest the priestly sphere of the Temple on the immaterial or symbolic level. In the shadow of Sinai, then, the desert camp became a workable model of priestly space for the sectarians, one that was itself an extension of the graded holiness of the Tabernacle space (cf. Num 2–4). In the 38. Following Qimron and Strugnell, DJD 10:49–50. 39. For more on the social organization of Israel around the Tabernacle, see Mark K. George’s contribution to this volume, “Socio-Spatial Logic and the Structure of the Book of Numbers.” 1

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language of the YaÜad, the concentric circles of holiness in the wilderness camp challenged the ¿xity and alleged coherence of the Jerusalem Temple and the boundaries of its priestly power. The camp functions similarly to that of the tabernacle itself, of which George remarks, “The spatial practices of portability and orientation make possible the metaphorical and symbolic re-creation and reproduction of tabernacle space wherever Israel ¿nds itself…”40 The desert camp is itself free from the ¿xity of place, allowing for the priestly production of holy ground where those priests may be found. Here truly is where the sect’s imaginative biblical geography met spatial practice. Soja de¿nes praxis as “the transformation of knowledge into action,”41 or the dimension to human spatiality in which new and different spaces can be created. In this regard, even the dispossessed can continuously construct and re-construct “other spaces.”42 In this intermediate place between imagined lands and life on the ground (“Thirdspace”), illustrated best by the “camp,” the desert becomes a place of resistance to the hegemonic powers of Jerusalem, both in the text and the tangible world. The wilderness camp was effective wherever it was practiced, and whether at Qumran or elsewhere, YaÜad members attempted to name a new landscape—or at least reclaim it—in the absence of an ef¿cacious Temple. This experienced desert embodied …the “dominated spaces,” the spaces of the peripheries, the margins and the marginalized, the “Third Worlds” that can be found at all scales, in the corpo-reality of the body and mind, in sexuality and subjectivity, in individual and collective identities… They are the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation, [and] emancipation.43

At least for the YaÜad, the desert camp was a transitory, impermanent space, essentially a heterotopian space in Foucault’s terminology.44 Moreover, because it became translatable space, produced where the sect lived out its regimented lifestyle, it could become a newly authoritative space for them. 40. George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space, 188. 41. Edward W. Soja, “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination,” in Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday (ed. A. Read; London: Routledge, 2000), 15. 42. Soja, Thirdspace, 5; and “Expanding the Scope,” 22–30. 43. Soja, Thirdspace, 68 (emphasis mine). 44. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27; see also Alison Scho¿eld, “Re-Placing Priestly Space: The Wilderness as Heterotopia in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam (ed. Eric Mason et al.; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 469–90. 1

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The Desert as Lived Space This desert camp, then, was the result of the imagined and lived (Third)spaces of the YaÜad. Indeed, human praxis is an important component of spatiality. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, “space is a practiced place.”45 Actions de¿ne spaces; equally, actions can rede¿ne social spaces. In a discussion of urban practices, de Certeau notes how a person walking the city experiences various public spaces, squares, walkways, entryways, etc., yet that same person can transgress and rede¿ne those public spaces, which may have been designed for entirely other purposes. With “pedestrian speech acts,” the disempowered can challenge the hegemonic de¿nitions of spaces merely through their movements through the cities, in a “style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation.”46 This is certainly true for activities such as loitering, skateboarding, and the putting up of propaganda. One may also think of the modern example of the Twitter-inspired Àash mob taking over New York’s Grand Central Station, or the Opera Company of Philadelphia, who transformed Macy’s into a surprise performance hall for Handel’s Messiah, when human collective action not only de¿ned spaces but was the means through which the normative de¿nitions of space were challenged. In the Macy’s example, this unexpected public performance, deemed a “random act of culture,” was one way in which these artists transformed the mundane into a temporary opera house.47 These examples de Certeau would consider to be “tactics” through which one is not just a passive user of space, but de¿nes appropriate spaces through manipulating “the basic elements of a constructed order.”48 Through human movement, “users” of space can turn into new “producers” of space, thereby challenging hegemonic de¿nitions of space.49 In the case of the YaÜad, its members were ostensibly not 45. De Certeau, Practice, 117, emphasis original. David Canter (The Psychology of Place [London: Architectural Press, 1977], 9–10, 158–59) suggests that “we have not fully identi¿ed the place until we know…what behaviour is associated with, or it is anticipated will be housed in, a given locus…” (158–59); cf. as well, Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity (London: SCM, 2001), 12. 46. De Certeau, Practice, 97. He describes this movement as “the operation of walking, wandering, or ‘window shopping,’ that is, the activity of passers-by…” 47. The Opera Company of Philadelphia, October 30, 2010, Macy’s Center, http://youtu.be/wp_RHnQ-jgU. 48. De Certeau, Practice, 100. 49. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 26. He claims that, although space is a means of control and domination, it is not fully in the hands of the primary 1

