Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy [1 ed.] 9780567592149, 9780567205049

Citation preview

LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

560 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers Patrick D. Miller, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher

ii

URBAN IMAGINATION IN BIBLICAL PROPHECY

Mary E. Mills

Published by T & T Clark International A Continuum imprint 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Visit the T & T Clark blog at www.tandtclarkblog.com © Mary E. Mills, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, T & T Clark International. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. eISBN: 978-0-567-59214-9

Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com)

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix Part 1 DEFINING URBAN PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHY

Chapter 1 URBAN PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIES Chapter 2 THE PROPHET AS FLANEUR

3

23

Part 2 SPACE AND PLACE IN PROPHETIC URBAN IMAGINATION Chapter 3 TEMPLE-SPACE AND URBAN IMAGINARY IN BIBLICAL PROPHECY

49

Chapter 4 A POETICS OF SACRED SPACE IN THE TEMPLE JOURNEYS OF EZEKIEL

72

Chapter 5 NARRATIVE SPACE AND RITUAL SPACE IN THE BOOK OF JOEL

95

Part 3 THREE URBAN IMAGINARIES Chapter 6 THE GREAT CITY IN THE BOOK OF JONAH

121

Chapter 7 THE VISIONARY SPACE OF THE SIM-CITY IN ZECHARIAH 1–8

144

vi

Contents

Chapter 8 DEATHSCAPES AND THE CITY IN THE MINOR PROPHETS

167

Part 4 ANALYZING URBAN PROPHETIC IMAGINATION Chapter 9 GEOGRAPHY AND VISION

193

Chapter 10 PROPHETIC CITIES

216

Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

240 247 251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Much of the material for this book has been worked out via a series of papers given at SBL meetings both in the US and in Europe so I am very grateful for the opportunities offered me by Unit Chairs to rene my ideas through peer response. I am especially grateful to the Editors of the LHBOTS series for the support I have received from them for the completion of the project. I also wish to record my gratitude to Ursula Leahy whose assistance with proof reading my initial draft has proved invaluable.

viii

INTRODUCTION The task of this book is to examine the spatial aesthetics of written works of biblical prophecy; within this framework the particular aim is to explore and comment on the embedded urban setting of written prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This enterprise requires the reader to approach biblical material from the angle of literary studies, examining the poetics of prophetic literature. It is the symbolic city of the textual world which is the focus of attention. In pursuit of this aim I will examine aspects of prophetic literature from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in order to identify urban references within this material and will then read and interpret the selected passages via the lens of modern cultural geography. The use of cultural geography as a theoretical resource for biblical study draws upon the commonality of spatial investigations within material sites and within literary and artistic worlds. The explorations made by social geographers into the ways in which human beings construct urban discourses provide a valid access point into spatial disciplines for the textual scholar. My intention is not to produce a systematic account of the construction and everyday life of ancient cities but rather to examine the ways in which prophetic literature works with symbolic city-scapes, using these as the medium for delivering a social/religious message. I focus on investigating the literary aesthetics by which ancient texts provide the reader with imagined urban scenes. Hence the key concept for this book is that of the “urban imaginary.” This is a term used by the social geographer Steve Pile, who aligns it with the eld of psycho-geography. Psychogeography deals with the construction of the city within the collective consciousness of its population. Viewed from this angle the city becomes an embodied subject and develops an emotional layer in which hope and fear have a major role. An urban imaginary provides an access point into the world of urban dreams and highlights the varieties of city life which are constructed by an imaginative response to an urban environment. At the same time, psycho-geography draws on the gure of the individual observer of urban affairs who is part of city activity while also standing somewhat apart—the urban aneur.

x

Introduction

In using modern disciplines as an inter-disciplinary resource it is necessary to acknowledge that the modern metropolis, the post-industrial city, is different in size and activity range from its ancient counter-part. What is common to modern and ancient urban concerns, however, is the way in which cities are constructed via imaginative responses to the space that the urban environment offers and it is this link which is employed as the foundation for this book. In the pursuit of urban imagination it is possible to make some comments on the moral and practical values which can be attached to urban sites more generally and these ndings offer a modern readership food for thought in the assessment of contemporary city life. With regard to the original cities whose histories underlie prophetic texts, biblical archaeology has already offered useful insights through excavation of material sites of urban occupation. There has been considerable work done on the archaeology of towns and villages in ancient Palestine and Israel, work which presents us with some evidence for the built environment of northern cities such as Megiddo and Samaria. Current work is also carried out in Jerusalem, although access to ancient sites in this city can be difcult. Equally, the preservation of artefacts from cities in the Mesopotamian region such as Nineveh and Babylon has provided some access to the activities central to the life of the urban elites in ancient city-states. This mode of research is not the direct concern of the present book, which looks to the textual version of city identity rather than to material remains. In terms of exploring the symbolic city of the biblical books, some overall coverage of the subject was provided in the book co-written by John Rogerson. The rst part of this volume surveyed the presentation of the city in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, thus providing readers with an overview of a variety of urban proles. Part 1 led into a pastoral application of urban material for our modern world. The present book shares some of the literary aspects of Rogerson’s work, but diverges from his approach because of its specic use of social geography as dialogue partner. Urban studies map against a wider examination of spatiality as a measure of meaning and considerable work has been done in this sphere by Programme Units of the Society of Biblical Literature. The series of volumes which have emerged from these investigations under the overall guidance of Jon Berquist and Claudia Camp have already established foundational perspectives in the subject eld. Thus, Constructions of Space I explored the methodology of spatiality in an inter-disciplinary mode, while Constructions of Space II addressed the application of 1

Introduction

xi

spatial methodologies to detailed exegesis. A further spatial Programme Unit, based on consideration of the theoretical work of Edward Soja, has been formed by Christl Maier and Gert Prinsloo and this seminar is in the process of contributing a volume to the Constructions of Space Series. This present book sits within the bounds marked out by such biblical endeavour, but offers its own unique treatment of spatial aesthetics. It has as yet no companion in the eld of biblical interpretation in the range and identity of the key thinkers from the eld of urban geography with which it works, especially with its specic focus on prophetic books. The volume engages not only cultural geography but also sociological, philosophical and literary reections on how to evaluate human society. There is an interface with the historical issues involved in the production of prophetic material, but this is not a major topic of the book. While prophetic books can be situated, with regard to their contents, in a period of political upheaval in the North West Semitic region, the stress is not on examination of the historical past for its own sake. The approach taken is to view the cultural origin of the books as a response to regional politics. They provide religious treatments of vitally important political and cultural problems in a period of renewed military activity from the north and east of the Syro-Palestinian region. Given that starting point, this book explores the manner in which these texts mediate such a state of affairs in their literary landscapes. This treatment opens out into a wider consideration of the symbolic city. The use of an inter-textual methodology which draws on cultural geography provides a fresh perspective on biblical material in that it highlights the urban environment as a site of lived experience and the function of literature as a medium for processing civic affairs. The prophetic books can be read as expressing political theology and not simply as theological handbooks concerned with religious belief unconnected with urban government and regional politics. The existence of a sophisticated body of socio-religious texts provides a resource for an examination of urban imaginaries which can be set alongside more recent accounts of how cities function. This book explores urban imagination through four parallel parts. Parts 1 and 4 provide an outer frame, establishing boundaries and tools for the rest of the volume and returning to these foundations for a reective review. In between, Part 2 addresses issues of spatial measurement as these engage with urban iconography, highlighting the importance of the public monument of the urban temple. Part 3 provides three individual urban imaginaries, indicating the breadth of approach which this line of interpretation offers the reader. 1

xii

Introduction

In each part attention is given to aspects of spatial theory and to textual commentary. The combination of reading tools so provided leads to a literary investigation of the aesthetics of the biblical passage under review and thus to the poetic imagination which shapes the text as a response to shifting patterns of cultural need. A balance between the biblical city as a single entity and as a plurality of possible social contexts is explored in the nal chapter of the book. The study is not intended to be a systematic and denitive treatment of prophetic urban imagination but is proposed as a robust entry point into a currently emerging sub-discipline of biblical studies. Attention is given to theorists in the elds of cultural geography, of social science, of philosophy, as well as those who write on the borderline between documentary genre and the novel.

1

Part 1

DEFINING URBAN PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHY

2

Chapter 1

URBAN PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIES

The presentation of urban society found in prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible is one which implicitly assumes that the target for the prophetic message is the leaders of city-states of the ancient Near East. This turns prophetic texts into works of political theology which deal with an urban elite society and its national/international relations. The major feature of this prophetic urban scenario is the palace–temple nexus,1 but references also occur to streets, houses, gates and populace, as places where human and divine interests meet and engage.2 It is that textual reality which is the subject of this book, which will explore the ways in which prophetic text constructs and evaluates urban contexts. My focus is not on the details of the historical conditions which led to the production of the urban images as much as on the manner in which a text presents a picture of the city and how the way that picture is drawn leads to an overall evaluation of the nature of urban existence. In order to carry out this task inter-disciplinary tools will be used, drawn from aspects of modern cultural geography and urban studies. These resources come not from the area of town planning or statistical analysis but from a humanistic approach to geography which deals with the ways in which inhabitants and their material site interact and which highlights the role of human imagination in the development of a city space. In particular, two approaches are central to this book—urban psycho-geography and the concept of the “aneur,” or “drifter.” The 1. Doreen Massey, “Cities in the World,” in City Worlds (ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen and Steve Pile; New York: Routledge, 1999). Massey (117) notes how religious centres such as Jerusalem have been a focus for powerful geographies. 2. Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment,” in The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment (ed. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 4. Park argues that the city plan establishes the bounds and xed character of a city foundation and imposes an orderly arrangement within the city area.

4

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

function of this chapter is twofold—to provide an insight into psychogeography and to use some examples of this methodology as reading partner for interpretation of biblical text. In particular it is Steve Pile’s book Real Cities which will provide the reading lens.3 Pile develops the term “urban imaginary” to delineate the meeting of human imagination and material site and speculates about a number of imaginaries which can be found in city life. By carrying out this exploration I will elucidate the concept of “urban imaginary” as used by Pile and set the scene for later chapters which will examine particular examples of urban imagination in greater detail. Through the use of interdisciplinary methods it is possible both to connect the urban imagery of the ancient texts with a contemporary perspective on city existence and to explore the aesthetics of textual iconography with regard to prophets and their cities. Although there is a great difference between ancient and modern cities in terms of size, design and occupation, there are also points in common. The focus on urban imagination is especially helpful in inter-textual work with modern theorists. The prophetic texts are poetic works which employ the human imagination both to develop their internal themes and to attract the attention of the reader. This mode of operation occurs also in modern studies which address the ways in which people “feel” about cities. Scholars such as Gordon Childe have already attempted to set out the concept of the city as construed in the ancient past. Childe notes the symbiosis in the ancient world between deity and city; typically, texts reveal that the king constructs the city in line with dreams sent from the divine sphere which dene the temple plans.4 On the ground the reality is that temples functioned as core institutions for the economic system. “The economic system that made the god a great capitalist and landlord, his temple into a city bank, goes back to prehistoric times.”5 The city, then, is both a religious and a secular reality, with two dimensions, that of social metaphor for community and that of material streets and buildings. 3. Steve Pile, Real Cities, Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005). In this work Pile develops his earlier approaches of applying language regarding the human body and psyche to city life, stressing the role of imagination in constructing and interpreting urban affairs. 4. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” in The City Reader (ed. Richard Gates and Frederick Stout; New York: Routledge), 24. Both Childe and Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), note that urbanization has been a continuous form of human habitation from the times of the ancient Near East. See, for instance, Soja, Postmetropolis, 27–29, for a review of ancient Jericho. 5. Ibid., 27. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

5

As Burton Pike notes, the visible city lives its life, thus producing subconscious currents in the minds of the city’s living inhabitants, from the combination of past and present urban dwelling.6 The meeting of secular and religious perspectives drawn from past and present life leads to competing evaluations of city life—the myth of the city as corruption and the myth of the city as perfection.7 In prophetic texts the twofold view of the city as corrupt and as perfect can be clearly seen in Ezekiel’s critique of Jerusalem, with its corruption leading to its destruction in chs. 8–11, and its purication by divine re, an event which allows for a new city life which is cleansed of corruption to emerge in chs. 40–48. Developing the Urban Imaginary My approach focuses on these “mythic” perceptions of urban life and can be aligned with the way in which Robert Park argues that the city is a “state of mind” not merely a “physical mechanism.”8 It has about it the aura of magic and fantasy insofar as it is eshed out by the iconography of cultural traditions in a given place, with religious tradition as part of the resource-set for such “supernatural” imaging.9 It is this wider eld of urban imagination which political institutions must relate to if they are to gain credence among city-dwellers since political activity seeks to harness both social and economic structures and cultural imagination in support of claims to power.10 This view is supported by Park’s argument that “the political machine is an attempt to maintain, inside the formal administrative organisation of a city, the control of a primary group.”11 Thus there is a pragmatic aspect to urban imagination, allowing it to inform situated, political activity. Urban imaginaries are inherently political in their eld of reference to human affairs. In the case of biblical images of the city it is, of course, written material which this book will use as the evidence for urban imagination. To give an example, one narrative construction of an urban political 6. Burton Pike, “The City as Image,” in Gates and Stout, eds., City Reader, 243. The production of subconscious currents comes from the link with the city’s dead, through religious rituals. 7. Ibid., 244. 8. Park, “The City,” 1. 9. Ibid., 129. 10. Cf. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone, 1999), 18–19, where Donald notes the importance of the Imaginary, stating that this is not delusion nor idiosyncratic imaging but reects a social imagination which creates from everyday life the symbolic reality of the group, in language. 11. Park, “The City,” 35. 1

6

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

imaginary may be seen in the book of Jeremiah, where the temple becomes a place of contention for two competing approaches to international politics in the region, with groups pressing for war against the imperial landlord and, conversely, other groups demanding acceptance of foreign rule.12 Jeremiah 7, for example, represents one side in this contention, on the side of cautioning against rebellion, since the prophetic voice puts forward the view that merely having a temple building in a city does not ensure its success in war. The prophetic voice expresses a political theology in which the temple site is a key feature, dened both by its underlying historical reality and by its function as a symbol for a civil society in its last stages of collapse. In this particular urban iconography the life of historical cities in Judah in the Assyrio-Babylonian period is evaluated by a passage which sets up a symbolic Jerusalem and then uses the literary setting to critique the political stance of the populace and city elite who visit the temple as part of their civic duty.13 The historical space and time of a temple-based culture is aligned with the symbolic temple-city found in prophetic texts in such a way that what opens up is the potential for using spatiality as a helpful interpretive tool for biblical reading. One key resource among biblical scholars interested in spatiality is Edward Soja, who develops the view that urban affairs are inuenced by the imaginations of those who inhabit city spaces.14 His theory of Thirdspace, drawn from the work of Henri Lefebvre, aims to construct a trialectics, where the concept of a third breaks apart binary thought.15 Here the physical, mental and social dimensions of human spatiality relate to each other to produce a concept of human spatiality as simultaneously real and imagined, concrete and abstract, material and metaphysical.16

12. Cf. Robert Carroll, Jeremiah (London: SCM, 1986), 70–71. 13. This reality can be aligned with Childe’s commentary on ancient cities, that civic and religious functions were closely intertwined. See also, John Short, Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 14. Soja’s work is used, for example, as a point of reference by Christl Maier and Gert Prinsloo in setting up a Space and Place programme unit for the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. 15. The use of Soja’s thought here does not preclude a serious critique of his views, such as is implied in Claudia Camp, “Introduction,” in Constructions of Space II: The Biblical City and Other Imagined Spaces (ed. J. Berquist and C. Camp; New York: T&T Clark International, 2008). 16. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 61–65. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

7

For Soja the metaphorical nature of urbanism and the role of the city as symbol constantly function to expand the horizons of what a city may be and can become. This approach is rooted in exploring the social function of language. Soja argues that “all language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past”; this is the foundation for focusing on the symbolic nature of language. In this context he moves from everyday speech to the language of vision, which he stresses as highly symbolic. “Mystics fall back on symbols… Ezekiel on the godhead…the four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east/ west and north/south.”17 Reading the book of Ezekiel from Soja’s viewpoint allows the reader to emphasize the symbolic and imaginary work of prophetic text and hence to examine how prophetic language functions to expand the urban symbolism of the city of Jerusalem, rst in the direction of an unimagined catastrophe via the space of temple and city streets, then moving into the unexplored territory of the renewal and rebuilding of both city and community in a new era. The concept of urban renewal and a new life for the house of Israel is mooted in Ezek 36, where v. 24 contains the promise that the deity will gather the scattered people from their exile and bring them back to their own land. Verse 27 conrms this in the language of covenant: “You will be my people and I will be your God.” Verse 33 promises as part of this renewal of alliance between God and people that towns will be repopulated and ruins will be rebuilt. Verse 38 turns this into an image of supreme reconstruction of the urban community. The people will ll the cities with ocks of people. So far all this is a future on the lips of the deity without any sign to show that it will in fact happen. How are we the readers to put our trust in the promise at a time of desolation and social fragmentation? Chapter 37 responds to that need for a sign by exploring symbolically the resurrection of the people from their graves.18 At the start of the sequence the bones are not only scattered but are very dry, the epitome of sterility.19 To change this situation requires the prophet to mediate the inbreathing of life to the members of a community which is culturally and politically dead. As a result of this activity the dead return to life, clothed in esh, breathing life. The dramatizing of the return from death to life is the mode of symbolic transference of hope for the future into the dead community. Finally, in vv. 15–28, the bodies of individual citizens are

17. Ibid., 55. 18. Cf. Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37 (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 747–48. 19. Ibid., 742. 1

8

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

bound together into a nation and kingdom, with “David,” a king from the Davidic line, as their ruler. In this scene the material world of people, land, city is interwoven with that of the mystical experience of the prophet through the symbolic language of metaphor. Approaching urban studies from the angle of the imagined symbolic city leads to a focus on the role of literature as catalyst for actual urban activity.20 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift suggest that the city not only exists in the minds of individual bodies that travel through a given site, but is “carried on images…and pressed into texts. These images and texts are themselves actors performing different species of spaces which, though they use the same city name, are radically different imaginaries.”21 This dense statement refers to the way in which the content of literary artefacts emerges from a preceding act of human imagination. If oral expression communicates such imaginings to an audience, then written communication performs a similar role. Since the human imagination is a exible resource, capable of adding to and taking from its database of images, the city itself must be viewed as “less than a series of locations” and more as “forces and intensities which move around, and from which the new constantly proceeds.”22 For Amin and Thrift text does not describe an already existing reality. It creates new urban proles through the creative process which the writer engages in. These are imagined spaces which reect material affairs but which can also re-shape the material environment by re-structuring human perception of what such spaces should be like. The creation of such urban imaginaries may be an eirenic process but can as easily be the product of violent imaginings.23 In Ezekiel’s rst act of aneurie, where he is led though the temple site, the result of his mental engagement with the worship practised there is the declaration of a brutal urban imaginary of annihilation.24 The message is clear—the city and its inhabitants are

20. Cf. Donald, Imagining, 8, where he discusses “immaterial cities” which are composed of ideas and ideals and which have had a major impact on the shaping of the organizational design of cities. They also represent the social and spiritual element invested in space. 21. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities, Re-imagining the Urban (Malden: Polity, 2002), 122–23. 22. Ibid., 91. 23. Ibid., 105. 24. The role of the aneur is one celebrated as a grass-roots observer-participant. This idler/spectator is usually a male who can walk the streets alone with impunity. See here the writing of Walter Benjamin discussed in Amin and Thrift, Cities, 10–11. See also Chapter 2 below. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

9

the subject of violent destruction. Chapters 10–11 seem to rejoice in depicting an outpouring of blood, which is presided over by the image of the departing deity. This is a political message aimed at an established elite, designed to pierce its complacency.25 The imaginary city of the text becomes a tool for contesting political dispositions. The views of Amin and Thrift can be noted here, that “the role of cities [involves] dening who or what is normal” and that symbolic cities act as a commentary on “power as a mobile, circulating force.”26 The text from Ezekiel undermines the tradition of a temple as a place where the deity resides and which ties together cosmic and civic order via ritual acts, while the image of the mobile throne-chariot leaving the city indicates the transfer of political authority to a new regime. Soja argues that, for the residents of an ancient city-state, “the combined ziggurat–palace–citadel–king, became the iconically materialised manifestation of the local territorial culture and identity.”27 Here is a gathering of the self, body and city in which symbolism is a key feature.28 As pointed out above, questions concerning the authority and authenticity of an urban elite are played out in the urban imaginary of the rst few chapters of the book of Ezekiel. There is an interface between heaven and earth provided by the dynamic energies of the divine thronechariot which acts as a third site, bridging material and virtual worlds. The kabod, as cult symbol, can function in this manner since it holds within itself both Jerusalem’s centrality for the Judahite political economy and the sense of being the access point to the transcendent.29 The forces of a great storm—its wind, lightning, clouds and speeding pathway across the skies—are a material reality which transforms into the manifestation of the virtual world of the transcendent one who controls the destiny of human society and which outlives a material cult site.

25. As noted by Joseph Blenkinsopp, the examination of the temple area depicted in the text corresponds to the indictment of the temple ofcials and shows how the Kabod distances itself from the temple; see Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 53, 57. 26. Ibid., 105. 27. Soja, Postmetropolis, 65. 28. Ibid., 324. 29. The throne-chariot represents, in Ezekiel, the Glory of the Lord, that is, in some way it mirrors the body of the deity and is what dwells in the temple. For a detailed examination of the temple and its ttings, see Michael Chyutin, Architecture and Utopia in the Temple Era (New York: T&T Clark International, 2006). 1

10

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Psycho-geography If Soja’s focus on the social role of language, noted above, allows for a link between material space and the transcendent, through the symbolic nature of both language and architecture within lived space, literary critique explores the way in which “city” is realized within the symbolic world of a narrative. Psycho-geography, according to Merlin Coverley, is a term which resists denition but which moves across literary, political and philosophical themes.30 Coverley notes its origins in the 1950s, partly as a tool to transform urban life. Associated with Guy Debord, it covers the “study of the specic effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”31 Focusing on the emotional aspects of urban existence as a means of reporting engages the city as “site of mystery” and seeks to understand the “real city” underneath the ow of daily events.32 There is continuity between seen and hidden elements, but it takes a reective wanderer to identify the hidden layer which is the energy centre for city life. This is in line with psychological theory which emphasizes the work of the inner subjective self in interpreting material events. What comes to the fore in the literary eld is a visionary tradition whereby an individual wanders purposefully through the urban space “as if” on an imaginary voyage.33 This is an engagement with the emotional force of urban sites and the dialogue between a pedestrian whose feet move across a material surface of a host city-space, a dialogue which functions to elicit responses which are imaginatively charged. These reactions dig beneath the innocent outer layer of the built environment and touch into the city as a place with a dark underside.34 The familiar face of the material city is transformed into new and challenging environments via the “imaginative force of the writer.”35 The book of Amos, for example, challenges the reader to view the leisure life of the elite as the equivalent of catastrophe. The rawness of calling them “cows of Bashan” mirrors the way in which they will be herded like animals out of the broken city by its vanquishers. 30. M. Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006), 10. This volume aims to provide an overview of the major writers whose work has contributed to the eld, while acknowledging that the subject area is one of loosely connected explorations of the emotional impact of the city street. 31. Ibid., 10. 32. Ibid., 13. 33. Ibid., 15. 34. Ibid., 14. 35. Ibid., 16. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

11

Steve Pile’s approach to cultural geography picks up on this approach to understanding urban culture and takes humanistic geography into fresh areas.36 Pile aims to use Freudian psychological theory as a foundation tool for exploring the nature of urban existence. He argues that the “psycho-physical eld is critical because it connects the internal mental world of people with the external physical world of society and nature.”37 and suggests that “the city has an unconscious life which carries out a guerrilla warfare with attempts to repress it.”38 Issues of developing the material city, for instance, can be twisted away from the planners’ intentions by the force of urban imagination on the part of city dwellers. The interior dynamic of an urban unconscious forms a link with the dreamworld of the individual urban subject, since “through fantasy the urbanised subject creates an imaginary urban landscape.”39 A city, then, is composed not only of its outward manifestations such as buildings and monuments but also of its imaginary aspect.40 Citizens interact with the urban environment in such a way that they map the urban world according to their “desire, disgust, pleasure, pain, loathing and love,”41 using the city as a tool for negotiating their feelings and place in the world.42 Hence subjects create in their image “multiple real, imaginary and symbolic spaces.”43 The result is that the city is as much a construction of the imagination as a material reality in its own right: an issue which Pile explores in his case studies of New Orleans. He carries out this exploration under the headings of dream city, magical city, the vampire and the ghost before summarizing his ndings as blood and grief work which cities perform within their urban spatiality. These categories will be examined in more detail below. For Pile these urban constructions are as real as actual bricks, concrete, steel and glass. Once in existence urban imaginaries exercise continuing inuence over future cohorts of urban dwellers who draw upon the “fantasy-city” to change the face of existing urban developments. Just as the physical human body is driven by its inner psychological energies, so also the city is energized by the subtle forces of urban 36. This approach is similar to that of Amin and Thrift, Cities, 28, who also address issues of psycho-geography and dene the city as having reexes and automatisms which make up a city’s Unconscious. 37. Pile, Real Cities, 21. 38. Ibid., 227. 39. Ibid., 236. 40. Ibid., 212–13. 41. Ibid., 209. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 1

12

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

imagination within the populace. In Real Cities Pile develops further this emphasis on the urban imaginary as a valid subject for examination of urban identity. In his rst chapter he points out that he wishes to move from urban studies to dreaming, as a key methodological tool. Pile agrees with the views of Park that a “city expresses itself not just in building and streets but in the ways in which people live, work and trade.”44 This leads on to a consideration of phantasmagoria, a concept which implies “experience of movement, the procession of things before the eyes,”45 making contact with the quality of life that is ghostlike/dreamlike, and to an emphasis on the emotional aspects of the city. Dreaming the City A major approach of psycho-geography is to map people’s experience of the city,46 their emotional traces—hence the focus on dreams. Pile asserts as a basic point here that “dreams are found in cities, cities in dreams.”47 According to Freudian thought dreams provide a model for understanding the work that goes into the making of cities, creating a bridge between the personal and the social.48 Dreams focus on imagery49 and “tap into secret desires and fears.”50 Thus “dreaming can create worlds that are both strange and familiar: uncannily familiar worlds that are nevertheless strange and disturbing.”51 Reading urban social imagery, then, is “like walking through the city’s web of dreams.”52 In other words, cities have bodies which are capable of dreaming, just like individual bodies and the content of their dreams is recorded in the urban imagination of the human population. The task of reading this web of dreams is city-work, which produces “city-spaces,” that is, niche areas for chains of meaning which create human social identity.53 Ezekiel 40–44 can be examined as a case study of city-work through the lens of dreaming. First, with regard to dreaming a city, Ezek 40:1–2 44. Ibid., 1. 45. Ibid., 3. 46. Ibid., 12. 47. Ibid., 21. 48. Ibid., 26. 49. Ibid., 30. 50. Ibid., 35. 51. Ibid., 35. 52. Ibid., 51. 53. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 24, where they argue that the city is literally scripted through urban art forms such as grafti. City-work can thus be dened as the mental activity involved in interpreting the urban spaces and their symbolic elements. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

13

describes how the prophet is drawn to the city on a hill-top in a visionary mode.54 In chs. 40–44 it is in this dream-like state that the prophet encounters the detailed foundational shape of the future city, notably in 40:2. In v. 3 he encounters a gure with a measuring rod who is about to set out through the temple precincts to measure each part of the site. It is the prophet’s job to accompany the surveyor and to take note of all that he sees (v. 4). Although the dream starts as a city of the imagination, the rst building actually explored, and that which takes up most of the dream, is the temple. Starting with the outer wall of the precinct Ezekiel walks through the site from outer spaces to the temple itself, which he reaches in 40:48. The climax of this rst part of his urban dream is the sight of the throne-chariot returning to live in the temple and being addressed by a transcendent voice in 43:6–27. The purpose of his dream is revealed at this point as making him into the messenger who will pass on to his fellow citizens a graphic description of the sacred site. He is turned into a geographer whose intimate experience of the spaces of the divine home will act as a design guide for temple construction. As the literary prophetic gure recounts his experience he causes an image of the temple-city to appear in the minds of his readers, thus fullling the role he is assigned within the text. In this visionary sequence Ezekiel enacts city-work. As a aneur walking the byways of the future temple-city site he observes its details, passing them on in a symbolic narrative, opening up the new urban environment for the reader.55 Once the material setting has been outlined the spaces so produced can be lled with activity. In ch. 43 a great storm force rushes in from the East and lls the centre of the temple with its body of Glory.56 In v. 7 the divine voice takes ownership of this dream-city, “the place of my throne and the place of the soles of my feet.” The dream city is totally transcendent in nature; it is entirely consecrated to God and everything inside its

54. See here Paul Joyce, “Ezekiel 40–42: The Earliest ‘Heavenly Ascent’ Narrative?,” in The Book of Ezekiel and Its Inuence (ed. Henk Jan de Jonge and Johannes Tromp; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Joyce argues that the motif of vision here is not simply a way of introducing a blueprint for a new material temple, but is itself an envisioning of the heavenly, transcendent temple. 55. Cf. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 22, where there is a discussion of the role of the metaphor of a footprint in overcoming a sense of the city’s xed spaces. Ezekiel’s path is that of a pedestrian whose walking realizes the construction of a temple site. 56. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT, 2001), 28. The body is always in excess of our knowing it, always in excess of representation. 1

14

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

parameters must mirror divine transcendence.57 In Ezekiel’s city-as-dream the urban site is dened by the centrality of its worship site to the life of the community. The purpose of the city quarter as such is to provide a material platform for the support of public worship. What marks the city is not so much the everyday toil of making a living, as the need to carry out faithfully the daily cultic round in honour of the hidden but powerful energies of transcendent power. The city must pursue an orderly pattern of civic behaviour, regulated from within the sphere of religion.58 This dream-city is the hinge point between human urban existence and divine habitation.59 Magical City The city as threshold between worlds links to Steve Pile’s view that dreaming leads to magic, citing as evidence for this progression that magic lies between worlds, as dreams do.60 As threshold space, cities connect with and combine elds of energies.61 He argues that in urban architecture, ancient and modern, the skyscraper, like the temple, can be viewed as connecting three worlds—gods, daily life and underworld.62 This overlap of spaces turns cities into magical places—but magical places can be found in cities.63 For Pile the stress on the role of magic leads to investigation of voodoo activity in New Orleans and other US cities. Looking to biblical material it is possible to identify a turn to magical activity in Zech 2, an event once again connected to a man with a measuring line in his hand.64 The essential magical act in this passage is 57. See Chapter 6 of Chyutin, Architecture, for a reection on the manner in which utopian state/ideal city are interwoven topics in post-exilic texts which evidence a longing for a fresh stage of an independent Jewish state (168). 58. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 22, contains a vision of the city as spatially stretched patterns of communication through whose tracks social imaginaries are constructed. 59. Cf. Massey, City Worlds, 168, where the city is described as caught between utopia/dystopia as both celestial city and city of destruction. 60. Pile, Real Cities, 59. 61. Ibid., 67. 62. Ibid., 69. 63. Robert Park, “Magic,” in Park, Burgess and McKenzie, eds., The City, 129, discusses the way in which all human activities tend to assume the character of an image insofar as they become conventional and are dened in sacred formulas. 64. The motif of a “man” with a measure is found in several prophetic contexts and signies a true evaluation of the sacred site. Here and in Ezek 40–48 this is a positive judgment whereas the deity in Amos performs the same action to reveal the failure of the site to meet with divine approval. In Amos it is the deity who is found 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

15

that of measurement. The plain purpose of this action is to dene Jerusalem and discover of what the city is made. The measuring becomes a magical event when measurement itself is rescinded in v. 3 since the city’s contents make it too large to be applied to it. More magical still is the magical wall of re described in v. 5, which surrounds the city to protect it and the living presence of the deity at the heart of it, acting as an amulet, a protective charm, to deect hostile attention.65 The chapter ends on a note of solemn invocation—“Be silent, all esh, before the Lord” (v. 13), accompanying the act of theophanic self-manifestation within the city chosen to be the property of the deity. This city is a magical production because so much of it is emanates from supernatural energy and design. It is this aspect of Jerusalem that denes it and provides its self-identity. Pile argues at the end of his chapter that in the modern city, too, beliefs and rituals that invoke magical worlds and seek to produce magical actions remain important.66 In the last sections of his study Pile turns to two further aspects of threshold activity, that of the vampire and of the ghost. He notes that the vampire is “an intensely ambivalent gure, lying at the intersections of often contradictory networks of affect, meaning and power.”67 Insofar as the vampire is itself an urban imaginary it represents the ways in which the city “sucks the life blood of its citizens.”68 It lurks in the underworlds of the urban environment, not only graveyards but also the basements of public and residential buildings. Ghosts meanwhile are “social gures that speak to us of loss, of trauma and of an injustice.”69 Their haunting indicates to us the signicance of “time and memory in the production of urban space.”70 Both of these manifestations of urban imagination deal with the threshold between life and death. The vampire is an undead force bridging in an uncanny way the worlds of the living and the dead.71 Evading in this role. Richard Coggins, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1987), 48–49, suggests that Zechariah and Ezekiel are both texts which link with the importance of the Jerusalem temple. 65. Julia O’Brien discusses the role of the city without walls as a motif in utopian visions of the ancient Near East; see O’Brien, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 183. 66. Pile, Real Cities, 95. 67. Ibid., 97. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 131. 70. Ibid. 71. Donald, Imagining, 17, remarks that we always need the spectre to link reality and the immaterial, thus closing the circle of reality. 1

16

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

the end of corporeal existence, vampires sacrice their beating hearts and living souls as, leech-like, they suck life-blood to provide energy for their own activities. Ghosts do not bridge the gap between life and death as much as they stand in that very space.72 They inhabit a world of their own, passing in and out of human time and space as they wish. Intangible and bodiless, ghosts accompany the living,73 breaking into human urban affairs with mementoes of the past, touching deep memories within the social community.74 A Vampiric Imaginary In the book of Amos the prophet makes frequent reference to a coming “Day of the Lord.”75 Clearly the inhabitants of the city of Samaria expected that day to be one of victory and vindication for their political economy. But Amos envisions this as a day of vengeance on the home city. In ch. 2 the prophetic/divine voice announces that “he will send a re upon Judah and it will devour the palaces of Jerusalem” (v. 5). In 3:12 the warning comes that as the shepherd rescues only small body parts from the predator’s mouth so also the city’s inhabitants will be taken up piecemeal following military conquest. In v. 15 all the great houses of the city will fall and both building and household will perish and have an end. Amos 4:8–9 lists the disasters that have befallen— drought, blight and decay in the natural world. In the Vision Reports of the later chapters the plague of locusts and re are so all-consuming that the prophet cries out that all life will be extinguished and begs the deity to cease his predatory acts (v. 5).76 The sub-text of these graphic images is the lurking presence of a hidden deity, ready to strike out at any time.77 72. Grosz, Architecture, 92, states that the space of the in-between is the site of social, cultural and natural transformations: a place where becoming, openness to the future, outstrips the impulse towards conservation of the past order. 73. Pile, Real Cities, 129. 74. Donald, Imagining, 125. He refers to the uncanny edge to reection about past cities as a symptom of the temporal disjunction of memory and imagination. 75. This theme has been the subject of much scholarly debate since Gerhard von Rad’s work in the 1950s. A serious account of the use of the term in Amos is given by Shalom Paul, Amos (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991), 182–84. 76. Amos contains repetitive imagery of lions as sovereign beast and a sign of danger; hearing a lion roar indicates the hunter at work. This is constantly used to express the view of the deity as roaring from Zion and “hunting” the population of Samaria—a sovereign God whose will controls all that happens politically. 77. See Amos 5:19 where the metaphor of the Day of the Lord is extended by the further image of someone going into a house, leaning on the wall and being bitten by 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

17

In this urban imaginary it is the deity who is represented as though he were a vampiric energy operating on the city of Samaria, sucking out its life force, breaking its hold on life. Inside the text this activity has a pragmatic intent of shaking up urban complacency in the stable life of a wealthy elite to the end that human endeavour is understood to be dependent on the external forces shaping the environment. Given that the text is reective of the events of military conquest and territorial expansion consequent on the rise of the regional superpowers of Assyria and Babylon, the icon of a vampiric transcendent stands in a perilous place, maintaining a tenuous link between past urban patterns of living and the new uncertain world of a city broken into, torn down, a populace decimated.78 For the deity signies the possibility of some continuity in life, not for individuals but for the city-culture as a whole—at a price. Only if God works in and through the foreign invasions and the true role of conquest is not to enrich other nations but to draw a deeper humility from the home urban society, can the conclusion be avoided that there is no future and that we are wholly dead since our world and our imaginary places have disappeared along with the human beings involved. But the price of this appears to be a soul-less deity, narrated via a vampiric imaginary, a persona which happily sucks life blood to further the divine purpose of discipline and order. Divine Memory and the Ghostly If everything goes, so also vanishes the memory of those who lived and built and worked in “this place.”79 Yet the ghost allows for traces of memory to remain alive, touching and separating from, human activity. In Isa 40–48 God as ghostly presence acts to bring a message of loving hope from the memories of past care. “Comfort my people,” states ch. 40, “tell her that pain and suffering are over.” Speak once again of a deity who cares and who comes to live in your cities, bringing with him a a serpent. Just when the house-dweller thinks that safety has been reached the lurking vampiric deity strikes out to bring darkness and gloom (v. 20). 78. This chapter takes seriously the plot setting of prophetic texts in a time of regional upheaval and links these texts with that socio-political reality, but without intending to make any comment on the historical details which may have originally given rise to the material. 79. Donald, Imagining, 145. The city becomes a symbolic space in which we act out our imaginative answers to the question of how to be “at home” in such an uncertain world. 1

18

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

new population, imaged as a dusty caravan trekking across the desert from Mesopotamia to the hillsides of Judah and the city of Jerusalem. A shepherd deity safeguards the column and devastated people are challenged to renew their memories of past nurture.80 In 40:27 the prophet appeals to memory of past experience, “how can you say that my way is hidden from the Lord?” Don’t you know that your God is the universal deity, the creator of the globe? Such a God is beyond human strength and never loses power. A divine ghost carries his own power and life force, which stands in the place between past and future. What is to be remembered here are our dreams of nurture, protection, shelter within the city of Jerusalem. The memory of divine power stirs and this time its goal is healing and renewal. If the deity seems to be absent this is false since the unseen God accompanies all journeys, especially in the crossing of waters—an echo of the Exodus theme of Israel’s national youth.81 The divine ghost is a sign of love which outlives negativity. In the alien and uncertain world of a people displaced from inherited places memory and tradition can function to bring healing and to energize the city’s rebuilding, in a spirit of peace and collaboration. The question facing the reader here is whether s/he believes that the god of a city past can enable the new society of a city future. Blood Work and Grief Work From his reections Pile arrives at two main principles relating to life in the city: blood work and grief work. Pile notes that cities are “sites where dreams are forged, housed, circulated—sites of complex emotional work of real desires, personally and socially.”82 In the city emotional work is to be done and the urban imaginary is one way into this emotional activity. In particular, “cities have to deal with their dead.”83 Occult geographies deal with the strategies for handling death engaged in within cities, since such geographies occupy threshold spaces between life and death, despair and hope. The setting of the urban prophetic imaginaries is a world torn apart by invasion, then re-shaped by the interaction of

80. Cf. Brevard Childs, Isaiah (London: SCM, 2001), 302. 81. See here Isa 43. The reference to crossing waters probably emerges from the Exodus tradition and has become a metaphor of overcoming all kinds of life-threatening dangers. 82. Pile, Real Cities, 167. 83. Ibid., 170. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

19

imperial strategies within a local region.84 The real world of politics is a dangerous and difcult place for the living to negotiate—a reality mirrored in urban imaginaries of death, blood and grief. The textual universe engendered by the urban imagination here is dangerous also for the character of God. A vampiric imaginary carries the burden of a religious world in meltdown while yet offering the message that there may still be some communal good emanating from a continuing belief in a particular transcendent being. Such a worldview can generate a focus on heroes and their quest at the edge of annihilation and defeat, an image found, for instance, in the position of the prophet in the vision reports section of Amos, where he stands in the place of the community to turn back violence from its borders. Yet vampiric imagery is dangerous for those readers who put such great weight on this image of the human person as servant of the city, whatever the cost, that they create the divine as irrevocably violent, aggressively requiring the suffering and death of believers. Blood work, then, engages the reader in mediating between the extremes of dysfunctional social experience and a rendering coherent of that which is experienced. A vampiric transcendence produces an occult geography which situates the city as both the space of violent death and the space through which some continuity of group values and beliefs can be maintained. God-as-ghost softens this characterization of transcendence. Un-canny and un-homely though the divine can appear to be it, yet reminds the community of the homely and the familiar. Grief work is about engaging with this imagery and centres on emotional recollection of places and people now lost. It deals with the disorientation of the reader who remembers a world different from that currently experienced. Grief work transcends the categories of sin and retribution which dene a society’s self-awareness. Thus Isa 40 moves from noting that Jerusalem’s warfare is ended because her sin is pardoned (v. 2) into the proclamation of the divine presence and a demand for rejoicing. The prophet moves from operating within a doom-laden context to envisaging a trouble-free future.

84. A major study of how later prophetic texts may reect an imperial political and religious strategy is to be found in Jon Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995). Berquist’s treatment of texts starts from the premise that Yehud was a Persian colony at the time the Hebrew Bible material was being edited and thus examines how such a context would have shaped the message conveyed. 1

20

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

This can be interpreted from Pile’s perspective as “wish fullment”— the prophetic visionary dreams that the peace of past times has not disappeared forever but can and will be re-constituted for Jerusalem. The divine ghost touches the human imagination at the point of recall, with the need for hope that awed acts leading to disaster, pulling the world down on the heads of the perpetrators, are not all there is. The past cannot be undone nor the experience of pain wiped out, but grief work allows for a faint but tenuous hope that there may still be happiness, that the city may yet take pleasure in itself and in its urban activity. Grief work draws on the hope for a redemptive gathering-in of shattered fragments of a once proud urban world. Such is the deity of ghost-like dreaming, a force which creates wholeness out of the raw material of chaotic disruption. Space Work Ultimately, Pile concludes, all these aspects—dream, magic, vampire and ghost—come together in the concept of space work. The particular face of space work in this context is occult geography, an activity which explores the nature of threshold spaces, sited at the intersection between the worlds of past and future. These are porous sites which allow for border-crossing and thus promote continuity of the urban imaginary.85 Occult geographies offer the reader one way of exploring the spectacle of urban existence.86 They build up a dynamic of urban phantasmagoria and it is, Pile suggests, within the phantoms of imagination that people seek resources to underpin successful urban living. The occult geographies of the prophetic texts examined in this chapter all deal with the urban spectacle of the ancient Near Eastern city-state. They are essentially occult since the key imaginary for the city is that of temple. This public monument gathers to itself a procession of images, creating its special phantasmagoric effect on readers. Dream and magic are essential components as a sign of how human urban life opens onto and is open towards, unseen transcendent forces. The city is born from a

85. Pile, Real Cities, 174–75. Also Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 53, with regard to the porous nature of boundaries, a topic which underpins the view that borders are points of intersection. 86. Michael Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Blackwell: Oxford, 2000), 167, where he talks of the concept of society as spectacle and discusses how representations of city life become guiding texts for emerging urbanisms. 1

1. Urban Psycho-geographies

21

basis in vision and verbal articulation of that vision. The normal life of the city—buying and selling, busy streets, visits to public religious sites and the political complexity of royal government are viewed as representing only part of the meaning of city, to be only a surface phenomenon. It is through the literary depiction of scenes of destruction and construction that the reader accesses deeper urban values. Simon Sadler notes the turn to a more situationist approach to city life. There has been a need “to peel away the outer surface of the city— created by planning and capital”—to arrive at new urban vision.87 The Situationists, he argues, are marked out by a “determination to address fundamental issues about the politics of space.”88 The movement drew on the work of Lefebvre in its tendency to overset cultural boundaries and on the theories of Sartre in its focus on the existential aspects of city life. Sadler views the situationist city as one that rejects modernity’s goal of an ideal urban setting which contains an ideally content population.89 Instead, there is an appeal to emotion as the guide for understanding urban affairs. Situationist cartography uses the powers of the imagination to reconstruct a picture of the city which wove together physical, subjective, cultural and temporal strands and which raised the experience of the city as fragmentary to an essential principle for the design of city space.90 The city, then, is to be understood as the space of cultural engagement between disparate urban groups and their concepts of urban life—a process of engagement which is often fraught with tension and constitutes the urban as a battleground. The ultimate role of the city is in blood and grief work, a business which deals with the ne line between life and death, destruction and rebuilding. This activity reveals the porous nature of the boundary here, focusing on the shifting dynamic of pain and hope. Hope is presented as an affective stance deepened by pain-lled living. In Ezek 37 the prophet’s place, at the end of a city’s existence, is challenged by the voice of the deity. “Can these dry bones live?” Against the odds the prophet replies “You know…” This capacity to hold out against the closure of annihilation, even if in a small way, provides a space in which whole bodies can return to living and breathing existence.91 It is such an

87. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), 15. 88. Ibid., 40–41. 89. Ibid., 76–77. 90. Ibid., 82. 91. Cf. Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 262–63. God will burst the prison of the grave. 1

22

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

event which, it can be argued, is at the heart of occult geography, the holding steady of two opposing images, not only dead but dry bones, with the supple energies of eneshed bodies. A key focus for this chapter has been psycho-geography as a means of “dreaming the city.” This prole aligns with the concept of prophetic vision and opens onto the topic of urban site as a space in which transcendence can be found and which is itself shaped by human capacity to transcend the purely material and to seek an aesthetic environment which will re-shape human affairs. Both dreaming and vision put priority on imagination as an evaluative tool to explore the value of urban space via prophetic books where the urban is endemic and implicit and where varied projections of the city as co-existent with the political reality of elite government are put forward. These broader treatments of “city” lead into a study of the individual whose gaze performs the urban imaginary. The prophetic persona functions here as wanderer and critic of the urban scene. Whereas this chapter has elucidated the theme of psycho-geography with regard to the personas of city-space, the next chapter offers a parallel but separate, investigation of the city-self of the prophetic voice which proclaims an urban message. Prophets function as singular individuals, standing aside from the urban status quo in a self-aware manner. With their negative assessments of their fellow elite they are a basis of resistance to the urban identities produced and owned by powerful upper classes. Prophets stand alongside their fellow citizens but view themselves as set against the citizen body, as depicted in the call narrative of Jeremiah. Insofar as they narrate oracles which deal with the worth of both monuments and public spaces they provide a “grass roots” opinion of urban existence.

1

Chapter 2

THE PROPHET AS FLANEUR

It is clear from reading the prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible that the person of the prophet is the key mediator gure of the narrative.1 The books frequently engage with messages which use the embodied voice of the individual as the medium for the evaluation of urban existence. This use of the individual as analyst of urban fortunes provides a link to the work of urban psycho-geographies which rely on stressing the role of the self-aware individual as a test of city life.2 The urban aneur is, primarily, a man on the streets whose peregrinations across the city build up a body of commentary. In a parallel manner, the term used in the Hebrew text, dabar, indicates both speech and event/act.3 This chapter engages with the act of aneurie, using the approaches of Walter Benjamin and Peter Ackroyd to psycho-geography as dialogue partners for prophetic narratives. In carrying out this task the chapter will also introduce a number of prophetic works which will be explored further later in the book. The chapter forms a pair with the previous chapter, which introduced the topic of urban imaginaries. In this second treatment of psycho-geography it is the manner in which cities are expressed via the individual perspective of a voice which is both part of the urban community and yet separated from it which is the focus. Both Benjamin and Ackroyd stress the individual, subjective, idiosyncratic role of the observer who is there “on the street,” although from different angles. Benjamin uses his own life experience as the basis for his 1. The books are assigned to a single named prophet and the present study addresses this fact without intending to make a comment on authorship as such. Clearly historical-criticism has raised many issues regarding actual authorship of parts of the prophetic books. 2. Cf. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 11, which gives a good succinct summary of psycho-geography and the work of the aneur. 3. Cf. Francis Brown, Sameul R. Driver and Charles Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), which in its long list of usages of the noun includes “speech/word” and then “matter, affair; events, things.”

24

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

evaluation of the urban European culture in which he grew up. He is simultaneously a member of the bourgeois elite and a serious critic of the capitalist system as it is manifested in the production of urban artefacts. Ackroyd is concerned to show that a city has its living persona which can be identied through the plurality of the city’s sites and stages of growth. In his novel of urban architecture and architects he constructs his main characters more in the manner of the estranged citizen whose life experience offers an indication of the true nature of the city. A Situationist Perspective The gure of the aneur, the “drifter,” emerged from a group of French theorists and activists who wished to examine the city from underneath, escaping from the monolithic prole created top-down by urban elites. This movement has already been explored in Chapter 1. The endeavour to demonstrate the plurality of city life involves giving voice to other sections of the populace than those in urban government, and this means highlighting what actually happens out on the streets in the public arena. This is where the aneur becomes signicant, as the one who sees what happens, records it and evaluates what this shows about an urban community, especially its powerful classes. Merlin Coverley, dening the psycho-geographical approach to city life, engages with emotional responses to the geographic environment and suggests that the act of walking focalizes this model.4 The range of the walker, the pedestrian, is large since it includes not only the surface level of the built environment but also the city as a site of mystery which reveals its “true nature under the ux of everyday events.”5 Hence the “act of urban wandering” takes place in “a spirit of political radicalism, allied to a playful sense of subversion, governed by enquiry into methods by which we can transform our relationship to the urban environment.”6 And this, in psycho-geographical terms, draws on the tradition of visionary imagination, on dark imaginings. In the visionary journey through the built environment the walker operates simultaneously in the present and in the historical life of the city, and through the lens of the personal imagination the “topography of the city is refashioned through the imaginative force of the spectator.”7 4. Chapter 1 above provided a working denition of the term psycho-geography. See also Coverley, Psychogeography, 12. 5. Ibid., 13. 6. Ibid., 14. 7. Ibid., 16. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

25

This approach brings together the human body and the city as social body, with a stress on the role of body/embodiment as performing meaning. In spatial terms the bodily form is the place from which “voice” emerges. In Architecture from the Outside Elizabeth Grosz points to the links between body and space.8 She suggests that a subject can only understand the social context by “being able to situate its body in a position in space from which it relates to other subjects.” Hence bodies are not xed entities but moving realities, created and re-created both physically and spiritually through the process of social engagement.9 For Grosz, bodies and cities are alike. “The city-as-body has a shape “which takes its forms and functions from the (imaginary) body it constitutes.”10 In turn, cities produce, control and give order to, bodies.11 Both body and city are connected with the idea of “dwelling,” since the subject, whether individual or group, brings itself into being by inhabiting a particular space, marked either by skin and limbs or by buildings and streets.12 Hence both cities and bodies are assemblages of parts.13 As the city is the site of the body’s “cultural saturation,” so also the body transforms the urban landscape via the impact of changing human demands on the built environment.14 The views of Iain Chambers in Border Dialogues echo this perspective. “It is our bodies,” Chambers argues, “dressed, undressed, disguised, accentuated” that provide a map which records how different aspects of society, such as history, sexuality, race, “create a common cultural interface.”15 This body imagery, functioning to create an urban imaginary, can be pressed further into the service of urban exploration. Paul Rodaway uses the human experience of sensory activity to produce a geography of the senses, in which the four main sensory systems of the body can be used to create humanistic geography.16 His approach is rooted in 8. Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 38. This is one of a series of books by Grosz which explore the social and political nuances of body imagery. 9. Cf. Soja, Postmetropolis, 6, where he suggests that the process of producing spatiality begins with the body, with the construction and performance of self. 10. Grosz, Architecture, 48. 11. Ibid. 12. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 85, describe the city as a body doing, making, talking via the actions of multiple agencies provided by the city-dwellers. 13. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 108. 14. Ibid., 108–9. 15. Chambers, Border Dialogues, 71. 16. Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. 1

26

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

psychological models of social geography, arguing that the “senses are geographical in that they contribute to orientation in space.”17 The sense of sight, for instance, leads to a visual geography in which the biology of perception can be linked with sites in the form of lm landscapes, thus moving the viewer into the realm of virtual geography.18 “Body” and “City” thus perform mapping functions for social evaluation by acting out a subjective/personal approach to urban existence. Prophetic Bodies The physicality of the human body is associated here with “feeling” the urban environment by engaging human bodily senses as tools for reading the city site. The experience is a “whole body” event, and that approach is found in the portrayal of the prophetic hero in biblical texts. Faced with understanding the collapse of Jerusalem and its temple foundations Ezekiel’s body engages through vision and imagination.19 The initial vision which controls the meaning given to urban sites is one of sight and hearing as well as touch and taste. The prophet sees a throne chariot manifested as a violent storm; here sight is on two levels in which the material dimension opens the way to transcendent reality, which is understood as both like and unlike material objects from daily life. He then hears a voice from the throne and is asked to reach out and grasp a scroll which he eats. Following this initial body-related event, Ezekiel moves, in ch. 4, to use of his body as a medium of transmission of divine messages. His power of speech has been symbolically blocked and he now uses his hands to turn domestic objects into a material image of a city besieged and broken. This leads to the engagement of the rest of his body in the feat of lying on one side of his body for a vast number of days, while his intake of food is determined by the transcendent meaning for city identity which he is charged to perform.20 In all of this Ezekiel becomes a “walking” city; his body and that of the social body are intertwined to such an extent that his identity is subsumed into that of the city—a prole of suffering and fragmentation. The representation of the prophet here is set to endorse urban anxieties concerning future existence. Ezekiel says little about how he experiences 17. Ibid., 37. 18. Ibid., 160. Also Amin and Thrift, Cities, 23. 19. For the engagement of the senses here, see Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 52. 20. For a discussion of the psychological aspects of this prole, see, for instance, Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 16. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

27

this identity at the inner level, remaining an object for the reader’s gaze. By contrast, the “Confessions” of Jeremiah reveal more about the interior state of a prophet whose bodily existence must mirror that of the community. There is evidence of a mental and emotional struggle in which the dominating emotions are those of hostility, alienation and isolation. I have discussed the manifestation of a disturbed psyche which emerges from this material at some length in Alterity, Pain and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.21 Once again, the presentation of the prophet is one which engages a person’s whole existence and leads to the deconstruction of a secure sense of well-being. It is possible to pick up these themes of body and city through engagement with the work of Steve Pile his The Body and the City. Here Pile states that place is a social reality and that what matters “is not the home but the identity of the home-dweller.”22 One of the attributes of the human person is the “mental processes [which] include an innate capacity to map the world around (cognitive geography).”23 This perspective can be applied to the topic of the city and the cultural evaluation of urban space by city-dwellers can be mapped onto human bodies and their spatialities—as in the metaphor of “sewer rat” or “slum dweller.”24 The process allows human beings to create differential social sites and so gain self-identity, dening themselves as self, same as and other than, a range of places and persons.25 A particular expression of this is in the form of “grass-roots” activity. The term indicates the manner in which individuals are directly in charge of their own identity-creation. If linking people and places is one way in which urban elites establish control over the urban environment by marking out regulatory open and closed places within the urban boundary, the “view from above” is challenged by the grass-roots “view from below.” Pile discusses the work of De Certeau as key to this approach. “The proper spaces created for the city by the view from above are interrupted, re-signied by the everyday practice of moving by foot. Walkers are involved in the production of an unmappable space which cannot be seen from above.”26 Hence the role of the aneur is engagement in “the long 21. Mary Mills, Alterity, Pain and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel (New York: T&T Clark International, 2007). 22. Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 65. 23. Ibid., 27. 24. Ibid., 177, quoting the work of Stallybrass and White. 25. Ibid., 92. 26. Ibid., 226. 1

28

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

poetry of walking.”27 This is a liminal position but still one with an authoritative voice.28 The aneur is, supremely, one who regularly patrols the streets— whether the upper class idler or the destitute whose home is the street and who knows nothing else but this venue. That this approach is relevant to reading prophetic urban critiques is exemplied by an examination of Jer 7. The prophet is placed on the streets of Jerusalem; he is a walker who gazes on the movements of the urban population and who projects from its use of city-space to the inner life and destiny of the city itself. In this role the prophet marries the actuality of human movement with the perspective from cosmic space. Hence Jeremiah is told in v. 2 to stand at the gate and speak to those who come and go, especially those who pass by with the intention of worship. The prophet is put into the role of one who has superior understanding but who is, at the same time, an outside observer of urban behaviour. His is an estranged voice in that he tells worshippers that they are no longer secure occupants of the temple-space since their actions outside the monument contradict their purpose. In v. 5 he tells them that only if they reform their actions will they be allowed to live in this place.29 In order to reinforce his point he takes them on a symbolic journey to another temple-city, that of Shiloh, to see how it has been destroyed. The prophetic viewpoint is thus informed by an historical perspective; such mixing of history and its decaying inuence on the present is key to the work of the aneur, as will be seen below in the examination of Walter Benjamin’s theories. In a second section the prophetic aneur is encouraged by the deity to walk the streets of Jerusalem and watch what is really happening. Verses 18–19 indicate that this is preparation for a feast in which the whole community is engaged. The walker must stay outside such unthinking activity for its goal is inappropriate. His is a voice which must provide an alternative evaluation of communal religion; he cannot join in. The same is true with regard to the sacricial worship which is denounced in vv. 30–34.30 The prophet is tasked with a message of retribution; as the populace have killed their own kindred so will they be killed. The

27. Ibid., 229. 28. Ibid., 230. 29. Although the main subject here is the sacred site itself, it should be extended to take in the city wherein the temple is found. The temple is understood to be the guarantor of urban security and it is this simplistic view that is challenged. 30. For a discussion of the historical background to this comment on child sacrice, see, for example, Carroll, Jeremiah, 220–21. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

29

overall mood of ch. 7, then, is the tension between the joy experienced by worshippers and the deeper reality of desolation. It is the prophetic aneur who sees through the surface celebrations to the inner emptiness at the heart of the city. Walter Benjamin Attention to the role of aneur owes a great deal to the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose reections on his own urban context set out a theoretical framework whose basis is in spatiality. He maps the value of cities against his own life experience, especially his childhood in Berlin. One of his most well-known studies is the Arcades Project, based on Parisian shopping arcades whose architecture and ambience have fallen out of favour.31 Benjamin’s perspective is both archaeological and historical: material and ideological. For him, examination of historical traces found in present existence is the key to understanding wider culture—in his case that of the urban bourgeoisie.32 It is possible to interpret this search as informed by the value of the perfect tense in that it engages the inherent continuity of the past into the present, even though this may consist solely of ruins and decayed traces of the urban heritage. In addition to the material world of objective signs of urban occupation the aneur operates at the psychological level of the world of dreams. For Benjamin this connects with Surrealism and the importance of the visual sign: what matters is not words but the visual space of images.33 Benjamin wants to create an immediate interaction with the past, in time’s intersection with space. In this alliance time is “stilled” since the disparate material objects are held in relationship by virtue of occupying a common place. The image-space is “understood as dialectic at a standstill; is transformed to writing.”34 The individual aneur utilizes visual memory to unlock meaning, a process in which the “trope of

31. Cf. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (trans. James Rolleston; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 91. 32. Cf. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (London: Polity, 1996), 7, where he denes Benjamin’s task as uncovering the delusions of the urban environment. 33. Cf. Maggie Bowers, Magical Realism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 133. Bowers gives a useful, short comment on the term “surrealism.” This book also discusses the relationship of surrealism to parallel modes of magical realism in Chapter 2. 34. Sigrid Weigel, Body-and-Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (trans. Georgina Paul et al.; New York: Routledge, 1996), 52. 1

30

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

memory is activated by the obsessive mapping of topographies.”35 There is a political dynamic at work here which engages in resistance to the capitalist life of modern European cities. But the tool for this is found in psycho-geography, described by Witte as an “attempt at dialectical fantasy.”36 As Graeme Gilloch states, “Benjamin’s writings constitute an account of history-as-catastrophe—city as the focus of perpetual sufferings and conict.”37 Benjamin views the products of urban effort as the evidence for his opinion. The urban commodities on sale, the buildings, the sites of production are “frozen representations of utopian wish-images.”38 Salvation lies in acknowledging this and then moving away from such unthinking passivity and subjection to the phantasmagoria of the selfsufcient city. Use of the gure of the socially marginal is a key tool in the development of self-awareness. One such gure is the middle class idler, a drunkard and gambler, whose marginality to “proper” middle class life makes him an observer/outsider. At the other extreme is the prostitute, a marginal female whose only home is “on the street.” The paradoxical nature of Benjamin’s thought is his use of behaviour which is considered socially disreputable to critique the corrupt nature of urban elite culture itself. In his Reections Benjamin sets out a foundational position from which particular commentaries on city life emerge. This, he states, is his long intended act of “setting out the sphere of life—a bios—graphically, on a map.”39 Benjamin’s initial mapping concerns examination of his own life through pictures representing his boyhood experience—the public spaces of the Tiergarten, schools and cemeteries. In his later work he extended the same method to cities, using their public sites as mapping icons which would reveal the [un]healthiness of their lives. The prophetic narratives also produce urban evaluation via mapping of public spaces. In Ezekiel the conscious use of graphic iconography serves to deliver a negative commentary on the established city of Jerusalem. As noted above, in ch. 4 the prophet uses images of a walled city under siege to get his point across. In chs. 8–11 it is the actual temple and its interior 35. Walter Benjamin and Peter Demetz, eds., Reections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (trans. Edmund Jephcott; New York: Schocken, 1978), Introduction, xvii. 36. Witte, Walter Benjamin, 108. See also Gilloch, Myth, 1, where Benjamin’s understanding is said to be that European cities are beautiful and bestial, phantasmagorias of mythic domination. 37. Gilloch, Myth, 14. 38. Ibid., 103. 39. Benjamin, Reections, 5. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

31

spaces which are mapped in order to reveal the corruption and decay at the heart of urban life in Jerusalem. Ezekiel’s narrative, like that of Benjamin features the tragic decline of city life, viewed from the angle of one who is part of the community but who is estranged from it. In the book of Jonah there is a variant on this pattern. The book makes great use of graphic icons as mapping the progress of the prophet from his initial experience to a later stage of life. This can be viewed from the angle of Benjamin’s engagement with his own life via the graphic images of places of memory. There is an ironic twist in this book, however, since it is not the aneur himself who is opened up to deeper reection but the reader of the tale. The story uses a series of material icons which map the experience of the prophet and challenge his own self-perception as agent of justice.40 The prophet migrates from ship to sh, to city streets to a hillside shelter. In his interaction with these settings he is challenged to examine and change his views, but despite being responsible for the near-death experience of innocent others and nearly dying himself, despite witnessing a change of heart on the part of a guilty community, he remains committed to his view that the great city is inherently evil and to the demand for its eradication. Hence Jonah fails to turn the light of history on his own lived experience. His journey, part fable and part history, provides a map of a city through mapping a personal history in such a way that debate about urban existence is opened up rather than closed down. Thus the book ends with the open and unanswered question to the prophet regarding the transcendent worth of a city population, situated within the scope of his recent personal suffering at the hands of the deity. Four particular aspects of Benjamin’s urban mapping will now be engaged with regard to the prophetic texts. The rst of these is the icon of “picture postcards,” which is an image of the points on a map which chart journeys through space but can also be viewed as independent objects. The second can be labelled the “memory cellar.” It is possible to liken memory to the cellar of a house where long-forgotten items are stored. The third is indicated in Benjamin’s own words by the image of the “cathedral railway station,” an image of the capitalist system’s reduction of religion to a commodity culture. The fourth is the topic of “urban dreaming”; cities are as dreams in the mind of the aneur, phantasmagorias which evaluate the historical city.

40. For a commentary on the structure of Jonah and its impact on meaning, see, for instance, T. Perry, The Honeymoon is Over: Jonah’s Argument with God (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2006), Introduction. 1

32

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Picture Postcards These colourful items, collected by Benjamin over time, can be “read” as indicative of the progress of a life, he suggests.41 They are a key to unlock the destiny which awaited him even when he himself had no idea of what the future of his life would look like. He states that looking through his collection with hindsight would allow him access to deeper insights about his own development. He begins with the cards sent to him by his grandmother; viewing these cards as a boy he had the sense of being in the place which was the subject of the picture. The snapshots of a distant site arouse a longing to be there—but where is the site so desired if not in the picture card itself? It can be argued that it is the graphic image which moves us most and engages our sympathy. In prophetic narrative a number of graphic sites are pictured as the setting for prophetic speech and critical evaluation of the material places signied by the literary image. The reader encounters a series of snapshots which provide a tool for engaging our interest in the message of the text. In Zech 1, for example, a series of graphic images occur, set in the spatial perspective. These “picture cards” are the means of promoting a belief that there is hope for Jerusalem.42 The picture of the four horsemen links with the concept of a global scrutiny which reveals that the earth is at peace, a fact which contradicts the unhappiness of Jerusalem in the time of exile.43 The prophet’s curiosity about the visionary gures and their meaning leads the reader also to pause and consider the message of the passage at greater depth. The reader is transported to the place of the horsemen to hear a word of comfort for the home community about the renewal of the city. The second picture card develops this theme; if Jerusalem is to be comforted, its enemies are to be destroyed. The visual icon of the four horns causes both prophet and reader to gaze and to seek understanding in a manner more effective than a simple oral pronouncement.44 The place of the horns is entered by four “craftsmen” whose role is uncertain; the card has become a video! The lm-like movement of 41. Ibid., 40. 42. Cf. Coggins, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, 10–11, where he discusses the issue of the rebuilding of the temple. 43. With regard to whether an exilic setting is historically accurate for this text, see ibid., 9–11. 44. The image of horns was used in apocalyptic to denote the heads of the nations. See O’Brien, Nahum, Habakkuk, 178. See also Mark Love, The Evasive Text: Zechariah and the Frustrated Reader (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1999), 179, which refers to the intertextual links here. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

33

gures graphically demonstrates that the enemies will be broken down, thus performing an end with which the reader is expected to concur. In ch. 2 a further visual snapshot shows a man with a measuring line. So arresting is the image that the prophet breaks into rst-person speech—a move which also engages the reader in the scene as overhearing the conversation. Once again the postcard opens into a dramatic sequence in which the prophet and several angels take part. This moving image leads both prophet and reader to focus on the motif of walls and measuring. If a wall measures a city for closure then a wall-less city challenges the assumption that a city’s destiny has been xed forever by diminution. What is more, since this image turns into a transcendent wall of re, the sense of expansion is matched by that of safety in such openness. By causing us to pause the graphic imagery of a “talking postcard” leads to reassurance that the future will be good for Jerusalem. The Memory Cellar Benjamin draws on the icon of the cellar as a comment on the place of our past as a challenge to becoming complacent, to failing to apply selfconscious critique to our current state. He states that we all forget events from the past which shaped “the house of life.” Yet these events live on in the memory, deeply buried and can come back to us through the medium of dreams when we are under stress. When life “is under assault by enemy bombs what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations?”45 It is as though life has a cellar in which the past is stored, the deepest memories which Benjamin refers to as a “horrible cabinet of curiosities.” Dreams can become nightmares which draw on these deep memories to provide a warning for the present and future events of life. This is a question of dreaming and learning more of our situation from the veiled images which our sleeping self provides and which then have to be interpreted if we are to gain value from the experience. In Ezek 8 the prophet is presented with just such an experience. In his visionary state he has access to the cellar of city life in Jerusalem, in particular the storehouse of religious memory and tradition. He wanders through a visionary temple which nevertheless critiques the actual temple and the use of sacred space on the part of the priestly ofciants there. He passes through the upper reaches of the temple and observes a number of worship activities, all of which are deviant in some way. But then, in v. 7, he is led to a hole in the wall through which he has to dig in order to 45. Benjamin, Reections, 62. 1

34

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

enter a series of darkened rooms where the elders of Israel offer sacrice to false deities.46 In the symbolic mode of exchange to which dreams are subject material darkness is the image of religious darkness. The true darkness, to which the vision points, is the urban community’s lack of understanding of religion and politics. The community has come to believe that the deity has abandoned, it but this false belief is productive of the disaster it seeks to avoid by a more pluralistic religious praxis. This reading of the state of the community draws on the communal cellar of religious tradition which the prophet reads as not supportive of current cultic activity. If visiting the cellar of a life and turning over the traces of its earlier tradition brings a better approach to present reality, then it is an act of opening up places long closed, of bringing into the light of day meaning which has been growing dusty in the dark. To this extent it is an act of exhumation, digging up the past in order to move on more effectively in the present. In the nightmare scenario the inner self is inspired to understand more deeply the possible outcomes of the present waking state by being presented with troubled images, which in Benjamin’s case he describes as “the corpse of that boy, which had been immured there [memory cellar] as a warning.”47 Cathedral Railway The narrative of Ezek 8–11 unpicks the community’s religious perspective on the political scene of its time, implying that the urban elite have misread the situation. Hence the destruction of their culture, which they are afraid of, will be inevitable. This disaster is vividly pictured in ch. 9. But is this just a religious affair? The temple in Ezekiel is discussed in terms of its role as guarantor of a political status quo, for in prophetic texts city and temple, religion and politics, work symbiotically. This raises the question as to whether religious monuments which the aneur can visit should be viewed through a sacred or a secular lens. Benjamin plays with this theme in his account of the cathedral at Marseilles, which he views as a cathedral-rail station. He notes that “as a reloading point for intangible, unfathomable goods the bleak building stands between quay and warehouse” and that it is in an area which is deserted at the time he passes through.48 The building is a monument to

46. Greenberg, Ezekiel, 169, notes the textual ambiguity with regard to the motif of hole and wall. 47. Benjamin, Reections, 63. 48. Ibid., 133. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

35

capitalist activity over a period of forty years and a great amount of money was spent on its construction. In his imagination Benjamin sees the cathedral as another public monument of a city whose life is dominated by commerce. He re-reads the sacred monument and its function as bridge between heaven and earth using the vocabulary of a railway station, complete with waiting room, timetable, “suitcases” full of the spiritual possessions of the religious traveller and washrooms to cleanse the traveller by Confession. “This is the Marseilles religious station. Sleeping cars to eternity depart from here at Mass times.”49 The cathedral is situated between commercial buildings and its work is similar to theirs in that it stores and transfers goods (people) to a new setting. For Benjamin the religious monument shares the utilitarian desires of the capitalist culture which has built it; heaven is simply another dimension of the commercial universe. The prophet Amos also engages with the alignment of political and religious sites. Benjamin’s whimsical narrative reduces the cathedral to a function of society. Amos’s encounter with the sacred shrine in Samaria also engages with the interface between economic and religious affairs but in a manner which seeks to preserve the independence of the transcendent. The scene in Amos 7 provides an unambiguous message about who owns both temple and city. In v. 9 the deity is standing by a wall with a measure in hand measuring the sanctuaries of Israel for destruction. This scene is balanced in ch. 9 by the image of the deity standing by the altar as an earthquake is set to destroy the monument and its occupants.50 The reason for this event, as given in ch. 8, both establishes a relationship between sacred and secular and emphatically criticizes the political elite for its secular activity. Verses 4–5, for instance, accuse the regime of lacking respect for the less wealthy citizens by its manipulation of the market in food commodities. It is because of bad dealing within the urban economy that the public worship of the city has been corrupted. Religion and commerce can co-exist but it is the religious dimension which determines the worth of the secular environment. This evaluation emerges from a visitor to the city, just as Benjamin’s commentary on the cathedral is a reection of his encounter with the city as a passer by.

49. Ibid. 50. The text is ambiguous with regard to the exact nature of the action of the deity here. Cf. Hans Wolff, Amos the Prophet: The Man and His Life (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), 300–301; Paul, Amos, 233. 1

36

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Haggai 2 provides another version of the theme of sacred/secular. Whereas Amos puts the divine in contest with the secular Haggai is more sympathetic to the link between wealth and temple. The chapter is intended as a message of comfort to the current elite in Jerusalem. Chapter 1 has pointed out that the urban community is not prospering, planting much but harvesting little, in v. 6. The reason given for this poor state of the local economy is that the community has neglected to build a House for the Lord. There will be no increase of productivity unless this is remedied as commanded in vv. 7–8. Chapter 2 builds on this scene. The city will prosper—once the temple is in action, in vv. 6–7. The proof of this is that the temple will become a rich treasury. The language of the text is that of a fruit tree being shaken so that the fruits fall out of the branches and can be gathered in.51 In this case it is the nations who will be shaken so that their gold and silver fall out and all this wealth will accrue to the temple and will make it a place of glory. This text reverses the mood of Amos whereby economic activity is the cause of the decline of the sacred site. Here both status and economic gain will accompany the restitution of the temple in Jerusalem. Urban Dreaming When Benjamin gazes on the cathedral he sees, now the church and now the railway station; his dreamlike mode of reection is based on his admiration for Charles Baudelaire and the Surrealist movement.52 Benjamin thought of Baudelaire as an allegorical genius whose gaze is that of one estranged, a judgement which led him to adopt the idea of the aneur as one who sees the familiar places of the city as phantasmagorias.53 For Benjamin it is through such dreamings of the city that real knowledge of the urban project can be gained. The city becomes the subject of lyric poetry as the aneur “surrounds the approaching desolation of city life with a propitiatory lustre.”54 Benjamin notes that Baudelaire’s poetry draws on a “rebellious emotionalism” which deals with Paris as a “submerged city,” permeating reections on “women and death” with the image of the city.55 51. I prefer a nature image reading here. John Goldingay thinks of this as a cosmic shaking, on the model of prophetic apocalyptic imagery. See J. Goldingay and P. Scalise, Minor Prophets, vol. 2 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009), 164. 52. See n. 33, above. 53. Benjamin, Reections, 156. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 157. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

37

The Minor Prophets contain a variety of cityscapes whose depiction is achieved through metaphorical language. It can be argued that these texts also treat the city as a submerged subject which permeates their lyric poetry of vision and oracle. It is easier to nd the cityscape which is at issue in some of these prophetic treatments than in others. Zechariah 1–8, for instance, contains a highly charged world of symbol in which the reader strays, not always knowing what is signied. The images of Zech 1 and 2 can be interpreted because a voice in the text offers a practical meaning for them, in terms of a longed-for return to peace and security for Jerusalem, as noted above. But the images of the Flying Scroll and the Woman in a Basket are less easily penetrated and turned into a readable urban allegory. How does a scroll become a curse, for example? Or two women become storks? What is the value of the images of transportation embedded in both these metaphorical images?56 By contrast the imagery of the book of Joel is more accessible. Chapter 2 contains a description of urban construction which is recognizable, and although there is an inter-weaving of the imagery of locusts and armies, a clear picture emerges of the city and its people sinking under the weight of a destructive force which enters into every urban orice.57 The relation of religion to this secular catastrophe is also made clear. The twin point of action in the urban drama to that of invaders is a lament ritual. The entire populace is to be gathered into this act and into a narrow space, between the porch and the altar. This boundaried site concentrates the power of liturgy to the extent that it more than balances out the actions of the vast energies of destruction engulng the city.58 In the book of Amos the dreamworld is far more edgy.59 In the rst chapter the prophetic style points already to that edginess in which “now you see it and now you don’t.” The sins of the cities can be enumerated, but there is always an extra dimension to be taken into account. This sets 56. See Edgar Conrad, Zechariah (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1991), 116–21 which comments on the bizarre nature of the imagery here. 57. Scholars disagree as to whether this is an historical reference to a time of locust swarming or an indication that the locust has become symbolic of military activity. See, for example, Daniel Simundson, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), 119, who favours an historical link, and Arvid Kapelrud, Joel Studies (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948), 2, 15, who prefers to see symbolic usage. 58. A detailed treatment of the usage of spatiality in this text is found in Chapter 5 below. 59. Cf. Mary Mills, “Divine Violence in the Book of Amos,” in Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets (ed. Chris Franke and Julia O’Brien; New York: T&T Clark International, 2010). 1

38

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

the scene for the message about Samaria which is often associated with the icon of the Day of the Lord. This image also shares the tension between knowing and not-knowing. “Woe to you who long for the Day of the Lord. That day will be as though a man ed from a lion only to meet a bear” (Amos 5:19). The deity has chosen Israel to care for above other people; he will punish it by the same token.60 How can this contradiction be held? The answer is questions to the wise—do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so? (Amos 3:3). Each of these prophetic commentators has produced a dream version of the city whose material fate they are concerned with. They have done this through reecting poetically on their own experience. They function as messengers who are in some sense estranged from daily reality but who believe that they are the guardians of a deeper understanding of that physical aspect of the city. Peter Ackroyd Whereas Benjamin nds urban meaning through analysis of his own urban experience, Ackroyd reects on the city in a more detached manner in his biography of London and more subtly in his novel concerning the churches of London, Hawksmoor.61 Where Benjamin places himself as a gazer and walker on the street and reects on the nature of the aneur’s role, Ackroyd deals with the city as if it was a person with a body and a history62 and draws on the acts of the citizen body to give content to the urban persona.63 Yet he shares with Benjamin the view that the task of the performer of urban meaning is both historical and ideological. It is through drawing all the times of the city’s past into the continuous space of its material site that the aneur can both encounter urban sights, sounds and smells and pass beyond the material outward surface to the inner, and for Ackroyd, mystical or occult, meaning. Ackroyd’s approach to psycho-geography weaves the personal and the material together in several ways and aspects of this viewpoint can be read alongside biblical prophecy. The book of Lamentations, for example, is a prophetic example of the act of personifying the city and thus offering an account of the current urban condition. In 1:1 the narrator operating as outside observer characterizes the city as lled with sorrow, likening it to a newly bereaved 60. 61. 62. 63. 1

For an account of Amos as wisdom teacher, see Paul, Amos, 104–7. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (London: Penguin, 1993). Ibid., 1. Ibid.

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

39

widow. Widow Zion becomes the Daughter of Zion in v. 6 and the metaphor of a woman who has lost her family is extended to cover the population of Jerusalem, the children of Zion in vv. 7–8. In v. 9 the city speaks for herself as we hear the sound of her cry to God for support against a triumphant enemy. Verse 17 pictures the utter ruin of Jerusalem in the image of a woman who stands in the public space and reaches out to potential sympathizers only to be denitively rejected, left to her own misery. In 2:20 the same manner of urban portraiture occurs. But this time the city stands in its lonely dignity of total suffering and demands to know why such extreme devastation has been wrought on her. The nal image that the reader is left with is the woman who is on her own yet demands the justice of a hearing and an answer from the deity for the destiny that has come upon her.64 The mapping of the Daughter of Zion draws together spatial and temporal modes of narration. It is through the spatial framework of the text and its mapping of the female gure within the symbolic settings of ruined gates, starving women on the streets, that the depth of urban loss is conveyed. Yet the book of Lamentations is entitled “…of Jeremiah” and as such it invokes the historical account of the fall of Jerusalem found in the preceding prophetic book. Although there is a spatial deployment of a female urban icon in Lamentations, with human beings located within the context of the mapped urban site, there is also a strongly chronological resonance attached to this narrative. Ackroyd, too, has a strong sense of the temporal aspect of the city identity. It is when the historical record of London is engaged that the symbolic representation of the urban psyche is revealed. Walls and Fields Ackroyd notes, for example, that the material site of London has a history of being walled about—from Roman times—and this reality shapes its persona both in terms of creating London as a safe site and dening the content of its psyche. The city understands itself as an integrated urban unit—which includes farms, elds and orchards in the early Middle Ages.65 It is useful to read the references to walls in prophetic texts from this vantage point. The sense of impregnability is found in 64. For a treatment of feminist criticism with regard to the character of Zion, see Carleen Mandolfo, Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations (Atlanta: SBL, 2007). 65. Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 20–22, 27–28. 1

40

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Nah 3, where Nineveh’s prole as an unassailable, imperial power is addressed. In v. 12 the prophet asserts that such apparent strength is an illusion and that her fortresses are shaken like fruit and fall, her gates are set wide open. The image of the wall as safety is thus undermined and hence the fall of the city as a whole is ensured. On the other hand, in Mic 7, Israel’s return to power is expressed through the imagery of wallrebuilding. Verse 11 understands this action as synonymous with extending boundaries and v. 12 pictures the city as attracting many social groups once it is again visible. Here the strength of walling as identifying the urban character is used to re-state the enduring life of a city. In all these instances the imaginary produced is that of city-as-walled space, that is a measure of urban strength and something to be contested when armies march against it. Later in his biography of London Ackroyd reects on the city and nature. He nds in “the contiguity of city and country” symbols of the city itself.66 The plane tree, for example, widely planted in London and remaining over time, is symbolic of the city’s regenerative powers since it sloughs off its sooty bark.67 The emergence of royal parks at the centre of the city, such as Hyde Park, shows that the city has the capacity to move slowly as well as at speed, to embrace silence and to be selfreective.68 Ackroyd’s viewpoint is that urban and rural operate together in London. The parks and gardens are an integral aspect of city-life and offer the wanderer a place of reection on the prole of this historic site. Prophetic voices also make use of nature as a way of dening the urban psyche. At the end of a series of negative comments about ancient cities in his region Isaiah uses nature to make a wider analysis of the ephemeral nature of urban civilization. In Isa 24 the collapse of nature has cosmic effects.69 The earth will dry up and wither in a great drought and so the city too will fall to ruins (v. 13). This is expressly caused by the symbiosis of earth and people; it is the fault of human beings that nature will be ruined, reecting the inner famine of covenantal values. In v. 18 this scene opens out into a further, elemental, collapse in which chaos returns to the entire cosmos, with great waters ooding the earth. The text assumes a cosmic scale of rebellion against divine order and asserts that the heavenly planets will suffer alongside earthly rulers. The focus in the passage is not on the everyday encounter with rural space as 66. 67. 68. 69. 1

Ibid., 409. Ibid., 412. Ibid., 413. Cf. Hans Wildberger, Isaiah (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 446–47.

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

41

productive of a deeper sense of the longevity and inner strength of a city, as it is in Ackroyd’s study; prophetic usage acknowledges the signicance of local viticulture for the life of the city by pointing out that its collapse causes great alarm in the inhabitants, in vv. 7–9. From this point the text moves to cosmic space and to the wider effect of drought (as already noted in v. 4), moving thence to the fragmentation of the world due to ooding in vv. 18–19. Although the imagery used in Isa 24 is negative its underlying role is akin to that of the natural landscape in the biography of London. In both cases the city can be proled through nature imagery as well as by construction symbolism such as walling. In good times there is harmony and symbiosis between built and natural places; so strong is this link that depiction of the negative effect of the natural on the city space as a whole is readily used to comment on the destruction of the city. In Isa 24 nature imagery serves the purpose of undermining the argument that cities are self-contained, inherently powerful entities. Dreams and Nightmares Ackroyd focuses in his biography a great deal on the joint themes of holiness, enchantment and death. “The founding of Westminster Abbey is enwrapped in dreams and visions,” he believes.70 London was once a holy city, having many mystics and visionaries as dwellers. Indeed, in its “very grimy and malodorous streets ‘the gate of heaven’ can be opened.”71 Thus Ackroyd views the city as a link to the beautiful and the good, through the symbolic term “heaven.” Understanding how city space can equate with heavenly beauty is very much part of prophetic thought. In Ezekiel’s vision of a city on a mountain he arrives rst at the temple-site, indicating that the key to urban truth is found in the sacred monument. It is not just the building which is important, however, since what matters is that this is the real dwelling place of a deity. The signicance of this for the portrait of a city is found in ch. 47. This chapter is concerned with the theme of a holy stream, living water which is lifegiving. The energy of the river is its healing powers; fresh water irrigates the banks, causing trees to grow and fruit, and it provides a safe habitat for sh. The local inhabitants—dened as shing villages in v. 10—will have life and prosperity. The river is the presence of transcendent space in the natural world: hence city, nature and the sacred are woven together in the prole of visionary Jerusalem. 70. Ibid., 38. 71. Ibid., 40. 1

42

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The city as access to supernatural power is not all about vision which lifts up and encourages. The city also has roots downwards into the earth, and for Ackroyd this means that London remains tainted with the psyche of doom. Interestingly, he chooses to invoke prophetic imagination in his own cause, viewing London as a site of city-as-doom, being the Jerusalem about which the prophets wrote.72 He takes up Ezek 13 and offers his own commentary on its urban imaginary. He picks up vv. 10–12, which offer an icon of the city as a site of fallibility by using the image of a weak wall construction: covered with whitewash it looks strong but cannot do its job of containment and strength when rain comes.73 So it is that London looks to be a city of strength and a site of rational endeavour, while in fact having a dark, mysterious energy, symbolized by elemental forces such as London fogs and by the presence of so many grave-sites.74 There is a chthonic supernatural energy which looks for blood and can be connected with suffering, death and the devil.75 It is this last, nightmarish side of the urban psyche that Ackroyd focuses on in Hawksmoor. The presence of relics of past, dead, people and places renders the city full of ghosts who still have the power to subvert the living. This imagery is close to that of Steve Pile in Real Cities, where he deals with the urban vampire and the capacity of the city to prey on itself.76 At the start of the novel one of the main characters shows that he is already closely tied to an underground, subterranean force when he both acknowledges and enjoys his isolation from the mass of people in the city.77 As the architect of new churches in London in the seventeenth century he is keen to read urban construction back to ancient times, even to Cain. Tying the city to the image of Cain immediately makes the urban prole one of bloodshed and murder, of greed and hate.78 In his novel Ackroyd makes use of Benjamin’s prole of the aneur as a man estranged from the ordinary lives of citizens but whose acts provide a commentary on the daily busyness of a city. This characterization of an anti-hero allows Ackroyd to associate him with “enchantment,” as when he writes in his character’s persona—“it was in that fateful year of the Plague that the mildewed 72. Ibid., 201. 73. Cf. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 1:295, where the prophet is described as a watchman who must call out the city’s sins. 74. Ackroyd, London, 434. 75. Ibid., 499, 502. 76. Pile, Real Cities, Chapter 3. 77. Ackroyd, Hawksmoor, 2. 78. Ibid., 5–6. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

43

Curtain of the World was pulled aside…and I saw the true Face of the Great and Terrible God.”79 In this novel the act of aneurie is one of menace. The daytime life of an organized city is viewed as at risk from the dark, night-time forces, which exploit it for their own purpose. The human street walker is constantly on the edge of being recruited by these mysterious spirits which have their own power and survival in mind, at the expense of the human subjects. Their existence is entirely tied up with death and their presence more truly shapes the material sites of the city than the human architects who think that they control the process of construction and determine the character of the monuments they are engaged in. This darker side of the city is dened not by logic but by instinct: by the irrational rather than the rational. The citizen who understands this truth believes that he has gained ultimate wisdom yet this is matched by the unravelling of his life and of his reason. A powerful prophetic example of the encounter between a human and a transcendent force of destructive energy is found in the account of Jeremiah. In ch. 1 the prophet learns of his intended role in society which is, at least initially, to proclaim destruction for his own fellow citizens. He is to stand against all rational arguments that a deity cannot abandon his homeland and temple-house. This will be a harsh life but the deity will be with him (v. 18).80 In his oracles the prophet announces great violence to be done against the city, as in ch. 8:13 where the deity starves his people. In the midst of so much suffering and doom the prophetic persona also experiences strain and distress. In ch. 12 Jeremiah is led to question the message he has to proclaim as untrue since there is no immediate punishment for the wicked—such as those who, in the previous chapter, have plotted to kill the prophet himself. In ch. 14 another source of doubt emerges as Jeremiah sees himself as estranged from his fellow prophets. In ch. 15 the prophet laments that he was ever born, so hard is his existence and so alienated has he become from his fellow citizens. He can only throw himself into the image of the God he has come to believe in and beg that deity to care for him. He reminds God how he suffers reproach because of his duty, how he sits alone because of the divine hand on him.81 Like the characters in Ackroyd’s novel, the prophet no longer knows where true meaning lies;

79. Ibid., 12. 80. See Carroll, Jeremiah, 231–33, which details the barrenness of the people against prophetic despair. 81. Ibid., 330–31, where Carroll notes the harshness of Jeremiah’s experience. 1

44

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

he is undone by his trust in the power of death, by the knowledge that death, the irrational answer to a great city’s existence, is more real than the strength of the urban life force. This, then, is a picture of what Pile describes as Occult geography,82 a viewpoint which dwells on the manner in which a city feeds on its living population, where life on the streets is marginal in many ways, with the socially poor and deprived vulnerable to subterranean forces. Ackroyd’s characters are often marginal gures: the night walker, the vagrant, lacking a stable community life. In many ways the biblical prophets are also socially marginal. They are told not to marry or have a dysfunctional marriage thrust upon them. Their children must bear names symbolic of the doom that will fall on the citizenry. Their powers of speech and the way they act are all determined by hidden, terrible energy. The prophetic aneur bears the burden of the people’s activities, which task in its performance shapes the inner psychological make-up of the individual subject. The Drifter In modern accounts the aneur drifts along the street or sits at a pavement café, or loiters with intent, seeking to pick up passers by and engage in a commercial action with them. She or he is not caught up in the endless rush of trafc through the street, is not mindlessly engaged in urban affairs. Spare time is essential for the aneur since it provides a resource for a deeper observation of the functions of places in the city and of urban space. But, as walkers and gazers, prophetic aneurs do not seem to have a great deal of leisure time. They are serious analysts of urban culture who provide a rigorous critique of urban institutions and of city-state behaviour. A great deal of the content of their analysis is doom-laden and their views lead them into ever greater separation from the establishments of their day. Yet, for all this, they are solid upholders of the ultimate worth of urban existence. They are capable of holding out a utopian vision of a “better society” to their readers. Like Benjamin, they argue that mapping the past of a city via its current traces in the material site opens up a valid assessment of contemporary culture. Like Ackroyd, they seek for the urban psyche and are aware of hidden forces at work to shape that identity in unhappy ways. Prophetic aneurs engage their whole self in these activities and in the role of aneur. Ezekiel loses his power of speech, Jeremiah despairs, Hosea wrestles with relationships and loyalty in his marriage. Jonah 82. Pile, Real Cities, 172–75. 1

2. The Prophet as Flaneur

45

binds upon himself righteous anger. The effect of a vocation to stand alongside a city and weigh its worth deeply shapes the psyche of the individual who is called to this role. This is not simply an intellectual exercise but engages the emotions as well; it is not only about strength to stand alone but about bearing the cost of that social role. At the limits of endurance stands Widow Zion, whose self, consumed with pain and suffering, is an icon of the survival beyond what can be borne, to which there is no answer but silence.83 Some of these aneurs are also predatory walkers. They stalk the city, tracking down its contours until a judgment can be passed on it. They deal with the city “as a place of dark imaginings, in the meeting of the horizontal tour with the vertical history of the urban past.”84 Their paths across the city’s places and histories unleash transcendent spiritual energy which shows itself to be the originating power behind the built environment. Coverley describes this when he talks of the city as a dreamscape “in which nothing is as it seems and which is only navigable by those possessing secret knowledge.”85 Or, as Ackroyd concludes about London—the city is always concerned with vision and prophecy; its visionary or mythic status renders it provisional and impalpable.86

83. Regarding Lamentations as a book about survival, see, for instance, Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 84. Coverley, Psychogeography, 14. 85. Ibid., 17. 86. Ackroyd, London, 771. 1

46

Part 2

SPACE AND PLACE IN PROPHETIC URBAN IMAGINATION

1

48

Chapter 3

TEMPLE-SPACE AND URBAN IMAGINARY IN BIBLICAL PROPHECY

In Part 1 of this book I explored the basic concept of psycho-geography as a form of urban exegesis—both with regard to city as objective site and to the subjective role of the aneur in mapping the city. This presentation drew upon the Situationist movement, together with the writings of Walter Benjamin and the Freudian approach of Steve Pile. That rst section of the book established the view that psycho-geography is a wide-ranging theme whose essence is to defy a functional, utilitarian dening of city-space. The combination of objective and subjective perspectives endows a unitary, material prole of the city with a plurality of “picture postcard” variants produced by individual pedestrian adventures in the material site. In common with all forms of urban geography, psycho-geography is concerned with space and places—such as the Arcades whose spatiality is, according to Benjamin, governed by capitalistic desires and intentions.1 Picking up on the topic of space, this second section considers some major issues regarding the urban imagination of the prophetic material of the Hebrew Bible and examines the spatial dimension as a measure of the validation of urban identity. This approach relates to places as “situations,” moments in time-space where over-arching urban systems can be evaluated. A key aspect of the spatial dimension of prophetic presentations of the city is the icon of the temple and its spaces. The three chapters in this section offer an evaluation of how texts produce meaning with regard to the symbolic textual world’s management of the twin icons of temple and city. The focus is ultimately on the use of space in prophetic texts. This chapter addresses the topic through an intertext with specic cultural geographers—Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey. The other two chapters of the section explore the narrative 1. Cf. Benjamin, Reections, Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, section 1, the Arcades.

50

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

construction of space in a specic biblical book, namely Ezekiel and Joel. If it is accepted that prophetic texts produce within their narratives imaginary symbolic cities and temples as tools for reecting on political, social and religious realities, then it is proper to examine the ways in which temple-as-space provides a useful iconography for prophetic writers. The city and the temple function as spatial co-relatives in that they are co-existent and symbiotic places; prophetic literature moves between viewing the city as a human site and as a place subsumed into the sacred site, with the fullest exposition of urban identity provided through visionary experience. The Prole of Temple and City in Prophetic Texts In the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible the city is intimately aligned with the temple since constructing a temple is shown to be central to urban success by providing it with divine protection.2 The temple as place of religious observance engages the city in transcendence, in order to embed civic society in a wider universe and to give stability to government. Yet in many prophetic books the alignment of divine and earthly authority is challenged; the temple as dened by the divine voice stands divided from the palace in a viewpoint which deconstructs and undermines the power of the governing elite.3 In this context temple and city are two parts of the same urban perspective and each can be used to critique the other. Although the temple is the site of worship carried out by orders of priests and hence an urban monument, its destiny is forged by its divine inhabitant. Thus the text of Ezekiel, when it wishes to demonstrate this fact, does so by the symbolic event of the cult icon, the throne-chariot, ying away from the city in ch. 10 and returning in ch. 43. The presentation of prophetic speech as “dabar Adonai” reinforces the view that city affairs are determined by the sacred and that this must not be simplistically interpreted to mean that temple ofcials are infallible. 2. Cf. here the message of the Former Prophets, such as 1 Kgs 6–8, where much narrative space is given to the royal act of temple-building leading to the incoming of the deity. Chapter 9 depicts God as hearing and listening to the dedicatory prayer of the previous chapter and acceding to its request for a permanent divine presence in Jerusalem. 3. Cf. especially the tone of the book of Ezekiel where the Holiness of God, symbolized by his Name, separates itself from possible corruption caused by the socio-political activity of the kingdom. This is present, for example, in ch. 20, which recounts the history of Israel to show that God constantly seeks to keep the Name from being profaned either by the home nation’s acts or by the effect that abandoning it would have on the respect given to the Lord by other societies. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

51

The urban prophetic dynamic is twofold.4 On the one hand there is city as threatened with fragmentation—besieged, isolated, at risk. This picture is found, for instance, in Isa 1, where v. 7 describes the city as desolate and v. 8 as besieged and abandoned. On the other hand there is a city culture which has been enlarged, with peace restored, as found in Isa 40, with its message of consolation and re-population for the cities of Judah. The prophetic voice, as represented by the entirety of a book such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, moves between these two moods, producing icons of city as site of destruction and death: renewed population and material reconstruction. Prophetic texts engage these political and economic shifts of fortune not via a systematic ethical treatise but through the indirect form of rst person and recorded speech. The texts assume an urban setting where temple and palace co-exist and the prophetic messenger evaluates the work of court and priesthood in providing for the safety of the city. Prophetic imagery mediates its evaluation of urban politics through imagery pertaining to the urban site (its streets, gates, houses) and to the temple house (cultic sites, religious praxis). One example of how these elements are interwoven is found in Jer 7, where judgment is passed against those who make queen cakes for religious festivals.5 The narrative construction weaves together cultic practice and the public space of the streets in order to convey its message. The temporal context is the sacred calendar, but this is engaged with popular religious praxis and the manner in which that link is made is through references to family members moving around the streets, children for instance gathering sticks for the cooking re. The image that ties all these strands together is the spatial sign of a dedicated “cake.”6 4. My intention is to examine the construction of the textual worldview and not to make comments concerning details of the historical events which may lie behind given portions of text nor how many authors and editors may have been involved in the production of the nal text. These aspects of biblical interpretation are regularly provided within the major commentaries on each book of prophecy. 5. Although there is some dispute among scholars as to what was actually happening in Jerusalem, given the biblical prohibition of worship of other deities in the Torah, it seems likely that worship of female divine gures was carried on throughout the monarchic period. There is considerable evidence of female imagery in seals and amulets recovered from the area which aligns with biblical Judah. See Othmar Keel’s work on interpreting archaeological material: Othmar Keel and Christopher Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998). 6. The precise shape and decoration of these cakes are uncertain. Cf. Carroll, Jeremiah, 213. 1

52

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The phrase temple-space linked with that of urban imaginary, then, indicates that the icons of city and temple can be used as spatial corelatives to measure the worth of urban systems, a perspective which acknowledges the biblical viewpoint that material and religious dimensions of life go hand in hand. The prophetic approach to the symbiotic relationship between politics and the transcendent is a careful balance between supporting temple-space as key to urban wellbeing and the critique of that view found in the prophet’s voice. Although there is no doubt that the deity is in charge, the texts present competing views of what this means for a given temple-city regime. City-space and Urban Theory These interrogations of the proling of temple-city in prophetic texts are carried out from within the wider framework of modern urban studies and it is helpful, here, to offer an account of how such material relates to ancient city-space. Edward Soja, for instance, notes that the paradigm of the ancient city-state is one in which an urban centre is aligned with neighbouring land, for purposes of food production, and with smaller outlying towns and settlements.7 In this environment the role of the king and that of patron deity are combined in the work of urban government, in a system based on two parallel houses/palaces.8 In this system secular and religious power centres are both engaged in the creation and maintenance of urban communities.9 In his book on Urban Theory John Short offers some relevant comments on the manner in which cities can be delineated. He believes that there is continuity between all forms of city-dwelling, from past to present time. Cities in general are, for example, “agents of change, the embodiment of social transformation. The city is a site of social change as well as a site of social theorising.”10 The term “city” remains “plastic 7. See here Soja, Postmetropolis, 20–36, where Soja develops a prole of ancient city culture in line with archaeological ndings. 8. The biblical material indicates, for instance, that both God’s house and that of the king can be indicated by the term hekal, as used in David’s speeches regarding the construction of a temple in 2 Samuel. Cf. Jon Levinson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 97–101, “House of YHWH, House of David.” 9. This alignment of political and religious matters in biblical material has been addressed by Gordon McConville in God and Earthly Power: An Old Testament Political Theology: Genesis to Kings (New York: T&T Clark International, 2006). See especially the conclusion provided in Chapter 10 of McConville’s volume. 10. Short, Urban Theory, 1. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

53

and exible,” inclusive of all types of communal dwelling which are larger than a large village.11 The essence of such a society is the segmentation of the site and its population into designated groups each with its own space; hence the city is a “nested structure of power, difference, polity and commity.”12 The organization of cities is based on power politics, on the struggle for power between competing groups; we “cannot understand architecture without reference to power and difference.”13 Just as Steve Pile Short accepts a symbolic link between personal body and the idea of social body, hence a city is primarily a “human construct” which is constantly changing shape due to the shift of power among elites and its consequences in the material environment.14 In line with his overall review of urban life Short moves into a discussion of a series of particular models of the city. Each model is to be seen as a metaphor which represents one possible model of how the city decides on the use of its space. Because cities can change the self-identity which they promote and thus invent fresh urban imaginaries for themselves, Short suggests that it is “sometimes useful to see the city as a text that is constantly being re-written, reconstructed and deconstructed.”15 This is a helpful perspective for the reader of prophetic material in that it makes clear the link between material site and symbolic representation. In this theory each stage of a city’s life can be read as providing a new metaphoric identity, with these imaginative self-promotions being as signicant for urban studies as a physical examination of city-space. The city is implicitly the work of human design, a “human construct,”16 although Short notes that in the past there was a “dominant image of God as architect.”17 At the start of his book Short attempts to provide an overarching survey of some of the major images of city-space which can be deduced from studying individual cities and their operation and two of these models are particularly helpful for readers of prophetic urban imagination in that they prole the twinned themes of religion and politics which have already been agged up as worthy of attention, in this chapter. He entitles these models, cosmic and political city, respectively.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 1

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 161.