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practicing in the Jerusalem Temple itself, yet their actions allowed them to rede¿ne what spaces were appropriate for priests. Their oxymoronic wilderness abode, produced wherever they lived in community, delineated new circles of sancti¿ed spaces, organized and re-produced through their own techniques of sociocultural production. They acted upon new spaces, whether at Qumran, Jerusalem, or elsewhere, and therefore manipulated them in such a way as to make it habitable as priests. These new regimented spaces offered a counter-site to the Temple and very same Jerusalem hierarchy which they themselves imitated. While we are left with no sectarian bodies moving in space, we have hints as to how they would have lived out or experienced space. Found in various permutations in the Community Rule, Damascus Document, and Miscellaneous Rules, their rule material details a new priestly code of action. With some variation between the various versions found (and different states of preservation), this code reveals an intense concern over regulating the actions and bodily processes of members within the YaÜad.50 There are regulations prohibiting one from falling asleep during the general assembly, walking naked in front of another, interrupting the speech of a fellow, speaking folly, guffawing foolishly, gesticulating with the left hand, and spitting.51 Further, there are strictly enforced protocols about defecation and other bodily functions; for instance, one is punished if one’s “hand” shows in the defecation process or other genitalia are seen through holes in one’s garment (1QS 7:13–14), and toilets are to be built a strict distance from the habitation of the YaÜad members.52 Tellingly, it is after the legal regulations in The Community Rule (1QS, etc.) that the authors describe their desert calling. 1QS 8:12 says that when they comply with these bodily practices, then they open up the pathway of YHWH in the wilderness, thereby linking both the conceptual spaces and material practices of the sect. Whether or not they actually followed all of these practices—although there are reasons to suspect that they did—they rede¿ned profane spaces at some level. Each community

producers. Other spaces exist to compete with the dominant space. See also Karen J. Wenell, Jesus and Land: Sacred and Social Space in Second Temple Judaism (New York: T&T Clark International, 2007), 22–23. 50. 1QS 6:24–7:25; 4QSe, 4QSg; 4QDa 10 ii, 2–15; 4QDe 7 I, 1–11; 4Q265 1:1–2. 51. See 1QS 6:24–7:25; CD 14:20; 4QDa 18:3–4; 4QDb 12; 4QDe 11:1. 52. For instance, the Temple Scroll mandates that toilets should be constructed 3,000 cubits away from the city (11Q19 46:13–16), while the War Scroll indicates 2,000 cubits (1QM 7:6–7). 1

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could produce a “desert” (path)way.53 It was the enactment of those spaces, their very production, that delimited a new sanctuary for the sectarians of the Thirdspace-type, resting somewhere between the imagined and experienced space of the sect.54 Collective “Right” Practice and the Legitimation of Priestly Space On a collective level, the practices required by the penal code would have created an alternative reality for what priests do. Genealogy may have provided the raw materials for the creation of a priest, but proper behavior legitimated one. These legal regulations, when properly lived out, would enact new priestly spaces, simultaneously imitating and reproducing a certain social power. In this case, it was hierarchal power that drew from genealogical terms from the Bible (“Children of Zadok,” “Children of Aaron,” “Children of Levi,” etc.), and these leaders were viewed to be the proper ones. They then reproduced the priestly spaces described in the Bible from which they themselves drew language and legitimacy. In such conceptual spaces (cf. the P source), the Israelite Tabernacle and its extension in the wilderness camp was built upon increasingly restricted and therefore holy spaces. Similarly, the Temple was later organized on a similar spatial logic. By using this wilderness camp terminology, the YaÜad also built increasingly restricted spaces for themselves that both mimicked and simultaneously contested the hegemonic spaces in Jerusalem. The spatial logic to the community (the “camp”) was built upon the same principles of gradated holy ground— but this time enÀeshed in the sectarians themselves. Just as de Certeau speaks of a “rhetoric of walking,” movement also rede¿ned other spaces for these sectarians.

53. For recent arguments that the authors of the Scrolls lived in multiple communities besides Qumran, see Alison Scho¿eld, From Qumran to the YaÜad: A New Paradigm of Textual Development for The Community Rule (STDJ 77; Leiden: Brill, 2009); and Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community. For an alternate view, consult Sarianna Metso, “In Search of the Sitz im Leben of the Community Rule,” in The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Technological Innovations, New Texts, and Reformulated Issues (ed. Donald W. Parry and Eugene Ulrich; STDJ 30; Leiden: Brill, 1999). 54. See Lefebvre and Trebitsch, Everyday Life, 11; and Soja, Thirdspace; “Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel—LA,” in Postmodern Cities and Spaces (ed. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson; Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Soja, Postmodern Geographies. 1

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The Desert as Embodied Space The larger body of sectarians itself was organized around the hierarchy of its members, with those of regimented behaviors creating a certain spatial arrangement. The spiritual standing of each member was acted out in the lived spaces of the sect, for “those who freely volunteer to join the community shall be ranked and limited in their access to the cleansing waters and the pure food of the men of holiness” (1QS 5:13). Indeed, elsewhere they describe an annual ceremony whereby they collectively rank each member’s spirit (1QS 3:13–14), predicated on the assumption that one’s behavior (“their spirit and their deeds”) could be evaluated in some tangible way so as to promote or demote each member (1QS 5:23–24). The priestly hierarchy was predicated upon one’s proper action and therefore became reinforced in the spatial practices of the community. As The Community Rule makes clear, “every one shall sit according to his rank before him… Each one by his rank: The priests will sit down ¿rst, the elders next and the remainder of all the people will sit down in order or rank” (1QS 6:4–9), and none may speak until those of higher rank allow it (10–11). Further, their spatial practices maintain the delimited holiness of the Israelites in the wilderness, as described in the annual covenant renewal ceremony found within the YaÜad camp: The priests shall enter in order foremost, one behind the other, according to their spirits. And the Levites shall enter after them. In third place all the people shall enter in order, one after another, in thousands, hundreds, ¿fties and tens, so that each Israelite may know his standing in God’s Community in conformity with an eternal plan. And no-one shall move down from his rank nor move up from the place of his lot. (1QS 2:19–23)