54

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Short points out that the history of urbanism indicates that cities are viewed as religious artefacts, reecting and embodying cosmologies.18 The major public spaces of a city offer the context for ceremonial action in which there is a union of religious thought and cosmic narrative.19 The very design of a city may mirror the presumed design of the cosmos, providing a hierarchical chain between gods, ruling class and the mass of the populace. The city gives a safe and permanent access point to the divine, while also legitimating any given regime through its endorsement by divine authority.20 In putting forward this city model Short is close to the thought of Yi-Fu Tuan, who denes “construed space” as having three types, one of which is the mythical.21 Mythical space is a conceptual reality which has a pragmatic effect in that people organize their lives around it.22 Even though the actual content of mythical space is not clearly understood there is a belief that spaces relevant to the proper running of human society include one which is the unknown space of transcendence.23 It is useful to read the temple speeches of Jeremiah from the prospect of a cosmic city model. One such speech is found in ch. 11. Here the deity provides the prophet with an opinion of city space which he is to make known to the citizens of Jerusalem. The task involves the messenger in denunciation of the city. The message attacks the current use of temple-space; “what is my beloved doing in my temple as she works out her evil schemes?” (v. 15). But the reason for the verbal attack goes wider than random cultic acts. The city is said to have broken its contract with the deity in vv. 4–5. It is that contract with the ancestors which established the people in the land in which they were able to construct their city. However, they have ceased to practice monolatry and have become systematic polytheists (v. 10). The construction of meaning in this chapter works on the assumption that the reader agrees with a cosmic city pattern. The urban space is one with that of divine space and the religious aspect of civic duty requires practical acknowledgment of that fact. Within that assumed worldview the actual question that is a matter of contestation is which deity the city owes allegiance to. By attributing an identity to that God/gods, the 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 17. 22. Ibid. 23. Cf. ibid., 86. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

55

populace both structure their sacred liturgies and also drawn mythical space into their own space as protection against hostile forces. The critical point, then, is whether the inhabitants have correctly assigned identity to the urban mythical space; the prophetic voice says that they have not. Short’s approach to “political city” notes that urban politics are concerned with who has power in the city and what to do with that power.24 Authority tends to reside at the top of a political hierarchy which not only operates formal power mechanisms but also shapes a wider political agenda by promoting, isolating or marginalizing topics for political debate.25 With this pattern in mind, Short argues, we can see that urban crises can in fact be legitimation crises. When events in the city move swiftly and political factions vie for authority, when a new regime takes over the city, there is a need for city images which will validate bids for power and lead to popular acceptance of a given elite.26 In times of rapid change, then, the production of rival symbolic representations of what is best for the city lead to image campaigns.27 Such image campaigns can be detected in the text of Jer 27–28. In ch. 27 Jeremiah graphically endorses the view that the best political move at that moment was to accept the imperial rule of Babylon. He is inspired to fashion a yoke and to put it on his neck, in v. 2. Not only does this symbolize the view of a “peace party” at the Judahite court it warns the court that getting this wrong will lead to more military action by Babylonian forces and result in complete loss of independence, as vv. 8–10 demonstrate. Jeremiah then provides historical support for his symbolic representation, drawing on the reign of a previous ruler (vv. 12–15). His political speech contains a warning against the advice of a rival faction, described as “lying prophets.” It is clear from v. 14 that this group prefers the opposing plan of campaign, that is, the faction wants to break ties with Babylon in an attempt to regain full independence at a local level. Not to be left out, Hananiah, who is presumably a leading advisor to the opposite group, carries out his own graphic symbolization of the urban future by breaking the yoke on Jeremiah’s neck, in 28:12. He accompanies this with a speech in support of his faction’s plan for foreign affairs. This prophetic drama appears to be an example of the kind of image wars that arise when the international scene is volatile and 24. 25. 26. 27. 1

Short, Urban Theory, 144. Ibid. Ibid., 153. Cf. ibid., 146–53.

56

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

decisions have to be taken by the government which will have serious consequences for the survival of the city. Since this narrative material also draws on the prole of “cosmic city,” it is not surprising to hear that the debate is ended when a divine oracle not only condemns Hananiah to death but also carries this act through.28 In this part, concerning spatiality and the application of spatial theory to interpreting biblical text, I wish to draw on Short’s comment, referred to above, that cities can be read like texts. They share the nature of texts as human constructs which aim to convey truth to their readers. The prophetic material of the Hebrew Bible aims to communicate cosmic understanding of the historical life and work of urban elites to its audience. Each individual book has its own method of doing this by the construction of a symbolic urban world which expresses serious evaluation of the material city. In the urban imagination of prophets the text is the city; it is through textual representation that the political city of temporal experience is aligned with the cosmic city of religious belief. On the political front these works mediate the experience of power moving from an indigenous culture to that of an invading city-state. Local kingdoms nd their power source in the alliance of city and deity, but the prophetic message is that divine force ghts for the enemy armies, as in the Day of the Lord theme in Amos 5:18–27. Thus in the book of Amos the prophetic voice systematically attacks the social and economic aspirations of Samaria’s elite, its complacency in its own authority as in 6:1, and places this reality alongside an international scene in which a new super-power has arisen in Mesopotamia and threatens the kingdom from the north. Because this book emerged within an urban culture which ts the model of cosmic city, politics are not divorced from the mythical space of transcendence. It is the cosmic city which in the end denes political reality. The urban site which represents the cosmic point of control is the city temple and its image is embedded within the textual city. The temple of the narrative world of prophecy functions as a public monument in a parallel manner to that of the historical world. Political disputes are fought out in the space of a narrated temple just as in an historical one. 28. Although this material appears to give a historical account of the prophet and his experiences there is no certainty among scholars on this matter. That war and peace factions existed and that divination and prophecy were sources of political advice are likely to have foundations in historical reality when the wider prole both of the political scene in the region and evidence for the political use of divination is taken into account. In relation to the issue of a personal memoir in Jeremiah see, for instance, Carroll, Jeremiah, 55–64 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

57

The temple icon offers a space through which to debate the continuing life of the local culture. The textual temple is both a space and the focus for the social production of space, in this case the political arena of competing city elites. Geopolitics and Geo-symbols Temple-space is inherently a political space which deals with the ownership of territory from a cosmic angle, as shown in the commentary on Jer 27–28 above. The identication of a given place with cultural critique means, according to Joel Bonnemaison, that “space may be produced by society yet a society creates itself within a cultural space.”29 The use of spatiality to express social identity leads to the creation of urban founding myths which locate city culture through an “initial place” which serves to identify a given city in all further versions of its self-narrative across the timeframe of its existence.30 Bonnemaison’s study of Melanesian culture results in his denition of the category of “reticulated space,” which is a network of spaces where each group has its niche alongside all other groups.31 It is through the development of such spatial webs that groups identify themselves vis-à-vis their use of, and control over, areas of land. A group’s concept of its territory, in this model, is achieved through the growth of a mental map which traces its command over land and its resources. Once this foundational pattern is set up individual places function within it as geo-symbols. “A geo-symbol is a material, geographic reality which operates as a sign in space that mirrors and shapes cultural identity—often a sacred site such as Jerusalem or Rome.”32 The temple-space depicted in prophetic texts functions as such a geo-symbol insofar as it is a tool for evaluating the overall state of the political city. The symbolic treatment of the temple in these texts provides a set of geo-symbols which perform the cultural role of “initial places.” Doreen Massey offers another entry point into the discussion of the role of symbolic cultural markers when she suggests that space and spaces are concepts which are co-dependent and which in turn depend on the consciousness of city 29. Joel Bonnemaison, Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 2. This is essentially a work of anthropological approaches to space; its approach works well with social geography’s search for lived experience. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 8–9. 32. Ibid., 45. 1

58

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

dwelling on the part of inhabitants.33 From this viewpoint the city is a kind of “open intensity,” enabling us to image the complexity of many different urban features, established by the historical socio-economic relationships of inhabitants.34 Massey’s views on the production of space by lived experience can be linked with Bonnemaison’s discussion of the nature of geo-symbols, which he suggests “mark out a territory with an array of signicant monuments.”35 Massey claims that the spatial organization of an urban community inuences the way that society works, that “spatial congurations produce effects.”36 From that angle, public monuments would both affect the self understanding of city populations and be constructed to realize a particular identity already operating in the civic mind. Hence geo-symbols could occur in both material and symbolic format. Bonnemaison’s argument that geo-symbols represent the emotional response to important places, including religious sites, empathizes with this approach. Bonnemaison points out that the “fall of sanctuaries and capitals in the course of warfare always provoked moral upheaval out of proportion with their strategic value” because of their underlying mythical function which is to strengthen value-systems and keep them alive.37 Such symbols incorporate past tradition as well as present experience.38 It is from places which unite past and present, lived experience and ideological reection that communities develop their culture, since culture is the “aggregate of what human beings inherit from previous generations, although each new generation re-interprets the tradition.”39 The temple is a robust source of cultural meaning in the biblical city, situated adjacent to the residence of the king and forming a dual seat of urban government. This picture emerges from texts such as 2 Sam 6–7. These chapters tell of the political strength of David as he carved out for himself a kingdom and established his seat of government at the stronghold of Jerusalem. The sequence of events makes the point that citybuilding needs to engage a deity as well as a human ruler. In ch. 6 the king “brings God to the city” in the form of the divine Ark. Thus he creates a fundamental alliance between city and deity. In ch. 7 the king .

33. Doreen Massey, “On Space and the City,” in Massey, Allen, and Pile, eds., City Worlds, 160. In this chapter Massey seeks to dene the nature and function of cities in terms of spatial perspectives. 34. Ibid., 161. 35. Bonnemaison, Culture and Space, 33. 36. Ibid., 162. 37. Bonnemaison, Culture and Space, 47, 81. 38. Ibid., 56. 39. Ibid., 59. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

59

reects that he has now got his own settled site of residence and wishes to offer the same benet of a “House” to God. This desire is resisted by the deity who does, however, promise to build the king a house. The play of the text draws together palace and temple, temple and dynasty in the reader’s mind. The narrative has invoked the symbolic sense of remaining, abiding and attached political particularity to the timelessness of the cosmic. Second Samuel 7:24–26 makes this point with its repetition of olam (“eternity”). In later sections of the Former Prophets the Temple emerges as a large monument at the heart of the urban site which experiences stages of alteration and re-building. Second Kings 22, for example, depicts Josiah inheriting a temple which is to be repaired (v. 6). This temple is a key urban site since it holds the royal treasury, a place which has hidden depths since it is there that a key book is found which will unlock the true nature of Judahite religion and secure physical safety for the city, as evidenced in vv. 14–20. As part of the religious reforms following on from the discovery the king decrees the removal of cult items which previous rulers had deposited in the temple, as narrated in 23:12–14. The textual account of this scene promotes a sense of the sacred public monument as the “hearth” of the city—space which enshrines not only a particular divine identity but which educates new generations of citizens as to the authority which is the guardian of their city’s security. Temple-space fulls a key role in the symbolic worldview of biblical prophecy as a geo-symbol which controls the destiny of collective urban identity. It provides in literary form the cultural role of monuments and public architecture. It is from this foundation in urban spatial studies that aspects of the thought of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey will now be used to explore specic prophetic texts and their use of temple imagery in more detail. Both scholars engage with the denition of space as a concept through a mixture of intellectual reection and social engagement with physical spaces. Henri Lefebvre Lefebvre’s major work, The Production of Space, provides a valuable reading tool for biblical investigations of representational spaces, the architectonics of space and contradictory space.40 Representational space links cultural meaning with the construction of given sites which acquire 40. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). This work in fact provided the basis for postmodern geography’s interest in social space, though it is a work of social science. 1

60

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

symbolic value; thus monuments function as places for urban activity and as repositories of communal identity. The term “contradictory space” points to the fact that any imposition of a spatial framework leaves out/ makes space for, further and other aspects of social meaning. Spaces designated originally in one particular way can be re-appropriated by new social usage and produce new meaning. In what follows each of these three categories will be applied to reading prophetic urban narratives. Lefebvre argues that “every society produces a space, its own space.”41 Hence space is performed as much as it is built or intellectually delineated. Geographical sites function as symbolic sites insofar as they are related to rituals of death/renewal, as holy and cursed sites and as places linked to gods.42 Representational spaces “are redolent with imaginary and symbolic elements which have their source in the history of a people.”43 There is no space outside experienced sites, for social activity alone provides the content for the term space/place. In biblical prophecy society produces its space via the speech of the prophet, in a narrative of divine pronouncements which mediate a value judgment from God to ruling elite. In the case of Isa 6, experienced space is offered to the reader by the medium of prophetic vision. Within this personalized narrative a representational space emerges which unites message with temple-space via the recorded dialogue of prophet and deity. The narrative aligns symbolic sacred space with the physical temple in the image of the deity “high and lifted up”: language which duplicates the cosmic nature of divine authority. Having established a recognizable link with an important geo-symbol in Jerusalem, the text is enabled to give serious weight to the condemnation of city life which follows in v. 11.44 Although the rationale for this event is the lack of perception on the part of the populace (vv. 9–10), the real power base for urban destruction comes from the divine sanctuary.45 41. Ibid., 31. 42. Ibid., 34. 43. Ibid., 41. 44. See here, Timothy Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90–96, on the tension between the Great House and vernacular dwellings. Respect for the Great House is a political symbol; the topic of dwellings is an ethical matter in which houses symbolically represent human culture. 45. Mark George has recently provided a spatial approach to reading the sacred site as socially signicant, as a symbolic space which holds physical and intellectual levels together and by means of which ritualized actions transfer social energy; see George, Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space (Atlanta: SBL, 2009), especially Chapter 3. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

61

A social, political message is thus validated by the construction of a textual setting which draws to itself the identity attached to the building at the heart of an historical city. The textual temple functions in accord with the physical site, material site as eshed out by visionary experience which the prophet lives through and which tunes into transcendent space. By mirroring a familiar cultural space the literary narrative encourages the reader’s acceptance that the city is at risk of invasion in a context in which the sanctuary operates as a sign of despair. Architectonics Lefebvre moves on to discuss the nature of boundaries and whether these are porous. A house, he suggests, is viewed as having robust borders such as strong walls; yet, viewed through the image of modern energy ows in which gas and electricity pass across the domestic threshold, it can be seen to have imsy boundaries.46 The topic of house leads on to that of the body in relation to architecture, which produces living bodies, each with its distinctive traits.47 Monumental spaces in particular embody communal identity while also hiding the fact that these buildings owe their existence to the political will of an elite. Appropriated spaces such as a temple provide a site which serves the needs of a particular group.48 Thus there is a link between static monuments and shifts in city identity since successive elites claim authority by virtue of their relationship with key urban monuments. This linking of monumental space and cultural identity can be used to examine Amos 7, which contains an account of the prophet’s encounter with the royal priesthood.49 The priest at the shrine of Bethel admonishes the prophet and rejects his right to operate in that place because his identity as a non-Israelite gives him no right to perform prophecy. However, the narrative of the previous verses tells the reader that the real reason for Amaziah’s opposition is protection of the local elite. In v. 10 the king is informed that Amos is encouraging a rebellion against the king from within his own subjects. What appears to be a religious debate is in fact driven by political motives on the part of an elite culture. The

46. Lefebvre, Space, 93. 47. Ibid., 137. 48. Ibid., 165. 49. See Paul, Amos, 239, which deals with Amaziah as an ofcial state representative and Bethel as established as a state shrine in competition with Jerusalem in the south. 1

62

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

reader knows that Amos has been openly attacking the privileged class, the women in 4:1–2 and the men in 6:1–6, thus commenting negatively on the overall social framework of the city-state.50 But the real reason for the temple servant’s objection comes into the open in 7:13. Amos’ activity is illegal because the monument is not open to the public voice of the pilgrim since it belongs to the king. This stance represents an approach to temple-space which puts the political city in supreme control over the cosmic city. The narrative ow of the book, however, unpicks that perspective, implying that the ruling classes are not supported by the local deity since the monument is primarily his home and the site which he will destroy. The temple remains a key geo-symbol but God takes charge of it, occupying the space of worship to measure them in 7:7–851 and taking over the place of a high priest at the altar in 9:1 to demand that the building collapse onto the head of the people in a seismic event.52 Thus the prophetic imagination re-establishes the primacy of cosmic over political in such a way that a familiar geo-symbol opens out to include both the destruction of the material monument and the abandonment of the citizens.53 Monumentality is thus connected with the eternal nature of the transcendent, though that timeless authority is in tension with the instability of political space. Architectonic space in Amos provides a nuanced symbolic site where a monument stands liminally between the relative space of a secular government and the absolute power of an eternal deity. Contradictory Space In the production of social space there is, according to Lefebvre, a stage in which material usage crosses over into absolute space. The idea of the modern state produces a social site in which an entity created by war and violence claims dominance.54 “Social space shows itself to be politically

50. Ibid., 128–35, for a commentary on Amos 4, and pp. 200–203, for a commentary on Amos 6. 51. Ibid., 236, regarding divine resolve for demolition: the mainstays of Samarian life are to fall. 52. Ibid., 276, for a discussion of whether this passage uses symbolic language or either anticipates or relates to an actual experience of an earthquake. 53. Ibid., 152–56, which examines the doxological vocabulary of divine upheaval and the revelation of transcendent meaning within chaotic natural occurrences. 54. Lefebvre, Space, 293. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

63

instrumental in that it facilitates the control of society.”55 But once this pattern is dened it gives rise to the possibility of contradictory claims on the use of communal urban space and the city becomes a setting for struggle between warring groups.56 The contestants all aim to reach the places where power resides, to occupy it and so create a new political framework. The nature of political struggle is represented in the book of Micah via an interweaving of city-temple themes in which the relationship of cosmic and political is once again at stake. The political context of city space is under condemnation in 1:3–8 where Jerusalem and Samaria are both named for disaster. The source for the comment on city society is the cosmic sphere since God acts as prosecutor and as witness to the truth of the accusation in v. 2. The site of the symbolic temple validates the message as truly divine.57 But whereas v. 2 situates the message as “coming out” from the temple v. 3 has the deity “coming down” from his transcendent temple in judgment. This use of “out” and “down” as separate realities sets up a contradiction of the union of deity and temple since, in v. 7, the evils to fall on the cities include the ruination of Samaria’s temple. The textual account of cosmic space not only prioritizes temple over city, it also replaces the icon of an urban monument with a place which is wholly transcendent.58 The death of a political regime means that cultic activity as a reliable icon of the city’s worth is put in doubt as the divine voice performs contradictory space. Yet the signicance of the geo-symbolic cultic site is so important that the narrative returns to it in ch. 4 as the locus of both a restored monument and renewed local society.59 These examples of reading text through the lens of Lefebvre’s thought lead the reader to understand the long life of geo-symbols and endorses their social signicance as stable symbols which can be used to shape and manage messages about social and political change. Elites fall and others rise but all are presided over by the timeless symbol of cultic

55. Ibid., 349. 56. Ibid., 365. 57. For reection on the phrase “comes out,” see Leslie Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 269–70. 58. Ibid., 317–19. Allen explores the gap between the expectations of the elite class and the superciality of its own social foundations. This leaves the deity in the role of outsider to a humanly constructed religious state. 59. Ibid., 322–23. Allen notes the long tirade against Jerusalem as balanced against the wide scope of salvic treatment of the community following on from judgment. 1

64

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

activity and monumental space. Despite the collapse of one generation of urban elite the symbiosis of political and religious authority is so culturally valuable that it can still be called upon to express the prole of a society duly authorized and underwritten by an absolute power base. Continuity and unchanging reality emerges here as a central emphasis. By contrast, Massey’s work produces a reading of temple-space as more dynamic and subject to ows. Space as Flows Massey’s book, For Space, deals with parallel concerns to those of Lefebvre. She, too, is engaged with the rejection of spatial order as a one-dimensional reality which can be imposed on temporal dynamism.60 For Massey, space does not exist outside of inter-relationships and is the sphere of multiplicity, of contemporaneous plurality. Thus space is always “open,” always under construction. Massey’s approach leads to a focus on maps and gaps, on the undecidability of space.61 This is due to the fact that space is shaped by encounters with time: history has a geography. A landscape has become what it is at the moment I view it because of its interaction with change over years and centuries. Hence space and place are linked concepts since both are events. As Massey sees it, “we are always, inevitably, making spaces and places.”62 Maps: Slices Through Time Massey notes that maps are used as an ordering tool, for “with the map we can locate ourselves and nd our way.”63 In this perspective maps provide a coherent, closed system but Massey argues for an alternative interpretation in which maps operate as markers of dynamic encounters, as slices through space which disrupt sense of coherence and continuity.64 When reading the text of Micah this approach adds to the meaning derived from using Lefebvre’s models of contradictory space, which stresses the coherence and closure of a key spatial marker. Massey’s

60. Doreen Massey, For Space (California: Sage, 2005). This study aims to reengage study of spatiality with a temporal perspective since neither time//space measurement on its own is sufciently ne-tuned. 61. Ibid., 106–25. 62. Ibid., 175. 63. Ibid., 106. 64. Ibid., 107–9. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

65

work militates against such closure; space can be viewed as a matter of chance,65 as the interaction of two sources of causality.66 Spatial understanding is to be viewed through the model of travel, where different spaces meet and temporally engage with each other. Reading Micah from this angle leads to a focus on the two “comings out” of the narrative. In Mic 1:3 the Word of God comes out of the temple as a witness against the earth and its inhabitants. The speeches which follow use the spatial sequence of travel from the temple to demonstrate the divine encounter with the spaces and places of earth which leads to the condemnation of urban society as awed. The narrative structure encourages the reader to share that spatial sense on an imaginary visit to houses and their ttings in order to perceive the reality of social evil, greed and the seizure of goods in 2:1–2.67 The reader sees house set against house as some dwellers drive out others from their property and even “eat up” the rival group.68 This prole is balanced by a second coming out in Mic 4. Here it is not the deity who travels from the temple but peoples who journey towards Jerusalem/Zion. In this second phase of time/space travel it is not domestic space but the prole of the sacred site which is revealed. Unlike the human dwellings encountered in the rst journey the temple is a place of law and judgment where violence is ended and by virtue of which people sit at peace under fertile vines.69 Whereas the travel encounters of phase one lead out from a venerable monument and progressive distance from the centre adds to the dysfunctionality of communal relations, the movement of phase two draws back those who have been fragmented due to their distance from the centre to the key area of temple-space so that they are no longer lost in the margins. At the heart of the twin message of alienation and reunion lie the static architectonics of the house of the deity but the signicance of this monument is indicated by the dynamism of encounter between cosmic space and human temporality.

65. Ibid., 111. 66. Ibid., 116. 67. Allen, Micah, 287–88. Allen comments upon the actions of land-barons; the exploitation of new economic resources only benetted one section of the community. 68. Ibid., 296–97. Allen argues that social relationships are governed by the division between “haves” and “have nots.” 69. Ibid., 325–27. Allen suggests that the text moves from a centripetal to a centrifugal vantage point—not looking in to Zion but looking out from there to view the wider impact of divine inuence. 1

66

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Politics and the Event of Place Space as the arena of “thrown-togetherness” leads to the consideration of politics as what occurs when we relate to the neighbours with whom we are juxtaposed.70 Massey suggests that spatial politics involves the ways in which juxtapositions may be regulated, how space might be coded and terms of connectivity negotiated.71 It is to the political aspect of spatiality that Massey turns in her discussion of political cosmology.72 “Political activity reshapes both identities and spatial relations,” she argues, since “space is perpetually recongured through political engagement.”73 Public space in the city offers the opportunity of “open space”—places where different opinions can be freely voiced and debated.74 She suggests that “they are necessarily negotiated, sometimes riven with antagonism, always contoured through the playing out of unequal social relations” and this is what constitutes them as truly public.75 This approach to the concept of political spatiality can be applied to a reading of Amos 7:10–17. As noted above v. 10 is a clear indication that Amos is producing a political message which contests the royal authority.76 It appears that Amos has treated the temple as a suitable place in which to express his accusations against the ruling class, thus nuancing the view that a royal shrine is a public space which is simultaneously the royal domain. Amos and Amaziah contend the right of speech with regard to a single site in which they have been thrown together as religious gures.77 This encounter is a political and religious event in which the stability of Samaria’s government in re-congured. Stability, both of temple and city, is once again put in tension with the dynamic of change—this time caused by a new voice speaking within the cultic site and claiming it as a truly public space of contradictory politics as opposed to the private space of a royal shrine which works to undergird the status quo.

70. Massey, Space, 151. 71. Ibid., 150. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 183. 74. Ibid., 153. 75. Ibid. 76. Cf. Paul, Amos, 249. 77. Ibid., 242. It is not Amos’ role as prophet which is denied but rather his right to act this way in the northern site. 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

67

Making and Contesting Time-spaces Massey moves from political space to broader issues of openness and closure in measuring space/place. She suggests that these are not terms which can be dened as total opposites, rather they co-exist in real terms. Thus the question to be asked is how much openness and closure exists in a given situation and how this is managed.78 This becomes a matter of boundaries which may be erected to control entry to spaces and of legitimation of those seeking to enter. Isaiah 56:1–8 provides an example of such negotiation with regard to belonging to both a cultural community and to access to the site of worship. Verses 1–2 make an over-arching statement about correct behaviour; the twin principles of fairness in human dealings and religious respect are enunciated, which leads into a more detailed explanation of belonging. Behind the text may lie disputes as to who is truly a Judahite,79 since the passage argues that it is not ethnic origin or family connections or the status of head of house which gives a person the right of entry to the temple, here envisaged as both house and holy mountain.80 The text makes clear that entry to the temple and union with the community via this geo-symbolic space is determined by an individual’s belief and conduct. Generic states such as being a foreigner or a eunuch do not in themselves make a person socially marginal. The underlying trend here is both the creation of a boundary around temple-space—there are criteria to be met before a person can enter—and the provision of an open door policy. Verse 8 proles transcendent space as a place of gathering in rather than pushing out. In this religio-political context the temple is an ambivalent sign of identity. The sign is hegemonic but also permissive. Socially this allows for the continuity of a local culture while adapting it to a new time frame in which there is a wider spectrum of inhabitants in the city, under regional imperial politics.81 Once again temple-space provides a point of crossover between the static monument and temporal re-inventions of both material sites and urban cohorts. As 78. Massey, Space, 179. 79. Cf. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow, on the effect of the Persian context on production of textual messages, and especially Chapter 2 and Chapter 9, on political and social maintenance. 80. Cf. Childs, Isaiah, 458–59. This motif is a stereotype of Third Isaiah and establishes a different relationship between Israel and the nations. The focus is on the activity of joyful praise in the house, because that is the place of access to the divine presence dwelling on the Holy Mountain. 81. Berquist, Persia’s Shadow, 73–75. 1

68

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Massey argues, “the differential placing of local struggles within the complex power-geometry of spatial relations is a key element in the formation of political identities and policies.”82 Territoriality The work of Massey and Lefebvre highlights the signicance of spatiality for expressing political viewpoints. Whether this is through a static icon of communal space or through the encounter between this place and city inhabitants during their daily journeying, the relationship between population, power and iconic space is central to the construction of prophetic worldviews. Viewed from this angle the temple icon offers a major mapping marker which endorses or queries the authority of a local government, as has already been discussed above. Bonnemaison asserts the importance of spatial measurement as a tool of identity creation which is aligned with the concept of territoriality. He argues that “territory incorporates the various identity-related and political geo-symbols that bind human communities” and includes in his reection the value of religious sites in this regard.83 David Delaney asserts that the concept of “territory” is a human social creation.84 Delaney believes that “territoriality is an important element of how human associations and institutions organise themselves in space.”85 From this angle territory operates as a “bounded social space that inscribes meaning onto dened segments of the material world.”86 Both static and dynamic understandings of the mapping process reect on the manner in which symbolic textual worlds map meaning onto the historical material state which lies behind the literary world. Whereas the static perspective does this by setting clear boundary frames, the dynamic approach to space sees in this activity the creation of a line to be transgressed.87 These mechanisms lead into a conscious act which can be dened as “to territorialise.”88 The organization of space which requires mapping space within a frame is parallel to Lefebvre’s views on architectonics.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 1

Massey, Space, 183. Bonnemaison, Culture and Space, 118. David Delaney, Territory: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Ibid., 10. Ibid., 14. Ibid. Ibid., 15.

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

69

The enclosure of spaces pins down social meaning: as Delaney notes, “territory always signies.”89 The role of spatial measurement here is that of creating a regulatory social system which classies activity according to the place of occurrence.90 But borders are not necessarily reied, so territorializing can “involve practices of evasion, negotiation, resistance.”91 Places turn into meeting sites where cultural hybridity is negotiated: as indicated with regard to the eunuch and foreigner in Isaiah’s text world earlier in this chapter. Whereas Lefebvre’s approach deals with temple as territorial symbol, Massey’s perspective highlights the importance of access to place as a territorial act. Both viewpoints endorse Delaney’s argument that territory regularly deals with aspects of social power. Hence the function of textual spatial aesthetics is both that of elucidation of traditional cultural borders, the unity of king, deity and elite politics, and the challenge to such unitive ideology. The second function makes possible the re-use of a central geo-symbol in changed political circumstances by transgressing the old pattern of mapping territory and so allowing a greater freedom of access to social membership in the city. Delaney argues that discourse has a vital role in the performance of territorialization, stating that “cultural-cognitive formations and linguistic structures”92 provide “conceptual elds through which difference and sameness are registered.”93 The use of narrative formats to disseminate urban identity is not a matter of harmonizing since violence and the threat of violence nd expression in literary mapping passages, as seen in Amos 7, for example. The use of implied threat to social cohesion frequently involves separation of insiders from outsiders.94 The movement of text in Isa 56 assumes that sorting of real citizens has been conducted by opposing groups and sets this aside as not worthy of best social practice in the task of re-creating Jerusalem’s urban identity. The written text and its narrative space performs a central role in promoting debate concerning the proper use of city space and negotiates issues such as who may validly have access to monuments which symbolize the ongoing power and authority of local government.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 1

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 99–100.

70

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Conclusion The exploration of temple and city space has demonstrated that the prophetic texts deal with both cosmic and political models of the city. These models are overall symbiotic but the texts mediate and manage social settings in which the city as political site is in tension with the primacy of divine space. In depicting the tensions and resolution of imbalances perceived in the real world of material cities and temples the prophets are able to make use of the symbolic temple since it, too, can perform the function of a familiar and acceptable geo-symbol, so allowing contradictory and changing urban identities to emerge. In extreme cases the literary universe is forced to abandon the concept of a public monument as source for any kind of reassurance for an urban community and to fall back on the icon of holy mountain which lies behind the formalized image of an urban place of divine habitation. At this point the possibility of a city having a positive cosmic identity is completely negated. The function of city and temple-spaces as co-existent markers of urban life makes possible a religious spatiality in which city is measured by temple, where the ofce of the deity subordinates that of the secular government. Since the reversal of political authority is presided over by a deity whose power both condemns and vindicates urban culture, the temple turns into a vehicle for discussion of political space. The concept of spatial politics thus construed entails a unitive approach to political theology in which temple and city as spatial co-relatives bring together the secular and the religious in a single dynamic production of urban identity. The temple-city imaginary has a political role, utilizing sacred space for social and economic purposes. It is in the narrative descriptions of cultic sites that burning political issues are rehearsed, challenges mounted, authoritative evaluations of regional politics made. The engagement with cultural geographers allows the reader to reect on static and dynamic models of spatiality and to arrive at a variety of interpretations of prophetic text. Lefebvre draws attention to the lived experience behind texts, not from a chronological viewpoint but from that of sociology. His work supports a focus on the unchanging signicance of key urban religious sites in the production and maintenance of cultural identity. It is the very stability of key monuments, albeit in symbolic form, that makes them useful icons for discussion of competing political arguments with regard to local/regional affairs in Judah and Samaria. Massey’s thought provides a further dimension to temple 1

3. Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary

71

imagery in that she promotes the openness and incompletion of space in which each encounter of persons in a given physical environment offers fresh insight into the depiction of socio-religious spaces.

1

Chapter 4

A POETICS OF SACRED SPACE IN THE TEMPLE JOURNEYS OF EZEKIEL

This chapter moves from wider spatial theories as applied in textual interpretation to one particular cultural approach to how meaning is derived from text through the subjective aspect of human embodiment, echoing the theme of the prophetic aneur in Part 1. It focuses on the book of Ezekiel and the theories of the social thinker, Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Space.1 The ranking of space set out in this work will be aligned with the prophet’s two tours through the temple in Ezek 8–11 and 40–42: a procedure which is facilitated by the fact that both works are dealing with the theme of house/home, which in Bachelard is the domestic house of a private family and in Ezekiel the divine house inhabited by the deity and the temple servants of that God. Architectural reection links in both instances to the “architecture” of the human body as a source of primal spatial symbolism. Bachelard operates from a psychological approach to space in which a building is symbolic of the human body and the use of the house image is iconographic of human identity. Such a psychological and embodied approach ts well with the overall aim of this book to explore psychogeography and urban existence. In this context what is homely indicates that which is familiar to the human person, what expands the identity in a positive mode of continuity with past experience. Bachelard himself treats his theme through iconography of the house, moving from the central space of the rooms within a house to artefacts and places within those rooms, before moving to the “world outside” the house. In this perspective the vertical frame of the house from cellar to attic is parallel with a vertical human stance, from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Ezekiel’s journeys through space plot a horizontal pathway from

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas; Boston: Beacon, 1994).

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

73

the gate of the Temple towards the inner sanctum, yet there is also a sense that his route goes both upwards into transcendent space and downwards into the depths of his own inner space. In chs. 40–42, for example, the text reects vertical movement as prophet and guide ascend stairs to access further levels of the temple-space. Bachelard proposes a poetics of space in terms of understanding how spatial imagery provides symbolic language for examining individual human experience; in Ezekiel symbolic imagery of temple-space functions as a vehicle for discussion of the urban community of Jerusalem as a whole. This chapter works from that basic stance and explores how particular aspects of the book provide the narrative mechanism for achieving this end. In order to carry out this task I will engage with some of Bachelard’s major spatial metaphors, using them as a lens through which to explore the spatial poetics of the prophetic journeys, which are not only movements through temple-space but also plot the deepening understanding of the prophet with regard to past and future states of the society to which he belongs. Temple-Space and Territory Kalinda Rose Stevenson has already examined how the depiction of spaces within the temple reects the socio-political context of exile.2 Stevenson argues that the task of the last section of Ezekiel is to provide identity for the exiles via a narrative which both creates spaces and keeps them separate.3 Its effect is to set up three areas—House of YHWH/Holy Place/Portion (land) of Israel and the vital issue is then who may have access to which of these spaces.4 The social identity established in the text is that of a community, which is dened as Israel and which is maintained by separating off the inner spaces of the temple for the use of the priests who themselves act as a “buffer” to the ultimate space of divine residence. This section of Ezekiel functions as a political tract within a society founded on the physical building of a temple, in which the role of a local king has been largely dismantled.5 2. Kalinda R. Stevenson, The Vision of Transformation: The Territorial Rhetoric of Ezekiel 40–48 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 2. This study makes extensive use of political geography, in particular the work of Robert Sack on human territoriality. 3. Ibid., 19. 4. Ibid. 5. See here, for example, Zimmerli, Ezekiel, vol. 2, which sets out the main issues raised by scholarship with regard to the historical setting of the book of Ezekiel in its introductory notes. See also Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 12–17. Both 1

74

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Stevenson’s book treats spatiality as a socio-political marker. Issues relating to political organization within a given state are symbolically mediated via the textual presentation of the temple as a micro-territory which mirrors that of the historical land under consideration. My study also engages cultural geography in the interpretation of the book of Ezekiel but takes up the issue of poetics as such. The focus is on places whose content shapes human orientations of the self. House-as-home is clearly one of such places since it is typical for humans to think of their daily lives organized around the principle of home—leaving home for work, shopping, leisure, returning home for rest and recuperation. Moving within the over-arching eld of house imagery it is possible to explore the subject of the city-as-home. The community tells itself the history of its social identity by the process in which the citizen body encounter public memorials to past tradition; as Dolores Hayden notes, “public history, architectural preservation and public art can take on a special evocative role in helping dene a city’s history.”6 In Ezekiel the temple is the public monument which represents the urban community as a whole. The narratives of chs. 8–11 and 40–48 are constructed with the temple as the symbolic site around which the rest of community life is organized.7 There are two aspects to temple at work here. On the one hand, temple is a unit of space which denes the hierarchy of social and commentators discuss the subject of the twinning of Babylonia with a presence in Jerusalem, in the prophetic vision. With regard to cultural geography, see Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996), 16, where Thrift points out the importance of narratives which relate to the changes in spatial syntax, where literary structures organize spatial changes within the narrative. 6. Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT, 1995), 76. See also Hilary Winchester, Lily King and Kevin Dunn, Landscapes: Ways of Imagining the World (New York: Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2003), 66. It is possible to treat the concept of “city” as an example of landscape symbolism; with regard to landscape Winchester et al. note how landscapes are tied to mapping the exercise of power, ideology and hegemonic control. 7. Hayden’s work provides a central study of urban landscapes as public history. In this perspective public monuments gather to themselves the common cultural traditions of a given city. Since they are openly on view to citizens they offer educational tools for passing on these traditions to new arrivals and younger cohorts. This approach touches on the discipline of urban studies. See Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 22–25, on urban footprints and namings. This study offers an overview of the subject of public urban landscapes. See also Chris Park, Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1994), 250–51. Park argues that for most religions sacred space entails real places on the ground and creates boundaries, because sacred space offers a people the roots of their culture. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

75

political structures in the wider community. This is a more narrowly political area in which the verticality of power structures is a key theme. The public monument is part of a chain of buildings which demonstrate the underlying sources of urban authority: since the start of the book gives an exilic context for the visionary’s experience, the stress is less on secular powers of government and more on the socio-political role of the priestly classes. On the other hand, the temple as a material place within the city-state has the capacity to generate urban identity and can function symbolically in prophetic literature to remind the inhabitants of the city of their own historical identity. Thus, in Ezek 40–48 the temple is proled as the unit of sacred space by which the house of Israel comes to know itself, as in Ezek 43:10–12 where the purpose of revealing the temple plans to the prophet is said to be that the community may observe and perform the laws of purity and worship in the context of the fundamental temple law, which is that the whole territory round about the top of the mountain shall be most holy. More widely, the temple icon gathers to itself, in prophetic texts, the function of key cultural marker, as indicated in the previous chapter. The treatment of the temple in Ezekiel shares that broader signicance but takes on the particular prole of the prophet’s priestly background.8 Ezekiel’s Temple Journeys The two journeys of the prophet through temple-space provide central moments in the book’s structuring of meaning. The rst journey culminates in the condemnation of the priestly orders and thus results in death and destruction for the city as a whole. To that extent it sums up the tone of this part of Ezekiel, which is concerned with the reality of urban collapse. The second journey culminates with the vision of the heavenly river which pours from the sanctuary and ows ever outwards to provide healing and life to the land and people on its banks. These two accounts are joined by the activity of the throne-chariot, depicted in the text as representing the divine presence in human affairs. This image, drawn from cultic symbolism, appears in ch. 1 to establish the whole work as validated by transcendent energy.9 Its re-appearance in the journey scenes has the effect of underlining the message of the text at those points. The two appearances are twinned, with the rst seeing the thronechariot abandon the temple-city and the second its solemn return to take up residence. 8. See Ezek 1 and the initial depiction of Ezekiel in exile. 9. Cf. Chyutin, Architecture, 66–71. 1

76

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The balance achieved by this movement of the divine out from and in to an urban sacred site graphically demonstrates the fact that the site belongs to the deity and not to orders of priests or to the Jerusalem community. There may well be a building constructed, but only when the divine presence lives there can this space truly be a cosmic space. In the rst journey human beings are using the sacred space for their own ends, choosing who to worship and how to perform liturgy, but this negates the true purpose of the temple, which is to house the active, concerned patron deity of the community. The temple-city’s destruction is the outward means of depicting this inner reality that the identity of a place as a House of God is negated by the community’s own acts. The return of God requires that land be set aside and that courtyards are built and vestments and necessary artefacts provided, together with the ofcials whose work will make this empty building come alive. However, only when the deity has observed that the space is properly measured out and secured and decides that it is a site worthy of divine indwelling is there really a ow of cosmic energy available to the city and beyond, as shown in the image of living water. As commentators have noted, the divine persona in the book of Ezekiel is one whose interests relate primarily to the proper status of the divine Name and to its public reputation; it is in this framework that the activities of the Jerusalem temple are debated.10 Geopolitical Symbols The temple-space depicted in Ezekiel draws together visionary events and the practical details of a material public monument. In the rst journey the narrative examines in great detail what various actions are being performed in different rooms of the temple; this is balanced by the detailed account of what should be happening in different sections of the temple, in the second journey. The attention of the text is on the inner workings of a sacred site and especially on the cultic rites which are the main function of a temple. Central to religious praxis is the person of the religious ofciant, who is set aside from daily life in order to function in the liminal eld of cosmic/social space. The person of the priest thus comes under the spotlight, a focus which is relevant in a special manner when the priest at the centre of the narrative is presented as in some sense alone. The visions of the throne-chariot are given to an individual priestprophet who is aligned with cosmic space through the heightening of his senses and engagement with heavenly gures such as the intermediary 10. Cf. Paul Joyce, Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1989), Chapter 6. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

77

who takes him on a spatial journey in chs. 40–48. The state of the community is revealed via the individual prophetic body which walks the temple house and in so doing comments on the religious praxis of the urban monument. The bodily space of the prophet is in an intimate relationship with the material building under review. The prophetic body takes on the persona of architectural space in that the walker and the place walked through have a symbiotic role. At the heart of this union of human body and monumental body is their relationship to cosmic space. When Ezekiel rst sees the throne-chariot it takes him over as he falls to the ground, in 1:28. His bodily form becomes a living vehicle for divine force, while the temple is the inanimate body which the deity enlivens by dwelling therein. Hence it is reasonable to describe spatiality with language drawn from the lived experience of a human body. As Yi-Fu Tuan suggests, the positions that the body can take up are transferred to denitions of spatial sites.11 It can be noted in this regard that Ezekiel’s new temple is given wider meaning through its positioning against the cardinal points of the compass, with the area of central importance aligned with a west-facing outlook.12 In complex models, Tuan argues, “a planned city, a monument or a simple dwelling can be a symbol of the cosmos… Architecture is a key to comprehending reality.”13 Certainly that is the underlying implication of Ezekiel’s temple journeys. The House of God is the point of access to cosmic space. And Ezekiel’s body is the point of access for the reader to the interior state of that house. House/home imagery is thus the cultural marker dening the key political geo-symbol in Ezekiel’s commentary on urban affairs.14 Heidi Nast and Steve Pile’s edited volume, Places Through the Body, raises the prospect of treating the human body as geopolitically placed15 and states that “bodies and places are woven together through intricate

11. Tuan, Space and Place, 38–40. 12. See here, for example, Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:362, where he notes that in Ezekiel’s utopian temple the worshippers do not stand around a central altar but face westwards. There is no gate behind the sanctuary so the worshippers’ route is directly from east to west, to arrive at the altar. 13. Tuan, Space, 102. 14. Ibid., 179. It should be borne in mind that in the ancient Near East there was generally no separation between secular and religious authority; temple and palace were twin sources of power. In the Hebrew Bible the term hekal designates both sites. 15. Heidi Nast and Steve Pile, eds., Places Through the Body (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2. 1

78

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

webs of social and spatial relations…made by embodied subjects.”16 Hence place operates as a way of understanding the world through the “rich and complicated interplay of people and environment” and as a way of being “deeply metaphysical.”17 Finally, place as a theme of dwelling offers “a spiritual and philosophical endeavour that unites the human and natural worlds.”18 This last idea can easily be applied to the intended impact of Ezekiel where the temple as divine dwelling at the heart of the city is the key to interpreting whether it will survive and prosper within its territory or whether it will collapse and decay. It is within this understanding of place as “being placed,” of “placing myself,” that the reader of Ezekiel is to interpret the socio-religious signicance of the prophetic text.19 Given the over-arching frame of sacred space//sacred place the task is then to identify how different biblical passages manifest spatial imagery and how far the concept of a special public place is central to the movement of the narrative. Given the usage of Ezekiel in which the temple is referred to as “House of God” it is reasonable to consider the ways in which house imagery can be mapped onto the spatial sites described in Ezekiel’s temple journeys.20 In order to work from the biblical text to a consideration of the poetics of temple-space the Poetics of Gaston Bachelard will be used as an inter-text. The aim is to discuss the nature of the spatial poetics which construct meaning in the text of Ezekiel’s temple journeys. This is an endeavour within the eld of textual aesthetics. Working within the frame of spatiality involves detailed examination of units of measurement of space. In the context of a house this entails exploration of the rooms, corridors and stairs which close off inner parts 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 1, 15–16. 18. Ibid., 22. 19. In chs. 8–11 and 40–48 the prophet is physically inserted into the temple buildings and it is through his visionary imagination that the reader accesses the true meaning to be attached to temple. The deity places within him an understanding of what constitutes pure/impure in religious praxis. Hence Ezekiel’s body operates as a political symbol through its geographical siting. For underlying theory of geopolitical symbols see Nast and Pile, eds., Places Through the Body, 4, where the editors draw attention to the ways in which contemporary theory impacts on body as site. 20. Cf. the combination of “temple” and “house” in Ezekiel (e.g. 8:6; 10:19; 11:1). The return of the Glory of the Lord, in 43:6–7, links the temple-site with the residence of the deity. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

79

of the site from each other while also allowing access from one part to the next. Imagined movement through a house moves from basement to ground level, to higher oors and attics. In each level of the building the traveller engages with space as identied by enclosure within walls and can pause to reect on the meaning of this encounter for her/himself. Some spaces may be empty but equally some contain further spatial units such as wardrobes and chests, which in turn have drawers. In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard focuses on “the transcendental geometry of the house,”21 using this in relation both to the human psyche and to poetic imagination. The thematic is space not time, not the history of use but an attention to “inhabited spaces…the Non-I that protects the I.”22 Bachelard suggests that “a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality.”23 All really inhabited space, he argues, bears the marks of that essential home, the primary place of identity, linked to human birth.24 In this approach Bachelard takes the primary spatial organization of the material house as a mirror for the house of the embodied self. The human physical frame structures inner spaces, from guts to head, and provides areas for specialized activities which give life to the whole. Treatment of human embodiment leads on to the eld of human psychology, in which one icon for human identity is a sense of being “at home”: at home in the body and at one with one’s inner self. Bachelard’s views have a base in Jungian psychology and the theory of archetypal symbolism. Working from this foundation he views his activity as a form of poetry which engages the human powers of imagination and, for Bachelard, situates meaning in the concept of the human soul as much as in the mind.25 The image of homeliness provides a resource for addressing the architectural space of an actual house as providing for house/ home symbolism. Bachelard deals with the experience of an individual and that person’s lived experience of being at home in a spatial context, but it is reasonable to add here the layer of collective lived experience within the communal home of a city and its urban monuments. The work of Robert Hayward and Francis Schmidt, for instance, shows that the Temple in Jerusalem 21. Bachelard, Poetics, Editorial Foreword, vii. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. Ibid., 17. 24. Ibid., 5–7. 25. For Bachelard’s own account of the philosophical systems of his work, see the Introduction to his Poetics of Space. 1

80

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

operated as a symbol of community identity in the time of Hellenistic Judaism.26 The House of God served to provide a focus for debates about the practical face of political systems in that period and gave several independent groups an icon on which to base their own internal systems.27 In this way the temple plays the part of a primal home, albeit one attached to social identity as much as to a personal sense of worth. Both domestic house and temple buy into the topic of “birth,” of the source of life, both individual and communal. The religious site provides a kind of homeliness which explicitly connects human origins with the plans of a supernatural being, thus validating the social systems in which it is embedded. Dreaming and the Poetic Imagination Bachelard’s interest in modern psychology provides him with the means to examine the work of poetic imagination through the perspective of dreams—this aspect of human life being a key issue for both Freudian and Jungian schools. The possible extension of Freudian thought underlies Steve Pile’s work, as we saw in Chapter 1. Here it is the methodology of Jung’s dream interpretation which is expanded to examination of spatial symbolism. In his Introduction Bachelard links poetic imagemaking to phenomenology, speaking of the “phenomenology of the image.” This leads him to argue that as “the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind is a phenomenology of the soul.”28 The culmination of this modelling of human expression of ideas is the proposal that we should study “the dreaming consciousness,” that is, we should address the eld of day-dreaming. Bachelard’s method leads him to the manner in which the act of daydreaming draws on the archetypal symbolism of the home site: the place where a human being feels comfortable and which spatially shapes

26. C. T. R. Hayward, The Temple: A Non-biblical Source Book (New York: Routledge, 1996); Francis Schmidt, How the Temple Thinks: Identity and Social Cohesion in Ancient Judaism (trans. Edward Crowley; Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 2001). 27. It is interesting to note here that Chyutin in his 2006 volume Architecture treats Ezekiel’s temple as utopian. He argues that Ezekiel’s vision of an ideal linking of land and city is the rst historically known example of a social utopia which contains a description of the physical environment (170) and allows that the plan of land and city involves a political vision which is integrated with urban planning. 28. Bachelard, Poetics, xx. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

81

human self-consciousness, providing images which lead to reection on the value and meaning of human existence. Imagery of the house functions as an aesthetic language with which the soul can dream and in dreaming touch into transcendence. He reects on places of secrecy, places in relation to which the human being can pause to dream of cosmic space.29 “The poet lives a daydream that is awake. It gathers the universe together around and in an object.”30 For Bachelard, the daydream is a comforting sign of the homeliness of a house which also allows the poet to reach out from known space to the domain of universality. In Ezekiel the material artefact of an urban public monument provides that same fundamental level of familiarity and is the setting for prophetic vision (dreaming). The image of the temple site is, however, twinned with that of a mobile physical icon, the throne-chariot. The movement of the text implies that the static temple site cannot provide a true icon for human evaluation on its own: it needs to be viewed through the lens of a separate phenomenon which truly images divine presence.31 It is in the land of exile that the prophet looks out to the north and sees a great storm approaching, an event which draws him into a dream state. His gaze goes through the scene of clouds and lightening to move out to the heavens and in to the temple city which was his home. In Bachelard’s terms his soul engages with the phenomenon representing cosmic space and thus develops a poetic imagination which measures the signicance of historical event against eternal reality. In the Poetics the state of daydreaming is presented as a generally positive activity leading to fresh understanding and to enlightenment. In the narratives of Ezekiel’s journeys it is only in the second temple walk that the comforting nature of dream-vision is apparent as the prophet dreams the perfect temple, fresh and pristine, unsullied by the corruption of human designs. The imagery that builds up such a hopeful imagination turns a great deal on the language of measurement. Chapter 40:3 initiates the pilgrimage through space by introducing a heavenly gure who is holding a measuring rod.32 As in his rst journey Ezekiel is told to use his eyes and ears as access points for interior grasp of meaning. The senses of the prophetic body having thus been tuned into the divine wavelength the journey begins. Chapters 40–42 are replete with comments 29. This can be read alongside prophetic concepts of the eschaton and the holy mountain of YHWH as raised above all mountains. See Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:347. 30. Bachelard, Poetics, 84. 31. See Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 53 on the subject of soul travel. 32. Cf. ibid., 196, which addresses the image of the prophetic tour guide in relation to mediator gures in Zechariah and the later prophets. 1

82

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

regarding the length and breadth of the several sites through which the walkers pass, each new area of space being thus materially referenced, as in the initial phase of movement in 40:5–9. It is clear that the act of measuring and the telling of size and shape is central to the text. The prophet’s dream relates to the process of building construction.33 The site and space of a new unit is measured out on the ground so that foundations can be laid and the building properly erected in such a way that all its parts balance and the building is as one. It is this inner quality of order and harmony which the text draws upon in these journey scenes; the prophet views each part of the monument and sees that all is in order. Moreover, the segmentation of the site according to its role in the overall task of public liturgy is asserted—everything in its place and a place for everything. By the end of ch. 42 the prophet has dream walked the whole site and can “sign it off” as t for purpose. It is no surprise, then, that ch. 43 opens with the sight of divine return to the habitation of God, the place which the Lord has chosen. The phenomenon of harmonious architectural space sits well with the perspective of an ordered cosmos. Verticality The sacred space of the shrine offers a chance of accessing primal cosmic identity. In practical terms this is achieved by acts of cultic worship within a properly constituted material setting and by authorized practitioners. Practical action, however, is supported by the symbolic imagination in which the source of a temple is not human endeavour but divine choice. In this role the temple is to be regarded as identied with the Holy Mountain on which ancient Near Eastern deities were frequently viewed as residing.34 In biblical material the God of Israel has his own mountain abode, Mt. Zion, a site linked with the city of Jerusalem and 33. See Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:343: the measurement of space involves a groundplan only and not a superstructure. 34. See here, for example, Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61–63, which discusses the ancient symbolism of a stone staircase bridging the gap between heaven and earth. With specic reference to Mt. Zion symbolism in the Hebrew Bible, see Ben Ollenberger, Zion, the City of the Great King: A Theological Symbol of the Jerusalem Cult (Shefeld: JSOT, 1987). With regard to cultural geography, see, for instance, Robert Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 77, where Sack deals with the topic of mythically infused conceptions of space and time used for political purposes and points out that new cities are often designed and located in line with mythical space/time dimensions. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

83

the royal judgment in Ps 132. The symbolic strength of holy mountains is that of providing a link between heaven and earth and thus allowing contact between deity and human beings, as in Exod 19–20, where Moses ascends Mt. Sinai to meet God in the clouds. Temple architecture reects this link of heaven and earth, with the deity thought to reside in the chamber at the heart of the temple, a room inaccessible to worshippers generally. From this heavenly centre the temple rooms work outwards through courts connected with daily sacrice to the gates which mark the border between heavenly affairs and secular life.35 A key part of the symbolism of temple as a holy mountain is that it partakes in verticality: progression through its chambers implies an ascent to heaven. Bachelard stresses the signicance of the verticality of the house, which, he believes, indicates the human being’s inner verticality, denoting human existence as a life gathering in both material and transcendent aspects. He takes as his key image that of the tower because it gives the impression of stretching from earth to sky, thus uniting everyday places with cosmic space. The capacity of the human body is likewise to stand with feet on the ground and head in the air; this produces a metaphor for the proper inner stance of the human spirit. “The verticality of a tower rising from the most earthly watery depths, to the abode of a soul that believes in heaven, illustrates the verticality of the human being.”36 The presentation of the rst journey which Ezekiel makes through the temple engages the reader with metaphorical verticality. At the surface level of the narrative the prophetic body is positioned vertically since in 8:3 Ezekiel is lifted up by the hair of his head, suspended in a vertical position between earth and sky and brought into the temple precinct. His stance is that of standing upright and the act of walking into which he is drawn emerges naturally from this bodily verticality. The outer presentation of his body is at one with the learning process which he is to undergo. The text refers frequently to acts of sight, uniting the physical action of looking and the inner perception of what is seen. Hence, in v. 5 the prophet is told to look northwards; he does so and he sees…an aberrant 35. Cf. Margaret Barker, The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem (London: SPCK, 1991), 22–25. With regard to the direction of entering the precincts, see Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:350. Zimmerli also notes that excavations of the temple site have revealed a gate design like that which the Hebrew Bible attributes to the Solomonic period. 36. Bachelard, Poetics, 25. On the subject of sacred space as “tower,” see John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 114, 118–23. This account offers a foundational approach to the topic and includes a treatment of Ziggurat and Tower of Babel symbolism. 1

84

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

religious artefact.37 The next verse plays on the doubled nature of vision with the phrase “do you see” meaning do you grasp what is happening and its consequences. What is happening is detestable to the deity and the consequence is that God will be driven to abandon his house. In the parallel scenes which follow in ch. 8 the imagery of sight/understanding are regularly repeated as the framework within which various liturgical acts are described. There is a further ironic twist to this use of language in 8:12 where the elders are quoted as saying “the Lord does not see us.” God sees and now the prophet sees as the deity sees but the community leaders do not see at all. Prophet and deity are aligned in this scene through the verticality of a human person whose visionary self can come alive and receive the impressions of a divine perspective.38 It is part of Ezekiel’s verticality here to unite human and divine perspectives, to be aligned with the transcendent critique of human action.39 A further aspect of the vertical is a house’s verticality from cellar to garret. The cellar is aligned with dark instinctual depths, the subject of nightmare, while the garret is airy, light and rational; in a parallel manner the human head is aligned with reason and the guts with the irrational.40 For Bachelard the cellar experience provides one pole of the human spatial imagination. “When we dream in the cellar” we are “in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”41 “In the cellar darkness prevails both day and night and we see shadows dancing on the dark walls.”42 The cellar is the repository of all the dark forces within the human body. If we occupy our “cellar space” and dream there it is the subterranean impulses of ourselves that will occupy us. Ezekiel 8:12 is easily aligned with Bachelard’s view of the cellar as a place of irrational and fearful experiences.43 The textual dramatization of 37. The original Hebrew can be translated “image of jealousy.” There has been considerable debate as to what material reality is being described here. See, e.g. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:238–40 and Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 54. One major theory is that this was a statue of Asherah. 38. Regarding Ezekiel’s journey between Babylonia and Jerusalem, see Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:234. On the motif of lifted by the hair and how this aligns the prophet with God, see Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 53. 39. For a discussion of the role of the prophetic body in communicating social values, alongside that of temple and divine bodies in Ezekiel, see Mills, Alterity. 40. Bachelard, Poetics, 17–18. 41. Ibid., 18. 42. Ibid., 19. 43. With regard to the text behind this comment and to its account of ritual sins, see Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 54, to the effect that the four cult issues with which the 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

85

entry into the site of hidden spaces in 8:7–8 focuses the reader’s attention on the horror of what will be seen. The siting of the inner chamber is difcult to follow, but accessing does involve the prophet in digging into a material substance in order to nd a doorway not seen before (v. 8).44 The meaning of the scene is conveyed to Ezekiel as happening “in the darkness.” The darkness extends to the blindness of the deity and back to the darkness of the worshippers. They think that they are hidden, that there is darkness because the temple community has been left to its fate; the deity views this as their darkness of intellect, that they are “in the dark” about the intentions and whereabouts of their patron deity. They have, then, let their irrational fears of risk and danger take over their better religious sense. Because they have operated from the cellars of their own space and in a hidden temple-space they have brought on themselves the event whose imagined reality has caused despair. Yet it seems that the elders think that they are operating from “attic,” that is, from a rational viewpoint. The text plays on these opposed levels of meaning and, in so doing, creates a subtle play of illusion and its power in the human mind and in the communal urban identity.45 The Line from Universal to Specic Bachelard’s study proposes that there is coherence between the smallest enclosed spaces which can be imagined and the value given to the house as a whole and instances the casket and wardrobe as containers of household goods in this category. A casket, for instance, is a hider of things, and can be viewed as iconic of the act of hiding away the self inside the human body.46 Wardrobes provide a “centre of order that protects the entire house against uncurbed disorder.”47 It is by the use of the wardrobe that the house owner gathers like items of clothing in one place, while separating out other garments, each to its own section of the wardrobe. This ordering function of the wardrobe can then be extended from container to the whole house and thence to the house of the human self, text deals are separate instances of religious collapse, so that the passage heightens the tension of human sin confronted by divine anger. 44. The action to be carried out is not completely clear. Cf. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:240. 45. Cf. here the formulaic nature of matching place, person and nature of sin, as commented on by Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:236. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 169–70, focuses on the subject of secret rooms as inherent in the narrative at this point. 46. Bachelard, Poetics, 88. 47. Ibid., 79. 1

86

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

which needs it own ordering tools. For Bachelard the key resource for organizing meaning is the poetic function as it dreams forth images which signify through their link with material reality. Ezekiel also dreams images which signify, drawing them from the physical space of an urban temple. The temple journeys of the prophet provide images which organize and structure religious understanding within a priestly worldview for which order and hierarchy are key markers. If the events of urban destruction are to be understood they must be contextualized within that ideological framework and in the journeys it is the rooms of the temple which act as meaningful containers. In the rst journey the text provides a room whose function is similar to that of the casket. The room to which Ezekiel can only nd access by digging into a wall is presented as hidden away. The act of digging reveals a doorway which was not seen before; this doorway functions as if it were the key to a casket: it unlocks the room of wrong liturgical activity which is dened as shameful by the divine commentator. There is a human resonance between what is hidden and what is shameful and the text plays on that underlying connection. Hence the element of secrecy attached to the narrative depiction of a hidden space whose contents are “brought to light” heightens the negative verdict being passed on city and temple. The image of a wardrobe can be applied to reading ch. 42, which is in a sense a literary wardrobe which holds ordered meaning about priests and their work. Verses 1–12 depict the measurement in great detail of a set of rooms on the north side and on the south side.48 The size and shape of these rooms is fully eshed out so that the reader gains a sense of empty containers with sub-divisions. Verses 13–14 then place “garments” in these organizing spaces. The rooms are for the priests who approach the Lord to eat the offerings and are repositories for sacred items used in liturgy. Under the purity of holiness code these items must be conserved within their proper containers if they are to enact the role of bridge between heaven and earth. Hence v. 13 requires the sacricial material to be kept safe within these special rooms. Likewise the vestments which the priests wear for ritual acts must be left in this ordered site where they can be kept sterile, free from pollution.49 This imagery of ordered containers is extended in a parallel passage in ch. 44, where the principles of order and containment are extended to the 48. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 209, notes the extreme volubility of the angelic guide at this point in the scene. 49. Ibid., 209–10. The value of the enclosing wall is to assert absolute separation of sacred and profane, a reality which extends to bodily states. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

87

bodies of the priests. Verse 16 states that only priests may enter the sanctuary; vv. 17–19 require these men to wear special clothing when they enter the inner space of the temple, which they must take off before going outside. But vv. 20–23 go even further.50 The whole of the human body is engaged in the need for ordered containment; the length of hair, the consumption of alcohol, the status of wives—these are all to be properly regulated.51 In this manner the priestly body itself becomes a container which preserves holiness intact.52 It is this narrative modelling of rooms and bodies as sites of purity that enact regulatory controls over ritual to make it effective to which the symbolism of the wardrobe can be applied. Bachelard’s house-dreaming leads him to reect on home sites within the natural world which also provide symbolic imagery which can be applied metaphorically to human affairs. Among these images is that of the shell. The shell is the home made by an organism which lives in and creates its own space all at the same time. As the creature’s life extends so also the shell-house expands; this happens in a process which is circular. The shell produced by this movement is dened by its spirals, which turn and twist back upon themselves.53 The shell image is symptomatic of the spiralling manner in which a human being constructs a sense of home, spun from the twisting and turning of the self identity. It is possible to use the shell image as a tool to explore the overall function of Ezekiel’s temple journeys. Temple-space plays a major role in the prophetic book and visiting this space is vital to the development of socio-political analysis on the part of the prophet. In his rst visit to the symbolic temple Ezekiel discovers that the site is under threat of annihilation, a perspective endorsed in the climax of the journey when the throne-chariot leaves the city and its monument. The motif of a second temple journey provides a commentary on that rst critique of home as unsuitable. The deity has been forced to leave his house since it has become too “dirty” for him to stay there. The act of cleansing is performed in ch. 9–10 by the transcendent re which is thrown down on the city with deadly effect. 50. Ibid., 220–21, where the point is made of the textual link here with Leviticus. The use of linen for priestly garments stresses the need for prevention of contamination of the puried site by substances from outside. 51. Ibid., 221. This version of the holiness code is more rigorous concerning marriage restrictions. 52. Cf. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:345; the focus is on the manner in which architectural symmetry stands for the purity of the nation as a whole. 53. Bachelard, Poetics, 106. 1

88

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Chapters 40–42 demonstrate that the old concept of home is still viable.54 The temple is appropriate for divine habitation just as the snail always dwells inside a shell. And now that shell has been reconstructed and expanded. Changes have been made; for instance with access to the inner space, which the prince cannot now enter directly from his own apartments.55 But it is still the same home, the place of which the deity can say “this is my home forever.”56 The process of moving between the former and the latter states of the house has not been a straight line. It has not been through the process of human reconstruction of a building seen to be out of date. Rather it has happened circuitously. The change has required the demolition of a whole community and its kingdom; it has been built on the deaths of many citizens, as imaged in chs. 9–11. In ritual terms it has been an act of purication which moved the site from corruption to cleanliness. But now the latest form of house-building spirals back to engage symbolically with earlier phases and thus renews its claim to be the authoritative divine house.57 Inside and Out From giving attention to the smallest home sites the dreamer-poet turns to the other extreme, the immensity of the world outside. This shift requires a change in mood, however, since the immense is “not an object, the phenomenology of immense refers us directly to our imagining consciousness.”58 Immensity has to do with how the poetic dreamer opens out the inner domain, “transcending the world seen as it is, was, before we started dreaming.”59 Bachelard aligns immensity with “pure imagination” and the result of this is “consciousness of enlargement” on the part of the dreamer.60 We open the world by transcending the world as experienced to encounter the grandeur which enlarges us.

54. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:355, notes that the centre of the new temple is the Holy of Holies and not the altar. He also notes the fact (2:358–60) that there is similarity here between the descriptions in the Old Testament of Solomon’s temple and that of Ezekiel’s vision. Cf. Chyutin, Architecture, 144. 55. Cf. Chyutin, Architecture, 104–13. 56. See Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:516, on the topic of God now being at home in his “own” site, although the image of the holy stream allows for an impact also on human affairs in the theme of super-abundance. 57. Bachelard, Poetics, 106. 58. Ibid., 184. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

89

In his temple journeys the prophet has his horizons stretched as he learns how to critique temple-space and a religious monument takes on for him a fresh identity, rst by a positive stance being negated and then by an empty space being lled. The guardian of this enlargement is found in the motif of the throne-chariot whose narrative role is to initiate enlargement and to provide guidance on the interior travelling which Ezekiel must do if he is to grow in wisdom and be able to full the task given to him which is to teach and enlighten his fellow citizens with the knowledge which he has gained.61 The two journeys are symbolically the means of enlightenment. The prophet leaves the security of his initial beliefs and is engaged on the risky business of learning through vision— risky because the visionary can lose his way and be wiped out—as ch. 8 describes the elders as having done. The rst stage of enlightenment is a negative one which dissolves any sense that the prophet might have had of the temple being a secure site which maintains the community’s existence. It is the divine presence which starts the prophet on this phase of his travels in search of meaning. In v. 1 the deity “comes upon” him; he recognizes this because he sees a gure in the same shape as that of his original vision. A humanoid gure whose upper part is re and whose loins are burning metal approaches him, takes him up and transports him to Jerusalem. The second phase emerges from within the knowledge of divine abandonment, imaged in 10:18–19 as the ight of the throne-chariot away from the city and leading, in 11:13, to Ezekiel’s cry of despair—Will you completely destroy the remnant of Israel? It is from this low point that the prophet gradually emerges into a more hopeful state, which is lled out in the vision of the new temple. Once more a heavenly gure guides and enlightens the prophet as he walks beside the divine surveyor. The nal closure of the circle is found in ch. 43 with the return of the thronechariot and the disembodied divine voice which announces permanency of residence.62 The imagery here is specically embodied in that it engages the rootedness of feet planted on the ground, in v. 7, to convey the strength of its meaning.

61. See Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:435–36, where he argues that the teaching of the whole sacricial ritual is dictated by God within the context of a geographical site and the authority of dedicated functionaries. 62. Ibid., 2:356, notes that the account of the Holy of Holies breaks into what has been so far a silent journey and argues that this indicates the tenor of the whole account as showing the location of the sacred realm at its highest. 1

90

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

This pair of journeys enacts prophetic enlargement within the human body of the visionary.63 Both narratives include commands to the prophet to use his senses carefully so as to record accurately all that he experiences. These are his notes, as it were, his resources for convincing an audience of the validity of the message. He encounters transcendent phenomena, two symbolic material sites with rooms and passages, with porches and sanctuaries, lled with ritual activity. The text creates an imagined spatial universe which is equal to the poetic imagination of the dreamer who descends to the cellar and rises again to the attic, which is not purely a place of reason but also the site of the soul. Ultimately immensity is found in the expansion of the understanding of the homely religious traditions of the temple-city.64 That which symbolically gave value to temple and city remains valid, but only as understood from the two extremes of death and resurrection.65 At the heart of Ezekiel’s journeys is an in/out dynamic; he enters the temple-space to leave it again and then re-enters to discover a new permanence. For Bachelard the in/out dynamic associated with house dwelling produces a “dialectic of division,”66 introducing tension and alienation as vital aspects of human growth. He argues that “entrapped in being we always have to come out of it and when hardly outside of being we always have to go back into it.”67 Being inside is balanced against going out of the familiar setting and both are necessary as opposing movements. When this is applied to the text of Ezekiel it can be seen that in ch. 2 the topic of the alienation of the prophet from the community is already indicated, as in v. 8 where Ezekiel is commanded not to share in the rebellious nature of the people, but is rather to set himself apart, taking the deity’s perspective to himself. This alienation is picked up in ch. 9 where the prophet has to share divine condemnation of the community despite his desire to side with his human companions, as evidenced by

63. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 53. The use of travel imagery here is a unique example in major prophetic texts of “soul travel,” an event which can be linked with shamanistic enlargement of human understanding. 64. Note that there is no east-facing dimension in the new temple since the altar is at the west end (with no gate behind) and the worshippers face it. See Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:362. 65. It is possible here to inter-text the nal stage of the prophetic journey as lifebringing with the scene in ch. 37, where once again life is brought from death—here the dry bones. 66. Bachelard, Poetics, 211. 67. Ibid., 213–14. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

91

his pleas for mercy in vv. 8–9. However, the climax of the rst journey where, in ch. 11:23 the prophet sees the departure of the Lord from the city, signalling the ultimate alienation of God and people, stands in tension with the renewal set in motion by that same deity in 43:1–2. The prophet thus shares in the deity’s own state of tension and alienation. In ch. 8, as in ch. 1, he is taken over, overcome, by the divine. In his material body he falls to the ground but only to be stood upright in his visionary self. His bodily functions still work, but in an alternative universe whose life is controlled by transcendent space, the space/place of the divine throne. Yet this alienated state of the self from itself is that which produces true vision, according to the overall pattern of this narrative. Meaning is depicted in the text as emanating from poetic imagination which is in excess of everyday rational intelligence—a situation which, as noted above, puts the human psyche into a risky liminal context. The characterization of Ezekiel in the temple journeys can be viewed as an example of the in/out tension of Bachelard’s imagination—a prole which is then offered to the readers of the book, who are encouraged to reect on the role of temple-house as an image of the instability of political elites. Readers are led to deepen their understanding of the tension between city as an enduring home and as a site which is easily destroyed.68 The scope of the total vision requires the reader to view the deity as in fact irrevocably tied to the urban dwelling, but this indwelling presence continues because the deity desires his home in Jerusalem and not because a city elite has deserved it. Spatial Poetics in Ezekiel’s Temple Journeys Some key aspects of the poetics of Ezekiel’s vision can be highlighted as a result of inter-texting with Bachelard’s work. Prominent among these are: verticality, dream-vision, the small and secluded as the pair with immensity, and house-building. While verticality marks out the physical state of the prophet it also delineates the role of the temple. In this model the north–south compass points are provided by heaven (north) and earth (south). This arrangement stresses the fact that the value of geographical

68. Cf. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:361, which views the orientation to the holy as the goal of human affairs, rather than the goal being human government as indicated by the splendour of a royal palace. The enlarged gates of the temple proclaim God’s defensive exclusion of impurity. 1

92

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

space is determined by pre-existent metaphysical systems. The heaven/ earth line is mapped out horizontally in the temple precinct under the symbolism of centre (altar/sanctuary) and margins (porch/gates). It is also reected in the human body of the prophet whose head connects with a heavenly outstretched hand and whose feet walk the temple courts. Dream-vision is the medium by which the social horizontal is evaluated through the sacred vertical—and it is imagination which allows the reader to proceed beyond the surface structures of sacred space to their symbolic value. The balance between the small places of seclusion and the immensity of the whole of heaven and earth is another key feature in the poetics of Ezekiel. When the prophet digs through a wall to a hidden doorway, in ch. 8, he enters upon a “world” of false religious praxis. When he revisits the doorway of the temple in ch. 47 Ezekiel nds a small ow of water in that place, but by following this source he arrives at a huge river which provides life and healing, while its freshness will overcome the salt of a great sea (v. 8).69 In both cases the prophetic engagement with a small place leads into a wide vista, whether of condemnation for temple and city-population or for the enrichment and fertility of land and sea. The movement between seclusion and immensity unites the manner in which the “House of God” is un-built in chs. 8–11 and re-built in chs. 40–48 and behind this imagery lies the deeper value of (un)homeliness.70 Temple-space is both familiar and strange. These poetics function to comment on urban existence. The narrative of temple journeys delineates the city as a “space” strung between heaven and earth, in which dreamlike and visionary activity has a vital role to play. Both the small, hidden and private aspects of human interiority and the vast spectrum of public space contribute to the horizons proper to human urban life.71 Human nature is marked by growth and development, since constructing the homely is an action which is not static but constantly renewed. The consequence of this prole of humanity for social and political institutions is a focus on the instability of material manifestations of the social symbolic, while the fundamental continuity of 69. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 231, notes that this account cannot be reduced to a purely realistic geographical sense but is to be regarded as a highly symbolic story, especially with regard to the healing power of water. 70. Ibid., 51. The text is designed to emphasize the impermanence of the material elements which give shape to our identity. Human beings take the social and physical environment for granted but this creates a false sense of ownership of human destiny. 71. See ibid., 416. YHWH enthroned in the innermost temple commandeers it as his dwelling place. 1

4. A Poetics of Sacred Space

93

central urban icons is afrmed. This reassurance is not without tensions and warning notes.72 There is a stance of violence and transgression towards a key urban place, held in tension with the pristine and washed-clean nature of that same site. In the old royal structures the temple sits beside the royal palace and gateways allow the king access to the sanctuary from within his own quarters, but in the new temple only the priesthood can access the central place of divine residence.73 This change marks the way in which “in place/out of place” values can be attached to a public monument in line with cultural developments within a wider urban imaginary. Ezekiel’s temple icon is concerned both with place and placelessness.74 In terms of social psychology the temple-city imaginary sits alongside Bachelard’s view that “the house, even more than the landscape is a ‘psychic state’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy.”75 In Ezekiel’s case this intimacy is between human visionary and divine intention, which unites the over-arching geo-political symbol of a temple monument with a particular stage in its historical and material development, notably by the individuation of cult symbol and temple building. This chapter provides a wide-ranging spatial commentary drawn from Bachelard’s aesthetics which addresses two textual units of the book of Ezekiel. Bachelard’s psychological approach to the space of home, integrative of architecture and social usage, contributes to urban psychogeography in that it emphasizes the human dimension of urban identity and the role of poetic imagination in providing access to philosophical truth in the form of spatial poetics. Whereas the previous chapter engaged spatial theories as a tool to examine over-arching patterns of the symbolic city, this chapter is more reective of a subjective, embodied 72. Cf. here Steve Pile and Michael Keith, eds. Geographies of Resistance (New York: Routledge, 1997), where Pile’s Introduction (14) indicates how maps of resistance work through reection on how power relations are incomplete and uid, liable to rupture. 73. See William H. Brownlee, Ezekiel (Waco: Word, 1986), 213. There is no royal chapel and the three-part set of functionaries shows the holiness of God as the paramount principle in the renewed city-temple. 74. For a treatment of the subject of placelessness within cultural geography, see, for instance, Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 75. Bachelard, Poetics, 72. cf. also Anne Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 158, where she points out that in the history of place deep contexts provide constants that successive generations must readdress. Although the everyday face of politics changes these deep contexts remain the key to the changed nature of historical usage in a given site. 1

94

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

perspective on the creation of spatial tools for evaluation of human existence and the urban environment. The previous chapter demonstrated a range of texts all of which make use of temple-space to communicate a message about the city. The focus there was on space as lived experience and the community dimension in producing spatial frames of city life. In these presentations the temple functioned both as static site whose place is central to the production of meaning, from which meaning goes forth and as the site of journey, change and difference. This chapter has added to those approaches the view that cosmic space, as the control of meaning, can validly be depicted through the symbolic homes of social beings—their own home, the temple as home, the homeliness of the human body.

1

Chapter 5

NARRATIVE SPACE AND RITUAL SPACE IN THE BOOK OF JOEL

The two previous studies in this section have demonstrated the centrality of temple-space to the prophetic analysis of urban society. Chapter 3 achieved this through studying a number of prophetic passages and Chapter 4 by exploring selected parts of a single prophetic book. The current chapter maintains the focus on a single prophetic book and makes the contents of that book the primary concern of the investigation, while also using the concept of religious geography as a lens through which to analyze the spatial dimensions of the text. The book of Joel deals with a spatial perspective which links together the places of earth, city and temple and engages them with transcendent space. This chapter will explore the role of ritual action in restoring temple-city culture, via the imaginative universe of a literary text which creates an ordered response to chaotic events through its deployment of religious geography. The book of Joel constructs a panoramic view of the world which includes earth and sky, land and city, as well as human and animal inhabitants. Ritual activity centres the life of this literary world, while the narrative depiction of places whose future will be affected by the human action of lament turns the text into a mimetic universe which functions in parallel with the actual world of land and cult. In ch. 1 the reader is led to view a fertile agricultural land visited by a vast destructive force.1 The ultimate response to this event is found in the call to gather at a ritual site in order to perform a lament ceremony. The narrative space created by the book plays here with two places, land and cultic site, which are shown to be in tandem and to have mutual

1. Willem Prinsloo, The Theology of the Book of Joel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985), 27. The calamity of the locust invasion concerns all the land, the people and the deity, since normal cultic activity is halted.

96

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

inuence.2 Thus the book of Joel pursues its message through the alignment of the material sites of agricultural land, temple and city, a process which ends by focusing the reader on the symbolic space of religious belief. Its treatment of natural events such as drought and famine are aligned with the presence of a vast storm but this image transcends the everyday and suggests the sphere of religious energies within the cosmos. Although cosmic space escapes from human control and is the supreme authority within creation it is possible to inuence the deity and bring the natural world back into alignment with human benet. Hence it is appropriate to refer not only to the geo-graphing of the earth in the narrative of Joel but also to the ways in which the book utilizes religion as an integral part of mapping systems. It is also a book which is implicitly urban in its perspective. The ancient city could not survive without fertile surroundings capable of producing enough food for its inhabitants. The direction of the prophetic gaze is from within the city, looking out to the surrounding elds and open spaces. It is ultimately the fate of an urban population which is at stake and it is an area within the urban space which has the power to counter-act the malevolent force of natural events. People are to come in to gather at the urban monument which marks the site of ritual. To this extent the text is evidence of an urban psycho-geographic imagination at work. The fundamental prole of the symbolic site referred to in the text is one which denes religious praxis as the ritual performance of Lament, creating a powerful tool for restoring order to the cosmos. The suitable and narrow space of a section of the temple is the dialogue partner of the whole of nature. The specied place is part of the House of the Lord, which is itself an urban monument. When ch. 2 refers to the images of Zion and Holy Hill it is engaging also with the city of Jerusalem since both the city and its land are ravaged by invaders; the same pattern is seen in the reverse theme of divine pity—land, Zion, Jerusalem.3 Because the re-iterated theme of Zion and Holy Hill is a fusion of land and the urban monument there is in fact a consideration of how a society survives at work in Joel 2:1, 15, 32 and 3:17, 20. Insofar as Joel provides a visionary answer to human problems of survival it functions as a mode of religious geography in which the text organizes the spatial placing of key icons which include a withered eld of crops and the image of the stormy Day of the Lord. 2. Cf. Hans Wolff, Joel and Amos (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 57. Joel 2:18 is the hinge of the book, via the movement from doom to salvation. This shift is constructed in the text as the effect of proper liturgical acts. 3. See n. 66 below. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

97

Religious Geography Thomas Dozemann notes that the earliest forms of geographic activity in the ancient world are forms of religious geography in which there is a focus on religion’s role in shaping human perceptions of the world and of the role of humankind. He suggests that these early maps “clarify acts of salvation from a geographical perspective”4 and emphasize the symbolic signicance over that of historical materiality.5 In support of his views he turns to theorists such as Yi-Fu Tuan and his concept of geopiety. In his 1977 work on space and place Tuan stresses that the modern separation between myth and reality is too clear-cut and fails to do justice to the continuing life of myths in human thought as vehicles for a yearning to identify that which exists beyond experienced geographical borders.6 Mythical space, he argues, is “an intellectual construct and also a response of feeling and imagination to fundamental human needs.”7 It allows for a small spatial site to carry the weight of cosmic order, as in the links between house, city, empire and cosmos.8 In mythical space, then, there is continuity between the material context of daily life and the realm of the divine. This link between lived space and perceived space reminds us that all map-making is at heart a social activity and reects existing social perceptions of the world.9 As Mark George has argued, the “analysis of space(s) produced by a society offers another means of studying it”10 since there is no gap between secular and religious meaning for “sacred and profane are social constructs.”11 4. Thomas Dozemann, “Biblical Geography and Critical Spatial Studies,” in Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography and Narrative (ed. Jon Berquist and Claudia Camp; New York: T&T Clark International, 2007), 88. 5. Ibid., 91–92. 6. Tuan, Space and Place. 7. Ibid., 99. 8. Ibid., 100. 9. This is to use the terminology of Edward Soja in his development of a theory of trialectics: Firstspace is that of the material (perceived) reality, while Thirdspace (lived) consists neither of the material nor the intellectual approach to spatiality but of the socially constructed lived environment. See Soja, Postmetropolis, 10–12. 10. Mark George, “Space and History: Siting Critical Space for Biblical Studies,” in Berquist and Camp, eds., Constructions, 1:16. George’s essay situates the treatment of space with regard to its value for biblical studies, using the concept of critical spatiality in which space per se becomes a topic of interest. He stresses the conceptualization of space as a social activity. 11. Ibid., 25. 1

98

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

George’s study of the wilderness tabernacle in the Pentateuch leads him to regard the space of this site and its cultic links as an example of symbolic space. For this George uses the trialectic of material, conceptual and social spaces set out by Henri Lefebvre and especially his treatment of social space. George denes cultic activity as primarily spatial; “space is indispensable to the performance of ritual. The efcacy and meaning of rituals depend on usage of appropriate ritual space.”12 The combination of space and ritual act reects the society so engaged, allowing symbolic meaning to emerge. In Chapter 5 George deals with the space of performance, as in Shakespeare’s theatre. He argues that the “walls separating theatre from world are quite porous.”13 Hence the lived space of the theatre and society as a whole are interwoven in the maintenance of social identity. At the centre of this interaction is an emotional, rather than an intellectual, uptake. Social space deals with the actual hopes and fears of the population. “Symbolic space is a space of emotion, affect and aesthetics, which gives such space social meaning.”14 This comment is clearly relevant to the concerns of urban psycho-geography which also stresses the relevance of the hopes and fears of an urban population in dening a city’s identity. Applying George’s perspective to the book of Joel provides the following insight: the text deals with the symbolic space of the cult in a way which allows the reader to address the fears of a city populace faced with catastrophe; the performance of lament draws on the function of mourning as a rite of passage between life and death. This transforms fear to hope and permits the desire for compassion to be realized insofar as a ritual space brings together congregation, priests and God in order to re-shape the destiny of people, animals, land and city. There are two layers here—the role of an actual ritual site and the associated function of a text which narrates action leading to ritual performance. The text is also performative in that it provides the medium for a meeting between religious tradition and contemporary concerns. For George, “symbolic space is dynamic because it draws in social energy and then sends energies back to society.”15 My argument picks up George’s idea (via Greenblatt) that the performance space of drama/ritual offers a porous interaction with the material world. A symbiosis of world and theatre is achieved through dramatic events which shape worldview.

12. 13. 14. 15. 1

George, Israel’s Tabernacle, 108. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 147.

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

99

Space and Place in Joel’s Narrative Construction The religious geography of the book of Joel is mapped by the interweaving of material and transcendent domains through the medium of sacred space. George’s comments on the porosity of performance apply equally to the area of narrative presentation. The text takes the place of an historical event, functioning to transfer collective emotional charges from world to narrative and thence back to world. The book opens in the divine sphere since Joel 1:1 moves from the voice of the prophet to that of divine speech.16 It is from this cosmic perspective that the particular needs of a community are addressed. The immensity of a cosmic worldview which encompasses the “civilized world” of an urban community is matched with a spatial unit which is clearly dened and forms a sub-unit of space within a temple. This area, described in 2:17 as the space between porch and altar, is the place which is appropriate for a liturgy of ritual lament which, in turn, will affect the universe. The function of cosmic spatiality in this opening scene is to draw attention to a major urban threat—the locusts. This icon from natural space provides an image of a mobile and developing threat in the space of the earth. However, the signicance of ritual space as a counterbalance to threat is already introduced in v. 8.17 In this sequence the locust advance, the failure of land and the need for lament are held together by the Day of the Lord image in v. 15.18 The imagery of locusts as deadly enemies is certainly one which draws on historical experience in the ancient Near Eastern region but here it takes on an extra dimension, becoming symbolic of divine presence and an impending judgment.19 In ch. 2 the language relating the acts of the locusts is drawn from military terminology; it is not clear which of the two hostile forces is described as like warhorses. The use of “like” may imply that locusts are 16. This is true overall even though ch. 2 does offer a third person slant in, for instance, vv. 18–19. 17. Cf. Rex Mason, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Joel (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1994), 105, where Mason refers to the overlap between a vast cloud of locusts and the use of cloud cover as an apocalyptic image. This comment is part of the treatment of the complex imagery which links both army and locusts to the Day of the Lord, with a blurring of borders between historical and cosmological aspects of events. 18. Ibid., 122, where Mason discusses the treatment of disaster and whether the text constructs its depiction of this in the language of myth. Prinsloo, Joel, 27, suggests that, traditionally, part of this motif is the image of God as commander of armies and hence personally controlling the signs of his intervention 19. Mason, ibid., 101, refers to some scholars who think that all the symbols here, locusts, re and army, are part of the stock themes of lament. 1

100

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

the focus, although the language of rumbling chariot wheels, scaling of walls, climbing into the city is drawn very clearly from the behaviour of a besieging force. The narrative construction of the book is such that cosmic space is eshed out through the symbolic “Day of the Lord.” This temporal marker becomes a spatial marker as it nds meaning in seeing the locust plague as divinely commissioned. Joel 1:15 is the hinge which holds together the passages on either side. The rst of these passages requires ritual mourning, while the section following v. 15 explores the extreme severity of the state of creation, withered and starving respectively. As such, the concept of cosmic intervention in world space is tied to physical manifestations of suffering and destruction. The appropriate response to what is a death threat is the fasting and mourning connected both with actual deaths of citizens and, symbolically, with urban guilt which threatens to annihilate the population.20 Locusts, like hostile humans, are God’s soldiers and as a divine army bring about the intended cosmic judgment. The work of insects in bringing about famine is joined with that of re as an icon of a drought caused by a hot summer climate.21 Yet the connection made between re and a cosmic Day of the Lord in ch. 2 provides a religious understanding of climate as a tool for the carrying through of plans at the cosmic level.22 These alignments produce a complex notion of space and place in which ordinary events such as the effect of the dry season are mixed with historical events such as the appearance of foreign troops, and both with the divine sphere. The locusts become larger than life in this imaging, as also does re. The biblical geography thus produced has a panoptical prole, yet it is aligned with the particularity of a limited ritual space. Lyrics of Lament Into this spatial scenery a counter-point is introduced; the people can act in self-defence by entering into the space of a place of worship. As human beings mourn, from labourers in the elds to priests at the altar, their lament takes on a specic shape, gaining weight by being gathered 20. This link is clearly present in the book of Jonah, which will be discussed in Chapter 6. 21. Cf. Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant (London: Sheed & Ward, 1992). Murray focuses his study of Joel on the drought caused by the burning heat of the midday sun, which is likened to the activity of demonic forces. 22. On the issue of in what the re consists, see, e.g., Wolff, Joel, 45: the re image is part of the theophanic tradition. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

101

together to one central and boundaried site—between the porch and the altar (Joel 2:17). Here again there is a mixture of historical reality and religious symbolism. Ritual is a physical human activity, usually tied to a well-dened site and involving specic acts and artefacts, as reected in the delineation of acts performed within a dened space in the Joel passage. But the narrow focus is balanced by the inherent supposition that the cultic act of lament draws to itself the whole of the land and the sky above. In this manner the voice of weeping balances the divine voice which performs the entire story.23 The narrative construction of the text engages human emotion as actor in the drama of crisis. The voice of weeping balances the divine voice which performs the entire story. A cultic action which matches chaos is a very specic action—that of a funereal speech-act. In her book Lyrics of Lament Nancy Lee notes the widespread evidence for the performative role of lamentation across time periods and regions and diverse societies. In Joel human grief is used self-consciously to mirror and hence act upon, the “sorrow” of the earth which is barren from locusts and drought. Lee notes how often nature is personied as lamenting in texts which “suggest a belief in the spiritual energies and personae within nature.”24 Whenever the benecial harmony of earth and human beings is lost, when the Garden of Eden image no longer works to demonstrate earth as responding to humans, texts transfer human pain to the land itself. “Earth and cosmos lament as persons.”25 Divine absence is thus a powerful tool to deal with loss, not only spiritual or psychological but also material. Exploring the Spatiality of Joel Wesley Kort’s spatial theories offer a useful tool for exploring the book of Joel and its unied approach to land as fertile and as barren and the apotropaic role of religion. Working with examples drawn from modern novels he develops three levels and two modes of spatiality which are operative in human place-relations.26 The three levels of space are the 23. Cf., e.g., Mason, Joel, 121, who reminds the reader of the huge tradition of temple lament found in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Individual and Communal Psalms of Lament. This tradition within the Psalter establishes the temple as a major centre for lament liturgies which could have a material effect on the world of human affairs. 24. Nancy Lee, Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 58–59. 25. Ibid., 78. 26. Wesley Kort, “Sacred/Profane and an Adequate Theory of Human PlaceRelations,” in Berquist and Camp, eds., Construction, 1:38–40. Kort refers to the 1

102

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

cosmic or comprehensive, the social and the personal.27 Cosmic space directs our attention to that which precedes and comprehends humanly constructed places,28 while social space is oriented both to the present material reality and to future goals.29 Personal space emerges from the interaction of both cosmic and social levels. All three levels have both a physical and spiritual mode.30 Physicality “grants space value because it grounds and steadies human life,”31 while the visionary element is “crucial to the possibilities for human creativity in social space.”32 Kort provides a lens for examining how social constructions of space bring the widest possible spatial plane which can be imagined to bear upon the fortunes of the group and of the individual. In addition, his theory is helpful in that it highlights the complementary perspectives of space as that which grounds human endeavour and as that which encourages a creative development of fresh responses to the material environment. For Kort, the dynamic which links these varied meanings of space is best understood as Accommodation, a term which indicates a positive engagement between the aspects of space/exibility/relationship/non-nality. Accommodation expresses both a capacity for space to be delineated as place of residence and a role for that mobility which is “crucial to human place-relations because it allows movement between cosmic/personal and physical/spiritual.”33 These theoretical divisions of space into levels and dynamics will now be used to explore more fully the narrative construction of the religious geography of Joel in which ritual dynamic engages comprehensive space. Comprehensive Space Kort denes comprehensive space as the “search for place-relations that can be accessed outside of, prior to, between or beyond places that are humanly constructed and controlled.”34 This level of spatiality is often manner in which treatments of time and history took priority over space and place in modern Western culture, only to lose their primacy as society became less optimistic about its values. However, the return of interest in space is problematic and the topic of “sacred space” needs much unpacking. 27. Ibid., 38–42. 28. Ibid., 38. 29. Ibid., 41–42. 30. Ibid., 41. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 42. 33. Ibid., 44. 34. Ibid., 36–37. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

103

“encountered as unpredictable and even threatening,” although it allows for awareness that human beings share space with other creatures.35 These aspects are clearly visible in the Joel narrative, where cosmic space is the dominant frame of the work and where the motif of the “Day of the Lord” comprehends all disasters, locust and human armies, together with the burning up of the land. The deity and the day form a spatial continuity in which a transcendent Being is revealed within metaphors of threats to human, animal and vegetative survival. In ch. 2 the text constructs the Day of the Lord theme as directed against human population in the city of Jerusalem. If the target is an urban society the means of communicating the threat are taken from nature since the text depicts a scene of coming darkness and gloom. The role of the term “army” here provides a link between insect and human threat since it is ambiguous.36 On the one hand, it clearly images a cloud of insects—before them the land is like a garden and after them a desert. Yet this imagery would as easily signify the effect of a huge army marching across the land, taking its crops for food and then burning the rest to make the inhabitants incapable of resistance.37 The use of re images in v. 3 highlights this textual ambiguity since this can be a cosmic image, divine re, or the res started by human force. Since vv. 4–5 describe the attackers as like cavalry and chariots and vv. 8–9 draw a picture of serried ranks of soldiers, line after line of them, who erect siege ladders and force their way into the city space, the human version of attack is underlined. However, a cloud of locusts can also “run along walls” and enter through windows. By the end of this section the text has returned to the cosmic level, as v. 11 indicates by the phrase “the Lord thunders.” The armies he commands, which are without number, comprehend all hostile threats which can affect a city site.38 Religious meaning is produced in this passage through portraying events of the natural world as these manifestations impact on human

35. Ibid. 36. Cf. Wolff, Joel, 46. Wolff imagines the rumbling sound of chariot wheels as a great intensication of the buzzing of the locust wings. 37. Joel 3 provides an indictment of the nations for all the wrongs inicted on Jerusalem, listing some of the evils carried out. Cf. John Allen, “Power,” in Companion to Political Geography (ed. John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 108–10. 38. See John Barton, Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 51, on the subject of how many and what threats to society are presented in the text. Barton notes that in ch. 3 the “locusts” have become the enemy nations. 1

104

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

beings.39 In this narrative mode the deity functions as having a spatial reality. The issue of the spatial dimensions of a divine person have been explored by Timothy Gorringe, who asks whether God has space in God’s self and answers this by suggesting that an a-spatial deity could not be relevant to human experiences which are essentially spatial in nature.40 “To fully appreciate our own spatiality we need a theology of the ‘eminent spatiality’ of God.”41 Furthermore, since “God must exist in everything God lls all places by giving existence to everything occupying those places.”42 Application of these ideas to the characterization of the deity in the book of Joel allows the reader to reect on the unity between a spatial deity and the spatial events experienced by human beings, in particular the subject of causality. If the transcendent life of the universe encompasses all the material events that occur within that space then some aspect of intention and purpose needs to be built into a theoretical denition of divinity. The “Day of the Lord” motif brings disasters inside divine purpose, as part of God’s own space, while also providing counter-arguments to the view that natural evil is purely random and that human beings are powerless in the face of such events. For Kort, comprehensive space uses the natural world imagery as a moral tool in that it forces human beings to understand that “nature” precedes human existence and is the foundation on which all human life depends. In the prophetic literature land is both the indicator of urban weakness and the measure of failure on the part of elite governments. Social Space If the construction of comprehensive space in the narrative of Joel indicates that human societies are essentially vulnerable entities depend39. This is to continue with an anthropocentric approach to the text. However, an earth-focused approach has been produced, which counters this viewpoint. See Laurie Braaten, “Earth Community in Joel: A Call to Identify with the Rest of Creation,” in Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics (ed. Norman Habel and Peter Trudinger; Atlanta: SBL, 2008), 41–52. 40. Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment, 26. Key to Gorringe’s study is the view that theologians need to dialogue outside their own discipline. In this instance that outreach touches upon the way that every building reects the perspectives of the human beings who created it, and hence embodies a value-laden, ethical position. The prole of the deity can thus be validly explored from within the spatial framework. 41. Ibid., 40. 42. Ibid., 42. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

105

ent on events in the natural world and in the elements for survival, then social space needs to nd a suitable approach to the human response to this existential condition. Kort argues that social space is always a human construction, tightly linked to human needs and viewpoints.43 This has both negative and positive sides; it is possible for social space to take over the role of comprehensive space and to produce the view that human beings can be completely in charge of the cosmos via the use of reason.44 A more nuanced approach, says Kort, deals with the work of visionaries “to provide directions for change and self-criticism.”45 This perspective has something in common with the views on the role of poetic imagination as dened by Bachelard in that it suggests a useful role for the affective and subjective dimensions of the human psyche. The book of Joel does not engage directly with a prophet’s experience, yet the presumed narrative voice in the text is that of prophetic vision.46 As such, this prophetic narrative deals with one particular situation—attack from hostile forces—which has several aspects, as shown above. It provides an answer to the question of causality beyond the immediate triggers of climate and regional politics and provides a response to danger which is within the grasp of human beings. It is interesting to note here that this response is not from within moral theory but from the enactment of a material ritual ceremony. The more localized nature of social space is dwelt upon by Kort, who argues that a key marker of social space is that it is not universal with regard to meaning. Each society provides its own content to spatiality and thus it is imperative that citizens examine their particular presentations of social space in order to ameliorate the evil impact of their social spaces. Kort argues that human actions and interactions exist rst and from that comes the construction of social spaces, rather than human life being determined by pre-existent social space.47 In Joel the social space in question is that of citizens engaged in religious ritual. The narrative construction of the text implies that it is the proper functioning of the religious space which allows for enabling power to be transferred from God-space to the social space of the worshipping assembly, since the 43. Kort, Sacred/Profane, 39. 44. Ibid., 38. 45. Ibid. 46. Prinsloo, Joel, 11, suggests that the verses at the start of ch. 1 clearly show that the contents of the chapter are treated as the words of God and that the prophet is assigned a secondary role. 47. Kort, Sacred/Profane, 39. 1

106

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

motif of 2:18 is that ritual lament has an inevitable impact on the deity, arousing his “compassion.”48 Human religious practice has an inuence on what happens both in politics and in nature. In this context Robert Murray has made valuable contributions to understanding the role of the text as social space49 when he suggests that Joel 1:8–20 is evidence of a ritual practice for controlling and disabling hostile forces, whether supernatural or earthly50 and that the space of the text is the equivalent of a temple-site.51 Murray argues that the hostile forces envisaged are a wider agricultural calamity that has been woven together in the text with the issue of locust invasion with a resultant focus on what “seemed to be an outbreak of cosmic disorder.”52 He aligns this presentation of danger with a sense of the uncanny, suggesting the end of the dry season may have been regarded as the weakening of the border between life and death, a time when demonic forces were more inuential.53 Murray stresses the role of the ritual fast, to which Joel makes reference, as a signicant symbolic act which mirrors the inability of the land to produce growth, in the dry season.54 A ritual fast enacts the severity of the drought and possible famine in order to engage benign spiritual energy in prevention of the worst extremes. Since the book goes on to cite the thirst-lled land receiving its ll of rain, Murray argues that “after due intercessions and fasting, the gift of rain has returned cosmic tsedaqah.”55 Viewed from this angle the narrative construction of ritual space and its depiction of the call for ritual action is a prophetic mode of educating the reader as to the value of such social space in producing new growth of vegetation. In turn, this shift impacts on the meaning attached to comprehensive space, ensuring that it too is understood as a site of nurture.