Such a hierarchical arrangement mimicked the progressively sacred and analogously restricted areas of the Temple, which required increasingly stringent levels of purity and authority in order to be accessed. Yet this time it was produced by the bodies and movements of the sectarians themselves. On an individual level, one was granted access to the increasingly limited and sacred activities of the sect (communal meals, cleansing waters, etc.) only when one could demonstrate the proper regimented behavior. In this way, each member would dynamically experience and participate in a tiered space, one much like the Israelite camp at Sinai, which was centred around the Holy of Holies and which saw the Israelites being subject to increasingly more stringent priestly requirements as they drew closer to the sacred centre. On the level of spaces of representation, or Soja’s “Thirdspace,” the communal arrangement of 1

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the YaÜad camp simultaneously reÀects and reproduces the power relations assumed at Sinai and the sacred space conceived to be from the wilderness camp with its Tabernacle space of old. As described by Soja, spaces of representation contain all other real and imagined spaces simultaneously, with past and present overlaid.55 These are the lived experiences that emerge as a result of the dialectical relation between action and imagination. The Sectarian Body as Site of the “City” The true sectarian spaces of the YaÜad lay in the lived experience of its members. Their new priestly sphere was embodied space. As Edward Casey reminds us, “…the living-moving body is essential to the process of emplacement: lived bodies belong to place and help constitute them” and by the same token, “places belong to lived bodies and depend on them.”56 Not only is “the body…our general medium for having a world,”57 it is also the means through which we produce our space, or, in this case, a priestly world. As we have seen earlier with de Certeau, bodies are the medium through which we may de¿ne or rede¿ne a space, even from what it was originally intended to be. In a form of pedestrian speech acts, the less-empowered city-dweller can appropriate the established vocabulary of city administrators and urban planners, yet transform these dominant spaces into something all his own.58 In this case, the sectarians appropriated the priestly vocabulary of the biblical Tabernacle narratives and Jerusalem elite and translated their experience of sacred space into something useable and meaningful beyond the con¿nes of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But at the core of this lived experience of space was the body of the sectarian, through which they could rede¿ne formerly profane spaces, whether against a literal desert backdrop at Qumran or elsewhere. 55. See Soja, Thirdspace, 69. 56. Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place (ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso; Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1996), 24, emphasis original. 57. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith; New York: Humanities, 1962), 146, also discussed in Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 24. 58. For more on these “tactics” of the marginalized, see especially his comparison with the speech act of movement, in De Certeau, Practice, 97–99. See also the discussion of the way places solicit bodily motions and actions in Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 21–24.

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The social spaces of the sect, identi¿ed as camps, resembled other socially complex and interactive networks, such as cities, which “must be seen as the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power.”59 These habitable spaces were intricately wrapped up with the embodied sectarian, the means through which both were produced.60 The “built” environments of the sect were organized by social activities, hierarchized ritual gathering, and highly regulated relationships. In this way, they imitated a city proper. Set against a desert backdrop, at least at Qumran, this organized sectarian network was predicated upon the regulated body. On the level of embodied space, the sectarian body became the site of the camp (= city) embedded in a desert context. This new wilderness abode was built upon the spatial practice of portability, just like the Israelite Tabernacle of old, and in this way it could transcend the ¿xity of the Jerusalem Temple. Qumran as a Desert Site As explored above, the essence of desert is that of the uninhabitable, ¿lled with chaotic forces capable of undoing civilization. Perhaps for the Qumran sectarians, such elements of the desert still existed but simply were navigated through the body-as-site of regimented spaces. Their regimented spaces transformed the desert—real or metaphorical—into a hospitable, recognizable place. Each properly enacted order and spatial arrangement of sectarian priests could resist the uncontrollable environment of the wilderness, in much the same way that the Israelites and their Tabernacle navigated the dangerous and chaotic sea of the Sinai desert. These disciplined bodies of the sectarian camp constituted the media through which the mental spaces of desert were brought into being. 59. As Elizabeth Grosz has de¿ned a city as “any complex and interactive network that links together…a number of disparate social activities, processes, relations, with a number of architectural, geographical, civic and public relations…to create a semi-permanent but everchanging built environment or milieu” (Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies—Cities,” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader [ed. Janet Price and Margarit Shildrick; New York: Routledge, 1999], 382, quote p. 386). 60. See, for instance, the work by Grosz, who recognized that there is a bi-directional Àow of inÀuence and production, as well as representation, between bodies and cities. For her, “the built environment provides the context and coordinates for contemporary forms of body. The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies: it is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced” (“Bodies—Cities,” 381–82, emphasis mine). Essentially, the city provides a context and frame for the body. 1

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Whether or not they religiously followed their camp rules and practices, Casey points out that “even imaginary places bring with them virtual bodies—‘subtle bodies.’ ”61 The YaÜad produced a wilderness space, and therefore a “wilderness” body, whether real or conceived through textual production. On the level of the individual sectarian, this spatial experience mimicked the delimited con¿nes of the Jerusalem temenos. Any built city could be said to be the correlative of the body, in that the city “exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it. It is de¿ned by entries and exits.”62 For the sectarians, it held true that the body was a mini-site of such organization. The sectarian bodies mimicked “built” or city spaces, whereby inlets and outlets were controlled (in practices of defecation, speaking, gesticulations, etc.) under the purview of the sect authorities, and systems were submitted to a higher regulatory body (as in the annual review ceremony). The body served to civilize the desert environment and to serve as a counter-city or counter-site to Jerusalem itself. Conclusion The body, or bodily experience of space, became for the sectarians their own organizing principles of culture, that localizing (civilizing) force against the chaotic forces of wilderness. In some sense, the sectarian body became the new “city,” or in this case, “camp,” and therefore could be reproduced elsewhere. That is to say, the lived spaces of the sect produced an alternate priestly sphere that was conceptualized as a wilderness “camp.” As an example of spaces of representation, this desert camp existed in the intermediate space between the rewritten language of the Bible and the material reality of the sectarians. This site was produced in and through the regimented actions of the sectarian body itself, and as part of collective right praxis could transform the mundane into the priestly. Their spatial practice symbolically translated the reality of displaced priests and a desert experience into en-placement, or lived belonging. In the experience of camp space, the YaÜad went from being the users of the Jerusalem Temple to the producers of a new social space, thereby challenging the very de¿nitions of priestly space in Second Temple Palestine.

61. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 24. 62. Grosz, “Bodies—Cities,” 384, citing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “City State,” Zone 1, no. 2 (1986): 194–99, esp. 195–97. 1

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INDEXES INDEX OF REFERENCES HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT Genesis 2–3 17 3:8 17 4:3 143 5:29 17 6–9 1, 11, 15, 17 6:9 16 6:14–16 2, 6 6:16 7, 8 7:1 16 8:6 143 12:7 63 12:8 63 13:18 63 14:13 63 17 17 17:1 17 18:1 63 18:10 64 19:1 72 19:4 65 23 70 23:3–20 70 23:17 64 23:19 64 25:9 64 25:24 39 28:10–22 69 31:13 63 31:22–25 63 31:43–54 63 35:8 63 35:9–15 63 35:27 64 36:8–9 39

38:28 41:1 49:29–30 49:31–32 50:12–13 Exodus 3:2–5 12 12:7 12:12 12:22 12:23 12:38 12:41 12:48 12:49 14:2–3 14:31 15:8 15:24 16:2 17:1 17:3 17:9 18 19:6 19:13 19:21 21:13 21:18–19 21:22 21:29 25–31 28:15–68 29:14 32 32:1–6

56 143 65 65 65

69 58, 59 58 59 58 58, 59 28 143 28 28 34 99, 101 149 94 94 34 94 34 165 31, 38 34 34 56 56 56 56 4 59 31 37 94

35–36 35:22 35:25–26 35:29

99 28 28 28

Leviticus 4:12 10:14 12:6 16 19:4 19:31 20:9 26:1 27

31 28 28 28 146 83 83 146 83

Numbers 1–4 1–2 1 1:1 1:2–3 1:17 1:18 1:20–25 1:26–31 1:32–37 1:38–43 1:48–53 1:53 2–4 2 2:3–9 2:5 2:7 2:10–16 2:18–24

23–25, 29–31, 42 165 24, 30 30 30 23, 31 30 24, 30 24, 30 24, 30 24, 30 31 32, 142 33, 166 30, 31, 34 24 32 32 24 24

Index of References 2:25–31 3 3:8–38 3:21–26 3:27–32 3:33–37 3:38–39 3:38 4 4:27–32 5–10 5:1–4 5:1–3 5:5–10 5:11–31 6 7 8 8:26 9 9:6–14 9:14 10:29–36 10:35–36 11–20 11–12 11:1 11:5 11:11–14 11:14–30 11:15 12 12:2 12:7 12:8 12:12:1 12:14–15 13–14 13:30 13:31 14:1–2 14:4 14:9 14:15–16 14:20–25 14:21 14:24

24 23, 31 142 31 31 31 31 36 23, 31 142 32 31, 33 36 33 33 33 33 33 142 33 33 28, 33 34 33 34 35 34 35 35 35 35 38 35 36 36 35 31 36, 42 36 36 37 37 36 37 37 37, 146 37

14:30 14:44 15:13–16 15:14–16 15:24–26 15:29–30 15:29 15:40 16 16:3 16:5–11 16:5–7 16:8–11 16:16–19 16:20–21 16:22 16:23–33 16:41–50 17 18:1–7 18:8–32 18:18–19 19:10 20–25 20:8–11 20:12 20:14–25:17 20:14 20:17–20 21:21–23 23:9 25 25:2–3 25:7–8 25:8 26 26:5–8 26:19–27 26:28–41 26:42–50 26:52–56 26:64–65 27–36 27–30 27 27:3–4 27:4

37 144 37 28 37 37 28 38 37 37 37 38 38 38 38 38 38 38 38 38 38 28 28 39 38 38 39 39 39 39 39 41, 99 39 39 39 39, 42 40 40 40 40 40 39 40 40 40, 42 40 40

191 27:7 27:8–11 27:12–23 27:20 28–29 30 30:7–17 31 31:4–6 31:13–20 31:49 32 32:6–15 32:16–19 33–35 33:54 34:3–5 34:6 34:7–9 34:10–12 34:16–29 35:1–5 35:5 35:11 35:16–21 36 36:2 36:3–4 36:5–9

40 40 40 40 41 40 123 41 41 41 41 41 41 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 56 56 42 42 42 42

Deuteronomy 1–11 1:1–3 1:1 1:3 1:5 1:30 2:24 2:30 3:2 3:3 3:8 3:20 3:24 3:25 4:1 4:25

44 44 45, 57 44 45 58 56 56 56 56 45 45 56 45 45 58

192 Deuteronomy (cont.) 4:28 146 4:34 56, 57 4:41 45 4:46 45 4:47 45 5:1–26:19 45 5:1 45 5:6 46, 50 5:14 46, 59, 60 5:15 56, 59 5:22 56 5:31 45 6:1 45 6:2 45 6:4–9 44–46, 50, 52, 54, 56–60 6:4 45, 46, 50, 52, 57, 60 6:5 46, 54, 57 6:6 46, 54, 57 6:7 46, 58, 59 6:8 46, 54, 56–58 6:9 46, 58, 59 6:10–12 50 6:12 46 6:14 80 6:20 59, 60 6:21 46, 56 6:22 57, 60 7:3 80 7:8 56 7:19 56, 57 7:24 56 8:2–4 100 8:6 58 8:15 164 8:17 55 8:18 55 9:18 58 9:26 56 10:12 57 10:21 58 11:2 56

Index of References 11:13 11:18 11:30 12–26 12–16 12 12:1 12:5 12:6 12:7 12:8 12:11 12:12 12:13 12:17 12:18 12:25 13:7–12 13:18 13:19 14 14:1 14:2 14:29 15 15:2 15:3 15:4 15:6 15:7 15:8 15:10 15:11 15:12–18 15:16 16 16:1–8 16:10 16:11 16:14 16:17 16:19 17 17:2 17:5

57 56, 58 45 44 83 50, 52, 59, 60 55 52, 55 55 52, 55 58 55 46, 55 52 55 52, 55 58 123 55 58 59 58 58 59, 60 51, 55 55 55 55 55 55, 57 55 55 55 60 51 60 59 55 59 46, 59 55 58 87 58 59

17:14–20 17:17 18:1–8 18:9–12 18:9–11 18:11 18:15–22 19–21 19:5 19:9 19:11 19:12 19:15–21 19:21 20:13 21:6 21:7 21:9 21:10 21:19 22:8 22:15 22:21 22:24 23:5 24:9 25:7 25:9 25:16 25:17 26 26:4 26:8 26:12 26:13 26:16–19 26:17 27:8 28:20 28:28 28:65 28:67 29:1–14 29:1 29:2 29:18

50 57 50 83 80, 83 83 50 55 56 58 56 56 50 56 56 55 55, 58 58 56 59 51 59 51 59 58 58 59 58 51 58 60 55 56, 57 59 52, 59 44 58 143 56 57 57 57 44 58 58 57

Index of References 30:1 30:2 30:14 30:16 33:2 34:1–8

57 57 57 58 149 44

Joshua 2:18 2:21 5:13 8:30–32 24:32

56 56 70 143 65

Judges 3:8–10 4:5 4:9 5:4–5 6–8 6:11–24 1 Samuel 3:1 18:10–11 19:9–10 22:6 22:7–8 22:10 22:13 22:15 23:2 23:4 28 28:3–25 28:8 28:11 28:13 28:14 28:17–19 29 29:1 30 30:8 31:13

150 66 84 149 150 69

143 67 67 65 66 85 85 85 85 85 77, 83, 84, 86, 90 82, 91 80, 83 83 83 83 85 82 82 82 85 66

2 Samuel 1:6 2:1 5:19 5:23 7 14:1–24 19:8 24 24:16

66 85 85 85 17 118 65 68, 69 69

1 Kings 6:2–10 6:5 6:6 6:8 6:9 6:14 16 16:24 16:31 18:19 22

6 6 7 7 8 8 77, 90 71 80, 87 80 71

2 Kings 9 9:6–10 9:22 9:30 9:33 9:34 9:35 11:5–7 19:2 19:23 23:4

77, 87, 88, 90 88 80, 87 89 89 88, 89 89 142 70 146 124

1 Chronicles 9:27 17:15 21–22 21 21:15–17 21:16 21:18–19

142 143 69 70 70 70 70

193 21:20–24 21:28–30 22:1 22:7–12 24:18 28:2–3

70 71 71 71 70 17

2 Chronicles 7:6 8:14 35:2

142 142 142

Nehemiah 13:14 13:30

97 142

Job 13:6 22:14 23:4

143 17 143

Psalms 5:8 11:4 17:1 18:16–17 18:34 19:6 21:6–10 29 29:10 38:15 65:5 68:8–9 74:13–14 75:3 75:9 77:17 79:1 86:1 89:10–11 90:1 97:7 102:1 106 106:7

147 147 140 149 151 141 146 16 16 143 147 149 149 143 144 149 147 140 149 140 146 140 100, 101 101

Index of References

194 Psalms (cont.) 106:14 115:2–9 119:32 124 128 130:5–8 132 132:7–8 135:15–18 136 138:2 142:1 147:15

101 146 141 101 100 142 17 17 146 100, 101 147 140 141

Proverbs 6:19 12:17 14:5 14:25 19:5 19:9

144 144 144 144 144 144

Isaiah 1:1 2:8–20 5:6 6:1 6:3 8:1–4 8:16–17 10:11 11:9 13–14 13:1–14:23 13:1 14 14:8 14:28 15:1 17:1 19:1–3 19:1 20:6 20:8 21:1–10 21:1

143 146 164 147 146 143 143 146 146 152 142 140 88 146 140 140 140 146 140 143 143 143, 152 140

21:3–4 21:6–12 21:6–10 21:8 21:9–10 21:11 21:13 22:1 23:1 29:7 30:6 30:8 31:7 35 37:21 40 40:3 40:31 44:6–20 45:16–17 45:20–21 46:5–7 51:17 51:21–22 52:8 56:10 57:3–13 65:3–7 Jeremiah 1–24 1–23 1–15 1:13–15 1:15 2–4 2

2:1–6 2:1–3 2:2–4:4 2:2 2:5

151 142 142 142 142 140 140 140 140 143 140 143 146 161 146 161 161, 162 141, 144 146 146 146 146 144 144 143 143 84 84

92, 105 103 105 105 120 116 96, 98, 100, 104, 116, 161 95, 103 94, 95, 99, 102 96 94–97, 117 96, 97

2:6

2:8 2:14 2:17 2:18 2:20 2:23–24 2:23 2:24 2:25 2:31 2:33 2:36 3:1 3:2 3:6 3:12 3:13 3:18 3:23 3:33–36 4:5 4:6 4:16 4:19 4:21 4:31 5:7 6:1 6:2 6:3–4 6:3 6:17 6:22 6:23 6:24 7 7:4 7:8–10 7:9 7:17