48. Allen, Joel, 85–88, notes that this phrase is a hapax legomenon and translates the Hebrew as passionate concern/“spared.” 49. Murray, Covenant. This study brings together a number of previous areas of study of ritual in ancient Israel to provide a coherent overview of belief and liturgical patterns in biblical religion. In particular Murray argues that social, cultural interests and the praxis of religious belief are conjoined in the topic of cultic activity. 50. Ibid., 51–56. 51. Ibid., 71. 52. Ibid., 55. 53. Ibid., 81. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 55. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

107

Personal Space Kort suggests that cosmic and social space together provide the context for personal space; the impact of personal places “arises from their enhancement of potentials within persons and their relations.” Personal space is the “site from which moral critiques of society can take shape and where personal potentials can be actualised, new forms of personal identity can be secured and new kinds of human relations created.”56 Kort emphasizes that personal space is not concerned with an individual owning their own niche site but is a matter of relationships between persons and places. This is a fruitful comment for the reader of Joel since the personal space indicated by the text as vital functions to esh out social space and to ensure community survival. The individual is charged with the weight of social responsibility and needs to answer society’s call to engage with social action in order to gain benet for all, inclusive of nature. In Joel the social space of ritual is dened as the personal space of the individual worshipper who has the chance to make a signicant impact on both social and comprehensive spaces.57 In Joel 2:15–16 there is a direct address to the reader in the form of the voice of command— Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the people, sanctify the elders, gather the children. This address sums up the whole of society by naming the youngest and oldest cohorts, emphasizing that the centrality of ingathering to focus on ritual events is the proper social action at this stage.58 Such an engagement is an absolute priority, as indicated in v. 16, where the bride and the groom must leave their wedding rites to attend to the greater rite which is both in contradiction of their ceremony of rejoicing and overturns lesser cultic acts for the greater social good. Personal space in Joel requires the assent of the subject to the common good; this assent is not theoretical but entails spatial movement—to the ritual site— and personal acquiescence in the performative function of ritual in the wider sphere of civic concerns. In this manner the narrative space of Joel creates an atmosphere of urgency and requirement, symbolized in the imperative voice of key verbs in 1:13–14.

56. Ibid., 40. 57. Barton, Joel, 21, comments on the view of Coggins and Carroll that Joel himself is a cultic prophet whose ideas are linked therefore to the nature of public liturgy. 58. Ibid., 21–22: Joel’s role appears to be that of calling on people to react appropriately; this could have been the function of cultic prophets. 1

108

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

In this poetic imaginary the voices of mourning and blessing control the viability of the land as a place of abundance. The scope of personal space is extended from the call to gather as a liturgical assembly to responsibility for the earth; the personal space of a ritual actor impacts upon the possibility of continuance for a human group in the context of the potential death/life of its domesticated animals. This in turn acts upon the wider natural world of vegetation. As Murray’s work demonstrates, the movement of the seasons, especially the cycle from dry to wet, is engineered through appropriate rituals: the rites of seasonal passage guard against the failure of seasonal change, based upon the view that there is a cosmic order which embraces all living creatures and their environments.59 The individual worshipper engages in activity which both looks in to the immediate urban crisis and out to the overall force of cosmic power. The prophet himself is a prime example of this function since it is his power of narrating speech that aligns all three levels of space. The material site of land and city is echoed in the origins of prophetic activity in the physicality of a human body. But the full identity both of person and environment is to be found not in the material but in the spiritual. As Kort suggests with reference to modern novels, narratives “extend the language of space not backward and downward towards the past and the physical but forward and upward towards the future and the spiritual.”60 In this perspective material physicality and spiritual modes of spatiality are interwoven. The focus is a desolate material site and the manner in which this can best be sustained by the spiritual space of religious praxis, such as fasting. When events turn to the better with the coming of rain the spiritual attitude of thanksgiving strengthens the physical order, undergirding society by ensuring a harmony between cosmos and community. Thus lament functions as an act of social resistance to hostile conditions within the land occupied by a community. The projected readers of the text are enjoined not to assume that they can without effort control the world in which they live. Rather, they are called to accommodate to events and to use past tradition to bring about new, creative conditions of survival. 59. Murray’s wider conceptual framework is that of a Cosmic Covenant Tradition which existed alongside a historical and monarchical framework and which underpinned the work of the cult site. This framework included acts for maintenance of a benecent situation as well as those for times when social, political and natural chaos began to break out. Hence the Covenant included three phases: Ordering, Maintaining and Restoring the Cosmos. 60. Kort, Sacred/Profane, 42. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

109

Geo-symbolism and Geo-piety The application of Kort’s methodology to a reading of Joel suggests that the book places in high regard religious approaches to human affairs. It is a text which uses visionary understanding to identify material need and a proper religious response. The book assumes the existence of a settled people living on and working agricultural land, and refers to cattle and herds which are part of this scene. Their patron deity shares in a common fate with society; since there is no food for anyone, God too will go without his due offerings of produce. Joel 1:16 refers both to “our food” and to the cutting off of food from the House of God when it tells of the seeds shrivelled and the granary emptied. In this spatial approach there is an assumption that the land referred to is not simply land in general but is that of the territory belonging to a particular community. Although drought and loss are experienced across the globe, what is important for Joel is how this affects a given temple-city. This could be seen as leading the reader to the eld of geopolitics;61 but a better term for the literary presentation of land in Joel is that of geo-piety, since plotting the use of space and its frames cannot be separated from religious myths in this ancient material. Dozeman refers to “theological imagination and religious cosmology” as actors in the depiction of geographical space; he points to the links between cosmology and geography in pre-modern times as constitutive of the concept of geo-piety.62 Hence geo-piety represents a belief in the emotional and practical bonds which unite God, human beings and nature. This viewpoint is visible in the book of Joel in, for instance, the text’s assumption that the deity has a compassionate nature which can be tapped into by human cries of distress. This view structures the text in ch. 2, in vv. 17– 18. Verse 17 encapsulates the human expression of major distress as it is vocalized in lament liturgy.63 Verse 18, by depicting the deity as instantly responding with pity, shows that the prophet believes that there is an affective aspect to the divine persona.

61. The topic of political geography is, of course, a vast one, with considerable writing by cultural geographers, sociologists and political theorists. One recent volume which surveys the contemporary face of political geography from traditional aspects such as state and territory to new proles such as environmental justice is Agnew, Mitchell, and Toal, eds., Political Geography. 62. Dozeman, Religious Geography, 88. 63. Mason, Joel, 123. Joel believed a right order of nature and society could only be established by right use of the cult. 1

110

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The book works with key geo-symbols, images which serve to remind the audience of their social identity and which provide a resource for responding to fresh events in city life. Three of these symbols will be discussed here—land, temple-space and Day of the Lord. The land is the fundamental geo-symbol of the book.64 It is introduced at the start, in 1:2, which addresses “all who live in the land,” and is continued in v. 4 by referring to the impact of locusts on its produce. Verse 6 images the hostile forces as “invading the land,” while vv. 8–12 interweaves themes of mourning, whether of virgin, widow or priest, with portrayals of crop failure. The intervention of an engagement with temple-space leads, in ch. 2, to the narrative which reconstructs the value of land as a basis for human survival, where images occur which balance those of ch. 1 but in a positive mode. The crops will produce well in v. 19 and the army of attackers will be driven out in v. 20. Animals are told not to be afraid of thirst and hunger in v. 22. Under this motif of resurrection of the natural world is included the idea of foreign nations driven out, of insect damage corrected and all turns on the topic of the “autumn and spring rains” in v. 23. The ambiguity of meaning in this verse suggests the possibility that the return of wet seasons is itself the educating force which leads the inhabitants to “know” their God.65 The topic of the land, then, is the fundamental geo-symbol in Joel, and its role continues in the message of ch. 3. In chs. 1 and 2, however, a second key symbol is engaged with, that of a public religious site. The temple as a whole does not appear as a subject in Joel; rather, it is one part of that site in its function as performance space which is signied. Joel 1:8 picks up this theme when it describes the priests in mourning as they serve in ritual activity.66 This picture is repeated in v. 13, which instructs the priests to don sackcloth and to carry out an all night vigil in that clothing. Verse 14 adds into this the command for fasting and for an ingathering of social leaders to a “sacred assembly.” They are to come to the House of the Lord and cry out for compassion from the deity to spare the land and its inhabitants from death.

64. Prinsloo, Joel, 27, notes the close link of farming and religion and states that a national lament about the agriculture crisis facing society achieves its climax and is effective in meeting the challenge, within the cultic cry of distress. 65. Cf. Allen, Joel, 91: rain as the tool for creating a context of praise. 66. Wolff, Joel, 9, believes that the whole of the rst part of Joel should be read as a great “lamentation liturgy.” 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

111

Joel 2:15–17 repeats this pattern, with the emphasis this time not on priests and leaders but on adults and children. This version of ritual necessity species the exact site which is to be used for the assembly, as the space between porch and altar. It is in this section of temple-space that the priests are to weep before the deity as a means of engaging his affectivity and hence causing a practical reversal of natural conditions. The narrative constructs this signicant ritual space by engaging the human body as metaphor. Depictions of the garments which should be worn and of the siting of human bodies are drawn to the reader’s attention through the immediacy of phrases such as “wake up,” “wail,” “blow the trumpet.” The text engages the senses of sight and sound to make the visionary meaning impact directly on the reader. Woven into this sequence is the third geo-symbol, the moment of divine intervention, the coming of the Lord in a great storm. The graphic symbol of the Lord as warrior-in-chief of human and insect armies which the book constructs in 2:1–11 brings natural events and religious belief into unity and offers knowledge about causality. Verses 1–2 set out the image of the watchman who sees an enemy coming and sounds his horn to warn the citizens to defend themselves.67 The reader is then introduced to what the watchman is gazing at: vast black storm clouds, out of which emerge the component parts of a huge army rushing towards the city. Verses 10–11 return to the theme of the storm, albeit a cosmic version in which the deity heads up his armies, human, insect and celestial, in an event which threatens the survival of the created world. This visionary event is entitled the Day of the Lord. As such, it signies the divine response to human worship, which is pragmatic intervention in human affairs. The imagery of success in warfare as divine intervention is noted in the Former Prophets, including the campaigns attributed to the leadership of Joshua.68 The motif of a divine moment within human history is used frequently in the Minor Prophets, where Amos 5 points to it as a motif of reversal. No longer is it a moment for celebration of “our” success; it is a moment for despair as the enemies destroy us, led by our own patron deity. In Joel these three symbols work together to construct the narrative space of the book on comprehensive, social and personal levels.

67. Ibid., 43, the sound of the horn in Joel 2 is an alarm cry, not a battle cry or a call to celebrate. 68. As in Josh 6, where the Israelite armies carry out a military strategy but the nal collapse of the walls is depicted as coming from divine intervention. 1

112

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

It is from within the narrative framework of divine intervention as source of threat as well as of benet that the geo-piety of the book emerges. David Slater comments that “beneath the established social imaginary there are always ows of radical imaginaries with potential to create alternative social orders.”69 This view suggests that while an established geo-symbol has the power to produce a line of religious tradition it will need to be adjusted in the light of social change and development. It can be validly applied to interpreting the construction of thought in the book of Joel. The theme of a cosmic covenant, discussed by Murray, can function to provide stability by harmony between cosmic and social space. Land, ritual and divine intervention can work together to provide cultural continuity and material prosperity. But when events do not t into this geo-pietistic model there is need for adjustment—what Murray labels as repairing the damage to cosmic harmony—and one means to achieve this is by acting out the chaos that exists in the world outside temple-space within that space by a ritual funeral. It is this which creates the geo-piety of the book of Joel. Ritual Space and Social Empowerment The theme of personal empowerment alerts us to the fact that geosymbolism is always engaged with the subject of power. John Allen notes that power may be “power over” or “power to.”70 The book of Joel manages within narrative space the threats to social and cosmic order. In ch. 1 urban society lacks the authority to control its own destiny due to the failure of power over the natural world. But ritual performance restores to human beings their capacity to bring nourishment from the land. Ritual provides the “power to” of which Allen speaks. The text of Joel constructs ritual as a means of engaging with the energy latent in cosmic/comprehensive space, suggesting that its performance, under the guidance of duly authorized ofcials, provides the means for re-dening the value of the landscape. This perspective utilizes the model of geo-piety, which sets the place of religious praxis within the perspective that the deity and the universe 69. David Slater, “Geopolitical Themes and Postmodern Thought,” in Agnew, Mitchell, and Toal, eds., Political Geography, 82. Slater stresses the way in which the contemporary era deals with the particularist nature of the construction of political identities and its lack of overt emphasis on unitive approaches to power. However, this can conceal a form of neo-universalism operative in neo-liberal theory. Hence it can be argued that all systems in fact bear the traces of cultural inuences. 70. Allen, “Power,” 96. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

113

operate in tandem. Authority to act powerfully with regard to territory is given from the cosmic to the social level of human existence, a stance endorsed in Zion’s favour at the end of Joel. The link between divine sovereignty and human ritual is indissoluble in this approach. The tension between power as that which denes reality and as that which enables reality brings us back to Kort’s view, that the most helpful approach to the nature of space is that of accommodation—a term which stresses exibility and the ongoing role of mutual adjustment.71 This construction of spatial meaning softens the rigidity of an ownership model and allows for reciprocity of person and place.72 It also denes place as a gift, something unplanned and surprising which provides a positive experience of place-relations.73 The book of Joel provides an example of this kind of accommodative process in its management of the tension between human expectation and what really happens. Those who commit to land-work can justiably expect results from the cultivation, but armies, whether locust or human, deprive the concept of expectation of its accompanying adjective, “justied.” However, the religious dimension offers both a spiritual tool for understanding this phenomenon and the ability to continue expectation beyond its initial borders. Spirituality which moves into religious praxis bridges the gap between cosmos and social space, between desire and achievement, since it offers a material context for the expression of a more general spiritual energy. In the text of Joel the accommodative process is present in the narrative with regard to its management of the symbolism of the “Day of the Lord.”74 According to James Nogalski, the Day of the Lord “structures the movement of the book from presumed judgement to the call for repentance to promised restoration and the judgement of the nations.”75 It is the icon which Joel employs to situate the role of cosmic space in the text, functioning in the rst two chapters as the ultimate source of threat and in the third chapter as an indication that this threat has been transferred to other nations. The symbol is eshed out with material events in 71. Kort, Sacred/Profane, 45 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 46. 74. James Nogalski, “The Day(s) of YHWH in the book of the Twelve,” in Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve (ed. Paul Redditt and A. Schart; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), 193. Nogalski reects on the prevalence of this phrase and its associated concepts in the Book of the Twelve. Joel provides a further specic focus for such language within that overall prevalence. Nogalski goes on to argue that this is linked in Joel 2 with the outpouring of the spirit, then with those who call on the Name of the Lord (200–201). 75. Ibid. 1

114

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

nature and politics, but the references to cosmic upheaval seem to go beyond this social level to a more universal spatiality. Biblical scholarship has tended to stress material temporality as a focus, with Simon de Vries, for example, arguing that “authentic material in Joel involves a “here and now” futurism that stands in stark relief over against the highly developed cosmic eschatology of the book’s redactors.”76 John Barton, however, suggests an accommodative process whereby the basic level of the book is a natural catastrophe which can be viewed as eschatological if the transformation of the natural order is seen as indicating that nothing can be the same again.77 This last approach allows us to focus on the nal form of the book as a narrative space which accommodates history by employing the over-arching visionary graphic of the motif of the Day and whose focus is ultimately spiritual, in the sense employed by Kort. The Lord’s Day is a spiritual, supernatural reality incarnated in material substance, while at the level of the people the event produces a spiritual response which nds expression in material acts of ritual which have both a physical and transcendent value. On the one hand affairs pass beyond normal time and space, on the other the historicity of social activity is inserted into a metaphor of the eternal.78 The symbol of the Day is used in Joel to engage in a dialogue with the scope of lament liturgy; as such, it acquires a timeless quality which is tied to its power to image fear and anxiety as well as hope. The focus of the reader moves from the particular social space of a single disaster, its explanation and remedy, to the possibility of an ultimate cosmic disaster and to the role of ritual space in any such event. Comprehensive space now overtakes social space and bears down on personal space. This urgent threat to urban life provides the foil to ritual acts. Lament liturgy becomes the way to respond positively to such danger and the text narrates its power to transform risk, as shown above. The purpose of communal lament is graphically reected in the narrative 76. Simon de Vries, “Futurism in the Pre-exilic Minor Prophets compared with that of the Post-exilic Minor Prophets,” in Redditt and Schart, eds., Thematic Threads, 261. De Vries’ thesis engages with the perspective of a signicant difference between pre- and post-exilic books within the Twelve. The basis of Joel’s expectation is still a historical phase, although this is overlaid by editorial, postexilic layers of cosmic eschatology. Cf. also Simundson, Hosea, Joel, Amos, 119–20. 77. Barton, Joel, 27. Barton balances previous theories against each other and his tendency is to provide a commentary which harmonizes what are seen as later additions with an earlier, historical layer. 78. Mason, Joel, 122–24, where Mason uses the work of Simkins as a base for discussion and suggests that the theme of the Day is migrating from both from the cycle of nature and from history. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

115

construction of Joel 1–2, as a form of social empowerment. When agriculture fails to produce a solution to drought and famine the visionary response is to turn to the temple as a place which can dynamically change material events. Religious Geography and Narrative Space The narrative construction of the book of Joel creates a religious geography in which land, city and temple are mapped against drought, locusts, armies and storm. The social space of an urban imaginary is tested in extremely difcult conditions which have been brought to bear by the functioning of comprehensive space. This event raises questions about the value of a temple-cult imaginary and whether it is suitable for events which transcend those of normal daily life. Ritual space in the book of Joel endorses the signicance of temple-space as a site of resistance to natural or political disaster. Insofar as the narrative space of the text vividly sets out both danger and rescue it takes the reader on a journey from death to life. The threshold of this journey is located in comprehensive space in the Day of the Lord motif and in social and personal space in the small site between porch and altar. The sense of hearing is drawn upon in the use of sound—the sound of created space groaning under the intolerable burden placed upon it, the sound of thunder as the violent storm hits, the sound of ritual mourning. As the sounds die away the land is renewed by the impact of the storm. The ending of Joel reveals how important temple-space is for the audience for which the book is composed. The theme of the holy hill is attached to the purication of Jerusalem which will not again be invaded by foreigners. The renewal of a holy site ensures the displacement of the “others,” those whose social and political space is different from ours. However, the book of Joel does not overall address a situation in which there is a visible and living monument which functions each day to provide the religious foundations for city-life. Unlike the book of Ezekiel, which explores in detail journeys through temple-space Joel, stresses only ritual space while showing how this site, properly used, can change the urban world.79 The text focuses less on the activities of social leaders such as kings and priests and more on the contribution which can be made by all worshippers to a positive engagement with loss in a time of crisis. 79. Cf. Prinsloo, Joel, 87, who notes that the book draws on a Zion tradition in which the temple is seen as part of the nexus of Holy Hill, Jerusalem and temple site. Hence the book deals with urban affairs. 1

116

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Temple-Space and Urban Imaginary Part 2 of the book has addressed the over-arching topic of the symbiotic link between temple and city, religion and society, in biblical prophecy. It has carried out this task by rst engaging with theories of spatiality and applying these to reading and interpreting a selection of prophetic texts. One over-arching motif in this section has been the concept of geosymbol. In Chapter 3 it was the temple, seen both as static icon and place of spatial encounter, which provided this motif with content. In Chapter 4 the house situated this theme, as metaphor and even as allegory of the built environment, its safe spaces and its wider reach. In Chapter 5 there was not one dominant geo-symbol; rather, three such images emerged, from land to its inhabitants, to sacred site, to the sacred space of the Day of the Lord. The activity connected with these mappings is both spatial and dynamic. In all three chapters a key event is the journey: whether that of pilgrims to and from the temple, or of the deity going and coming again to his home. In Joel the storm travels across the land, as do the clouds of locusts and human armies on the march. This is paralleled with the in-gathering of the congregation to enact lament rituals. In Chapters 3 and 4 of this section the cultic activity of the temple ofcials comes under a scrutiny which declares that it is often awed; Chapter 5, however, showed that a much more positive prole can be attached to worship in prophetic literature. This opens into the issue of contradiction and resistance as aspects of space and place in the texts reviewed. Chapters 3 and 4 show characters resisting the pull of sacred sites and denouncing the manner of their management by elite regimes. In Amos the prophet claims the space as suitable for his individual viewpoint on society, while Ezekiel is taught to stand aside from Jerusalem worship by his accompanying messenger. There is a tension in the texts between the social space of an elite society and the personal space of the individual prophet who claims to have a better understanding of how social space should frame cultic activity. In ch. 5 Joel draws all worshippers in on equal terms since all members of society are needed for the ritual lament to gain enough weight to counter disastrous events.80 In all the texts examined in this section there is an emphasis on space as event. Space is both static and dynamic, when viewed as templespace. The secluded courts of the sacred monument are central to the 80. Simundson, Hosea, Joel, Amos, 122–23, notes the absence from the text of the gures of kings as leaders of the secular aspect of urban life. 1

5. Narrative Space and Ritual Space

117

control of political space in the city-state. But they are to be judged by the immensity of cosmic space whose transcendent energy they claim to channel for the good of the urban community. In this context urban psycho-geography reects both the magnetism of sacred site and the refutation of the authority of its practitioners to speak for, and on behalf of, the urban community.

1

118

Part 3

THREE URBAN IMAGINARIES

1

120

Chapter 6

THE GREAT CITY IN THE BOOK OF JONAH

Parts 1 and 2 have together provided the context for this present section, which treats material relating to prophetic urban imagination. Whereas the Part 1 established the book as dealing with aspects of urban psychogeography, Part 2 explored the diversity of perspectives that can be attached to reading temple-space as a central icon of urban imagination. Part 3 moves on from these wider considerations to provide three individual case studies of the prophetic treatment of the urban condition: of which this chapter on the urban imaginary of the great city in the book of Jonah is the rst.1 In this imaginary the city of Nineveh is treated as a person who can be held responsible, as a moral agent, for the effects of its policies towards other urban communities. Yet there are few scenes in which Nineveh appears per se; the great city is largely viewed through the eyes of the prophet and his God and messages concerning its moral status are “hidden” within other narrative settings, such as the ship in ch. 1. From the angle of psycho-geography the image of the great city raises an uncomfortable issue of urban relationships. As “another” city Nineveh could be read as a site which might be twinned with Jerusalem, but its historical character as “the other” city makes it a focus for fear and distrust. The tension between two urban sites relates to themes of difference and reciprocity, with which the book of Jonah deals in a large measure via the characterization of the prophet as an urban aneur. Jonah’s job is to go to Nineveh, to walk its streets and to dialogue with its people. As a man on the street the prophet provides information concerning the possibility of a great city being a “moral agent.” 1. Nineveh was a large city, judging by excavations of the site, but not as large as implied in the text. Hence the size is to be viewed as symbolic. See Simundson, Hosea, Joel, Amos, 227, and Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, 223. Allen suggests the purpose is rhetorical, to emphasize the size of the task for the prophet and the immensity of the conversion.

122

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

This task turns the prophetic body into a liminal site which symbolizes the ambiguity of urban life and questions the city’s capacity for morality.2 Can Jonah view Nineveh as just another city or will it always be the enemy other? If the great city “gets away” with crimes against humanity perpetrated in the pursuit of territory; what does that say about divine justice?3 Jonah’s viewpoint, it transpires, consists of a personal inability to see the inhabitants of Nineveh as like himself, tied in with a conviction about the sort of justice which the deity should exercise.4 Such a stance might be expected in the light of the many prophetic books which use Assyrian aggression as a symbol for the collapse of local states.5 The Jonah story which sets Jerusalem and Nineveh side by side gives rise to questions which have a wider bearing on cities as global sites. Some of these deal with the subject of relations between urban populations; others treat the topic of imperialism, with its implicit view that only one city can be dominant within a regional setting. Both of these topics share a concern with the role of the urban stranger, the issue of alienation and the nature of marginality. The book of Jonah does not deal with these issues in an abstract, systematic manner. Instead, it does so in a narrative which has a plot carried out through the actions of a cast of characters. Two of the key players in the narrative drama are the prophet and his God. It is important to notice that the third major player is the city population. That is, 2. This is to note that in the book of Jonah the prophet is spat out onto land and immediately arrives in Nineveh. Once that is over he immediately heads for the desert. Narrative structure makes the city the in-between place for sea and desert, thus allowing the value of the city to be established in relation to the neighbouring place settings. Cf. Perry, The Honeymoon Is Over, 51, where he suggests that this triptych of settings offers multiple possibilities for Jonah’s attitude to the city. 3. Cf. Katherine Dell, “The Shaping of the Book of Jonah,” in After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason (ed. John Barton and David Reimer; Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996), 98–99. Dell focuses on theodicy as a central aspect of the book. See also Allen, Jonah, 193, where Allen discusses the rival claims of justice and mercy. 4. Many commentators see Jonah’s attitude as stemming from a reluctance to forgive. Robert Coote, for instance, addresses the view that Jonah’s anger is a key theme. Though it is Absurd it allows for God’s mercy as a lesser Absurdity; see R. Coote, Amos Among the Prophets: Composition and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 129. See also Allen, Jonah, 227. Against this view Perry, Honeymoon, emphasizes the inclusivity of the book and hence argues that Jonah’s challenge concerns the scope of divine care. 5. Cf. Simundson, Jonah, 278, where he argues that the Ninevites are not neutral aliens but a hated and cruel enemy, whose wickedness is recorded in the Old Testament. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

123

the city is not proled as a material site and there is little attention to its construction, the stress falls on the nature of an urban site as a social place whose identity is constructed from the hopes, fears and actions of the social body. The story of Jonah visibly deals with the lived space of urban conict and the way in which a regional situation opens up to wider issues of urban intention and responsibility while, at the same time, being constructed in a thoroughly imaginative manner in which mythological creatures such as sh and insect play a key role and domestic animals are counted as part of the urban population. This narrative construction of Nineveh places the city on a par with Jonah and the Lord in that all three are bodily presences which have the capacity for action and interaction, thus opening up a point of access to the eld of cultural geography. David Smith’s work on moral geography suggests that urban places and sites are as capable of carrying values as is the human body.6 Smith argues that human geography deals with the relationships between human beings at family, community and institutional levels. These relationships in turn touch upon the topic of values; hence the task of geo-graphing cities has an essentially moral dimension. The literary representation of Nineveh in Jonah is in line with its identity as imperial aggressor in other prophetic books, as noted above. Lowell Handy’s commentary on the circles from which Jonah originated provides useful information regarding this context.7 He notes the scribal worldviews embedded in the text.8 These include the belief in an ordered universe, where anything that causes disorder is construed as injustice.9 The city is an essential part of cosmic order: its social hierarchy, led by the urban elite, mirrors the ranked nature of cosmic space. This urban character implies that city space is essentially moral; however, Nineveh’s military activity and political ambition disrupt the proper order of its companion city, Jerusalem. To this extent Nineveh attacks proper cosmic order and can be condemned as an unjust society.10 In this perspective the great city counters intrinsic urban morality by breaking the correct code on urban interaction at an inter-national level. This judgment is borne out by comparison with Amos chs. 1–2 which condemns a number of urban 6. David Smith, Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 8–9. 7. Lowell Handy, Jonah’s World: Social Science and the Reading of Prophetic Story (London: Equinox, 2007). Handy describes his study as contributing to socialscientic commentary. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. Ibid., 17–18. 10. Ibid., 33. 1

124

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

societies on the grounds that they have damaged the rights of sister cities in the region.11 Jonah the Flaneur Since Jonah, Nineveh and the Lord are all characters in the story of how Nineveh was both condemned and potentially pardoned, we can see that the debate over urban morality is mediated not by formal disputation but by plot and setting. Whereas a parallel discussion about human guilt and divine justice in the book of Job is worked out via a long section of formal speeches by gures of scribal status, the poetics of Jonah utilize a series of spatial movements to raise sophisticated matters of urban interrelationship. Nineveh is the object of both divine and human concern but appears as itself only in ch. 3. Yet the great city has been present from the start of the book and has already attracted characterization. God’s command to go to Nineveh and declare its condemnation on account of its evil deeds sets the ultimate framework of the debate. This is balanced by the last words of the book, in 4:10–11, where the deity implies that compassion is needed. Evaluation of the great city is embedded in the spatial movements of the prophet.12 Jonah’s rst act is to go as far away from Nineveh as possible; the great city should be avoided at all costs, it seems. And it is at all costs because the ship on which Jonah embarks is nearly destroyed by a divinely caused storm. So the great city cannot in fact be avoided, it cannot be escaped. Whether the prophet knows it or not he has already begun to engage with the city in a hidden manner in the shape of the ship’s crew. They face destruction and assume guilt on their part; hence they pray to their gods to save them. Jonah is forced to tell them that he is a Judahite and a believer in YHWH. As a result they both try to save him and put their trust in his deity. This narrative presentation of the outsider culture is repeated in ch. 3, where the urban community experiences a parallel conversion. But Jonah represents Jerusalem, the urban companion of Nineveh. In ch. 2, while in the sh, Jonah is portrayed as though in the temple-space 11. Amos addresses the social crimes of attacks on city-states by Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon and Moab. Cf. Coote, Amos, 129. 12. See here the concept of place-ballet. In Chapter 2 of Massey, Allen and Pile, eds., City Worlds, John Allen discusses this topic; people move on the streets according to their own goals but the combination of movements creates a rhythm by which city spaces are produced. The combination of the prophetic movements and the subject of city space work together in the book of Jonah. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

125

of his city. His lament psalm demonstrates a longing to be in the temple in v. 4—an image endorsed in v. 7 since the speaker is condent that his song will reach the deity just as if it were uttered in the temple site. The reader is reminded of the demands which that city makes on our sympathy. In this subtle manner the narrative has dealt emotively with the relationship of different cultures which cannot escape proximity. In ch. 3 Jonah enters the great city and is inside it rather as he was in the great sh—as an extraneous object which is temporarily present but will be ejected. In this second version of the motif however it is Jonah who will eject himself, in righteous anger, as against being vomited up by the sh. Jonah may have short and boundaried encounters with mariners, sh and urban community, but the effect of the encounter on the human groups he meets is to bring about a change of religious identity. They become worshippers of his deity and accept all that goes with that— ritual prayers, acts of penance, celebration of loyalty. So, they have become fellow-worshippers with him. But can they truly be associated with the Assembly of Israel in other ways? Jonah rejects any such suggestion by leaving the city site and settling outside its space, building a separate home for himself. However, the prophet is himself vulnerable, as the enacted parable of the plant, the “worm,” the sun and the wind demonstrates. The stance of absolute moral correctness on the part of human beings is itself awed, perhaps. Jonah in his hut is Jerusalem in its own space, within a narrow conne both because it has been reduced to that state by Nineveh and through its responding desire to break all ties with the great city. The book ends and there is no resolution of the issues raised by the narrative structure of bringing together the two urban societies. Yet the issues are there and linger in the mind of the reader. Presiding over the entire story is the person of the Lord whose scope is depicted as universal, the deity of the nations as well as of the chosen city-state. Is the intention of the deity to bring vengeance on the persecutor of his people, in ch. 1? It could be a desire for the enlightenment of the communal religious mind of the “others.” Within the plot sequence it is God who initiates and controls the movements of the two cities in their various guises. It is the characterization of the deity to act as a facilitator bringing two contested positions to the table of dialogue and allowing them to hear each other. Thus, by ch. 3 God has insisted by word and act that Jonah enter the city, where he sees and hears the citizens’ response to the divine message. He ensures that Nineveh has the opportunity to hear Jerusalem in its own personal voice. 1

126

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

If this spatial encounter is potentially a rst step in urban arbitration it is only partially successful. But then, does Nineveh accept the Lord rather than Jerusalem; does it see itself being in relationship to a deity as against a people?13 In ch. 1 the sailors try to save their fellow human being and so appear to have a sense of personal relationship. Or is it that they simply don’t want to be accused of murder? Since the text records some of the inner motives of each of the main players, but by no means all that motivates their acts, the issue of urban morality also remains incompletely recorded. Spatial poetics provide readers with the questions and some possible lines of enquiry, but after that the subject of city rectitude turns into a matter for open and ongoing debate.14 The role of the prophet as a aneur provides a major textual device for dramatizing the presentation of the themes of familiarity and strangeness, of the challenge to established self-identities on the part of urban communities. Moral Geographies Smith’s book is called Moral Geographies, plural, because his approach suggests that there is no one absolute morality which will work universally across the globe. He argues that the term morality gains meaning from human agents whose activities within spatial settings give content to the concept.15 This perspective places ethics as a universal truth in dialogue with the variety of material contexts which exist and suggests that there is inevitably a degree of ethical variety and difference when the eld of study concerned is geography. Smith suggests that each culture has its own reality and that geographic morality is grounded in contextualization.16 Using Smith’s approach to urban morality is very useful in an exploration of the concept of moral city within the Jonah story because it offers 13. Nineveh is never described in terms other than of evil. The fact of her evil nature is set out but the issue is whether this reality can operate within the range of what is normally valid. Cf. Allen, Jonah, 189, where the work of Phyllis Trible is quoted. Jonah cannot accept the love that repents of performing retributive evil. See also p. 193, where Allen suggests that the text allows for God to qualify a death sentence if there is a radical change to a moral situation. 14. Cf. Perry, Honeymoon. Perry discusses the theme of repentance in Jonah (125–26), suggesting that the text highlights repentance but leaves unclear whether the hero remains unrepentant. However, Jonah does change his mind and go to Nineveh. Perry also notes that, in terms of mercy, God appears to be able to co-exist with evil, once the source of evil repents (124). 15. Smith, Moral Geographies, 10. 16. Ibid., 14. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

127

a tool for interpreting the similarity and difference between two ancient city-states. Prophetic texts such as Amos 1–2, referred to above, provide evidence in biblical religion of a common set of basic rules about political decency between urban communities. On those terms it can be agreed that Nineveh has acted unjustly towards Jerusalem. But the text of Jonah implies that the great city has not grasped how this code of practice can be used to measure its moral standing and that it is the task of Jerusalem to make this clear to the Ninevites. The textual view is that the great city will come under the same moral code as the Judahites; it has acted unjustly and deserves to be punished. Equally, however, if, once the situation is made clear to it the community acknowledges guilt and turns to God, it should receive the same pardon as the home community of the book. This is not simply a matter of crime and punishment but of loyalty to YHWH. The moral code which is to be embraced is intimately linked with acceptance of the authority of a foreign deity. The textual focus on particular spatial sites in dialogue with Nineveh resonates with Smith’s use of the views of Alistair MacIntyre to support his geo-ethical stance: moral philosophy always mediates ethics through some particular culture or place.17 MacIntyre emphasizes the contextual nature of moral systems, arguing that this is the only practical approach to take to the subject of ethics since, whatever abstract systems claim, the important signier is what people actually do.18 Moral codes are worked out within social networks; human beings learn from observing other people and thus create a subjective morality.19 Application of this perspective to reading Jonah leads the reader to keep in mind the reciprocal nature of human morality. But Smith also notes that cities function in a wider regional setting: questions of reciprocity emerge as a result of this political reality. The themes of reciprocity and proximity are relevant to an understanding of Jonah. Reciprocity is a matter of relationships and Nineveh has engaged in relations of urban aggression; should not Judah’s God threaten a reciprocal disaster for the great city? In acting imperialistically Nineveh has treated Jerusalem not as a neighbour city but as a distant stranger to whom it has no special ties. Can Judah have anything neighbourly to say to the great city, given that reality? It is by traversing the city space on

17. Ibid., 24. 18. Alistair MacIntyre, The Tasks of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106. 19. Ibid., 108. 1

128

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

foot that the prophet can bring the responsibility of reciprocity in urban relations to bear on Ninevite consciousness. In ch. 3 the great city, as constituted by its inhabitants, shows that it is starting to relate to Jerusalem as a proximate human society. We can note here Smith’s comment about the signicance of people’s experience of travel as an aspect of life which makes individuals reect on the nature of morality—a view which is highly signicant in the light of the importance of travel as a narrative theme in Jonah.20 MacIntyre also reects on the role of the human body and its moral stance, suggesting that it is action within a social setting which constitutes an individual as a moral being. Hence bodily movement functions as an ethical tool; it is in the body’s movements towards and away from other human beings that morality is demonstrated.21 Smith’s study opens out into explorations of key geo-ethical concepts which he develops in the main body of his book and these will be used in this chapter as a resource for an examination of Jonah. They cover areas such as reciprocity, landscape, proximity, distance and territory. Each of these terms combines the search for moral truth with the treatment of particularity and difference which are essential aspects of any geographical enterprise. The use of moral geography as a reading lens for interpreting Jonah will engage the reader more deeply in the ways in which the narrative space of the text both gives rise to ethical enquiry and, possibly, offers some responses to these issues. Reciprocity Smith sets out the category of reciprocity as the nearest concept to a universal moral rule.22 He argues that “reciprocity is reected in the everyday practices of mutual aid,” thus establishing an ethics based on relationships in human affairs,23 and denes the scope of the term as that of the Golden Rule of treating others as one would like to be treated oneself.24 Reciprocity refers to the interweaving of the fates of multiple social bodies and can be explored as a tool for understanding the narrative construction of Jonah. The book raises moral topics by portraying the prophetic body interacting with a number of other bodies in scenes which are fraught with danger to survival. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 1

Smith, Moral Geographies, 33. MacIntyre, Philosophy, 93–96. Smith, Moral Geographies, 39. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40.

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

129

Chapter 1’s account of a ship in danger of sinking due to an immense storm provides an example of this literary usage.25 Verse 5 provides a vivid picture of the sailors’ fear in which the ship-community works together for safety. This provides a strong contrast with Jonah, who has sought rest for himself alone. In v. 6 he is asleep in the inner depths with no thought of the community as a whole and is challenged by the ships’ master as to his moral sense. How can he be failing to put his weight into rescuing the group? But, even so, it is the other group members who are active, casting lots to nd a solution to the problem. Only when he is completely exposed as the cause of societal collapse does Jonah admit his responsibility, and only after that, in v. 12, when conditions have worsened, does he take on himself the social duty which is his by telling the sailors to throw him overboard.26 A fully moral role is his when he says “I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.” Jonah’s “I” is put into direct relationship with society’s “you.” Dialogue is used here as a means of gradual revelation of the reciprocal nature of human society. The ship’s crew are depicted as outsiders, as Gentiles with their individual gods; this is in tension with Jonah, who is narratively depicted as behaving as though he has no ties with the community. The crew gain from Jonah knowledge of the truly transcendent and he learns to acknowledge that these people have a call on his own actions.27 The dynamic of this scene provides a foretaste of the dynamic found in ch. 3: the ship is parallel with the city. This reading builds on two of Smith’s ideas, that sociability is a universal connector and that geographic mobility opens up a person to world of difference and cosmopolitanism. Landscape Smith notes that location and its parallel terms involve normative judgments. When we gaze at a site we also assess its overall value. But the “interpretation of meaning of a particular place involves complementary 25. For a discussion of the role of storms at sea in ancient narrative, see Handy, World, 95–96. 26. See here Perry, Honeymoon, 38–39. Perry describes the sea as representing the netherworld of chaotic waters and oceanic abyss—a setting for the origins of life in ancient Near Eastern myth. See also p. 165, where he denes the sea-desert as the proper reading site for Nineveh. 27. The sailors begin by calling on elohim but end by making pleas to YHWH. Handy, World, 71, discusses the way in which the text of Jonah depicts sailors as religious people. 1

130

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

and competing moral discourses” since not all viewers produce the same evaluation.28 Smith acknowledges a link between his ideas and those of Yi-Fu Tuan, who attaches moral signicance to aesthetic judgments. Hence particular images of natural sites may give the viewer a sense of the over-arching concept of innocence. The literary aesthetics of Jonah deal with the ideas which city spaces can produce. The size and weight of Nineveh in ch. 3 becomes an image of inherent evil, in Jonah’s eyes.29 The plant which lives and is killed offers an alternative moral gaze in divine eyes, in which a city is capable of moral growth.30 The enacted parable of ch. 4 works as a form of moral geography to dramatize this dual face of urban existence. This is what Smith describes as the “performative powers of spatial practice.”31 Tuan himself suggests that “from the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space.”32 Tuan’s view that moral geography is closely linked with the reality and the metaphor of the body leads him to argue that the learning from experience which an embodied person is capable of is a good measure of social values and that this involves the overcoming of perils and engagement with the elusive and the uncertain.33 This metaphoric function of the body includes how an individual body positions itself, as well as human bodies in their relations with each other.34 An example of the bodily context of moral education is provided in ch. 2 of Jonah. At the end of ch. 1 the deity has organized a great sh to scoop the prophet from the sea. This is both fantastical and potentially death-dealing; Jonah might just as well have drowned, surely? But the sh is in fact a safe space for the human being.35 The prophet uses it as his worship site, just as one might use a temple-space in the city. This is 28. Smith, Moral Geographies, 46. 29. For a treatment of the increased power and size of Nineveh as a city, see Allen, Jonah, 221–22. 30. Although the plant’s destruction is ultimately caused by God. Divine destructive activity in the prophet’s regard is noted by Allen, Jonah, 233. The combined forces of sun and wind are addressed in Perry, Honeymoon, 65–66. 31. Ibid., 53. 32. Tuan, Space and Place, 6. Tuan’s study emphasizes the usefulness of taking human experience as the foundation for exploring spatial geography. 33. Ibid., 9. 34. Ibid., 34. 35. A great deal has been developed from this scene, in the afterlife of the book. Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), provides a thorough examination of this interest. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

131

made clear in v. 4, where Jonah states that he will look again to “your holy temple,” a symbol of one of the two cities in contestation for moral right.36 The theme is repeated in v. 7, where Jonah asserts that his prayer rose “to your holy temple.” Finally, Jonah makes a solemn vow to God to offer sacrice of thanksgiving for salvation in v. 9. The entire tone of the chapter is, indeed, that of the psalm of lament, associated with the Jerusalem temple. If, in ch. 1, Jonah’s body is the context of others’ religious education, then the sh is the body through which Jonah relearns his own religious tradition. Morality is thus interwoven with correct religious loyalty. While Jonah learns about the morality of urban life within his personal body, Tuan argues that the human body serves as an ordering tool on a second level also, as a source of metaphors for use in establishing an ordered picture of a social body. This approach to the function of the social body turns the city into a learning space which requires the reader to address issues of order and hierarchy.37 Tuan’s worldview suggests reading of ch. 3 as a mythical space which represents human attempts to make sure of the environment, using the metaphor of the human body as a way of attributing values to the city.38 In ch. 3 the streets function as the nerves of the city, channels by which messages pass through the urban community to reach its command centre, the throne of the ruler. In Jon 3:5 the city as people on the street believes the message to be true, while in v. 6 tidings have reached the central control of the social body, the king. The role of streets as channels of communication is one with the function of the throne-site as the brain/mind of the city, expressing the central political will in the decree of public mourning in vv. 7–8, which includes all members of the body-politic.39 This reading of the underlying structure of the chapter suggests that a metaphoric pairing of city streets and palace with the human nervous system allows the reader to focus on the ordered and hierarchical nature of the great city. It is such robust self-organization which has enabled it to take up an imperial course of action in the past but now the same structural order is used to move the city swiftly into a publicly visible new prole—which in this case is a model of just action.

36. Perry, Honeymoon, 118–19. Perry addresses the issue that Jonah’s prayer appears to come from a temple setting even though he is in the belly of a sh. 37. Ibid., 88. 38. Ibid., 89. 39. See Allen, Jonah, 224, where it is noted that the Persian custom was for animals to take part in mourning ceremonies. 1

132

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

If cities can be read as social bodies it is also possible to read individual human bodies as symbolic of wider social bodies by aligning the concepts of body and monument. Smith suggests that the urban scene can be read through the presence in cities of public monuments which carry urban cultural values.40 The culture of a city is made visible in the built monument, which acts as a symbol of urban identity.41 This topic brings the reader to consider whether the two cities in Jonah are demonstrated via public buildings, and, if so, to what effect. Two such constructions can be traced within the narrative: the temple building in ch. 2 and the palace in ch. 3. In ch. 2 the implied setting for Jonah’s prayer is that of the temple in his home city of Jerusalem. It is the function of a temple to provide proper space for religious ritual. The psalm of lament gains weight from being prayed in that context since a temple provides a site which is in direct contact with cosmic space. The element of praise at the end of a lament psalm works with that belief in access points to divine aid which resolves evil events in the worshipper’s favour. In ch. 3 the reception of Jonah’s message is fully endorsed once the king has accepted it as normative for his city. This is provided by the issuing of a royal edict in v. 7. The place setting for this edict is the royal palace, especially the seat of secular authority, the throne. In v. 6 the king rises from his throne and goes to a different space. He takes off his royal clothing, the reection of his royal power, and puts on sackcloth. He sits down in the dust and not up, on a throne. In these ways the text conveys the message that the city acknowledges the power and the authority of Jerusalem’s deity. These two scenes depict twinned places within the spatial poetics of the book. The temple is the seat of religion while the palace is the seat of secular power. In ancient cities they would normally act in tandem to empower the urban community, with the ruler ensuring that the correct cultic activity took place. This is found, for instance, in the scene in 1 Kgs 8, where Solomon’s prayer on behalf of the city is received by Israel’s God. In prophetic books the urban spatial symbiosis is used to indicate the collapse of the home community; an evil fate awaits Jerusalem in Isa 1–39, for example, because the city cult has diverged from its true role. In Jonah there is a further version of this theme. The Jerusalem temple is the true religious home of the narrative and the scope of its divine inhabitant is extended to a foreign city which has its own deities. The narrative depiction of the king showing subservience to

40. See here Smith, Moral Geographies, 31. 41. Ibid., 45. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

133

Jonah’s God enhances the message that divine rule operates across the nations as well as in Judah. Proximity For Smith the idea of proximity is eshed out through the subjects of locality and community. He notes that in the ancient world location and social group tended to provide a static foundation for human society, leading to a worldview in which the proper social link was to the neighbour, with strangers being looked on as a source of danger to the home group.42 Moral codes tended to cover the relationships between families and clans; thus morality was intimately connected with locality and hence with community.43 The community has the role of moral authority and each citizen has a place in the social order to which are attached both rights and responsibilities.44 An example of this mechanism at work has already been explored, in the relations between sailors and prophet in ch. 1 of Jonah. In this scene the stranger was indeed a source of mortal danger for the local community. Clearly, a second instance of this theme is provided in the narrative of Jonah’s arrival in the great city. The text is sparing in its attention to detail in this scene, meaning that the reader is left to ll in the gaps. Nevertheless, the main frame of the action is clear. The reader shares the visitor’s rst sight of the city and learns, on the ground, how vast it is, taking three days to walk through.45 The prophet advances into its streets and starts his proclamation, in v. 4. Since v. 5 states that the inhabitants immediately took action the text pictures a direct line between a man on the streets, a public preacher, and the public at large. There is an immediacy and an intimacy in this story-telling in which a local group takes a stranger as one of its own members insofar as his social understanding is concerned. In ch. 3’s version of urban proximity the prophet’s presence is that of the aneur, the one who can offer valid and serious comment on the values espoused by an urban community but who stands apart from full engagement in urban activity in order to

42. Ibid., 74. 43. Ibid., 77. 44. Ibid., 78–79. 45. Cf. Perry, Honeymoon, 50. The city is “the object of ight, directed prophecy and perplexing curiosity in the book of Jonah.” It can be viewed from two angles, from the sea and from the desert, and these places hep to dene how it should be measured. 1

134

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

engage in a reective analysis of city life.46 Jonah exemplies the image of a “true voice on the street” with his grass-roots function of uttering urban critique. The value of the proximity of a aneur to busy city life function is underscored by his being met by a harmonious grass-roots response from the Ninevites. Distance The passer-by metaphor allows both for a clearer vision of the inner measure of urban community and also for investment in the subjective truth of the observer. By acting as a proximate relation, located in the urban neighbourhood, the alien presence of the foreign visitor challenges urban complacency with regard to its own domesticity.47 But there is in ch. 3 a complex mixture of proximity and distance in the spatial performance of the prophetic body which is used to deconstruct Nineveh’s image as t for destruction. Smith explores the balance between closeness and distance in social relationships, noting that “distance leads to indifference, while closeness can lead to pity.”48 Jonah’s character is a tense mixture of indifference and engagement. He appears to think that he needs to remain at a great distance from the great city in ch. 1 but in ch. 4 we discover that he is passionately concerned with Nineveh’s fate. He is so angry that he has been sent on a false errand that he wants to die, in v. 3. His visit to the great city has not provided him with any sense of its citizens as fellow human beings whose actions are directed as much by ignorance as by evil intent. It remains for the deity to suggest this attitude as viable. It is this narrative use of prophetic travel as a physical event, accompanied by a lack of emotional travel, which helps to engage the reader in the ne-tuning of urban morality. The prophet could have found himself facing a reciprocal aspect of being a visitor, a non-resident of Nineveh. Smith notes societies tend to be suspicious of strangers who travel into their home site, viewing them more as threat than opportunity.49 But there is no sign of urban hostility 46. This is to use the concept created by Walter Benjamin, from the way in which the male person can wander the streets with impunity and observe events there at leisure. Cf. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 10–11, which picks up on the contemporary revival of the theme of aneurie. 47. James Limburg, Jonah (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 87. Jonah as a lone stranger walking the streets. 48. Smith, Moral Geographies, 74. 49. Ibid. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

135

to Jonah, even though Smith suggests that “to be a stranger away from home, out of place, adds to the vulnerability of difference.”50 Technically it is Jonah who should be feeling vulnerable when he enters Nineveh, but the plot changes this around to make the prophetic presence a comment on Nineveh’s own certainty. Yet Jonah does experience inner vulnerability, at the delay of divine anger against Nineveh. In 4:2 he accuses God of being too lax, too soft.51 This divine trait undermines Jonah’s self-worth, symbolically Jerusalem’s trust in divine vengeance for wrongs carried out against it. His inner space is violated by standing on enemy soil and seeing it prosperous and undamaged; his liminal position leads not to common cause with the group with which he engages, as happened in ch. 1, but to an absolute denial of any commonality with the Ninevites.52 The movement of the dialogue between prophet and deity, which takes place at a distance from the material urban site and thus indicates the possibility of a positive disengagement with city space in order to take a calmer approach to urban morals, provides a space for stressing the essential sociability of human existence. Smith believes that “community is a normative ideal for human society” and that it is the substance of the divine viewpoint.53 Smith argues that starting from this approach leads to a focus on care above justice. “Moral relations involve an ‘ethic of care’ more than justice” and when this concept is transferred to a global context its impact is to widen the scope of ethics to one community’s care for another, rather than care only happening inside one community, to the exclusion of others.54 The presentation of Jerusalem’s view as one of justice above care raises key issues about urban morality. If two cities are in conict and one has harmed the other, how do justice and care approaches operate? Does injustice negate care or can care come back into action if the oppressive community compensates its victim? It appears to be a highly charged message which suggests that care comes before recompense and is contingent only on an internal change of attitude within the unjust

50. Ibid., 73. 51. A key matter of interpretation is the balance of the book of Jonah between nationalism and universalism. See Allen, Jonah, 193, who notes that God saves all creatures. Simundson, Jonah, 255, sees Jonah as universalism. Perry, Honeymoon, 50, understands Nineveh as a gure for humanity itself. 52. It is useful to consider here the symbolic role of another city, that of Tarshish, as the locale where God has never revealed himself. See Allen, Jonah, 204. 53. Smith, Moral Geographies, 77. 54. Ibid., 82–6 1

136

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

society. It is because of Jonah’s warning that Nineveh can be spared, but he himself rejects that consequence of his act. In this textual presentation the great city, despite its apparent independence, is more likely to survive because an external party asserts it has a life in common with other urban sites than because of its own international reputation as a great power Space and Territory The fraught nature of the moral justice of politics may be reviewed through the lens of Smith’s approach to the moral geography of identity. Smith suggests that human identity is closely tied to territory, with the subdivision of space creating a place of identity for a human society.55 “A geopolitical map deals with moral geography” and has to do with “boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.”56 Territory satises basic human needs, emotional as well as practical. A city site can be counted as one such territorial marker and the city-as-home is present in Jonah; ch. 2 functions as a source of nurture and security. It is the apportioning of such a prole to the great city, as a matter of right, which is the fundamental departure point for the whole book of Jonah: a narrative fact which only becomes clear in the nal chapter.57 The moral right of Nineveh to remain in its own space is managed in ch. 4 through the motif of the prophet’s temporary shelter. Jonah’s hut stands in for the city of Jerusalem which he represents and which, signicantly, is placed on the extreme edge of civilization since Jonah erects his shelter at the edge of the desert, in the east, in v. 5.58 If the great city is allowed central place in the story of two cities then where is Jerusalem to go except into liminality?59 However much on the edge the

55. Ibid., 114. 56. Ibid. 57. See Handy, World, 33–34. The real context of the book of Jonah is the place of Yehud in the Persian Empire. Since Nineveh is a past reality it is safe to use it as a metaphor for any imperial urban power centre. 58. Cf. Limburg, Jonah, 93. Limburg observes that the prophet walks off the set, taking up a position outside, as signalled by the term East. He also notes an image of this scene he observed in a shop window in Oxford, an image which illustrated how readers share Jonah’s gaze and view laid out before them houses, streets, shops (98). 59. See Coote, Amos, 134. If Jonah is an exilic book the story of Nineveh prepares Judah for an understanding of the pain of its own exile and the coming repatriation of its populace. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

137

hut is and however much it is a site of despair it is still Jonah’s own space, which he himself built.60 But this is not a comfortable position since a temporary shelter gives little protection from the desert conditions of wind and sun and, metaphorically, because it is a narrow space created by righteous anger feeding on itself—a denial of sociability, a declaration of man against the world. But Jonah is given another member of his group, a plant which supports him physically and emotionally, only to have this point of sociability withdrawn. At this point divine reason intervenes. Jonah, says God in v. 10, has related to the plant with which he had only accidental relations so strongly that he is deeply upset at its death. So how much more should the deity show concern for a city which has many members and which has a much bigger stake in the right to exist than a transient plant. The appeal to care as a higher principle than strict justice made from cosmic space has an uncertain effect on the social and personal space of Jonah. The text simply ends there, facing the reader with the same question as that faced by the prophet. In this textual construction the city is aligned with the space of its territory, with its right to own and live at peace within, its own boundaries. The prophet has a right to his hut and to occupy it as a sign of a demand for reciprocal judgment. Nineveh is already a vast city, though one now lled with the sights and sounds of ritual lament. How will anger and remorse come together in the same moral space? It is the deity who proposes a resolution of the stand-off; in cosmic space what is impossible because no urban society can be required voluntarily to vacate its proper site is made possible since all territorial divisions are subsumed in the sphere of transcendence. Once again religion is set above politics, but this is a controversial move which may meet human rejection. In Jonah’s estimation the great city is a threat to regional peace which must be destroyed. Christoph Lindner investigates the volatile and threatening aspects of the city, with its “violent politicisation of urban space.”61 From Lindner’s 60. Cf. Perry, Honeymoon, 98–100, with regard to Jonah’s several stages of desire for death/acceptance of the fact of death until he actually nears death itself. God never lets him sink fully into Sheol. Perry argues for the theme of love as key to Jonah. Hence there is a real resurrection for Jonah as he is spat onto land. This has a wider scope in ch. 4, where his protection by the plant is paralleled by divine desire to spare the city. 61. Christoph Lindner, “Re-visioning Urban Space and Cityscapes,” in Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture (ed. Christoph Lindner; New York: Routledge, 2006), 3. 1

138

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

viewpoint a city is a force for the subordination of everyday human concerns to the political desires of a governing class. The politicization of a community links with the experience of estrangement.62 It could be argued, as the deity does, that the ordinary citizens of Nineveh have little say in the major political actions of their home site. It is the king and the elite who decide on war and peace, so how can the lower class be held fully to account for the deeds of their leaders? In ch. 4 God not only counts the numbers of human beings in the city but also includes all their animals: can animals tell their owners what to do? When urban space is contested the likelihood is that there will be winners and losers and that urban territory will map the balance of power between competing groups. At the centre of this perspective is the theme of power, which denes urban systems through the theme of [dis]empowerment; as Simon Parker indicates when he states that “all discussions of urban formation can be said to depend on relations of power.”63 The desire to nd security through the possession of power over the urban site opens up to narratives of contest between particular urban networks.64 In Jonah the historical intrusion of one city into the space of another is debated in terms of ethical use of the urban resources. Nineveh has created an empire for itself by using its material reserves of people and goods to engage in military campaigning. As urban property the citizen body must be implicated in the actions of the city as a whole. Hence the text deals not with monuments and the variety of urban buildings but with people. The prosecuting voice of the prophet is a social voice which highlights the power struggles between human beings. The topic of political power-plays raises the question, then, of who should be where.65 Smith focuses, in this context, on the signicance of borders, suggesting that the placing of Jonah bodily within Nineveh, in ch. 3, provides an ideological commentary on the theme of Us and Them in which boundaries are challenged and become porous.66 The sign of Jonah’s shelter provides an example of a clear boundary activity. It represents a claim to power over space, albeit a narrow and transient location. It is described as being outside the urban boundary in v. 5. It is narratively placed in opposition to the city site since Jonah is

62. Ibid., 13. 63. Simon Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City (New York: Routledge, 2004), 120. 64. Ibid., 89. 65. This is a topic which is addressed in Chapter 6 of Smith, Moral Geographies. 66. Ibid., 118. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

139

depicted as a watchman set over the city—not to guard it, however, rather to look for its end. What is more, the text states that he “sat down” there: he abides in that space which is the watching space of a hostile urban society.67 The invasion of his space by an innocent plant is welcomed but that intrusion of an “other” turns out to be a source of discomfort and even threat to his moral certitude. The plant’s textual function is ambivalent. It could be truly “in place” as part of Jonah’s personal world but also functions as an “out of place” transgression of the border between two urban perspectives. The view that the border must be policed so that the rights of a violated city are maintained is vividly illustrated by the book’s nal stage.68 Territory and Social Justice But the theme of territory is not all about strength and inviolability. Smith notes that it includes the issue of the “protection and advancement of the vulnerable.”69 It is important to identify “those differences among persons which are morally signicant in the distribution of benets and burdens.”70 The geographical reality of different peoples, living in different regions, requires an approach to universal human rights which is based on the very differences of location and condition—which brings us back to the topic of cities as people rather than inanimate buildings. Vulnerability is a key concept in the debate on urban morality since it appeals to the human capacity for imaginative engagement with the plight of others. In Jonah the text plays on this theme in the last chapter in a subtle manner. Jonah rejects the signicance of vulnerability as suitable for application to Nineveh. Instead, he insists on retaining capital punishment for the city. Divine space, he seems to suggest, has too much vulnerability since it has empathized with the weakness observed by God within Nineveh’s citizen body. But God plays a trick on Jonah to demonstrate that he too is vulnerable—not only to heat, but to empathetic concern for

67. Perry, Honeymoon, 59. Perry notes that this is another example of the prophet’s desire for quiet space where he can be on his own. He is happy to be selfreliant. 68. Cf. Allen, Jonah, 229, on the egocentricity of Jonah, and 233–34, where Allen discusses the self-interest of happiness that YHWH has rescued Jonah from his distress. 69. Smith, Moral Geographies, 136. 70. Ibid., 137. 1

140

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

living creatures.71 Hence the prophet should be able to “identify common human needs universal for human survival.”72 Parker notes that whereas administrative organizations concentrate authority “at the top of the decision-making tree,”73 marginalized groups can operate as the advance guard of a new identity.74 In ch. 3 it is Jonah himself who allows a new identity to develop on the streets of Nineveh. Potentially this is Jerusalem allowing Nineveh to grow in moral stature. The irony is that the marginal persona here does not intend a fresh start for its enemy. The action of the prophet as a marginal presence in the city is educational and salvic since it is his voice which promotes change of heart, though he sees himself as prosecutor and judge. What is more, the prophetic impact is intimate, touching on a speaker and his audience since it is the ordinary citizen who takes the rst step to remorse and only after that does government become involved. Jonah does not applaud the effect he has and would have preferred to have had no impact, for then the deity would have been forced to carry out the death sentence. This seems to be a hard line to take. But Nineveh is always in the balance with Jerusalem in this book.75 It is appropriate for the great city to be held to account for its past activity, as shown in the opening speech of God in ch. 1. The book does not condone urban immorality or imply that the past is wiped out. Hence difference operates as a force for social justice in that it makes space for the powerless social group to assert a claim to equality with the powerful. Smith discusses the manner in which “the focus on difference has broadened the scope of social justice and drawn attention to the disadvantage of specic groups.”76 Difference can thus function as a moral tool, providing a means of identifying those at risk of marginalization and setting the scene for a shift in power and rights towards those so identied. There is a dignity in the prophetic stance of ch. 4 in its essential refusal to abandon a claim to be heard. Chapter 1 denes the great city as a site known for its brutality. Amin and Thrift suggest that cities are brutal places which can yet include spaces of escape which can be bent to another image.77 Hence cities are 71. See here Perry, Honeymoon, 124, where he dwells on love and repentance themes, in which God appears to be tolerant of evil as an aspect of his mercy. 72. Ibid., 144–45. 73. Parker, Urban Theory, 122. 74. Ibid., 133. 75. Cf. Handy, World, 106–7. The moral norm of the book is that of the Yehudite elite. 76. Smith, Moral Geographies, 138. 77. Amin and Thrift, Cities, 105, 119. 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

141

volatile signiers of meaning; “urban spaces are engaged in a struggle with an often unknown endpoint in which corporations and other assemblages constantly try to modulate the environment.”78 The question arises as to whether there is any mode of escape for Nineveh from its own brutal image.79 As noted above, the prophet’s role is, in the fullness of the book, to be the access point for such an escape. But there are other agents of escape in the cast of human characters. Chapter 3 denes the inhabitants as agents of their own escape from condemnation. It is the ordinary citizens who rst adopt the attitude of repentance in v. 5—a verse which also states that they believed God. So also their leader, the embodiment of city authority, agrees with a stance of remorse and it is this event which changes the city’s destiny. He descends from his throne, putting his city at the mercy of cosmic space in v. 7. But is this interior shift or external expediency; what is to be made of his use of “may be” and “who knows”? Is this religious piety or political expediency? Whatever he intends, God respects the external act: seeing what the king does, the deity has compassion.80 So, the coming together of remorse and compassion provides an escape route from death. The combination engages emotion with the physical, sackcloth and ashes with lifting of curse. Escape can be described, in this setting, as a form of social justice, a way of enlisting difference to deconstruct brutality. The spatial sites of escape are themselves moral spaces. But the matter of escape is not a simple topic since it raises the issue of the extent of the impact of escape sites on fundamental urban brutality. So what about the brutality which violence aroused in him. Can he nd an escape from his own prole of violence? Has he embraced Nineveh as a parallel social body and will that change his desire for the destruction of the great city to an acceptance that mercy and compassion are also key aspects of urban morality? The endpoint of this theme in the book is surely found after the last verse has been read, in the liminal residue of the narrative in the reader’s mind. When Jonah remains silent in response to divine questioning, what is brought to bear is the articulation of Homi Bhabha that “what is interrogated is not simply the image of the person, but the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically

78. Ibid., 129. 79. Handy, World, 34. The great city is synonymous with imperial political power. 80. Ibid., 81, which stresses the icon of the king as symbolizing the whole multinational Assyrian Empire. 1

142

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

positioned.”81 A human subject is “continually positioned in the space between a range of contradictory places that co-exist.”82 Conclusions Smith refers to an approach to moral geography which is “deliberately pluralistic and pragmatic.”83 The rhetorical style of Jonah constantly engages the reader with paradox. At times it brings together unlikely partners—city and ship as social bodies, for instance, or sh and plant as natural associates of human society. But the pairing of motifs within the book cuts across the individual examples of pairs in such a way that certainty of meaning is undermined. When the city can be measured by the sea and the desert it may be delineated as a space of chaotic justice. But the linking of sea with sh and then with temple brings into question the simple interpretation of chaos as signifying death and ending.84 Ultimately it is the story which is the space in which moral geography can be seen at work. The focus is the narration of divine intervention in the life of a great city. The voice of the city provides a prole in which retributive justice is kept in balance by mercy. But the fact that in real life this prole does not work itself out in any simple political manner is highlighted by the personal space of the prophet. City and prophet as individual and social body share the impact of difference, of alienation, of death, of brutality. The city itself may have found a space of just behaviour as a result of encountering these energies, but the space of the prophet remains a site of contestation. From beyond the end of the narrative the query hangs in the air as to whether the great city is a moral site. It can be suggested that what the book of Jonah rehearses for a Judahite readership is both that the other city’s imperial power cannot be wiped out and that this brutal fact may still have room in it for the dignity of a marginal society. If this is so then the concept of urban social justice must be seen as inclusive of awed human activity, including brutal aggression and the desire for annihilation, even though the endpoint is the perception that aggression connected with hostility to difference is not the best urban justice at an international level. The shared 81. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47. 82. Ibid., 48. 83. Smith, Moral Geographies, 205. 84. A complex system of pairings of motifs shapes the rhetorical structure of the book of Jonah. See Perry, Honeymoon, Introduction. For a classic account of the structure of the book, see Phyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method and the Book of Jonah (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994). 1

6. The Great City in the Book of Jonah

143

space and mutual valuation involved in the play of difference and alienation rests nally in the recognition of the fragility of all human bodies, individual and corporate, and the resulting emergence of pity and compassion as the basic truth of human powerlessness.

1

Chapter 7

THE VISIONARY SPACE OF THE SIM-CITY IN ZECHARIAH 1–8

The aim of this chapter is to explore the visionary material of the rst part of the book of Zechariah through the dialogue partner of Edward Soja’s concept of the city-as-simulation. This interaction leads to the question of whether a city viewed through visions has the status of reality. Visionary space creates images of urban temple-city activity through experience of the virtual, of dreams and imagination which simulate cityspace and hence could fall into the category of the hyper-real. The concept of hyper-reality developed by Edward Soja as part of his work on contemporary Los Angeles can be set alongside the presentation of the temple city of Jerusalem in Zech 1:1–5:6.1 This section of the prophetic book contains fragmentary scenes offering iconographies of temple-city which move between what might be an historical expectation of the renewal of Jerusalem and the restoration of temple and cult as an icon of the timeless reality which underpins material construction. The second section of the passage from Zechariah directly addresses hopes for a new Judahite government linked with a rebuilt temple but the visionary material is more ambiguous. The link between symbolic spaces of dream-vision and a specic historical project is tenuous. The question to which the textual construction gives rise is whether simulated sites, such as are found in prophetic vision, provide an experience of reality and whether the real to which visionary space leads the reader exists in excess of ordinary daily existence. Edward Soja developed his postmodern geography from the work of Henri Lefebvre, who suggested that as well as material sites and conceptual formulations of space there exists a third dimension of “lived space” which draws on both physical sites and intellectual attitudes to the nature of space but adds to the denition of spatiality the ways in which human 1. The focus in this chapter is on Zech 1–8 as a stand-alone text; attention will not be given to the overall shape of the entire book. Cf. Conrad, Zechariah, 20–21.

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

145

beings build and envision spaces through the act of inhabiting them. Soja’s earlier books argue that this prospect of a third-space is a valuable tool for analyzing city space, but in Postmetropolis Soja sets out a less hopeful perspective for urban studies after the era of modernity.2 In the chapter on sim-city Soja suggests that contemporary urban living appears to offer citizens the chance to design their own urban style, but what seems to provide freedom for innovation and ownership is controlled by commercial forces. For Soja this links with the work of Jean Baudrillard in his studies of hyper-reality. Baudrillard notes the way in which media both mimics real life but also takes over from it. Visual signs, he thinks, become an end in themselves; too many images hide the absence of meaning. What is at issue for Soja is the lack of true freedom for control over their living space on the part of urban dwellers who are sold an image of house design as productive of personal happiness by rms interested only in commercial gain. This chapter takes a more hopeful approach to the production of valid meaning by images which are in excess of normal modes of communication. For it is visibly the case that textually Zechariah plays with the ambiguity of signs to create a gap between seeing and understanding which requires informed interpretation. Soja’s perspective raises the question of how far an urban imaginary offers access to “reality” in the sense of empowering individual human beings and this question can be asked in relation to the prophetic imagery of Zechariah. Insofar as the visions simulate an actual temple-city setting, are they leading the citizen to a deeper understanding of the material environment and what roots it in existence? Or is the image all that we gain from the text, without being able to relate it to any truly lived experience of the city? Visions and Oracles in Zechariah 1–8 The rst section of Zechariah focuses on gaze and sight, not in a daylight manner but in the night time context which signies access to a divine spatial sphere. The gaze of the seer engages human eyes in viewing an alternative universe which sits alongside that of the daily world. The book opens with the statement that “I saw in the night” (v. 8), a motif which belongs with a more-widely used format for introducing visionary

2. Soja, Postmetropolis. This book offers a résumé of a number of themes from Thirdspace, his previous study, but here he moves the application to the modern city and models which emerge following the decline of modern city structures. 1

146

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

experience, that of night visions.3 The motif is followed up in v. 18 with the phrase “I lifted up my eyes and saw” and the pattern is repeated in ch. 4 with the statement that the angel wakened up Zechariah to see. This literary style is in contrast to the approach of 6:9–8:23, which replaces visions with oracles. A further distinction is found in the plain sense in which the oracular passages spell out the message.4 Thus 6:9–10 deals openly with the crowning of an historical leader whose task is to build the temple of the Lord. Chapter 7 offers a classic prophetic account of the past history of the temple-city, with its failures leading to judgment.5 This account is now seen as that provided by earlier prophets while also being mixed into a current demand for justice. Chapter 8’s scenes of renewal engage the reader with human situations of a people who now nd life easier since the city is at peace, with a temple rebuilt and a resident deity.6 The chapter ends with a plain declaration that all nations will gather to Jerusalem because of its role as cultic site and access to the transcendent. How, then, does the plain message of the later section of the rst part of Zechariah explicate the visions depicted at the start of the book, where the focus on scenes set in the heavens appears to be in excess of plain meaning? It can be noted that the visionary material is also related to Jerusalem and its identity; the gure of Joshua appears in ch. 3, for example. The motif of Jerusalem as Zion is found in Zech 2:10, while in ch. 1, as in ch. 8, the deity is dened as a “jealous” God. These links imply that both sections of the book are dealing with the same historical matters: the future reconstruction of Jerusalem and its capacity to come to life again as a site of civic and religious activity. The visionary scenes, however, are shaped by the production of a simulated city and often 3. The book of the Hebrew Bible which exemplies this theme is Daniel; in ch. 7 the style moves from historical tales to visions, a move introduced in the rst person voice of Daniel who looked into the visions of the night. 4. Seth Sykes, Time and Space in Haggai–Zechariah: A Bakhtinian Analysis of a Prophetic Chronicle (New York: Lang, 2002). Sykes regards the genre of Chronistic text as event-communication. 5. Ibid., 115, 117. Sykes notes that time is visualized in terms of a succession of prophets rather than of kings, and space is visualized by a capital city. Janet Tollington, Tradition and Innovation in Haggai and Zechariah 1–8 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1982), 114, comments on the link between themes of judgment and a visionary genre. 6. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought, 277–86, deals with the model of city/ temple/deity and makes the point that Babylonian and Old Testament thought integrate the cosmic ruler with the ruler of the kingdom. Thus the city involved works as the power centre of the universe. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

147

employ bizarre and unconnected “sight-bites.”7 The narrative space of Zechariah is lled with complex images from which it is hard to derive any meaning which could relate to an historical city’s destiny. These chapters engage matters of grave material concern for urban renewal with the space of vivid imagery in which horsemen ride forth and a woman seated in an ephah is transported through space.8 In his chapter on Sim-city Soja discusses both the issue of social regulation of space and the topic of ofcial and hidden urban cultures.9 In the image of city-as-doubled he balances the citizens’ deconstruction of regulated city-space with the attempts of urban government to impose civic order via the creation of a normative urban imaginary. Soja nds an example of this doubling in the mixture of ideal and virtual manifested in the motif of the theme park and the world of Disney.10 On the one hand people are encouraged to believe that they can create their own homeland experience but, on the other, these experiences are managed and controlled within the ideologies facilitated by the simulation world of the manufacturers of imaginary space. The city emerges as a place in which people become consumers of their own urban imagination. Like Baudrillard, Soja views simulation with doubt since it seems to be offering liberation and independent choice while in fact channelling human beings into accepting signs as the only reality.11 The real and the virtual become blurred and meaning is earnestly sought for in the consumption of objects which are not sufciently divided from a subjective identity, which is itself a manufactured prole. This is the case because the city appears to be constructed according to personal desire when it is in fact a commercial creation drawn up to bring a prot to the developers.12 “Choice” in fact means commitment to “an array of formal and informal regulations and covenants which ensure

7. What can be noted here is the manner in which historical reality and the visionary can be interwoven. Coggins, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, 49, wishes to align both levels here. Love, The Evasive Text, 72–75, suggests that the text is incoherent and that it falls to the reader to create harmony between the textual elements. 8. Love, Evasive Text, 232, concludes that the incomprehensible, opaque nature of the imagery does offer coherence in that the author has deliberately evaded identity in an era where meaning could not be determined. The writer deconstructs the past and resists depicting the future as determined (233). 9. Soja, Postmetropolis, 324. 10. Ibid., 341. 11. Ibid., 325, where Soja addresses the role of theory in expanding the material foundation of reality, and 326–27 where Soja explores the topic of magical realism. 12. Ibid., 341. 1

148

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

loyalty to the chosen spatial image.”13 Can it be said, then, that the urban imaginary of Zech 1–8 operates to provide a message of freedom which is in reality tightly regulated. Certainly the imagery appears to promise the freedom of the city as theme park. The marks of the “themed space” are found in the topic of openness in ch. 2, an easy life in ch. 3 and a city among cities in ch. 8.14 All these facets are summed up in the image of the city as co-existent with sacred space in 8:20–22. This is utopian insofar as it opens up endless possibilities of good fortune for the city. But is it a reality? Is it not the case that it is the incomplete tense of the verb which dominates the text, as in Zech 8:4, which promises that old and young shall enjoy leisure.15 Material value pertains to the past (and possible) future, but this leaves the present as a space empty of signicance, a city identity lled out by memory and desire rather than actual experience. We are led to ask whether human desire for peace is ever capable of fullment or whether the iconography of ch. 8 is an example of delusionary wish-fullment. The prophetic message thus casts doubt upon, even as it veries, the city as a site of prosperity and comfort. The urban imaginary of Zechariah produces a “make believe” city whose prole implies also the city as limitation. At the same time the introduction to the book indicates the nature of divine control involved in urban destiny. Zechariah 1:2–5 speaks plainly of the negative fate of Jerusalem as the result of divine anger with its inhabitants and makes good fortune dependent on blessing from God.16 This allows the prophetic voice of the following visionary sequence to demand of the deity why there is no peace for the city and ask when God will intervene on its behalf in the regional political scene. Citizen freedom to enjoy the material abundance of nature comes from within the narrow borders of the heavenly hierarchy in which the deity is sovereign. The inhabitants of Jerusalem may long for peace and good crops but they cannot make them happen. To this extent the vision of a happy life is “sold” to the reader as the reward for good behaviour and is available only on the terms and conditions set out by the prophetic messenger, as in 1:12–17.

13. Ibid. 14. See Pamela Scalise, Zechariah, in Goldingay and Scalise, Minor Prophets, 2:222. The text can convey a wealth of positive meanings in just a single sentence. 15. The Hebrew text has yeshbu here. 16. Cf. Scalise, Zechariah, 193. The start of the book synthesizes the work of earlier prophets as divine doom messengers. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

149

Foundations in Hyperreality Soja nds in Baudrillard’s work on hyper-reality a useful tool for discussion of this tension between freedom and control in the urban space because hyper-reality deals with a growing confusion between, and fusion of, the real and the imaginary, between what actually exists and what may be imagined as a potential existence.17 Baudrillard argues that the modern world has sought a completely rational explanation of human life.18 In so doing it created an excess of meaning which leaves no space for emptiness of signication or for silence. He suggests that “because we are no longer capable today of coping with the symbolic mastery of absence, we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images.”19 Soja suggests that for Baudrillard map takes precedence over territory in such a way that the mapping icons are all that is left of a site. The image masks the absence of reality by becoming its own reality.20 A better mode of seeking truth is presented by the realization that communication overload produces simulacra, that is, signs that signify nothing since they are not attached to objects which stand in their own space. Baudrillard reects on the value of embracing silence and nothingness for its own sake.21 So what of the linguistic code of Zech 1–8? Does the spatial poetics of the book produce an excess of meaning or simply an excess of images? Certainly there is a wealth of imagery which purports to give access to truth: horses and chariots in technicolour and an immense ying scroll, for instance. These provide a strong appeal to the visual as source of information yet sight itself does not provide sense and order, since the text requires a divine intervention for their interpretation.22 Thus, in Zech 1:8, where the prophet sees four horses of varying colours, he has to ask the angel “who are these?” and the same pattern is repeated with the topic of the four horns in Zech 1:18–19. In Zech 5:2 the angel asks the prophet what he can see—which is a ying scroll. The surface manifestation is not the inner meaning, however, since in v. 3 the prophet is

17. Soja, Postmetropolis, 325. 18. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (New York: Verso, 2008), 29. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Soja, Postmetropolis, 325. 21. Baudrillard, Perfect Crime, 8. 22. Cf. Scalise, Zechariah, 201, for a summary of the narrative use of the intermediary in books of minor prophecy. 1

150

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

told that the object of his gaze is a sign whose content is a message of curse and wickedness.23 By this wealth of graphic signs the text conveys the gap between what is seen and what is meant, by indicating that a viewer sees the surface manifestation but cannot move that experience to meaning on the material level of the urban social setting. In Zech 5:3 the text moves swiftly from sight to the revelation of meaning by a heavenly interpreter, without leaving space for the prophet to produce that meaning from within his own intellectual grasp. It is indeed a large jump from a mobile script to the motif of curse and one which the visionary has no obvious means of performing.24 Without interpretation, then, the object of the gaze remains valid but stays at the surface level of the object of sight. At the surface level the text is a pictorial space populated with fantastic images which hold the reader’s gaze. But the motif of transcendent interpretation opens human understanding up to the urban prole as it is viewed from a heavenly viewpoint. The thought-world of Edward Soja relates mainly to the sphere of socio-economic activity, critiquing the apparent freedom of a capitalist market, regarding this freedom as more apparent than real. Yet the views of Marina Warner on the spaces created by imagination provide a more hopeful tool by which to evaluate the visions of the ancient biblical text.25 In Phantasmagoria Warner notes the invasive force of modern visual technology as leading to the replacement of reality with the virtual. She does, however, take a positive approach to the subject of simulation.26 For Warner the concept of the copy can elide with the mystical and both with the concept of imagination as the “spark” which animates human cultural understanding.27 She argues for the view that mystical

23. Ibid., 231. Flight of the scroll symbolizes total coverage of land under the curse, including diaspora communities. The scroll signies in itself; there is no direct reading of what is written on it. 24. Although a reader of the Hebrew Bible might remember that the scroll which Ezekiel is to eat in Ezek 1:3 is bitter to the stomach since it contains words of condemnation and doom. 25. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media in the Twenty-rst Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–13. 26. Ibid., 378. 27. Ibid., “Introduction,” 9–20, where Warner links the Christian view of spirit as animation with the “spark” of imagination. The logic of the imaginary is found in metaphors of wax, light, breath, cloud. Later in the book Warner notes the interface between soul and spark with reference to the fear, in the early days of photography, that being photographed would lead to the stealing of one’s soul (196–97). 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

151

experience allows access to that which is other precisely through the communicative value of language.28 Sight and understanding form a single reality brought together by the work of narrative description. The textual construction of Zech 2:1–5 works with the themes of sight and understanding through its use of sight as an access point to understanding. The prophet sees an angel with a measuring rod and then speaks directly to this gure, discovering the angelic purpose concerning Jerusalem.29 In a second phase the prophet sees another angel, is led from sight to hearing and thus to a deeper understanding of the divine purpose for the city. The function of sight as a narrative tool in these scenes lays emphasis on spatial scenes as providing an educational resource for both prophet and reader of text. It is in the gaze that the text provides an access point to meaning which is beyond the range of normal reasoning. What the narrative conveys through an imaginative space of encounter is the mystical nature of the city itself—as a place poised between the material and the ideal.30 In scenes such as this the contested issue is representation: representation as leading to the real or the collapse of representation into its own virtuality. Does visionary space provide a tool for reecting on the state of an historical urban site or is it locked into its own imagination? Does visionary space use simulation to arrive at knowledge of the essential energy which drives the world? Warner argues that the human “cognitive range” lies between the powers of extra sensory ability and the limits of embodied vision, thus producing an inevitable blurring of borders between a signier and what it signies.31 In the Zechariah passage referred to above there is some blurring of signier and signied. At the start of the passage the signier is the “I” of prophetic voice but this comes to be aligned with the voice of the deity, who is the ultimate signier here. Yet God is also what is signied in that the text reveals the divine character as tending towards compassion for Jerusalem. At this level God is the signier and the city is the thing signied. But the divine is signied through the actions of angels and the message concerning the city cannot be entirely separated from the message concerning the

28. Ibid., 67–68. 29. Scalise, Zechariah, 211, notes the inter-text here with the message of 1:16. 30. Cf. Chapter 1, above, for a further exploration of this scene as urban imaginary. 31. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 17. The brain cannot face the state of no-meaning, so reason seeks to abolish it. Thus we construct what we see and understand with regard to what we already know. 1

152

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

transcendent, as indicated by imagery which denes “wall” as “re.” Visionary spatial poetics goes beyond what already exists to offer new possibilities in which the functions of signier and signied are used as a tool for demonstrating the complexity of urban reality. The source of signication becomes itself the goal of gradual revelation, a process in which urban existence is merged with that of transcendent space. Baudrillard’s viewpoint would undermine a reading of Zech 1–8 as text which produces an opening to an empowering supernatural.32 Yet he notes the paradox that “only that which comes to pass in the mode of disappearance is truly other.”33 Otherness is, for Baudrillard, a sign of the negativity which leads to a better understanding of signication.34 The text of Zechariah makes use of a negative mode in which prophetic ignorance of the meaning of his own vision is central. This narrative device opens up a gap between sight and understanding which requires the insertion of an angelic mediator whose task it is to open up the images to human grasp, whether that of prophet or reader. The interpreter’s role is to align imagination with material reality so that the visionary symbolism of the gaze is understood to be paired with events in historical space. The fact that the text situates the interpreter at the threshold between vision and materiality indicates that material events can only be truly understood from a vantage point which is situated beyond the range of normal human experience.35 The failure of sight to act as a medium for direct understanding points to the fact that communication itself is an ambivalent concept. It embraces both sight and sound, which fail to communicate in any clear sense, and a genuine search for meaning which is accessed by the visual. Hence meaning is found in excess of visual images yet the simulated places produced by vision hint at this excess of meaning—that there is something more to be found concerning the meaning of the everyday world of a familiar social context.

32. Baudrillard, Perfect Crime, 5. Baudrillard argues that the Byzantine theorists simulated God in images, but behind each of these images lay the disappearance of God. So the great questions regarding truth in terms of the cosmos were “solved” by simulation and its manipulations of meaning. 33. Ibid., 87. 34. Ibid., 89 and 113. Baudrillard suggests that we ght negativity and death, but by eliminating the work of the negative we have unleashed a positivity which is in fact lethal. 35. Cf. Scalise, Zechariah, 179, where she introduces the gap between a vision and its total fullment as a historical phenomenon. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

153

Does the Visionary Temple-city “Signify”? Since the urban imaginary of Zech 1–8 is structured by this tension between sensory experience and intellectual knowledge it demonstrates that the city is potentially a hyper-real construct marked linguistically by metaphors drawn from different contexts. The urban imagination of the text deals with a protective wall in 3:3–4, but also with a being “clothed with lthy garments” in 6:9–10. It is accursed and judged as wicked and yet it is also capable of housing a crown which reects royal honour upon itself. It can, however, be suggested that the profusion of images is empowering for the reader since it draws out paradoxical contrasts in the prole of the temple city. The metaphors of city walls and dirty clothes function as virtual imaging which touches upon actual city space as both sharing in transcendent life and as awed and stained. The text thus illustrates the inherent ambiguity of city as refuge and as danger. This textual construction tends to produce an evaluation of city life still at a symbolic level, without the provision of detailed chronology which marks a more historical literary style. If the book of Zechariah occupies itself more with graphic images in cosmic space than with an account of how a temple city can be built by human hands, does this lessen its value? It would be possible to read such a literary style as self-indulgent, deliberately playing with unreadable imagery for its own sake. But it can also be suggested that the purpose of complex visual iconography is to mirror human anguish over the value of city-life and that the function of the imagery is to express links and gaps between past and present phases of a material templecity.36 Visionary space requires the use of the bizarre and surreal because it is holding these two aspects together. Left to itself the lived experience of urban destruction would undermine the view that the urban site is capable of longer life; the exible, ambiguous nature of the pictured walls of ame and worn, stained clothes open up the possibility that cityspace has more to offer than it has yet delivered. Visionary space proves to be a valid, excessive means of carrying urban hopes and fears which in real life could tear the urban community apart. The imagery of the horsemen in ch. 1, for example, provides the space for voices which take up the urban cause, asking “how long?” and “why is there no peace as yet?” The riders have seen peace throughout the world and can report that all is well in v. 11. This scene visually enacts the care which the deity has for all created beings. It provides evidence for an angelic report to God on the state of the nations and thus 36. Ibid., 179–82. 1

154

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

opens a point of access for the cause of Judah as not having its share in the peace given to other societies. The scene continues with the deity accepting the criticism of divine providence in v. 14. The vision dramatizes the emotive desires of the audience and by depicting the deity promising to reverse Jerusalem’s fortunes in vv. 14–17 asserts the validity of national longing. At a human level simulation manages the hope and fear of a community via the corporate gure of the dreamer. Although Soja’s overall verdict on sim-city is a negative one he does perceive some helpful aspects in the virtuality of urban space. He denes his subject as relating to “how the restructured city-centred consciousness” shapes the way in which urban society is “kept together in the face of powerful disintegrative forces.”37 Simulation thus provides a point of order which maintains a sense of shared communal identity when previous self-understandings have broken down. The text of Zechariah can be explored as an example of re-structuring activity since it uses visionary space to counter balance the disruption caused by physical warfare and does so by promoting a strong city prole via its nature as sacred space. This motif is found, for example, in the divine speech of 1:14, “I am jealous for Zion so I will return and live in Jerusalem.”38 The visionary nature of the text makes it possible to combine in one statement a deep divine attachment to a place and the ideas of return and dwell. Since these words are uttered in cosmic space they carry the weight of absolute meaning. The temple and the city, Zion and Jerusalem, are read as one. The material impact of divine speech is found in v. 17, where towns will be sites of an excess of good fortune. The prophet stands in a place of sight which is in excess of ordinary geography, but by virtue of that can see into heaven. The text balances this state with the deity seeing into the human world and declaring an excess of benet. The body of the prophet thus becomes the space of urban meaning, aided by heavenly actors who move forward the plot of the visual drama. It can be said that it is visionary text which gives special weight to the belief that Jerusalem can be held together as a living cultural site, as set against the volatile historical background of regime change.39 In this light we can read Zechariah’s use of the visual through Soja’s statement that 37. Soja, Postmetropolis, 324. 38. See Scalise, Zechariah, 255. The concept of God as “jealous” is repeated in Zechariah and can be translated as a sign of passionate attachment. 39. It is possible to set the text against the prole offered by the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, not to assert the historical validity of the details of those books but to suggest an intra-canonical source for the contextualization of material from later prophets. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

155

“our imaginary maps of the real world appear to fuse with the real geographies of life and so alter how we behave.”40 Location and site imagery replace temporal, historical continuity here as a source of selfidentity. The simulated city of Zech 1–8 provides an urban space created by the deity through revelation, which is more resilient than material buildings.41 Cyberspace Despite Soja’s pessimism with regard to the capitalization of third-space, it is possible to view virtual worlds, produced in cyberspace, as offering a valid imaginative vehicle for engagement with transcendent space, beyond the built environment. Other theorists, whose work Soja critiques, are more hopeful; Michael Benedikt, for example, notes that in cyberspace “seen and heard objects are neither physical nor necessarily representational of physical objects but made up of pure information.”42 He views this as positive since, no longer xed via physicality, subjects and objects can have multiple appearances and identities. His argument stresses the opportunity to “think outside the box,” since space is now dened as freedom to move.43 Exploration of this possibility does blur the distinction between virtual and real worlds, but the end result is an etherealization of the present world and/or concretization of the world we dream and think, which is neither exactly either of these two positions but a specic, third position.44 Marcos Novak echoes the positivist outlook of Benedikt when he states that “architecture, especially visionary architecture, the architecture of the excess of possibility, represents the manifestation of the mind in the realm of the body, but also attempts to escape the connes of a limiting reality.”45 40. Soja, Postmetropolis, 331. 41. This comment links revelation with knowledge about the universal state of affairs. However, Conrad, Zechariah, 21–22, claims that what is revealed is primarily local and regional, although the text does align Jerusalem’s affairs with cosmic deity. He argues that the text stresses issues of human power rather than a dehistoricized situation. He compares this with Hanson’s view which is also towards pragmatic knowledge. 42. Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: Some Proposals,” in Cyberspace, First Steps (ed. Michael Benedikt, Cambridge: MIT, 1991), 123. 43. Ibid., 127. 44. Ibid., 124. 45. Marcos Novak, “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace,” in Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace, 243. 1

156

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Viewed from the model of cyberspace the vision spaces of Zechariah can be read as possessing liberating possibilities. Taken as a form of cyberspace visionary space has the capacity to look otherwise at urban death and the loss of cultural identity, via the production of imaginative urban re-constructions. The vision of Zech 2 posits urban renewal as a vast expansion of the image of a city as limitation of space.46 Within this passage the symbol of measurement is removed and the city is envisaged as “without walls,” while its population is of such a great size that it pushes out its boundaries.47 The concept of wall as regulating is abandoned, while its function as protection is still valuable in this virtual urban space so that quality is pushed to excess with the walls being made of transcendent re. The etherealization of a walled city operates as “architecture in excess.” The same movement to transcendence of existing limits is found in Zech 5:5, where the image used is drawn from the symbolism of measuring: this time weight rather than size. The spatial poetics of the passage once again develop the topic of meaning which exceeds the normal since all evil can be contained within the measuring device. This vision manages in a spatial manner the need for Jerusalem to undergo inner cleansing from evil actions, alongside material rebuilding. At the surface level the imagery is bizarre; the ephah is occupied by a woman who is squeezed in a sitting position and the angel pushes a lead cover down on this gure.48 But through the symbolism of the human form pushed in and pressed down the text conveys the belief that spiritual renewal is possible. The tension between the large amount of evil and the tiny space, the nality of the solid metal lid, these symbolically depict the containment of deviance. This is a static image but what follows utilizes space-asows; there are winged gures which carry the evil far away to a place which is not within the homeland.49 This virtual space of travel separates the old city from its new manifestation. The urban symbolic self is 46. Cf. Coggins, Zechariah, 48–49, where he notes the close links between Ezekiel and Zechariah. 47. Cf. Scalise, Zechariah, 212–13, for a possible interpretation of this scene in the light of economic reality in Persian Yehud. 48. Cf. O’Brien, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, 198–99. The ephah as a measuring container and the female gure inside could be a comment on goddess worship. 49. Conrad, Zechariah, 120, notes that the stork was a detestable bird and an abomination and hence a suitable image. For a feminist critique of woman as evil, see Ulrike Sals, “Reading Zechariah 5:5–11: Prophecy, Gender and (Ap)perception,” in Prophets and Daniel (ed. Athalya Brenner; Shefeld: Continuum, 2001), 186– 205. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

157

transported through the air to a far off land while the textual reference in v. 11 to a new “house” suggests that “foreign” worship models have been sent to their own place.50 This use of imagery enables the visionary to dream away the old city space but in ways that are somewhat opaque for the reader who can viably ask whether the book deals with reality or hyper-reality at its most empty point.51 Prophetic vision allows human understanding to cross the limits of historical possibility and envisage an urban context in which the meaning and value of city life is found in excess of its chronological manifestation. The very fact of disassociation from what is physically possible is an indication of the ultimate durability of a city, of the belief that cities are divinely founded and thus constitute intended living spaces.52 The powerful impact of a simulated urban imaginary on the mind of the reader is created by its challenge to its audience to wrestle with boundary transgression. As Novak concludes, “the dematerialised, dancing, difcult architecture of cyberspace, uctuating, ethereal, temperamental… only indirectly tangible, may also become the most enduring architecture ever conceived.”53 Cyberia, Code and Password As Soja notes, virtual reality is open to the creation of “cyberias,” places to visit to experience cyberspace.54 For Soja this is a matter for disillusionment, although cyberias do offer a vehicle for maintaining cultural traditions when the material context is lost, for those to whom the religious system remains potentially viable. Christine Boyer argues that cyberias are helpful spaces which provide an intellectual move from space as a matter of production to space as a matter of ows.55 If the city world is itself a space of ows what is needed to engage with it is not 50. Scalise, Zechariah, 236–37, reects on this imagery as a form of political satire in which stork/women are a poor parallel to the cherubim who accompany the Ark of the Lord. 51. Tollington, Tradition, 101, suggests that this occurs in ch. 5 as part of a prole in which prophets see surreal objects. 52. “Intended” here indicates that this is where power comes from, that Jerusalem is a microcosmos—of the sacred cosmos. Cf. Conrad, Zechariah, 43. Conrad notes that the prophet enters the temple in ch. 2 and takes part in the ritual of choosing Joshua as high priest in ch. 3. The recurring motif is that the Lord is master of the whole earth. 53. Novak, “Liquid Architectures,” 252. 54. Soja, Postmetropolis, 334. 55. Ibid., 338. 1

158

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

knowledge of regulatory systems but a code or password which gives access to these spatial energies. Just as we enter cyberspace through registering ourselves via an initial portal so we can enter a cyberia by recognizing correctly the coded nature of virtual space and entering the correct password. It is possible to interpret the visionary temple-space depicted in ch. 4 of Zechariah as inclusive of a symbolic code for entry to a sacred cyberia and the role of the leader as password. In ch. 4 the prophet describes a visionary space dominated by cultic objects—lampstand, bowl, lamps, olive trees. They appear in relation to one another and are clearly meant to convey a wider socio-religious meaning since the prophet asks for an explanation of their function.56 The explanation as given in v. 10 revolves around the numbers seven and two, offering respectively a sign of completion and of balance. Seven as the number of completion is attached to the image of lamps, of light as an indicator of sight. Two is the number of stable balance, a pair of trees owing with oil. So far this leaves the meaning still xed in the objects of the gaze. They provide a code which seeks further translation and that is provided. The seven lampstands of completion are aligned with the watchful gaze of the deity, while balance is signied by two anointed gures who appear to reside within transcendent space.57 The text uses the symbolism of lamps, trees and number to produce the language of sacred space. This requires a coded format in which graphic symbols map the temple-space and then demonstrate its parallelism with transcendent reality. The visionary mode offers a valuable tool for establishing the temple site through its use of signs which have a dual role, touching upon items seen in an historical shrine but revealing the timeless signicance of these items. The sacred cyberia is thus set out as a space awaiting interaction. 56. The force of this passage is symbolic and not literal description according to Love, Evasive Text, 229, where he quotes Barker (1978) and Rifn (1986) to the effect that the book is consistently inconsistent, so there is a need to confront the incoherence and read it as such. Hence the key issue is whether the references are to the literal furniture of the temple or whether these are “free-oating” symbols and whether this is a form of allegorical language. These issues are raised by O’Brien, Zechariah, 195, regarding the possible historical existents behind the image of “sons of oil.” There is the matter of whether oil refers to what is done to them or whether it denotes their activity as functioning socially like oil. Conrad, Zechariah, 108–9, suggests that the reference is not messianic but a wider symbol of oil as abundance. 57. Scalise, Zechariah, 226–27, interprets the text as attaching “seven” to the lamps as a sign of the universality of divine scrutiny. She also comments on the visual impact of the golden liquid owing from the “trees,” while acknowledging that a number of English translations view this vision as linked to messianism. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