94, 96, 97, 104, 128, 164 96, 97 117 96, 97 128 116 117 96, 97, 117 97, 116, 117 96, 97 97 116 128 111 97, 117 116 105 116 105 111 111 143 105 120 143 143 116, 128 124 105 117, 128 117 117 142, 143 105 128 111, 116 112, 119, 120 118 124 119 120

Index of References 7:18

7:22–25 7:22 7:25 7:30 7:31–32 7:34 8:6 9:16 MT 9:17 9:19 MT 9:20 10:1–16 10:22 11:4–7 11:12 11:15 13:12–14 13:20 13:21 13:27 14:14 14:17 15:12 16 16:14–16 16:14–15 16:14 16:15 17:2 17:26 19:1–13 19:14 20–22 20 20:1–12 20:4–6 21:2 21:4 21:7 21:10 22:23 22:25 23:7–8

84, 119, 120, 123, 126, 130 94, 104 128 128 124 124 120 141 117 117 118 118 146 105, 120 94, 104, 128 120 124 144 105 116 124 143 128 105 105 94 105 128 105 116 118, 119 124 120 105 105 119 105, 128 105 105 105 105 116 105 105

23:7 23:8 23:16 23:21 24 24:1 24:8 24:13 26 26:2 26:18 27:20 28:1 29:1 29:4 29:7 29:14 29:20 29:24–28 30:6 31:8 31:22 31:32 32:20–21 32:29 32:34 32:35 32:44 35:2–4 36:9 36:22 38:14 41:5 42–43 42 43 43:7 44

44:1–13 44:1–4 44:1 44:7

94, 128 105 143 141 105, 106, 108, 110 105, 118, 128 128 128 120 119 164 128 119 128 127 127 127 127 120 116 116 128 128 128 124 124 124 120 120 119 65 118, 120 118, 119 128 128 128 121 111, 112, 116, 121, 126–29, 131 125 121 121, 129 121

195 44:8 44:9–10 44:9 44:11 44:12–23 44:15–19 44:15 44:16–19 44:16–18 44:17–19 44:17–18 44:17

44:18 44:19

44:21 44:25 44:26–30 44:26 44:27 44:28–30 46 46:11 46:19 46:24 48:18 48:19 48:41 49:4 49:22 49:24 50:28 50:42 50:43 51:7–8 51:11 51:33

123 121 123 121 121 125, 127 122–25 122, 124, 125 124, 125 127 126 84, 120, 123, 125, 126 126 120, 123– 25, 127, 130 84, 120, 123, 126 125, 131 125 121 121 121 128 128 128 128 128 143 116 128 116 116 118 128 116 144 118 128

Lamentations 2:9 143

Index of References

196 Ezekiel 3:6–21 3:17 7:13 7:26 8:14–15 8:14 12:22 12:23 12:24 12:27 13:16 13:17–23 20 20:8 20:13 21:25 21:29 21:34 27 28 28:13–15 33:2–9 33:7 35:5

143 142 143 143 124 84 143 143 143 143 143 84 101 101 101, 102 143 143 143 17 88 17 143 142 143

Daniel 8:12 8:13 8:15 8:17 8:19 8:26 9:21 9:24 10:14 11:14 11:27 11:35 11:40 12:9

143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143 143

Hosea 2 2:14–15 8:1 9:8

161 101 143 143

9:10 12:11 Amos 3:6 5:25

99 143

143 101

Obadiah 1

143

Jonah 2:5 2:8

147 147

Micah 1:2 3:6 7:4

147 143 142

Nahum 1:1 1:4 Habakkuk 1–2 1

1:1–17 1:1–4 1:1 1:2–17 1:2–4 1:2–3 1:2 1:3 1:4 1:5–11 1:5 1:6–11

140 149

139 132, 135, 140–43, 147–49, 152 132, 154 133, 154 139–41, 152 142, 143, 147, 148 141, 148, 149, 151 140 140, 148 140, 141, 148 148 148 141, 148, 152 141, 150, 152

1:6 1:7 1:8 1:9 1:10 1:11 1:12 1:13–17 1:13 1:14–17 1:14–16 1:17 2

2:1–20 2:1–4 2:1–2 2:1

2:2–20 2:2–17 2:2–4 2:2–3

2:2

2:3 2:4 2:5–20 2:5–17 2:5–6 2:5

2:6–20 2:6–8 2:6 2:7

141, 144, 148, 152 148 148 147, 148, 150 148 148 149, 153 152 141, 149 141 149 149 132, 135, 140–42, 149, 151– 53 132, 154 141 140 140–42, 144, 146– 51, 153 141–43 153 143, 144 141, 143, 144, 149, 152 140, 141, 143, 147, 152 144, 147, 152 144, 149, 152 141 147 152 142, 144, 147, 149, 153 144, 152 145 145 145

Index of References 2:8 2:9–11 2:9 2:10 2:11 2:12–14 2:12 2:13–14 2:13 2:14

2:15–17 2:15 2:16 2:17 2:18–20 2:18–19 2:20

3

3:1–19 3:1 3:2–19 3:2 3:3–15 3:3–7 3:3–6 3:3 3:5 3:6 3:7 3:8–13 3:9 3:10–11 3:10 3:12–13 3:13

145, 146, 152 145 145 145 152 145 145 145 145, 154 142, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153 146 146, 152 146 146, 152 146 146, 147 142, 147, 149, 151, 153 132, 135, 140–43, 147, 149, 152, 153 153, 154 139, 140 143 140, 149, 150, 152 132, 141 140 149 143, 147, 150 150 141, 150 140, 141, 149, 150 149, 150 150 150 141 150 150