159

The password that unlocks the door into the coded space of the temple site is provided by leadership in the form of Zerubbabel. He is inserted into ch. 4 between the vision of the sacred temple ttings and the explanation of that vision and thus functions as the hinge between sight and understanding. His role as access point to cosmic space is conveyed by his depiction as a founder gure who lays the foundation stone and the top stone of the temple building. His characterization is “stone-like,” identied with the ability of stones to knit a building together and make it strong.58 In this image of the leader there is a crossover between heavenly and material space since good leadership guarantees entrance to the desired space of re-owned communal identity. Chapter 3 stresses the importance of good leadership as a bridge with transcendence through the image of Joshua as a gure standing in transcendent space even though he started out as an ambivalent gure. The motif of his trial by the heavenly prosecutor of treason, balanced with his defence by an angelic advocate, mediates the cleansing of the entire urban community.59 It aligns the choice of the leader in v. 2 with divine election of Jerusalem. Verse 7 emphasizes the re-structuring of the temple city by depicting the leader as in need of a new skin before he can properly carry out his priestly duties.60 Temple and leader form a symbiosis in which the priestly function is to be a password to activate the code of cultic objects. This narrative pattern is repeated in the text in the role of other interpretive gures whose duty is to open access into visionary space and its meaning. Especially important is the gure of the messenger who is the interpreter and authoritative voice of virtual space—the mal’ak. The role of this gure in Zech 1–8 is to establish virtual space as a space of supernatural reality.61 The messenger is both observer and protagonist. As “Angel of 58. The “stone” here is a little ambiguous. Conrad, Zechariah, 107, says Zerubbabel brings out the head stone although it is not clear how this works in the material process of building. Also, to greet the stone as “graced” is odd. It may be possible to read the governor as metaphorical head stone and hence acclaimed. 59. Tollington, Tradition, 109, suggests that God is central to the visions, although the Divine Name is not mentioned nor is the action set in a throne room. Rather, the members of the heavenly council appear in the text—patrols, satan, mal’ak—and the role of the council is as a supervisor of judgment (114). See also O’Brien, Zechariah, 190. The accuser stands alongside the community and its concerns. 60. Scalise, Zechariah, 220–21, discusses this depiction of the ofce of high priest as intermediate space which bridges heaven and earth. 61. What can be noted here is the wide range of the term mal’ak. Tollington, Tradition, 94–95, addresses the term “angel of the Lord” and links this to the books 1

160

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

the Lord” the messenger functions inside the visionary world depicted by the narrative voice, being part of what is observed. As an “angel who tells” the role is that of one who presides over meaning. Thus the messenger operates inside a communication which requires further explication as well as outside of this kind of utterance. Zechariah himself acts as a messenger of this type, who conveys meaning while also standing outside of meaning. In Zech 6:9–15 the speech of God and prophet merge in an oracular style which makes the prophet the performer of divine communication, which can be set against visionary space where the prophet can only see and not understand.62 The role of the “messenger” seems to be to encourage the reader to look for the unusual, the strange and to realize that otherness is found in the gaps and slips between the visual image and the impact of this on the rational understanding of the observer.63 In the excessive nature of visionary space the transcendent is present at the points at which the joins between images can be discerned. In ch. 4, for example, the visionary gaze of the prophet cannot process the meaning of its own gaze, for the answer to “do you know?” is “no.” In the absence of signication a space appears for the human capacity to transcend previous knowledge and to press forward to innovative understanding.64 The Angel of the Lord presides over both the ignorance and the enlightenment and thus bridges the gap between seeing and knowing. Thus the book of Zechariah provides a cyberia which allows readers to move into the cyberspace of visionary activity, engaging with a vivid set

of Genesis and Judges. An angel speaking for God appears synonymous with the deity. Cf. O’Brien, Zechariah, 173, which notes the structuring role of interpretation by a divine messenger. 62. Cf. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 272–73. Warner relates how psychiatrists in the nineteenth century called on new technologies of radio and telegraphy to account for the experiences of double/triple personality and how the telephonic is imaged as a vehicle for messages from heaven. So here in Zechariah there is a sense of being split apart, in that sight takes on a life of its own, not integrated with rational understanding. Though the prophetic voice recounts what is seen, this does not lead directly to the embedding of knowledge in the human observer. See also Tollington, Tradition, 102, which suggests that the angel’s role is as one who adds inner, ethical meaning to signs. 63. Conrad, Zechariah, 57, suggests that the distinction modern readers nd between human messenger and divine being is not part of the Hebrew world where there was a deliberate blurring of the human and the divine. 64. Cf. Scalise, Zechariah, 186. The two levels of vision and interpretation work together to give greater space for reection on daily life through the creation of supernatural forms of objects of everyday sight. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

161

of images which ultimately deal with an urban monument in need of restitution. The bridge between vision and reconstruction of the material site is the human power of sight which opens the mind of the beholder up to fresh ideas drawn from the space which is beyond the material order. Visionary Space and the Politics of Control Soja’s more pessimistic attitude to virtual reality as thirdspace in which he demonstrates how a space turns into a place shaped by controlling, self-interested parties, leads to the consideration of the political dimensions of Zechariah’s visions. It is possible to argue that the temple-city as eternally valid is the creation of a political regime and its state servants. Whereas the text implies the objective value of a good leader, this approach makes the reader question in whose interests such a ruler works: surely those of a given political elite and their authorization via visionary space. In this context the function of the messenger is not neutral, one who interprets inner truth per se, but provides the narrative voice promoting a political view. Soja turns to political applications of cyberspace in the USA of the 1960s to 90s at the end of his chapter on sim-city. He deals with “reaganism” and the way in which media were used to disseminate political spin. He claims that the Reagan administration invented the concept of a “silent majority” whose hyper-simulated image was used to sell postmodern neo-conservatism to the American public.65 He notes that the crusade against Big Government was used to dismantle poverty programmes, arguing that “when simulation becomes so believable that you can’t tell the difference from the real” then there is “full-blown hyperreality.”66 Soja’s arguments introduce the theme of image wars in which groups sell themselves to a buying public—which makes urban imaginary a threat.67 His perspective opens up an interpretation of the visionary space of Zechariah as a political space. Take, for instance, the link made in the text between priest-leader, city and deity; this is a political image which justies a suggested new leadership through the visionary space which describes soiled clothes replaced by ne, pure vestments. While this allows that leadership can be awed, it nevertheless endorses a hierarchical structure as the proper political system for a temple-city. The urban

65. Soja, Postmetropolis, 345. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 348. 1

162

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

imaginary of visionary experience is a tool for gaining support from local inhabitants for the re-building of the sacred monument, in the textual world of Zechariah.68 The move to set the leader above criticism is constructed via coded vocabulary, in a usage which makes imagination the tool of the state. In chs. 3 and 6 there are references to the formal headdress whose wearing ensures that a human ruler is truly authoritative. In ch. 3 the item is that of a “tsaniph” or turban.69 The key aspect of this headgear is that it is pure and enables the leader to draw down transcendent power which in turn authorizes him as leader of the city. In 6:11 the item is an “atrah,” a crown or wreath, an item of splendour, wealth and honour.70 Since this item is made of gold and silver it produces reected light, clothing the wearer in glory. Together these two items of dress settle on the leader’s head the virtues of purity and power.71 The ruler is enabled to enter sacred space by virtue of purity and to sit on the throne as agent of transcendence. Thus the visionary space sells to the reader the idea that a proper urban imaginary is rooted in leadership which engages in refounding a temple. This political vision may well emerge not from a settled state of society but from one in which there are competing approaches to historical events and may serve to publicize the arguments of a faction which sees itself as potentially powerless to gain acceptance among the residents of the Jerusalem area. The text of Zechariah indicates support for a renewed elite with a governor, Zerubbabel, and a high priest, Joshua, and this can be aligned with a reality in which local leadership of the region was volatile, containing the possibility of governance both by secular and religious gures.72 In this uncertain political world the text of Zechariah 68. Cf. Scalise, Zechariah, 225. The social context of ch. 4 of the book is one of encouragement to the temple-building faction in a setting of local and regional resistance. 69. Brown, Driver, and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon, give this meaning for the word in their lexicon. 70. Ibid. 71. Cf. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow, 72–73, which comments on the socio-political context of Zechariah and how this shaped the book’s message. Berquist places the text in Darius’ reign, with the construction of a local temple state as the local issue. 72. Cf. Conrad, Zechariah, 108–9. Conrad refers to the two sons of oil as priest and governor. Regarding the confusion of gures in ch. 6, he maintains that two separate people are envisaged. However, while the text narrates an engagement with Joshua it only refers indirectly to the governor. Conrad argues that this is because the governor is a distant gure. 1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

163

functions as a liminal site which moves to the virtual as the only medium through which to return to material reality.73 Cyborgs, Sim-citizens and the Temple-city Cyberias do not function as spaces empty of human presence and are expressive of human hopes and fears. Donna Haraway’s book on Cyborgs moves towards a fresh mode of understanding human participants in virtual space in which the opening up of possible living sites is seen as valuable.74 Soja reects on this topic of cyber-people in describing citizens as “sims” and cities in sim-gaming as places inhabited by simulated citizens, which are both negative and positive. They are negative because someone is setting up the sim-city for its potential citizens and thus manipulating their “free” choice of how to construct their space. The aim is not public benet but the private prot of the owners who need to keep citizens happy if they are to pay their taxes.75 Zechariah’s utopian imaginary city does appear to offer a free happiness but this too may be a tool to gain willing acceptance of an urban imaginary which is the product of a scribal elite culture. Hence the prophetic voice announcing great good fortune offers a means for the elite to win over citizens to its plan for rebuilding both public monument and local government.76 Zechariah 8:12–13, with its depiction of fertile vines, needs to be read with the preceding passage of vv. 9–11, where the stress is on a command to build the temple as a pre-requisite of the good life. Those who want to re-shape the city through the presence of a vibrant temple culture appear to be the ones who also depict future good living for the citizens. Once again there is a question concerning the regulatory as opposed to liberating impact of simulated urban environments. But there can also be a more active role for a sim-citizen. Haraway suggests we embrace the fact that growth in IT makes us all cyborgs. She argues that our culture makes us into “chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism”77 and advocates the acceptance that “cyborg myth is all about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and 73. Scalise, Zechariah, 242–43, discusses the political function of the governor Zerubbabel, as this is dealt with in 6:12–13. 74. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association of Books, 1991). 75. Soja, Postmetropolis, 331. 76. Scalise, Zechariah, 244–45. 77. Haraway, Simians and Cyborgs, 150. 1

164

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore.”78 Such a view promotes representation and simulation as essential to cultural activity.79 Thus a major benet of the cyborg attitude is found in the possibility of changing habitual attitudes and freeing the self from past denitions of culture. Applied to reading Zechariah this approach endows the icon of a temple-city with the capacity to lead the reader outside existing boundaries to imagine new, creative ways of developing urban identity through the powerful pull of places from past tradition. As Lewis Holloway and Philip Howard suggest, “mythologies provide powerful ‘stories’ which shape our physical and imaginative journeys to familiar and unfamiliar places and spaces.”80 For Haraway, the cyborg way is not a matter of rebirth but of regeneration. Hence a cyborg approach to the sim-citizenry of the literary Jerusalem of Zechariah endorses the exibility of ethereal urban iconography as a resource for the regeneration of religious tradition. Soja notes the function of the sim-city as an opening up of a creative “spatial praxis of transgression, boundary crossing, border work.”81 In the space between No Meaning and The Meaning lies a possible site of creative resistance and subversion.82 This approach can be set alongside Soja’s argument that map preceding territory is not altogether bad since map does have a signicant contribution to make to spatial meaning.83 Zechariah’s visionary space can be viewed as providing maps which relate to territory which is not yet in existence, since there is no material temple. Thus visionary Jerusalem signies the virtual city held within the imagination of a divine mapmaker.84 Since it counters an experienced loss of power this map transgresses the border of death to suggest that the city can be a hopeful space for the benet of its inhabitants.85 Hence there is some possibility that an urban population can nd fullment within the visionary space of a virtual temple city. 78. Ibid., 154. 79. Ibid., 161. 80. Lewis Holloway and Philip Howard, People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life (New York: Prentice Hall, 2001). Chapter 6 deals with “Imagining Places,” the collective understandings of place via socially constructed myths. 81. Soja, Postmetropolis, 331. 82. Ibid. 83. Baudrillard addresses map and territory issues in Simulacra and Simulations. See Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (ed. Mark Foster; California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 169. 84. Cf. Zech 6:12–15. 85. Cf. Zech 8:12–13.

1

7. The Visionary Space of the Sim-city

165

Eliza Darling’s treatment of Coney Island as nature’s carnival provides a useful resource for understanding the positive effects of virtual space.86 For Darling, whereas Disneyland is a monument to control, Coney Island “was a monument to bodies and the potential abandonment into pleasure.”87 This is not a world without artice since “mechanical devices created a fantasyland of disorder, the unexpected: emotional excess and sensory overload.”88 Yet the controlled environment does not inhibit but rather encourages the release of pent up energies which are built up by the tensions experienced in urban living and a carnival site provides an edge space “where human beings congregate not only to gaze on spectacle but to struggle with and work out often contradictory relationships with it.”89 The textual Jerusalem of Zechariah can be viewed as providing that type of edge space in which the tension between the actual experience of a ruined site and the idyllic space of desire is vented positively. The book sometimes deals with xed borders which regulate the community, found in themes of discipline and judgment: hostile forces scatter the inhabitants, the deity acts wrathfully against the city. Yet within these regulatory spaces the place of release is found, whether in the abundance of food and drink under the g tree and the vine, or within the sense of open space created by the image of a city without walls.90 This concept of openness may be what a cyborg needs to embrace and it includes liberation from self-doubt on the part of the city inhabitants. It remains for readers as cyborgs to make visionary space their own, thus endorsing the value of imagination as a liberating and renewing facet of human existence; while also being aware that text sells its own excess and that we need to buy and resist the sale at the same time. In the 86. Eliza Darling, “Nature’s Carnival: The Ecology of Pleasure at Coney Island,” in The Nature of Cities: Urban Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (ed. N. Hynen, M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw; New York: Routledge, 2006), 75–93. 87. Ibid., 77. 88. Ibid., 79. 89. Ibid., 84. See also the volume by David Valeta, linking transgression of boundaries with Menippean satire. Valeta, Lions and Ovens and Visions: A Satirical Reading of Daniel 1–5 (Shefeld: Shefeld Phoenix, 2008), where he argues that the purpose of bizarre imagery is to contravene the norms and limits of everyday life. It uses the extreme to understand and to encourage boundary crossings. 90. Cf. Conrad, Zechariah, 101. The language of return in Zechariah is always associated with the abundance and prosperity symbolized by grain/wine/oil, all of which are derived from fertility themes. In this context land and temple are woven together. Also see O’Brien, Zechariah, 219. O’Brien notes the idealism in depicting a population at peace, using a play on the word sahaq, with its interface with Gen 18 and 21, suggesting enjoyment despite doubt. 1

166

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

end Transcendence and a human transcendence of past urban formats may come together in silence and absence, on the threshold between the cinematic scope of mind pictures engendered by prophetic vision and an inner response to the signicance of these visions. Visionaries needs to be able to stop, pause and sit lightly to their own religious imagination, while still owning the essential viability of gazing at visionary space as an evaluative practice. Buying the product may mean putting oneself under the control of a political group which claims that it has an absolute point of entry to the transcendent. Equally, it may offer a chance for individuals, within that frame, to nd a truly personal experience of internal harmony and willing commitment to the role of visionary space and the excess of hyperreality. Is buying into the transcendent buying out of the true, material reality? Is it selling out to hidden human self-interest? At what point does the virtual world of vision, dream and imagination no longer touch the real conditions of human life? Such an ambiguity of understanding marks out the self-aware but committed prophetic gaze. In these ways the narrative construction of urban themes in Zechariah provides evidence of the integration of religion, poetic imagination and temple-city while also demonstrating that this combination can produce an iconographic overload in which signication is lost.

1

Chapter 8

DEATHSCAPES AND THE CITY IN THE MINOR PROPHETS

The aim of Part 3 of this book is to make case studies of selected prophetic texts with regard to their urban imagination: the models of city-space which are inherent in the prophetic narrative. The case studies have so far demonstrated that in Jonah there is a serious critique of the manner in which the “great city” conducts its relations with other urban sites, while, in Zech 1–8, there is an exploration of the scope of visionary imagination which is in excess of normal meaning and which aligns the city with transcendent space. Life and death, gain and loss, are themes which emerge from these two previous studies and which will be forefronted in this chapter, with regard to the prophetic imaginary of the cityas-death. Hence this chapter will once again read biblical text via the lens of cultural geography: in this instance passages from the Minor Prophets will be examined via the symbolism of deathscape, memorial and grave. Insofar as these books may be understood as a collection, a “Book of the Twelve,” it is the social function of a plurality of symbolic scenes of annihilation which is the focus of reection.1 The foundational theme of this book is psycho-geography, which was dened in Part 1 through the work of Steve Pile and the concept of the aneur. If Pile’s work suggests that the city has a psyche which is produced by the collective energy of the urban populace, the views of Walter Benjamin and Peter Ackroyd suggest that the aneur, the “man on the street,” is a valuable source of urban critique. These perspectives draw on the emotional life of cities and citizens, indicating that more 1. The debate among scholars as to whether these texts are a collection of disparate works or form a coherent “book of twelve” is large and divided. See, for instance, James Nogalski and Marvin Sweeney, eds., Reading and Hearing the Book of the Twelve (Atlanta: SBL, 2000), for a collection of studies exploring textual evidence which could indicate a deliberate purpose in gathering these books together on the part of ancient editors.

168

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

than one prole of a city can be produced by sections of the population: as Pile remarks, “psycho-geographic experiments convey a sense of the multiplicity of cities that overlap, pass by one another.”2 Pile’s study explores the view that what is real about cities is “as much emotional as physical”; the complexity of city life results in a variety of levels of activity and energy ows in which the individual citizen has a great part to play; these ows create “the city as a phantasmagoria.”3 Since the urban population cannot assimilate the many different aspects of city activity, urban space acquires a haunting, dreamlike quality.4 It is from examination of this phantasmagoric phenomenon that the emotional life of cities can be deduced. Two major aspects of the emotional life are hope and fear; the previous chapter dealt with the imagery of hope and the present chapter will deal with symbols of fear—the fear of death. Both Benjamin and Ackroyd understand the role of the aneur to be that of sensing that the material city is undergirded by death— economic and cultural collapse. The prophetic aneurs of the component books of the collection of twelve Minor Prophets also perceive that their cities are dying and that the end of the current urban culture is at hand. In their narratives they picture the events of urban decline and, in doing so, turn the text into a memorial space which performs the social function of re-assertion of the vitality of city space in the face of destruction. The prophetic texts of the Old Testament assume as their sociopolitical reality the life of a town or city, even when, as Walter Houston points out, there is no explicit self-conscious desire to address urban living directly.5 Prophetic oracles assume the existence of towns with streets, houses and gates; many images of the doom of city life are contextualized by these referents. The Minor Prophets share this prole with multiple references to city elements. Hosea 8 and Zeph 1 relate to fenced cities, for example, while Zech 2 deals with a city without walls. There are repeated uses of the language of gate(s) and houses (as in Obad 1; Hag 3), of temple and palace (as in Amos 2–3; 8–9; Mic 5; and Malachi). In the passages I will be considering in the present chapter these urban settings are sites of destruction caused by violent military aggression, lled with the sight of blood, as in Nah 3, and the sounds of mourning lament, as in Amos 5. The purpose of surveying these passages is to 2. Pile, Real Cities, 15. 3. Ibid., 18. 4. Ibid., 19. 5. Walter Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (London: T&T Clark International, 2008), Chapter 2. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

169

move from the surface level of texts which image scenes of violence to the manner in which they function as conveyors of social memory. Their landscapes of death provide a bridge across the cultural divide resulting from regime change in the kingdoms of Israel/Judah by providing a symbolic universe of trauma within which to memorialize and transcend the destruction of local city-states.6 Landscape and Deathscape This chapter explores the religious and political dimensions of urban landscapes of death. Its rst point of contact with cultural geography is thus in the area of landscape studies. In Approaches to Landscape Richard Muir notes the links between a real and a perceived landscape. In the second sense we deal with “sensed and remembered accounts and hypotheses about the real landscape.”7 Muir continues by discussing the view of Peacock that the “realm of literature is an important source for images of place”8 and suggests that “landscapes often exist as commentaries on the political beliefs and class relationships which surrounded their creation.”9 Putting these comments together we can extend the theme of landscape to include a literary phenomenon, the settings in which plot-lines of stories take place and which add meaning to these events, accepting that these inscribed landscapes share the bias of the cultural contexts of the communities which produced them. As Iain Robertson and Penny Richards argue “the land in which we live is shaped imaginatively [as we project] on to it our aspirations and fantasies of awe, danger and consolation.”10 The role of the imagination in impacting on landscape depiction can focus the reader on loss which can turn to gain, sorrow to consolation and tragic past to redemptive future vision.11 A deathscape performs this role in a particular sense in that, as Scott Howard argues, landscapes of memorialization “serve as vehicles for the expression of grief, construction of memory and the writing of 6. Cf. Goldingay and Scalise, Minor Prophets, 2:1–2, which offers a summary of the historical situation in which these books function. 7. Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 115. 8. Ibid., 128. 9. Ibid., 149. 10. Iain Robertson and Penny Richards, eds., Studying Cultural Landscapes (London: Arnold, 2003), 1. 11. W. Scott Howard, “Landscapes of Memorialisation,” in Robertson and Richards, eds., Cultural Landscapes, 47. 1

170

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

historical narratives.”12 In the movement between loss and reconstruction within symbolic worlds, the energy for renewal which events have blocked or destroyed are freed/re-charged. Sites, physical or literary, where this death/life scenario is managed can be called liminal landscapes. Hilary Winchester et al. suggest that such threshold sites act as conveyors of “personal moments and movements of transformation” and that inbetweenness, caused by a loss of social co-ordinates, is generally associated with religious experience, forming the setting for a signicant rite of passage.13 This religious dimension is linked to the fact that death, fear and grief are associated, since the physical reality of endings brings a person face to face with the non-material world, emphasizing the quality of the unknown and the depth of nality.14 Deathscapes in the Minor Prophets In this chapter I will explore the urban cameos of death found in Joel, Amos, Micah, Zephaniah and Nahum.15 The focus in Joel 2:5–9, for instance, is the imagery of a locust attack envisaged as an army on the move in its battle array of serried ranks, which scales walls, runs through city streets and enters windows and houses. This is an image of a city under siege and at the point of defeat; as it is over-run its collective cultural identity collapses. The wider context of the passage is that this is the design of the Lord who comes as warrior in his Day of Victory. Military might is explained as a religious event and it is religion which must respond in the act of liturgical fast and ritual lament. The conviction that public worship is a political act is evidenced by the way that the text states that as a result the enemy from the north will be driven away (v. 20).16 A second example is found in Amos 5, where the key verses are 3–5 and 16.17 Here the city population is very severely decimated and the reference to the loss of those who went out may be to the army of 12. Ibid. 13. Winchester, Kong and Dunn, eds. Landscapes, 149. 14. Ibid., 150. 15. Although there is a commonality of scenes of warfare and death across all minor books of prophecy, it is also the case that a variety of time periods are given as the setting of these works, from the collapse of kingdoms at the hands of Assyria to the impact of later imperial regimes in Mesopotamia. 16. Cf. Chapter 5 of the present volume for a more detailed examination of the narrative space of the book of Joel. 17. Cf. Paul, Amos, 178. The section ends a series of divine oracles on the same dire note on which they began. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

171

defenders which is lost in battle on behalf of the city. Named cities are then dened as insecure, lacking the value of refuge sites; hence there is the sound of wailing in the streets. This message is dened as an oracle of doom on the house of Israel in v. 1 and its severity is mirrored, in vv. 8–9 by nature which is both stable and wild. Finally, the theme of the Day of the Lord is invoked, replete with iconography of ight, fear and danger.18 Meanwhile, Mic 5 deals in its rst verse with the scenario of troops laying siege, with God alongside armies, parallel with the human ruler, whether this be the Assyrian king or the ideal leader of the home community. A second depiction of violent aggression follows in v. 11, where the cities and strongholds of the enemy will be cut off. In Zeph 2–3 the context is Nineveh, which is the subject of a doom oracle.19 Zephaniah 2:15 picks up the city as complacent in its strength and argues for a total reversal of the state of life. Since in ch. 3 rejoicing is balanced by oppressing and city leaders are lions and wolves, their towers and streets will lie desolate and waste, destroyed to the point of annihilation—as illustrated by the theme of emptiness of people, places where no one passes by, ruins where animals now graze as the city returns to scrubland.20 A very clear image of city as site of death is presented in Nah 3, which offers the reader a direct sense of the traumatic effect of battle on cityspace. Verses 2–3 set out a lm-like sequence of the moment when an invading army penetrates urban borders. The air lls with the sounds of battle-chariots, the tanks of the ancient world, and defenders fall before the drawn weapons. Bodies pile up in hosts and heaps without end. As the enemy advances it has to climb over those who are dead. Reecting on this imagery leads the watcher to ponder on the extreme violence of warfare in which the political triumph of some is constituted from the mass killing of other human beings.21 But life is not easy for the survivors either; children who once destroyed strong men are carried off into slavery in v. 10.22 The fortress-city is a false refuge since in the end any city can be taken by its opponents if they have the strength (vv. 12– 13). The picture which builds up of an emptied, desolate waste where 18. For the prevalence of this motif in the books of minor prophecy and its signicance, see Redditt and Schart, eds., Thematic Threads. 19. Cf. Scalise, Zephaniah, 117–18. 20. Ibid., 117. 21. Ibid., 37–38. The urban site is constructed as a “city of blood.” 22. Ibid., 41. This image of enforced slavery is used and re-used in depictions of the fate of a number of kingdoms and deconstructs the value of a great city claiming to be superior to other urban regimes. 1

172

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

once ne buildings stood leads us to grieve for the fear and pain of those threatened with destruction and to look for a cause, either in human nature or at the level of transcendent energy. As narrative contexts these passages share some common images. Some of these relate to material sites such as streets, walls and palaces: all spaces whose occupation by the enemy symbolizes the collapse of a historical urban culture. Others relate to the impact on human inhabitants, from the bodies of the slain to the string of captives leaving the city, to the weeping sound of the decimated urban community. The stress is on the city laid waste, its identity as a human centre wiped out, its future as just another piece of wasteland for agricultural usage. The texts offer cameos of a major urban reality in which the play of warfare denies a town its future. As such, the texts provide an alternative universe in which readers can manage their own experiences of loss and can nd some form of consolation. They act as sites of memorialization just as much as do public monuments to the victory of some and the subjugation of others.23 It is time now to interrogate the spatial poetics of these texts in greater detail through the optic of cultural and political concerns, in consideration of the urban imaginaries of memory, trauma and grief which they develop. Places of Memory In political and cultural terms the key role of the prophetic narrative is to function as a place of memory: that is, to provide a stabilizing interpretation of regional politics which creates a sense of kinship and continuity across several generations of citizens. This is true even if the content of the stabilizing narrative is spatial iconography of the disruption of the governing faction, carried out by human armies at divine behest. To understand more fully the concept of “places of memory” it is necessary to turn to the cultural geographer Karen Till who argues that places are not backdrops but rather “moments of memory”24 which function to constrain and enable the “commemorative practices of a nation.”25 She argues that “places of memory give a scope to that which is metaphysically absent through material and imagined settings that appear to be relatively stable.”26 They thus provide social cohesion and have a 23. Cf. the Shalmaneser III basalt stele housed in the British Museum, London. 24. Karen Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 8. 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Ibid., 10. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

173

stabilizing effect through a “felt” environment. In addition, places of memory serve a political purpose.27 “A group represents its past through place in an attempt to claim territory and justify political actions.”28 This includes the role of the “sacred time-space of death and veneration.”29 Till’s earliest work is found in Textures of Place, a treatment of Berlin and its museums.30 She suggests that the museum acts as a memorial site for German cultures, but also that competing understandings of the past are remembered there. This view highlights the constructed nature of the German nation as opposed to its “natural occurrence.” Till uses Tuan’s work to expand this point.31 Settings help dene both self and world identity; thus social meaning is a “process by which groups ‘map’ their myths and values are attached to particular times and places.”32 Biblical texts, too, act as sites of memory and produce social maps through the imagery of physical objects. In that sense their role is similar to that of the museum. The text is the place where objects with cultural value connected with past history are gathered together for public viewing. One example of a textual exhibit is the metaphoric female body. Nahum 2–3, for instance, pictures the great city, Nineveh, in terms of the female body, an image previously used by prophets to communicate the fates of Jerusalem and Samaria.33 The metaphor of the city as a “ravaged woman” is found in Amos 4, which attacks the women of the elite class and narrates the demise of Samaria through images of their bodies stripped and bound. In Nahum the image of female violation is used to outline the collapse of the enemy city.34 The female “urban” body as site of memory for city collapse is a common metaphor, it seems, and can function as the vehicle for denouncing the home-city as well as the enemy’s space. Across the range of its usage the metaphor relates to a common set of emotions, drawing upon 27. Karen Till, “Places of Memory,” in Agnew, Mitchell and Toal, eds., A Companion to Political Geography, 289. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 293. 30. Karen Till, “Re-imagining National Identity: ‘Chapters of Life’ at the German Historical Museum in Berlin,” in Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies (ed. Paul Adams, Steven Holscher, and Karen Till; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 31. Ibid., 274. 32. Ibid. 33. Cf. n. 35 below. 34. See Goldingay, Nahum, 38–40. Goldingay discusses the prophetic use of the female body and sexual activity as a socio-religious symbol used to denote that which is abhorrent. 1

174

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

horror and revulsion to draw out the emotional charge of city demise. The emotional response can be on two levels: distaste at the spectacle of the female body pictured as an object of contempt and distaste at the historical treatment of women in violent contexts. However, the textual use of the female body also permits the viewer to accept the validity of such iconography as a metaphor of discipline and judgment.35 Chapter 3 of Nahum uses female imagery as the climax of its description of death on the city streets. Verse 4 places the responsibility for the loss of life on city-as-woman, a prostitute whose behaviour has seduced many nations. Nineveh has “enslaved” many peoples in this manner and as a result she will be enslaved by others. Verses 5–6 reinforce this political message with a graphic depiction of the fate of women in a captured city. Their bodies will be displayed naked, a shameful state, and will be the target for mockery which will include being “pelted with lth.”36 In this unit of text the reader becomes a voyeur who is placed alongside the crowd of attackers. The women’s bodies are on display not simply as urban icons but as exhibits which encourage audience interaction in joining with or avoiding, the mind-set of the attacking crowd. Women-cities provide a site of memorialization which is shaped by the concept of winners and losers, of power games played out by cities to the detriment of urban populations. Till argues that societies build memorials because groups assume that a particular type of place can shape the public meaning of the past towards its meaning in the present.37 In prophetic texts the depiction of city-spaces functions to make that link between past action and present condition. Nahum 2, for example, narrates the city streets as sites of death and scorn in order to move from a dominant Assyria in the past to imperial collapse and the reversal of Judahite fortunes in the present/ future.38 For Till, the symbiosis between site and event means that a 35. There is, of course, a large body of feminist criticism which discusses the iconic use of women’s bodies in prophecy. Key scholars in this eld are Phyllis Trible, Cheryl Exum, Alice Bach, Renita Weems. In terms of the abusive nature of prophetic imagery, a key essay is Exum, “Prophetic Pornography,” in her book Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1996). 36. Cf. Goldingay, Nahum, 40. “Filth” is literally abhorrent things and Goldingay suggests that this links the female metaphor with false religious practices. The exact meaning of concepts of harlotry, lust and scorn are unclear in the passage. 37. Ibid., 275. 38. Cf. ibid., 32–33, where Goldingay suggests that although it is possible to identify the city here as Nineveh, the events narrated could apply to any other ancient city. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

175

scholar must pay attention to architecture and the lay-out of exhibits at a memorial site. It is possible to transfer that view from attention to a built environment to the symbolic urban spaces of prophetic narrative. Attention to the narrative of Amos 5, for instance, leads the reader to explore an “emptiness” motif. This is worked out textually through two related themes. In the rst the narrative voice reects on the lack of population—the city that was a thousand has now a hundred and that which was a hundred now has ten (v. 3).39 The second strand provides a response to this decimation in calling for the spaces of square and street to be lled up with the sound of wailing, for which outsiders will have to be engaged if there is to be a strong enough sound (vv. 16–17).40 There is an interaction here between decimation of urban population and the need for streets full of people. The link between the two motifs is the sound of lamentation and its cause, namely, the death of citizens. The street as empty conveys the transient quality of urban life, a viewpoint which is endorsed by the indication that the true partner to emptiness is lament. The construction of urban space minus the humanity which would complete it provides for the memorialization of lost generations. The application of aspects of Till’s investigation of places of memory as reading tools for biblical interpretation endorses the view that the site of historical memorial is a complex place that localizes and spatially communicates narratives of time and identity. In her later work Till turns to political geography to examine the ways in which a group represents its past through place in order “to claim territory, justify political actions.”41 She argues that political elites support places of memory at prominent sites as symbolic settings for building national cohesion.42 The view that the role of the memorial site is to be a setting for an appeal for national cohesion can be useful for readers of the book of Joel. The prophetic book uses the symbol of a temple site as a narrative device to call for social cohesion and appropriate reaction to a moment of national disaster. In this way it draws upon the historical temple as a major urban monument of the city of Jerusalem. Joel 2 announces the need for the city to take notice and for its people to be aghast at the immensity of the threat which is heading towards it. The chapter closes its treatment of city as site of attack in vv. 8–9 with 39. Cf. Paul, Amos, 160–61. Decimation is a curse stereotype found in Mesopotamian literature. 40. Ibid., 167–71. The others to be called upon may be professional guilds of mourners. Regional evidence shows that such associations were part of social groups. 41. Till, “Places of Memory,” 289. 42. Ibid. 1

176

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

the imagery of an army besieging a city and successfully breaking into it.43 The seriousness of the situation cannot be doubted.44 The material site which can be opposed to the threat is shown in 2:17 to be that of the temple. It is described as a place which has magnetic strength to unite all levels of society in action which will provide safety. Joel 2:15 calls for a second trumpet sounding, this time to bring the roused citizen body to gather at the site of security. The text does not support a call to take up arms to resist military might directly; instead, it promotes a call to acts of worship which will be more effective in turning aside the danger to life.45 In the narrative frame the “sacred assembly” draws all segments of the urban population together physically—elders, children, mothers, brides/ grooms, priests. Moreover, it is not just the site which provides social cohesion: it is the participation of the inhabitants of the city space which enlivens the site and turns it into a means by which transcendent energy can transfer to urban affairs.46 Monumental space needs its complement of public actors whose participation is a mode of national cohesion.47 Hence the memorial site is one with its act of memory; it is a performative space. Till suggests that public squares and urban spaces become “theatres” where selective state histories can be enacted. Spaces, she says, are not passive but partake in complex national imaginations and power relations. Joel endorses the capacity of temple-space to act as a theatre in which the fate of the nation faced with enemies from nature and hostile regimes can be played out.48 Till believes that places of memory have both sociological and political roles. Hence geo-graphing is an act of spatially situating events of urban memory—an action which has a cultural impact on the wider urban community. In the passages from Nahum, Amos and Joel examined above the role of the symbolic memory site is to critique the death of a generation; an urban affair which leads to an imaginary in which the city is essentially a death-site. The represented city stands to inform the reader concerning the inherent tendency of cities to die and to be the 43. Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, 90. The text stresses that the locust army is totally under divine control. 44. Ibid., 70. The severity of threat is indicated by the change of the elds from paradise to desert all in one day. 45. Ibid., 46, notes that the same use of ritual service occurs in Jer 14 as a controlling measure against drought. 46. Ibid., 82. Joel views religious organization as a necessary means to attaining spiritual ends. 47. For more detail on the working of the Joel narrative structures, see Chapter 5 of the present volume. 48. Cf. Till, “Places of Memory,” 290–91. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

177

graves of their inhabitants. Deathscapes carry out the task of communicating the collective memory of a culture, a social activity examined by Marita Sturken, who has studied collective response to the American national disasters of Vietnam War and Aids epidemic; she argues that public memory of traumas is bound up with the variety of social values, since “to dene a memory as cultural is to enter the debate about what that memory means.”49 Sturken, like Till, deals with the phenomenon of competing memories which nd expression and embodiment in the physical memorial which operates as a “eld of cultural negotiation through which different stories compete for a place in history.”50 Sturken notes that “memory is a narrative rather than a replica of an experience” and the construction of this narrative includes forgetting as well as remembering.51 She suggests that societies forget painful events too dangerous to keep alive.52 The prophetic stories of the collapse of local communities deal with events which are painful to consider. The destruction of a city involves not only the deaths of individual citizens but the threatened end to a whole urban culture, including its religious components. It threatens a society with the “death” of its patron deity. Recounting the story of urban failure needs to address such a painful topic with great care. It is helpful to read the hymn of praise to God in Amos 4 in this light. The chapter concludes in v. 13 with hymnic praise to the deity who is a universal gure of power.53 Read on its own this passage contains a neutral image which celebrates divine control of the elements and which ts human beings into this prole as the recipients of transcendent knowledge. Even read on its own, however, there is a hint of dark power about this prole, for the deity could be depicted as turning light to dark in a reversal of the motif of created light emerging from primeval darkness. Certainly the iconography of God is that of a being of gigantic size striding across the mountain tops, an image whose impact is to stress the gap between human and divine power.

49. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1. 50. Ibid., 1. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Paul, Amos, 184–85. Paul notes the use of three participial verbs for creation in this unit but thinks the motif of light to dark should be reversed to read darkness to dawn. 1

178

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

When the verse is read in the context of the rest of ch. 4 the theme of uncontrolled divine force emerges more fully, since the verse concludes a section in which God tells of his past violent acts, withholding fertility and food, striking cities with earthquake and re, sending plagues. The overall impression of the chapter is that the deity is a violent, selfdirected being who alone causes urban distress and that such a persona is to be celebrated even as it hurts. Agency for city collapse across time and space is attributed to God; what is omitted is the fact that it is often other city-states who carry out destructive action. It can be argued that it would be too painful to focus on the contest between human groups since this would leave no space for hope that disaster could be turned aside if the enemy is greater in strength. The celebration of transcendent force as an inevitable feature of life forms a way to remember and yet to “forget” the pain of suffering: not the physical ruination of urban sites but the communal anguish of loss of cultural identity. Trauma Sturken refers to the intimacy of deathscapes, how they touch on personal and social raw nerves. For Maria Tumarkin the act of grieving found in relation to social sites of traumatic memory is a major focus.54 It is the function of traumascapes to contextualize the action of mourning; hence they are places which allow dark thoughts and feelings to crystallize, often because they are sites where public loss occurred.55 A traumascape can be dened as a place where death occurred and which therefore focalizes tragic grief. This viewpoint offers the reader of biblical texts a useful source of analysis which will be applied here to Mic 1. The text will be read for its function as a site which both dramatizes tragic grief and invites the reader to share in that overowing of lament. The main part of this chapter is broken into two balancing units. The rst describes events which cause grief, the second enacts a suitable sorrow on the part of the prophet. The rst section focuses on divine intervention in human affairs. Verses 3–4 picture the deity treading on the earth, which melts and trembles underneath him.56 This poetic image 54. Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 36. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Allen, Micah, 270. Verse 2 provides for a graphic depiction of a judge entering the court of the earth where verdicts made in heaven will be carried out. The motif of theophany has two parts: deity departs from heavenly home/nature’s reaction. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

179

stresses the power of the deity while also hinting that this power can be greatly destructive. The following verses link such destruction with urban sites, climaxing with the picture of Samaria reduced to a pile of stones, in v. 6. The narrative portrayal of cosmic energy which is dedicated to undoing created order provides a commentary on the results of warfare and turns city collapse into an image of annihilation. The spaces of city and world are read as one continuous place of distress. Faced with chaos the narrator reports in the rst person the appropriate reaction. Verses 8–12 provide one long lament in which words for grief are repeated.57 The “I” of the text weeps, wails, howls, moans and tells others to adopt mourning. The extremity of grief requires a bodily response of going barefoot and naked, of rolling in dust and writhing in pain, shaving the head. The reader’s attention is drawn to the visual site of a human person in extreme grief, torn apart by the inner pain of loss— in v. 16, of children. In such a place of loss the reader can only be silent and share emotionally in another’s pain. The text serves to remind readers of moments and situations of their own reasons for lament and suggests the importance of mourning.58 It is the emotional charge of gazing at a scene of urban annihilation which produces this extreme grief; the dramatization of prophet as mourner encourages readers, too, to discharge a heavy weight of grief by visiting a death site. The reader is like a “tourist” visiting a site of loss. For Tumarkin this encapsulates the role of traumascapes as space which offers a reective site of sorrow since it engages the tourist/pilgrim with violence enacted in history.59 Her argument supports the view that city-as-death provides a symbolic spatial dimension for processing cultural loss. As Tumarkin notes, such pilgrimages to trauma sites are less a matter of morbid curiosity and more to do with the notion of the sublime.60 The urban imagery of a deathspace provides a cathartic experience which “releases from the burden of a traumatic past, but also of an anxious and uncertain present— a moment of empowerment.”61 Because traumaspace is de-linked from temporality it provides a xed space in which to gather a city/nation’s grief. “Places of trauma stand for time” and experiences of loss thus 57. Ibid., 274–75. The grief motif heightens the severity of disaster, putting emotional support to arguments from reason. 58. Ibid., 275. The lament and collapse of Samaria prove that Jerusalem’s end is near. 59. Tumarkin, Traumascapes, 42–44. 60. Ibid., 53. 61. Ibid., 1

180

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

transcend private mourning rituals.62 They stand in for grave sites63 indicating the presence of the dead whose role in society is thus harder to ignore.64 Thus Mic 7 balances “misery” for the loss of the righteous population (vv. 1–2) against a day of rebuilding walls, when the city rises again (vv. 8, 11) and a new populace will be gathered in (v. 12) The tone of the chapter urges the reader/enemy of Israel not to gloat over “absence” and the “emptiness of the land.” That which fell will rise: a population scattered will be met by inhabitants gathered in. The movement of the narrative refuses the view that negation has the last word—a dynamic which Tumarkin refers to when she says that “places of loss and trauma are never empty or blank; they are lled with meaning and history even when covered with ruins or new buildings.”65 The past, dark as it can be, haunts the present; those “things that appear dead, past, nished, well and truly forgotten, have a denite place in the world.”66 In traumascapes “physical and metaphysical share a common space”:67 a comment which applies well to the narrative space of local cities in the book of Micah. Laying the Dead to Rest The idea of a ghostlike presence accompanying the living ts with Pile’s comments regarding memory and consolation.68 It accommodates a traumatic national past since in times of major warfare with accompanying loss of human life there is a social need to “lay the dead to rest.” For surviving citizens this is achieved through the grieving for lost inhabitants. John Walton’s volume on ancient Near Eastern thought examines the practice of cults for the dead.69 Walton centres his comments on funeral rituals and ancestor veneration.70 He notes the monthly family remembrance meal in Mesopotamian culture which ensured that “community is preserved and the dead fondly remembered and cared for.”71 62. Ibid., 79. 63. Ibid., 85. 64. Ibid., 162. 65. Ibid., 225. 66. Ibid., 233. 67. Ibid. 68. For more discussion of this issue, see Chapter 1 above, on urban psychogeography. 69. John Walton, Ancient Israelite Literature in Its Cultural Context (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006). 70. Ibid., 319. 71. Ibid., 322. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

181

The ghostly dead are incorporated into the community of the living and offer no cause for fear, whereas the spirits of those forgotten or neglected may present malevolent possibilities.72 Hence cultural weight is put on proper rites so that the dead do not wander.73 Jay Winter’s treatment of the modern period and its memorializing of the dead soldiers from the World War I offers a parallel perspective in relation to the laying to rest of this citizen body.74 War memorials were ways of focusing the grief of whole communities, united in the loss of so many men: vast military loss requires commemoration, “the need to bring the dead home, to put the dead to rest symbolically.”75 As in the social practices of the ancient world, a gathering of the community in an event of remembrance is understood by the group to effect the incorporation of the ghostly dead whose memory haunts the European imagination at this point. In the rst major section of his book Winter deals with the cultural signicance of the act of commemoration. He notes that on war memorials the dead “appear solely as names” and hence they “take on the ambience of the general will, of the collective spirit.” This turns the material monument into a site “of symbolic exchange” in which the sacrice of the individual is subsumed into a common good.76 This comment can be used to read the account of battle in Nah 3 as an act of commemoration, insofar as its description of events gives a place to the dead. Whereas war memorials give the bare names Nahum gives only the mass of the unnamed dead. Verse 3 refers to wounded and dying citizens, “bodies without number,” the public spaces blocked with corpses which the living have to climb over, stumbling as they do so. Verse 10 depicts the deaths of infants, snatched from their mothers and smashed against the ground. This symbolic world of urban death celebrates urban inhabitants as victims of warfare whose deaths are as one with the end of their city. They serve to convey the sense of a whole community wiped out as the city is corporately killed or enslaved.77 The prophetic construction of urban collapse through images of human death can encourage an urban 72. Ibid., 323. 73. Ibid., 326. 74. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 75. Ibid., 28. 76. Ibid., 94. 77. Goldingay, Nahum, 41–43. The great city will not stand for ever. Military fortications are not the ultimate defence. 1

182

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

reader to engage in fellow-feeling for all the abstract, anonymous mass of citizens who lose their lives in violent aggression, whether in the ancient world or the modern period, including the deaths of opponents. Winter suggests that the Europeans who survived the World War I imagined their world “as composed of survivors perched on a mountain of corpses.”78 This perspective resonates with the overall mood of the Nahum deathscape in that both Winter and the prophetic voice believe that sites can become the focal point for the lived experience of trauma. In Winter’s study the evidence is provided by the fact that European war memorials were often placed in the centre of villages and cities and were the object of civic funerary commemoration. In the literary world of Nahum, ch. 3 draws to itself the themes of battle and suffering which permeate the rest of the book. The rst chapter attributes warfare to the design of Israel’s deity and threatens its execution in an urban setting. Nahum 2:3–10 describe the arrival of troops and the effect that has on the populace. Chapter 3 focuses both divine causality and human fear on the scenes of battle, death and loss. Its narrative role is to bring out the certainty of urban grief and in this function it realizes fully the severe treatment of which the prophet speaks. Winter’s research reveals the extent to which national activity in the face of historical disaster was linked with the religious imagination, with “religious spiritualism and the attitudes of people who see apocalyptic, divine, angelic or saintly presences in daily life.”79 These material and spiritual responses provide a language in which inner emotional directions can be renewed. Winter notes the cinematic imagery of the war dead rising from their graves and visiting their home towns and villages; this, he argues, was not for the purpose of a state triumph over the willing sacrice made by the dead, but provided a means for the “exploration of eternal themes of life, death, redemption.”80 The motif of the Return of the Dead provides an example of apocalyptic imagination. Winter refers to the “uncanny landscape of the trenches,” an apocalyptic scene in which the Great War can be aligned affectively with the End-Time.81 Focusing on the manner in which religious imagination enabled emotional stress to nd an outlet provides another tool for interpreting the cultural role of prophetic deathscapes. Winter believes that “the apocalyptic imagination speaks in a language

78. 79. 80. 81. 1

Winter, Sites of Memory, 17. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 159.