3:14 3:15 3:16–19 3:16 3:17 3:18–19 3:19

140, 149, 150, 152 149, 151 140, 149 140, 151 141, 151 141, 151 133, 148, 151, 154

197 2 Baruch 10:8 77:14

164 163, 164

Jubilees 23:26 162 Testament of Abraham 12 164

Zephaniah 1:7 2:9

147 164

QUMRAN 1QHa 9:36

162

Zechariah 2:17 9:1 12:1

147 140 140

1QM 1:3 7:6–7 14:7

164 165, 169 162

Malachi 1:1

140

1QS 1:13 2:2 2:19–23 2:21–22 3:10 3:13–14 3:20 4:2 4:15 4:17 4:22 5:13 5:23–24 6:4–9 6:10–11 6:24–7:25 7:13–14 8:1–16a 8:8.10–11 8:8.22 8:12–15 8:12 8:15 9:3–10:8 9:12–21 9:12 9:19

162 162 171 165 162 171 162 162 162 162 162 171 171 171 171 169 169 161 162 162 161 169 162 161 162 162 162

New Testament Matthew 24:15 164 Mark 9:2–8 13:14

69 164

Luke 21:20

164

APOCRYPHA Wisdom of Solomon 5:7 164 11:2 164 1 Maccabees 1:39

164

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA 1 Enoch 28:1 164 77:4 164

Index of References

198 4Q179 1 i 12 4Q394 8 iv 5–7 8 iv 8–9 4Q504 6 10–11

164

160 160

4QMMTa 3–7 ii 29–31

166

4QSd 6:6–7

161

4QSe 3:17–19

161

165

4Q511 2i7 10, 8 63, iii 3

165 162 162

4QDa 11 17 18:3–4

165 169

4QDb 12

169

4QDe 7 ii 14 11:1

165 169

11Q19 46:13–16

169

CD 7:4–5 9:11 10:23 13:1 14:3 20:2 20:5 20:7

163 165 165 165 165 163 163 163

CLASSICAL WORKS Aeschylus Persae 619–620 83

Homer Odyssey 11.13ff.

83

Philo Allegorical Interpretation 2.84 164 INSCRIPTIONS CT 16 47 13 CTA 4:4:21–22 Gilgamesh XI

13

XI 202–206 XI 39–43 XI 57–63 XI 75

2, 9, 11, 14 13 12 2 12

Maqlû ritual VII 58–VIII

89

INDEX OF AUTHORS Abusch, T. 80, 81, 86, 88, 90 Achtemeier, E. 150 Ackerman, S. 123, 126 Ackroyd, P. R. 54 Allen, L. C. 125 Anbar, M. 72 Andersen, F. I. 139 Armstrong, J. F. 4 Arnold, B. T. 82, 85 Bachelard, G. xii, 156 Bal, M. 136 Baly, D. 100 Batto, B. F. 5 Bauer, A. 122, 125 Baumgarten, A. 159 Bautch, K. C. 82 Beach, E. F. 87 Berges, U. 142 Bergmann, J. 54 Berjelung, A. 137 Berman, J. 65 Bernstein, M. J. 160 Berquist, J. L. xi, 19, 48, 49, 108, 134 Bhabha, H. 128 Biran, A. 73 Bird, P. 84 Blenkinsopp, J. 4, 6, 16 Boer, R. 113, 115 Bohrer, M. A. 93 Bourdieu, P. 73, 74, 78 Braulik, G. 46, 56, 57 Brenner, A. 87 Brink, A. P. 136, 137 Brown, C. A. 80 Brueggemann, W. 100, 103, 104, 126, 129 Budd, P. J. 34 Budde, K. 95 Busink, T. A. 7 Butler, J. 111, 112 Camp, C. V. xi, 48, 49, 109, 134, 137 Campbell, A. F. 66, 85

Canter, D. 168 Carroll, R. P. 122, 124 Casey, E. S. 172, 174 Castells, M. 78 Centner, R. 66 Certeau, M. de xii, 24, 156, 168, 172 Chyutin, M. 7 Cleaver-Bartholomew, D. 148 Clements, R. E. 95, 122 Cohen, S. J. D. 159 Collins, J. J. 163, 170 Couturier, G. P. 101 Crang, M. 133, 136 Cross, F. M. 13, 165 Crüsemann, F. 46, 56 Culbertson, P. L. 65 Dangl, O. 141, 142 Davies, P. 115 DeRoche, M. 96–89, 102 Deleuze, G. 174 Dietrich, W. 151 Eck, E. van 136 Eco, U. 25, 26 Elden, S. 61, 62 Eliade, M. 138 Evans, P. 69 Everhart, J. S. 87 Fewell, D. N. 87 Fidler, R. 127, 129 Finkelstein, I. 115 Finkelstein, J. J. 3 Finsterbusch, K. 44, 46 Fischer, G. 120–23, 130 Fishbane, M. 92 Flanagan, J. W. 108, 136 Flight, J. W. 95 Foucault, M. xii, 160, 162, 167 Fox, M. 95, 96 Franklin, N. 71 Frymer-Kensky, T. 3

200

Index of Authors

García Martínez, F. 160, 161 Geiger, M. 44, 50, 59 George, A. R. 2, 8, 9, 12–15, 18 George, M. K. 25, 27, 28, 31, 36, 39, 49, 76, 134, 156, 157, 165, 167 Gibson, S. 63 Glassner, J.-J. 8–10, 14 Glueck, N. 96 Gooding, D. W. 8 Gorman, F. H. 27, 79 Gould, P. R. 82 Gray, R. 92, 93 Grosz, E. 173, 174 Guattari, F. 174 Gunn, D. M. 87 Halbwachs, M. 69 Haldar, A. 164 Hamp, V. 144 Haran, M. 27, 138 Hartmann, A. 62, 71, 73 Harvey, D. 158 Heidel, A. 3 Hepper, F. N. 63 Hoffman, Y. 123 Holladay, W. L. 100, 102, 122, 124 Holloway, S. W. 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 12, 16 Holt, J. M. 141 Homan, M. 4 Horowitz, W. 13, 138 Hubbard, P. 133 Humbert, J.-B. 157 Humbert, P. 142 Hunt, M. 79, 80, 89 Huwyler, B. 142 Jacob, B. 57 Janowski, B. 137–39 Janzen, J. G. 122, 132, 144, 151 Japhet, S. 70, 71 Jeffers, A. 81, 82, 84 Jenson, P. P. 27 Jeremias, J. 142, 149 Jericke, D. 64 Johnson, P. S. 82, 83 Jones, D. R. 122 Jones, L. 18–21 Jost, R. 122, 123, 125, 131

Kampen, J. 160 KcKinlay, J. E. 89 Keel, O. 56, 57, 138 Keller, C. A. 141 Kendon, A. 67 Kitchin, R. 133 Klein, R. W. 66 Koch, K. 123, 126 Kofsky, A. 64 Kraeling, E. 3, 17 Kuper, H. 79 Lambert, W. G. 13 Latham, A. 133 Laughlin, J. H. C. 73 Lauretis, T. de 78 Lefebvre, H. xii, 20, 21, 24, 48, 49, 54, 61, 68, 69, 76, 79, 83, 135, 137, 156–59, 165, 168, 170 Lester, G. B. 64, 70 Letellier, R. 65 Levenson, J. D. 5, 15, 16, 18 Levine, B. A. 30, 32, 36, 37, 40 Lied, L. I. 155, 164 Loh¿nk, N. 44 Löw, M. xii, 24, 46–48, 53, 54 Lundquist, J. M 10 Lyotard, J.-F. 69 Mabee, C. 63 Machinist, P. 5 Magness, J. 155, 157 Maier, C. M. 49, 120, 122, 134 Malpas, J. xii, 24 Margalith, O. 82 Matthews, V. H. 63, 66, 70, 136 McDowell, L. 78 McKane, W. 121, 122, 124, 125, 129 McKinlay, J. E. 87 McNutt, P. M. 109, 136 Merleau-Ponty, M. 172 Metso, S. 170 Meyers, C. 84 Milgrom, J. 28, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40, 41 Millard, A. R. 13 Mirguet, F. 37 Morrison, J. S. 83 Noth, M. 34

Index of Authors Økland, J. 77, 78, 134, 155 Olson, D. T. 34 Ortner, S. B. 115 Otto, E. 59 Ottoson, M. 147 Otzen, B. 63 Pardee, D. 16 Parrot, A. 3, 9 Patai, R. 4 Pedersen, R. K. 5, 6 Perlitt, L. 148 Pfeiffer, H. 150 Piggot, S. 85 Pleins, J. D. 6 Pohlmann, K.-F. 121, 122, 125 Polak, F. 18 Preus, H. D. 102 Prigge, W. 61 Prince, G. 136 Prinsloo, G. T. M. 132, 134, 137, 142–44, 146, 148, 149 Rad, G. von 100–102 Redditt, P. L. 151 Reis, P. T. 85 Relph, E. 93, 94 Ristau, K. 70 Robinson, O. P. 146 Rodaway, P. 133 Rose, G. xii, 77, 78, 112–15, 128–31 Rudolph, W. 95 Ruiten, J. van 151 Ryden, K. 92, 93 Sakenfeld, K. D. 98 Sallaberger, W. 9 Sarna, N. M. 64 Schloen, J. D. 20 Schmid, C. 67, 68 Schmidt, B. B. 83 Scho¿eld, A. 167, 170 Seybold, K. 138 Sharp, C. J. 121 Sheldrake, P. 168 Shields, M. E. 116 Shields, R. 135 Silberman, N. A. 115 Ska, J.-L. 23

201

Smith, J. Z. xii, 26, 29, 62, 78, 116, 118, 121 Smith, M. 123 Soden, W. von 54 Soja, E. W. xii, 24, 49, 61, 62, 71, 76, 77, 85, 109, 128, 133, 135–37, 153, 156, 158, 160, 167, 170, 172 Soloweitschik, M. 95 Sonnet, J.-P. 44, 57 Stager, L. E. 15 Stegemann, H. 165 Sternberg, M. 64 Stulman, L. 127 Sweeney, M. A. 139, 141–47, 151 Szèles, M. E. 139 Talmon, S. 95, 96, 163, 164 Thompson, L. L. 136, 137, 139 Thrift, N. J. 133, 136 Tigchelaar, E. J. C. 161 Tilley, C. 157 Trebitsch, M. 156, 170 Tuan, Y.-F. xii, 24, 79, 83, 86, 92, 106–8, 133, 135, 153 Tucker, G. M. 65 Uriel, S. 85 Ussishkin, D. 87 Valentine, G. 133 Vos, J. C. de 134 Vriezen, K. J. H. 126, 131 Waard, J. de 124, 125, 130 Watson, W. G. E. 99 Weiser, A. 101 Wenell, K. J. 134, 169 Wenham, G. J. 4, 17 Westermann, C. 5, 7 White, R. 82 Wieder, N. 165 Wijngaards, J. 97 Williamson, H. G. M. 70 Wolff, H. W. 54 Wright, J. E. 81 Wyatt, N. 70, 134, 137–39, 153 Wyschogrod, E. 68, 74 Zobel, H.-J. 145, 146