8. Deathscapes and the City

183

halfway between despair and hope”82—a comment which ts well with the manner in which prophetic books balance between scenes of chaos and imagery of re-ordering. The focal point for apocalyptic tendencies in the prophetic books is the motif of the Day of the Lord.83 This image is found frequently in the Minor Prophets, where it serves as a spatial marker, framing the urban battle scene, giving it a purpose beyond the human search for political and economic control.84 This spatial icon links the fate of the city with the state of the cosmos and with the transcendent energies which ow through the created world. The book of Amos repeatedly uses this motif of divine entry to the created world as a symbol for urban destruction. In Amos 5, for example, the suffering of the city community is dened in vv. 16–17 as the effect of the action of the deity who will “pass through.” The desolation caused by military activity is under-scored in this chapter by two devices.85 In vv. 8–9 it is linked with the forces of nature and with divine control of these. It is the same energy which ensures the succession of day and night that also causes huge tidal waves which, it is implied, have destructive force. And it is this force which also destroys fortied places and places of refuge. This same divine energy is focal ized in v. 18 as the Day of the Lord, that is, the breaking-in of divine presence, but this brings only darkness and danger. The destructive effect of war is thus gathered into the identity of the deity who is a gure of towering strength (but whose force is now directed against an urban community) and who controls agents of cosmic power, both celestial and human. Amos 8 uses the same motif. In v. 3 the prophet tells of how temple worship will become a lament as corpses are ung around. Verse 8 aligns this event with the deity who will cause an earthquake and obscure the sun, bringing darkness during daytime. These events are the signature tune of the coming of the “Day of the Lord,” which is also referred to as “that day.” These passages are material appropriate for the production of the social despair which Winter refers to as part of the apocalyptic imagination. The function of endtime language is to provide a sufciently vast space for housing the emotions of uselessness and even guilt felt by populations which live after traumatic 82. Ibid., 171. 83. Cf. Nogalski, “The Day(s) of YHWH.” This chapter stresses the frequency of usage of this motif in the texts of Minor Prophets. 84. Cf. the discussion of the narrative function of this symbol provided in Chapter 5, above. 85. Cf. Paul, Amos, 160–61, who notes the textual emphasis on the impact of military defeat. 1

184

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

regional events, thus creating a vehicle for the gradual processing of civic anxiety. In Day of the Lord poetics prophets produce a space as vast as the cosmos to balance the pain of urban chaos. Winter notes that as the years passed European communities no longer regarded a war memorial as a vital social site, wounds of social loss and grief eased as life simply re-shaped the survivors.86 Remembering emerges from despair, but the very act of memory consoles and gradually hope emerges in its turn. The urban imaginary of city-as-death reects this dual event of remembering and forgetting. Life goes on for survivors of urban loss and eventually a new phase of city life develops. The book of Amos works through this theme with an urban imaginary which interweaves human warfare with natural events which threaten the continuity of an ordered world and which leads out, at the end of the book in ch. 9, to an urban scene of life renewed, building re-construction, land again cultivated.87 The City-as-grave A similar pattern of organization of meaning can be found in the book of Zephaniah. In the rst chapter God declares that all created life will be swept away (vv. 2–3) and this will extend to the city of Jerusalem (v. 4); all this will happen as part of the Day of the Lord (v. 7).88 This is a great day (v. 14) and the upheaval in human history will be part of a complete end to world order. Pain and distress are one with darkness and gloom. The battle cry and trumpet signal are the prelude to the pouring out of human blood and disembowelling (vv. 16–17).89 Yet this day is balanced in 3:14–18 by the theme of redemption which is dominated by imagery of loving care, tenderness and nurture on the deity’s part.90 Once more the visual horror of battle is turned aside by a hope in survival and re-ordering. Micah 1 and 4 offer a third version of this theme. In the reversal theme of ch. 4 the human ingathering to the temple, the mountain of the Lord, to receive international justice is completed by the image of each individual having a personal space and place. They will sit under their own vine and g tree and thus be totally assured 86. Ibid., 98. 87. Ibid., 294–95. 88. Scalise, Zephaniah, 95–96, discusses the poetic skills demonstrated in this prophetic text, including his imagery of a day of darkness. 89. Ibid., 106–7. The text stresses the harsh realities which esh out divine intervention. 90. Ibid., 130–31. The passage uses the quality of sound to get across the message of rejoicing. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

185

of life and continuity (v. 4). In this imaginary the city which is a pile of ruins in ch. 1 becomes the place of successful agriculture in ch. 4. The death site is transformed through natural growth and the tending of plants into a place of peace and joy. City-space as narrated in these scenes of loss and renewal functions as a grave-site in that it makes possible a bridge between death and life. In The Secret Cemetery a team of researchers establish the cultural viability of urban cemeteries in which the grave functions as a “home from home,” thus providing for the transfer of the deceased’s identity from the domestic to the public, from life to death.91 By this mechanism the power of death as annihilation is freed up through a rite of human passage; at the end of the journey through the actuality of death life is given to the absent family member through the attention of those still living. The researchers note that burial grounds are “special, sacred spaces of personal, emotional, spiritual reclamation where the shattered self is put back in place.”92 “Funeral and mortuary rites help create a connection between home and cemetery”93 and cemeteries are liminal places “where geography and chronology are reshaped and history is spatially spread out.”94 It is possible to view the narrated city of prophetic texts as a type of memorial site, where the shattered urban self is reconstructed. The prophetic narrative encourages the reader to recreate a living city through attending to its symbolic representation in text. The frame for this activity is post-trauma. The pain of loss is still felt but is drawn into an urban prole which is hopeful for the continued vitality of city space. The prophetic imagery which links despair with hope often makes use of nature imagery. As indicated above, the prophetic voice links the collapse of human society with cosmic upheaval. Parallel to this use of creation imagery is the depiction of land, that is, as fertile as a symbol of the regeneration of urban society. Amos 9:11–15 speak of restoration and repair. The city has been ruined, its activity has ceased. But that is not the end of all possibility of that city’s existence. Verse 13 portrays that concept through images of planting and growth. Looking at this passage in more detail reveals how powerful the image of abundance is as a cultural marker.95 The term “reaper” looks back, by inference, to the theme of natural endings, but 91. Doris Francis, Leonie Kellagher and Georgina Neophytou, The Secret Cemetery (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 92. Ibid., 3. 93. Ibid., 84. 94. Ibid., 180. 95. Cf. Paul, Amos, 294–95, for comments on the motif of unconditional blessing. 1

186

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

this gure is “overtaken” by the one who prepares the soil for a new crop. Symbolically the stress here falls on the urgency of renewal and hope, since closing down acts are barely complete before newness springs forth. In a second version of the theme in this verse the one who places plants in the ground will give way to one who gathers in the fullness of harvest. The cycle from reaper to ploughman to planter to harvest is speeded up in such a manner that far from closing life down, the gathering-in of crops is the point of opening up to life. Francis et al. note that the cemetery as place is a unique landscape “whose outcome is dynamic change over time.”96 They point out that cemeteries are arenas for “crafting memory” via a material format and that a central aspect of this is that cemeteries are places of planting and growth.97 Graveyards thus draw down the identity of a garden, with a progression of seasons within a xed site; this “makes consoling cycles of seasonal renewal and regeneration available to the mourner.”98 For the family this means that through the garden-grave site they can use nature to help them to establish helpful memories of the deceased.99 The prophetic iconography of city as garden engages with a parallel mediation of life via the cycle of seasonal growth. Joel 2:23–26 provide an instance of this dynamic at work. Verse 23 urges the people to rejoice, introducing the motif of yearly growth as the reason for this. Life starts with the arrival of rain, especially in the autumn after the dry season when drought brings death. As a result the spaces of storage are lled to excess with grain, wine and oil. This benecence is compensation for the deprivation of life support caused by the appetite of the locust horde, in v. 25.100 The sequence closes with a summary of the seasonal cycle working with human agriculture—there will be plenty to eat. This urban imaginary, addressed to Zion’s inhabitants, provides a dynamic of change over time. Balancing the seasons when life fails due to a hostile environment are the seasons of plenty with the consequent renewal of life.101 This use of nature imagery provides a sense of consolation and hope for those made anxious about the fate of their city earlier in the book. 96. Francis, Kellagher and Neophytou, Secret Cemetery, 105–6. 97. Ibid., 117–18. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 119. 100. Allen, Joel, 78. Allen emphasizes the strength of the immediate moment in this material; the good things will really happen. 101. Ibid., 94. God’s claim to the ownership of people and land entails a pledge of divine support 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

187

Once an ordered site is set up, it is through actions relating to the site that identity is maintained: in the actions of visiting and tending. Francis et al. comment that visiting the grave is what makes it a live, perpetual memory-site for the dead.102 Hence tending to the grave-site can “forestall the effects of time, disorder and forgetting” and is a way of “symbolically reconstructing the body of the dead.”103 The same is true of books and their narrated space. It is when a reader encounters text that the literary world comes alive in an act of reading which engages at depth with the contents of that world. In prophetic works the reader is faced with poetic imagination which seeks to convey both horror and comfort through city stories. The cities involved are named sites and their life is one with the experiences of their inhabitants. Cities live and die and are reborn within prophetic books. The reader is invited to enter into the scenes which tell of this urban cycle from life through death to new life—as in the book of Micah. Micah 7 tells of an urban cycle from the point of death to hope for new life. Verse 1 begins with the state of lament and sorrow and introduces a unit which is full of anxious thoughts and worries of threats.104 The imagery uses the sadness of the harvester at the end of the growth cycle to communicate the feelings of someone who senses that urban society is decaying and will end. City authorities are painted as corrupt in v. 3 and citizens prey upon one another in v. 2. Verse 6 increases the tension since no-one in the community can be trusted to come to the aid of a fellow citizen. Verse 8 implies that the worst event which can be imagined has taken place: the city has fallen to assailants who gloat over their victory. But this is the point at which an upward trajectory starts. Verse 9 speaks of coming out of darkness into light, symbolically a setting free from the grave site, and v. 11 links this new life with the material aspect of the city in the construction of walls which contain a much larger urban territory.105 Verse 14 comes full circle with the use of pastoral imagery to endorse this time not danger but security, as city reconstruction comes alive in the image of a shepherd who leads his ock into good pasture.106 The reader who attends to Micah’s message can be viewed as a visitor to a memorial site, one who thus tends the grave and, by engaging in 102. Francis, Kellagher and Neophytou, Secret Cemetery, 126. 103. Ibid., 124. 104. Allen, Micah, 384. The lament form is used to stress the utter misery of the situation. 105. Ibid., 394–95. Allen reects on the loving intimacy motif of the text. 106. Ibid., 398–99. Shepherd imagery is used in all the hope sections of this biblical book. 1

188

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

the prophetic imagination of a renewal for the city, shares in prophetic hope.107 The act of attentive reading provides an urban imagination which honours urban existence and which extends the memorialization of ancient cities to reection on the meaning of cities known to the reader. The textual poetics of Mic 7 suggest that city life is intrinsically important for the survival of humanity. As was noted above, in relation to Tumarkin’s work on traumascapes, the reader of the biblical text may be aligned with a tourist who visits a dark landscape in order to empathize with those who suffered and died in that place. Yet this act of pilgrimage looks not only back to an urban past, but also out to a future which is still to be fully realized. City and Identity Having explored these urban cameos it is time to summarize the kinds of city-work in which they engage. As has been shown, prophetic urban imagination engages with the fundamental issues of human existence. The material site of a city is the backdrop against which urban actors play out their city’s fate. By implication the city is such a central mode of habitation for the societies which produced these prophetic books that the destruction of a city ranks alongside a chaotic upheaval in cosmic space. Yet this disordering event of divine arousal has ambivalent value. On the one hand the metaphor of the huge electric storm as the incoming of a mighty warrior God stresses the storm’s power to uproot trees and to strike to death with lightening bolts. Both land and people quiver and tremble at this manifestation of global natural energy. However, the consequence of the storm is that rain falls on dry land and makes it fertile again. As the clouds hit the mountain peaks their water drops and streams and waterfalls begin to ow down the hillsides. The natural reality becomes a symbol that life may only be secured by events which also cause destruction. A spatial poetics is created in which the icon of the storm divinity provides the frame which explains urban events. The motif becomes a signature marker in prophetic books that the views presented by the narrative voice are to be taken seriously and should be explored as providing clues to the nature of urban existence. The purpose of the texts thus produced is to provide some ways of measuring and xing city identity. Among the characteristics of the city which this textual activity draws out are social pride, arrogant complacency, ignorance of deeper 107. Ibid., 398–99. The community yearns for the green pasture next to their boundary and dreams of including this good land inside their urban site. 1

8. Deathscapes and the City

189

spiritual values as vital to promotion of urban continuity. The prophetic voice shakes its head at humanity’s tendency to assume that it is in charge and the resulting erosion of social justice. Seen in this light the texts use the traumascape as an educational tool to critique human hubris. But that is not the only function which deathscapes carry out. The vivid portrayal of violent city-endings produces an empathetic pathos for the fragility of human beings, their small stature when set against the universe as a whole. This form of imaginative engagement touches on the fears of humanity that it will be extinguished and looks this concern in the face. The prophetic deathscape knows what happens to cities when they are besieged and brought down. It knows of the scenes of civilian death, of looting, the ravaging of both people and their environment. By developing a symbolic city space of death the texts offer the reader a space and a place in which to grieve for lost societies. As in life, so in text; or, as in text, so in life—the killing of citizens and ruining of sites are events which are not viewed as necessarily productive of total urban annihilation. The prophetic narrative wishes to assert the value of hopefulness as an aspect of city identity. Faced with grim scenes the reader may despair; readers should certainly lament but they are capable of passing through the extremes of grief to the return to a state of normal urban life. The spatial poetics of the deathscape thus attach another characteristic to the list of urban qualities—that of resilience. The embrace of a denitive end to one phase of a city’s existence allows for the start of a further phase. The city continues even though this may be with a different cast of urban actors. The images of warfare and defeat still provide grim reminders of what potentially awaits all urban communities, but this time round it is the ancestors who have paid the price, leaving a new leadership to write a fresh page in city history. They can endow their elite status with authority precisely because they are that fresh start, working with an empty space. The over-arching cultural function of these texts is that they remain the repository of a strong emotional charge. Whether the trauma is self-endured or that observed by non-participants scenes of battle remind all writers and readers of the nitude of human existence and of the impossibility of staving of mortality by building and dwelling in cities of refuge. Yet, at the same time, urban imaginaries are capable of managing wider human responses to the death of societies and their members.108

108. David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redenition of City Form in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 1

190

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The eternal themes of death, life, loss and redemption are thus played out in urban death scenes in the Minor Prophets. In the study of Jonah this was evidenced in the debate within the book as to whether a city can be a moral site: whether it can ever be pure or innocent, a proper object for compassionate care. In the chapter on Zechariah the theme of the hyper-real pushes the tension between death and redemption into the eld of virtual reality. Rational thought might suggest nality as the true urban prole, but imagination in excess of history leads the reader to a more hopeful view. The visionary space of a virtual temple-city provides continuity with a material past and opens up to belief that physical rebuilding will be possible. In this chapter the emphasis moved more centrally to the topics of death and considered how dedicated textual scenes of city as deathscape assist the progress to renewal.

1

Part 4

ANALYZING URBAN PROPHETIC IMAGINATION

192

Chapter 9

GEOGRAPHY AND VISION

Part 3 of this study ended with a chapter which dealt with the intimate link between the destruction and deaths of cities and the iconography of natural landscape, both positive and negative, in prophetic texts. This chapter draws on the aspects of nature-imaging which relate to the theme of creation as found in prophetic books, linking this imagery with Denis Cosgrove’s approach to the interplay between vision and geography.1 The chapter addresses the subject of visionary geography as manifested in prophetic use of the themes of land, growth, rain and dryness to convey messages about the protability of urban life under the rule of a benecent deity, a creator-God. In carrying out this task the chapter provides a wider analysis of the role of landscaped urban iconography than that which emerges from the sub-theme of deathscape. The focus on the use of rural landscapes in prophetic texts initiates the analysis of urban prophetic imagination as a whole. It provides a means of considering the role of geographical actions such as the mapping of material reality when these are set alongside the theme of insight, of imagination and thus of inner visionary enlightenment. It assumes that it is possible to move easily from physical knowledge to a more abstract level of understanding in which spirituality is proled. Working with Cosgrove’s approach it is possible to align exploration of the domain of human social engagement with a cosmic perspective, embracing both an earthly and a celestial angle. Hence the particular spatial focus of this chapter is visionary space, a concept which aligns cosmic, world and local space, where geography is connected with cosmology and cosmography. The geographic vision thus constituted extends the scope of an atlas to include the celestial bodies which surround the earth’s globe, suggesting that there is an interaction between cosmos and human society. At the human end visionary geography is based on the twin pillars of landscape 1. The previous chapter already engaged with the work of Denis Cosgrove and identied him as a specialist in the area of imaginary landscape.

194

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

and vision; it engages the human capacity for sight on both a surface and a deeper level, where sight becomes perception providing the source for mental evaluation of what has been seen. In this chapter Cosgrove’s approach to the topics of order, garden, Arcadia, wilderness and utopia will be addressed as eshing out the interaction between spatial vision and spiritual reality. Viewed from a cosmographical angle the city provides a place from which the visionary landscaper looks outwards to the ends of the universe to search for the meaning of human activity. In biblical prophetic literature it is the role of the prophet to engage in such activity and so it is that the prophetic voice points out the connections between an urban community and the over-arching intentions of a cosmic deity. In order to convey his message a prophet draws upon the vocabulary of nature using this metaphorically as a spatial resource for a temporal message. Since visionary geography requires the use of imagination it draws upon the affective aspects of human response to the world around, feeding into the eld of psycho-geography. In order to develop this subject the chapter will examine passages from the text of Isa 40–65.2 In this material the prophet takes a cosmic view of the possible renewal of Jerusalem, speaking for the deity in defence against those who would argue that God has forgotten his people and abandoned them to subjugation under foreign rule. Chapters 40–65 typically deal more with the hope of renewal for Jerusalem than they do with destruction; chs. 40–49 especially make considerable use of the language of nature to esh out a message of redemption for Jerusalem and its populace. The imagery takes account of wet/dry states as symbolic of life and death, of sterility and fertility within the natural landscape.3 This use of language can be set alongside the theme of the pastoral idyll, a topic which may be viewed as utopian, using human desire for peace and prosperity to deliver a message which is both religious and political. The idyll genre involves visionary imagination of a benign landscape supportive of human behaviour and benetting inhabitants. It appears to be future-orientated but in fact its woodlands and elds, 2. There is considerable debate concerning the unitary or otherwise nature of the book of Isaiah. This chapter does not intend to give comments about that debate but is happy to work with a concept of a second and third stage of editing of Isaianic material. See, for instance, the summary of the history of interpretation on this issue in Childs, Isaiah, 1–5. Childs cites the disappearance of the person of the prophet after ch. 39 as relevant to the debate (8). 3. Behind this language lies the concept of the creative process as separation between waters and dry land, as in Gen 1. 1

9. Geography and Vision

195

brooks and streams draw on lived experience of spring/early summer growth and its promise of harvest to come. Utopian landscapes work via a yearning for that which is past but which is desired as an ideal state; the echo of past good times is a “ghostly presence” in the development of an idyllic landscape. Steve Pile’s work, reviewed in Chapter 1, surveys the urban ghosts as a mode of city-work in which healing takes place for the urban psyche. For Isaiah, looking back to past divine support encourages the application of a collective memory of better days in the city to a fresh social context. Setting the Scene In his article on “Geography’s Cosmos” Cosgrove addresses the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, for whom “cosmos” was a key concept involving the urge “to reach toward the heavens and grasp order/meaning beyond the contingencies and failings of a mundane life.”4 Cosgrove makes a verbal link between this need to reach beyond the everyday and the linked words “image” and “imagination.” This leads him to cosmography, which he suggests “was conventionally the imaginative and poetic expression of a home in the created world,” aligned with dreaming reverie.5 Hence mapping is a cosmic act and the spatial sign can link human concerns with cosmic space, as happens in Isa 40 where the prophet uses the image of a supreme creative Being, presiding over the created world, to support the argument for urban restoration. Cosgrove cites Macrobius on dreams, noting that in Renaissance Europe his category of somnium became a literary form used for the expression of cosmographic themes.6 Somnium denotes an enigmatic dream—reecting the mysteries of cosmic spatiality and hence making cosmography a eld of study marked by ambiguity of meaning. Nonetheless, the presence of transcendence can be found within the universe which itself operates as a kind of “temple”; “the vision of the heavens prompts the soul to self-motion and harmony with the cosmos.”7 In this context the act of mapping can be viewed as a dream-like activity involving the visionary gaze of the poet—an approach which resonates with the views of Steve Pile, dealt with in Chapter 1 of this book, that city-identity is produced by phantasmagorias.8 4. Denis Cosgrove, “Geography’s Cosmos—the Dream and the Whole Round Earth,” in Adams, Hoelscher, and Till, eds., Textures of Place, 326. 5. Ibid., 328. 6. Ibid., 333. 7. Ibid., 339. 8. Pile, Real Cities, Chapter 1. 1

196

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The links between vision and landscape highlight the signicance of the concept of landscape iconography within visionary geography. Cosgrove builds on Robert Sack’s view that “place” is an ordering tool for human beings, dening place further from the humanistic angle of a human person in dialogue with the heavens.9 In Isaiah, as in all prophetic biblical material, the central human person dialoguing with the heavens is the prophet himself. His role is to channel the meaning which he derives from gazing at the heavens to his community, which in chs. 40– 65 is a message about the certainty of renewal of the urban site of Jerusalem. The prophet acts as an instrumental agent with regard to city space in that his vision of what the city is and can be provides the content for a range of urban imaginaries. Sack states that “as geographical agents we create places not only that can help or hinder our awareness of the world but can also expand/ contract its variety and complexity.”10 In Isa 40–65 the prophetic voice dwells on the gap between urban anxiety and a protable urban future. The ambiguity to be resolved is that of the nature of the divine persona since it seems unlikely that a patron deity can also be an aggressor. Prophetic transgression of the border between death and life offers readers an opportunity to expand knowledge both of the complexity of divine nature and of the variety of urban fortunes which Jerusalem can experience. In order to share his vision of the universe and the city the prophet leads readers through the desert to watch trees grow and ower, to view “on the ground” the impact of divine cosmic order.11 Nature as an Interpretive Tool in Isaiah 40–65 The narrative structure of chs. 40–65 puts imagery drawn from nature in dialogue with the prole of the city, thus creating an urban imaginary which conveys the message that the city is a site of life expectancy by linking it with the natural world. There is a three part structure at work overall in chs. 40–65 which exemplies this pattern. Chapters 40:1– 49:13 have a predominance of nature imagery—wilderness, grass, owers, mountains and valleys, waters, grasshoppers, chaff, rivers, pools, sea and sand, scorching wind.12 Balanced against this, Isa 52–56 is concerned 9. Robert Sack, “Place, Power and the Good,” in Adams, Hoelscher, and Till, eds., Textures of Place, 232. 10. Ibid., 238–39. 11. As in 41:17–20. The motif occurs frequently within these chapters of Isaiah. 12. See Norman Whybray, Isaiah 40–66 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 30– 31, where he discusses the overall theology of Second Isaiah, noting a re-use of 1

9. Geography and Vision

197

with Zion and Jerusalem, using imagery of pinnacles, gates, House, altar.13 The book returns in ch. 65 to the image of fruitful vines, alongside built houses in vv. 21–25.14 It can be argued that the centre of interest in this sequence of chapters is the city, but that the value of urban existence can best be measured by an imaginative use of rural iconography. This paradigm is set in place in ch. 40. The prophetic geographer focuses his map on Jerusalem and its neighbourhoods, yet these are set in dialogue with high mountains and with the wilderness. It is by creating a level highway through the hills and across the desert for the exiles to return from Babylon that the city will once again be a place of life and glory. This means that the prophetic map includes also the place of the deity, a transcendent space outside creation which signies divine capacity for order and control, a topic stressed by the iconography of the Lord looking down on the world and seeing all the inhabitants like small insects hopping about.15 The initial message of urban hope is linked, in this chapter, with the original creative work of the deity in setting up the map of the heavens, in vv. 25–26.16 The chapter ends with an appeal to the symbolic signicance of the eagle as a bird of great power and endurance and suggests that the wealth of divine energy can be deduced from the ability of the bird so divinely created. But this energy is devoted to the aid of weak and weary citizens who despair of seeing their city rebuilt. Control of natural order merges into the raising up and pulling down of governments, of the deity’s control over rival city-states. Thus, in 41:8–10 Israel is depicted as the servant nation chosen by God, one who will be constituted by “descendants of Abraham” from across the whole Exodus motifs as a paradigm for the literal return of the exiles through desert conditions. He notes the use of creation theology also and suggests that the author has deliberately enhanced the element of wonder in these theological traditions in order to endorse the message of comfort. 13. John McKenzie, Second Isaiah (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 113–14, describes this material as part of a section which stretches from chs. 49–55 and which he labels “Zion Songs.” The material addresses the city directly as “Zion,” the site which the deity has chosen and which he still upholds and plans to restore. 14. Ibid., 199–201, suggests that the chapter falls into two parts. The use of vine imagery in the rst part links back to its use in First Isaiah. The second unit in vv. 17–25 turns to an apocalyptic style of presentation. 15. Ibid., 23–24, notes that this is part of Isaianic use of creation imagery to magnify the power of the deity, reducing all nations to nothing, with zero signicance. 16. Childs, Isaiah, 310. The heavenly bodies move in complete dependency on God. 1

198

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

earth.17 The servant’s role is then depicted in harvest terms, as the tool which threshes the grain reducing the stalks to chaff: a symbol of the insignicance of human power as seen from cosmic space. This agricultural motif opens out in v. 18 to a wider imagery of rivers and springs which ow out into thirsty land, enabling the growth of many trees in soil which was previously barren.18 The deity provides water also for the humans who thirst: in this case the humans who thirst for a secure future for their city. Just as divine power brings prosperity so it also controls the fate of nations, reinforcing in v. 27 the message of hope offered in ch. 40. Geography and Vision This union of politics and nature, the use of landscape as a spatial tool for communication of visionary understanding, can be explored further in the light of Cosgrove’s approach to geography and vision. For Cosgrove the term vision “incorporates an oracular act of registering the external world and a more abstract, imaginative sense of projecting images.”19 Hence vision “incorporates imagination—the ability to create images in the mind’s eye which exceed images registered in the retina.”20 For example, Ps 19 combines a vision of the cosmic glory of God with the order created within geographic space.21 Cosmography deals with the whole system of a geocentric universe, from the large-scale pattern to the chorography of particular places.22 Landscape and map are close relations, both being pictorial terms, but landscape can be viewed as symbolic of aesthetic unity.23

17. The theme of the servant has been the subject of vast scholarly debates. At times it appears to refer to the nation, as here, then to Cyrus, and nally to an anonymous sufferer. See McKenzie, Isaiah, xxxviii–lv. Childs, Isaiah, 319, thinks this passage deals with Israel as servant in the theme of victory. 18. Whybray, Isaiah, 66–67, points out that scholarship has suggested that this is a form of Salvation Promise, a style developed from earlier prophecy. The reference to the owering of the desert is to be taken literally as referring to material support for the exiles on their return passage to Judah. 19. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 5. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Ibid., 15. 22. Ibid., 17. 23. Ibid., 1. 1

9. Geography and Vision

199

The geographer passes from physical world to symbolic representation of that world, giving to material reality a range of meaning of a more abstract quality. For Cosgrove, the aim is always to pass into that interior, abstract arena and to value, while evaluating, the poetic, imaginative constructions of the world around which it is built. Hence the methodology involved is graphic and narrative at the same time. It is as if the icons of the map act as “characters” in a story and where they are placed helps to dene their contribution to the whole. Visionary geography is “simultaneously material and imaginative,” thus the act of reading landscapes to perceive their inner meaning is part of “the examined life.”24 The reader of Isa 40–65 is directed to a landscape which has at its centre an urban setting in a city community which is disgruntled and which engages in lament. In ch. 40 the movement of the plot begins in that space but directs the unhappy resident to look outwards to the desert in order to gain hope. The prophet takes up the task of the watchman whose vision is in excess of the gaze of his fellow citizens. He examines a wider landscape in order to examine the future of life in Jerusalem. His own gaze does not stop in the desert but travels ever outwards until it engages transcendent space. His imagined landscape places the city in direct contact with the cosmos and hence with powers beyond those of ordinary urban inhabitants. The prophetic vision places the reader alongside the deity, sharing the divine landscape of the earth as seen from above and beyond. The prophetic role is like that of a mental traveller setting out mental maps which serve to reveal city-spaces meaning when approached from a long-term perspective. This vantage point puts into a new perspective the troubles of the city since all human beings are equally minute points on the divine map. This examination of the urban condition promotes not despair but hope since no part of humanity has a claim to supremacy per se: everything turns on cosmic space. But cosmic space has a direct line of sight into Jerusalem below and knows the needs of that city. This narrative structure produces a landscape which encourages attention to the fact that the whole meaning of the city is not summed up in the urban site but includes the created world of nature and the eternal life of the universe.25 It is this imaginary landscape which promotes optimism in the citizen who reads it carefully.

24. Ibid., 15. 25. The signicance of creation imagery in this section of the book of Isaiah has been noted above. 1

200

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Cosgrove and Ruskin For Cosgrove, a particular example of the linkage between material reality and visionary landscape is found in the work of John Ruskin, who thought that the task of the artist is “to reveal graphically the form and order visible through all creation.”26 These basic principles of form and order govern geometric measurement and are thus manifested in architecture.27 Ruskin’s architectural vision interweaves world, architecture and human beings, ensuring that “humans are the connecting centre of the cosmic map.”28 Cosgrove suggests that Ruskin’s view tends to promote the existence of architecture which is essentially good or bad as a mirror of the health of the society from which the builders emanated.29 Two gazes meet, a human view looking out from the earth and the divine gaze down from the heavens. The rst is embedded inside the cosmos and the other operates from outside it. At the junction of these perspectives is an “architectural cosmos” which functions as a theatre in which transcendence is enacted via physical spatial acts.30 Ruskin himself expresses this idea in The Stones of Venice. Good architecture produces buildings which carry out the purpose for which they were built, but also results in that which is aesthetically pleasing. The rst quality leads the beholder to surface value and the second takes the viewer beyond the mere material to abstract values of good behaviour and noble ideals.31 The monument and the temple need to perform their functions robustly so that “a reader who passes along a street may be able at a glance to distinguish noble from ignoble work.”32 Proper architecture shows us “the right thing,” a quality Ruskin denes as a capacity to delight the viewer and so lead to a consideration of the transcendence present within this world.33 Buildings have a utilitarian purpose but also have a moral duty to lead human beings to a truer understanding of the divine. By fullling its intended function each sub-part of a building edies the beholder. Thus the true nature of an arch is as a Line of Resistance; if it can be clearly 26. Ibid., 26. 27. Ibid., 37. 28. Ibid., 39. 29. Ibid., 28. 30. Ibid., 39. 31. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (ed. and abridged J. Links; London: Pallas Editions, 2001), 17. 32. Ibid., 19. 33. Ibid., 24. 1

9. Geography and Vision

201

seen to be meeting this task the arch teaches human beings a sense of the true line of moral conduct.34 In a similar manner textual units have a material function as literary building blocks, yet can be said to provide the reader also with aspects of moral guidance. If literary language carries out its task properly the content of that guidance will be revealed. It is possible to examine the narrative structure of Isa 42, for example, from this perspective. Ruskin states that the true nature of the arch is to create a line of resistance which leads the viewer to reect on the theme of resistance. Resistance is also a theme of the prophetic chapter: the resistance of hope against despair, prophetic resistance in proclaiming salvation in the face of experienced disaster. The text constructs its line of resistance around the gure of the servant, who symbolizes divine justice in vv. 1–4. The servant icon reveals the power of transcendence inside urban affairs since vv. 5–7 reveal the deity as the true provider of justice, through the agency of the servant.35 “Justice to the nations” in v. 1 is balanced by “light to the gentiles” in v. 6. “Here is my servant” in v. 1 is aligned with “I am the Lord…new things I declare” in vv. 8–9. In this rst phase the servant gure is a model of goodness, a resource which the deity can use to re-direct readers’ gaze from recent destruction to the long-term creativity of divine intention. The proper response to reaching this understanding is then enacted in vv. 10–12, in a hymn of praise to such a God.36 Joy and praise are the virtuous activities which resistance to doubt reveals. In modelling this understanding the passage conveys what Isaiah thinks is a proper concept of God as the ordering force in the history of Israel.37 But the message is not for the in-house reader only; its fuller role is to bring understanding to the outsider. In order to full its task the text establishes symbolic sites. The foremost of these is transcendent space itself, caught in the act of creating the universe and bringing human beings to life in v. 5. The second is the image of the deity taking the hand of the people and ordering them to bring sight and freedom to other societies in v. 6. If the rst phase of the chapter is to inform the reader as to the goodness of hope, the second phase models the opposite—the badness which is to be avoided. Once again the message draws upon the icon of the servant. Verse 7 indicated that the servant is an agent of opening up 34. Ibid., 52. 35. Cf. Childs, Isaiah, 326. 36. Whybray, Isaiah, 76–78, notes the similarity between this unit and the call to sing a new song, found in Psalms, heightened here by the emphatic separation of former things from the new ones. See also Childs, Isaiah, 327. 37. McKenzie, Isaiah, 74. 1

202

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

situations that are closed, imaged as blindness and imprisonment. Yet, with dramatic irony, it is the servant who is blind and deaf in vv. 18–19. The challenge is the lack of seeing transcendent power at work on the people’s side. This produces a resistance to hope in a mindset which dwells on the weak state of the people, plundered and enslaved in v. 22. In v. 17 there is a preference for worship of other gods as part of this scenario. This textual depiction of lack of trust critiques human resistance to a hopeful imagination as wilful ignorance in vv. 23–24. The textual architecture of ch. 42 thus educates the reader both with regard to divine intention and to the appropriate moral virtues of hope and trust in the divine person so depicted. The core of this portrait of transcendence is to be found in the image of divine creativity as indicated in v. 5—balanced by the mapping of created places in vv. 10–11. A systematic arrangement of symbols in relation to one another not only provides a unied whole but at the same time models moral values to the beholder. In the biblical text there is the construction of an imagined landscape, built up by the use of the mapping symbols of deity, servant, Israel, nations, heaven and earth. Ruskin states that, as one of the modes of architecture, the tower must stand four-square on its base and rise up directly to a pinnacle at the top; it should not have any elements such as buttresses attached to its side. This is because the tower is “in its origin a building for strength of defence” and what this signies is the “faithfulness of watch.”38 A noble tower must visibly exude strength in its own material shape and hence indicate to viewers the value of that quality within human society. His approach to the correct nature of tower architecture creates the symbolism of the “tower of strength.” It is possible to apply this symbolic concept to the characterization of the servant gure in Isa 40–65.39 In ch. 49 the servant is certainly characterized as a gure of strength.40 This point is conveyed by the use of military symbolism: he is a sharpened sword and a polished arrow in v. 2.41 But he is also depicted as having lofty stature in v. 7. As he was once a servant despised by his masters, so he will now be the master to whom rulers will give homage.42 38. Ibid., 77. 39. See n. 17, above. Also Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought, 114, 118–23, likens biblical tower imagery to the Mesopotamian ziggurat. 40. See Childs, Isaiah, 386, on the complex structures of this passage. 41. See McKenzie, Isaiah, 104–6. He notes the parallel between the description here of the servant as a sword and as called from the womb, and Jer 1, where the prophetic vocation is set out. 42. Ibid., 108. The “contemptible one” here is Israel. Foreign kings will acknowledge this nation’s rights. 1

9. Geography and Vision

203

This kind of loftiness is that of an authoritative political leader and it is international in scope, a ruler who is earth’s sovereign. A further type of loftiness is indicated in the servant’s task of being a light to the nations in v. 6. This is the image of a beacon set on a high point to provide the light of sure guidance which will bring all who follow it to a safe place. But it is because of indwelling divine energy that the servant becomes a tower of strength, as demonstrated in v. 3. The tower-like qualities of the servant embody the virtues of strength and enlightenment; thus characterized the servant icon provides a site to be gazed on in the search for divine meaning, one which performs loyal witness to the supreme God.43 The Garden Cosgrove turns from the visionary role of architecture to that of the natural world. It might be thought that gardens are neutral places, innocent of political intent, but this is not so. Gardens are not lacking a political and social message.44 A cosmic perspective links gardens with both wilderness and the rational spaces of the city.45 Outside the city there is no civilization, represented by the idea of no cultivation. Gardens, viewed as domesticated farmland, provide a humanized space between chaos and culture. As a gardener struggles with the paradox of wild/ cultivated in the boundaried space of the garden, that site becomes the place of struggle, with the subjection of the out of control aspects of the world to the ordered planting of the garden site.46 George McKay’s book on Radical Gardening picks up this function of gardens by exploring the meaning of the word “plot.” This term covers both segments of land and a plan of campaign.47 Gardens, he states, “are not an escape from social cares but places of engagement.”48 Hence we are to reect on the links between “propagate” and “propaganda.” Gardens interweave land, history and politics, hopefully encouraging a positive humanizing inuence on human beings.49 McKay notes the manner in which the physical planting systems of a garden both reect and create political and social identities.50 43. See Childs, Isaiah, 327–407, passim. 44. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 52. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 55. 47. George McKay, Radical Gardening: Politics and Rebellion in the Garden (London: Frances Lincoln, 2011), 6. 48. Ibid., 7. 49. Ibid., 9. 50. See Childs, Isaiah, 437–38. 1

204

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

In Isa 40–65 the prophet addresses the imagery of sites of fertility as a central feature of the cosmic power to transform the socio-political landscape. Isaiah’s “garden,” therefore is one in which growth is paramount and this quality is linked with divine causality. The link is clear in 55:10–12, for instance, which makes use of the imagery of watering soil to make it grow.51 The narrative movement is that of descent /ascent which at the surface level is what gardeners experience since rain and snow fall down from the sky. But in this instance there is a symbolic aspect to descent since it is by divine command that the rain falls onto the ground. It is the divine word of command that is the ultimate cause of growth; divine speech utterance is an event which is causative in itself, even if the fundamental nature of causality as a feature of cosmic space is visible only in the effectiveness of the upwards growth of plants to their mature shape in which their fruits can be harvested to serve human needs. By this narrative structure the chapter emphasizes the centrality of divine command as the ultimate expression of causality. This could simply be an assertion of the seasonal cycle, but it is set out in ch. 55 as evidence for a more political message. Verse 3 calls on people to make a covenant contract with the deity under the sign of the ruler from Israelite tradition, David. This form of Davidic covenant, however, is not for the home nation as much as for other social groups in v. 5.52 Divine causality in the natural world is used to serve a political message. The blessings described here as the fruits of divine labour are carried out to reveal the deity to foreign nations so that they too may come to own the rule of the Lord. In this context the cosmic means of constructing a fertile landscape teaches the reader about divine causality in the world of human affairs; the imagery is not simply a poetic ourish but serves the serious purpose of proving that there is more potential for revival in local urban government than might be supposed. The development of the text makes this plain by aligning certainty of natural process with the re-shaping of national and international affairs. The city community of David has more potential than it realizes since it can become a witness to the peoples in v. 4, one who will function as ruler over them.53 The socio-political implications of gardening and planting imagery are to be found also in ch. 53. In this passage the gure of the servant is described via plant images. The image of a young shoot before it matures and of a plant which has not had enough water in its development is used 51. Whybray, Isaiah, 194. The rain and snow are another example of creation imagery here, demonstrating the reliability of the prophetic word. 52. See Childs, Isaiah, 435–36, on difculty of this use of Davidic covenant. 53. Whybray, Isaiah, 191–92. The Davidic covenant is referred to but not as leading to a ruler for Judah; the motif is shifted to rule over the nations. 1

9. Geography and Vision

205

to depict a human gure which lacks strength.54 The plant-servant is of no account, unlikely to be any use for humans, yet it is just such a useless plant which is to be the source of support. It is in that weak state that the servant is capable of acting as scapegoat, taking responsibility for the weakness of others upon himself. The plant image is pushed further in v. 3; such a stunted plant looks ugly and is likely to be discarded as it clearly lacks divine blessing. Even so, human observers rejected the servant as if his weakness was a sign of curse. In this agricultural imagery the text constructs a vivid picture of false vision and reverses normal expectations of where political and social strength and promise are to be found. Verses 10–12 reveal the true signicance of weakness and its potentiality for blessing and longevity and make a link with the message of 52:13–15, in which foreign societies are amazed by this power reversal.55 McKay notes that the location of the garden is an aspect of its identity. Where it is placed denes its duty and indicates what and how it should grow. He refers to the London Street Farmers of the 1970s whose work involved ploughing up urban streets and planting fruit trees and vegetables there.56 The wider intention of such acts was to provide a countercultural, radical comment on urban life and to lead viewers to take account of environmental challenges.57 The street farmers viewed the urban environment symbolically as desert—an arid zone incapable of supporting settled human occupation. In Isa 40–65 the urban community is placed into alignment with the desert on a number of occasions. In 44:1–4, for example, Israel is told not to be afraid because divine aid is at hand. The imagery which symbolizes that fact depicts dry land transformed into fertile growth. The people are like an arid zone which lacks the capacity for growth; they are thirsty for support after urban collapse, in v. 3. The water the land needs is parallel with the breath/spirit needed to bring life back to the human society.58 The return of social energy is reinforced by v. 4, which depicts 54. Ibid., 173. The use of tree and plant growth imagery is widespread in ancient Near Eastern symbolism, including its usage in the book of Psalms. 55. Ibid., 170–71. Whybray considers that the same person is the subject of the last section of ch. 52 and of the following chapter. Verse 15 would refer to the sudden transformation brought about by the exiles’ return if the subject is historical events. If the servant gure is allegorical, which ts ch. 53, then it is less certain what particular event would lie behind the text. 56. McKay, Radical Gardening, 122. 57. Ibid., 122. 58. Ibid., 95. Luxurious growth was a common symbol for prosperity. See Childs, Isaiah, 342. 1

206

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

a grassy meadow and tall trees growing by a river. Continuity for urban existence is guaranteed through the textual transfer of divine energy evidenced in the sudden spurt of growth in nature once water becomes available. This nature imagery can be read alongside 44:26–28, where the message for Jerusalem is that it will have inhabitants just as its ruins will be rebuilt.59 Here the symbol of water is not that of a precious divine gift but of a chaos which must be controlled so that life can prosper and the temple be rebuilt.60 Both usages have the function of establishing divine order in the city as in nature. The city as a dead place will be replenished by the divine planter who will make new inhabitants appear and will prevent any attempts to thwart the renewal. The assertion of the growth potential of arid soil provides imagery of hope as against despair; such imagery can be read as a narrative device to promote resistance to arguments which suggest there is no future for the nation and its home site. Both McKay and Ruskin argue that it is through eshing out social resistance that material artefacts witness to abstract values hidden within the universe and necessary for society to ourish. Steve Pile picks up this topic in his introduction to the book Geographies of Resistance, where he argues that “resistance seeks to occupy, deploy and create alternative spatialities from those dened through oppression.”61 The imagery of Isa 40:6–8 can be read from this viewpoint. The passage is an example of resistance to a loss of belief in self-identity on the part of an urban society. In this message it is not the abundance of natural growth which is the tool of communication but the fact that plant life is transient. The key concepts are withering and fall: grass withers and owers lose their petals. The imagery is repeated to structure these verses, beginning with the beauty of the living plants and owers and then moving into their deaths, which divine force carries out. The concept of breath includes also that of wind, so it is possible to see here a reference to the seasonal cycle of nature. It is the end stage of that cycle which is signicant since it provides a suitable contrast to the eternal life of God and hence the never-ending power of divine command. Verse 8 asserts that the “word of God” remains effective. Paradoxically, it is the destiny of all living 59. McKay, Radical Gardening, 103–4. The passage moves from the role of God in creation to his control over history. Childs, Isaiah, 352–53. 60. The prophetic writer frequently engages with images from the Exodus narrative to esh out his use of creation tradition and to extend the mythological aspects therein to an historical, material frame. This usage is commonly noted by commentators such as Whybray, McKenzie and Brevard Childs. 61. Pile and Keith, eds., Geographies of Resistance, 3. 1

9. Geography and Vision

207

beings to die which is life-giving since it provides a point of resistance through its twinned concept of divine creative force.62 The movement of the text can be read through Pile’s view that resistance may also “involve a sense of remembering and of dreaming of something better.”63 Isaiah 56:1–8 also appears to involve a dreaming of something better, offering a socio-political agenda which situates the more general nature language of ch. 40.64 This is urban renewal which is not simply a repeat of the past. However, the passage draws its mental map from the traditional iconography of cosmic space. Verse 7 speaks of the dual role of the sign of the mountain.65 As “my holy mountain” this is the site of divine habitation outside of human society, as “house of prayer” it is located at the heart of urban life and is thus a source for joy in the urban community. In this verse the mountain’s natural identity as a high place which towers above the earth and, a peak which reaches into the clouds, provides a unifying symbol for the organization of civic life. If the deity is prepared to accept into cosmic space anyone who follows the basic regulatory praxis set out in 56:1–2, then how can the city community deny access to social space on the grounds of difference? If God relates well with all genuine worshippers in his House, then why should the foreigner say he does not belong or the eunuch worry that his bodily shape prevents him from being a normal citizen? Arcadia Cosgrove moves from the garden in general to the particular context of Arcadia, a state dened by a sense of ownership which is incomplete. “Arcadia’s geography is of yearning more than nding,” he says.66 The concept he outlines addresses the abiding issue of humanity’s use of past experience as a measurement of the human condition since it provides stability and certainty. We know that crops have grown well and that the seasons have performed their cycle adequately, and this dynamic of what “has been” offers a link into a timeless present where we know what is going on: Arcadia is thus “the abode of troubling ghosts”67 and wishful 62. Whybray, Isaiah, 51. The imagery is drawn from the sudden withering of spring owers in the regional climate. 63. Pile, Geographies of Resistance, 30. 64. Chapters 56–65 often appear to be acting as a commentary on chs. 40–55, using the material to address postexilic interests. 65. Childs, Isaiah, 458. Childs suggests there is an intertext here with Isa 2:1–5. 66. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 70. 67. Ibid., 71. 1

208

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

dreaming leads into the trope of an “idyllic spring landscape which is timeless, with caves and shelters.”68 Human activity can easily be carried on among Arcadia’s sylvan glades since here time is at a standstill and the spatial context unchanging. The imagery of the pastoral idyll provides a respite from normal human society, which is often experienced as volatile and unsettling. The language of Isa 65:17–25 can be interpreted as functioning to provide such a timeless promise of hope.69 The passage sets out from the spatial site of the symbolic mountain. Verses 9–10 have already established that the mountains of God can be read as a safe site which offers good pasture and rest for herds. This imaging provides an Arcadian scene of animals peacefully grazing, a motif which carries through into the easy life which will be enjoyed by the animal-tenders since they do not have to nd food for their animals nor protect them from predation. So far the imagery has echoed the natural world in its depiction of ease of rural living. In v. 20, the image of Arcadia is then employed to examine the nature of city life and whether it, too, is productive of ease of existence in a timeless location. The textual references to the longevity of urban lifespan make the link with rural benecence: the city is capable of being an Arcadia.70 Unlike the real world none of the work carried out by the community will be a wasted effort, in vv. 22–23. The imagery provides all that an urban society could hope for and transfers the reader to a make-believe world where human yearning for peace and prosperity is always fullled. But v. 25, which closes the sequence of the pastoral idyll, moves the portrait of Arcadia to a new level.71 The location of the holy mountain is in a world truly beyond temporal reality. The theme of the unity of all living creatures stretches the image of idealized farming to alignment with the portrait of paradise in Gen 2–3, which is understood to represent a time and space before and outside of history. This is still an idealized picture, however, since the serpent is kept from being a source of disruption which could threaten the idyllic peace. The scene picks up also the use of the theme of a sacred enclosure in Isa 11, offering a second version of a spatiality which can be described as apocalyptic in style. This second telling of the theme hints at the possibility of trouble even in a

68. Ibid., 74. 69. Whybray, Isaiah, 275, notes that this passage is dominated by the setting-out of a turn to new things. See also Childs, Isaiah, 536–38. 70. Ibid., 277. Longevity of this kind shows unusually strong blessing. 71. Ibid., 278. This passage is a condensed version of Isa 11:6–9. 1

9. Geography and Vision

209

world which has an intimate connection with divine habitation; in its reference to the serpent there is the implication that this creature has to be kept under control, pressed down onto the soil. Cosgrove also notes that although Arcadia is the abode of Venus, it is also the place of Mars. Nature is never quite tamed.72 There is an incompletion about the Arcadian harmony: it is a favoured spot but outside tensions creep in. Read continuously Isa 65:17–25 indicates that the positive arcadian mood should be contextualized by more negative material which engages with imagery of anger and vengeance. If Arcadia is a favoured spot, its point of access is a narrow one. Only those who meet the divine test of loyalty can enjoy its benets. More humans might like to be in the arcadian space, but they will be excluded. It is the deity who plays the part of Mars in this chapter, as the movement of the narrative demonstrates. The prophet stresses the anger of the deity concerning the behaviour of those who should be loyal to him but who go their own ways, and in vv. 6–7 the Lord vows to repay to the full evil with evil. Verses 13–15 provide a table of comparisons.73 The deity will provide a feast of good food and drink but will exclude all those whom he regards as undeserving. They will feel anguish and mourning while the others sing and rejoice. The protected space of the pastoral scene is bounded with dark spaces where there is still weeping and mourning. Wilderness Arcadian space provides a boundary marker for visionary geography which is balanced by its opposite, the space of wilderness. Whereas Arcadia is an icon of all that is pleasurable for human existence, the wilderness is a metaphor for human life as dry and barren. Applied to city space the wilderness theme embodies the negative aspects of urban existence. Cosgrove notes that the garden–city movement as led by Ebenezer Howard set out to challenge the aridity of industrial cities by bringing garden space into the centre of the urban site, planning for a central park from which the commercial and residential life of the city would radiate out. McKay turns rather to the radical example of street farming, the transformation of small urban spaces of dereliction to places of natural growth. Both Street Farming and Garden City models of action offered, in their day, a radical challenge to what were seen as current 72. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 78. 73. Whybray, Isaiah, 273–74. The fates of two opposing groups as set out in the passage are now brought together in a parallel structure determined by blessing and judgment. 1

210

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

negative aspects of urban existence. The city is to become a green-site because its current symbolic identity is as a wasteland. Guerrilla gardeners take up this viewpoint by focusing on waste or empty marginal spaces in the city.74 For McKay their role is as a “small political gesture of aesthetic expression and environmental transformation” with the overnight transformation of a neglected patch or the random scattering of seeds.75 In this situation the aim of human endeavour is to provide a symbolic comment on the city as a sterile environment, suggesting that it is a wilderness in more than the direct sense. Cosgrove describes the wilderness as that which lies outside the oikoumene, located at the edge of urban space and so of a “humanized” landscape.76 It faces two ways: into the civilized world of the city and out into the chaos of the pre-urban.77 Yet it is always controlled by its opposite, the city. Wild areas are geo-graphed, “mapped and controlled via the abstract geometry of the city.”78 They are potential spaces, a “context for human development.”79 Isaiah 40–49 can be read as promoting the city of Jerusalem’s capacity as a site of human nurture through engagement with the opposite, using the language of the desert. The city is symbolically a wilderness and an actual ruin, but it can be transformed—just as the desert becomes a living space for plants. There is, for instance, a regular usage of desert imagery as the framing context for the development of the new city of Jerusalem, whose life turns on the ingathering of exiles and supporters from many directions.80 In ch. 40 the possibility of urban transformation is indicated by the re-shaping of the natural world that will make the desert into a smooth highway. The route so created is a way of the Lord, an act of God which provides an ordered space through which the “ock” of people can return safely to the city. As Cosgrove suggests, the wilderness theme provides an image of space which is informed by urban imagination but situated beyond the bounds of the ordered site of the city. In ch. 41 the wilderness serves as an indicator of urban transformation in that it is dry land which can be irrigated. The symbolic desert of the vv. 17–20 serves as witness both to urban need and to divine fullment 74. McKay, Radical Gardening, 183. 75. Ibid., 184. 76. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 106–8. 77. Ibid., 108. 78. Ibid., 110. 79. Ibid., 117. 80. See Childs, Isaiah, 335. The theme of in-gathering becomes a favourite topic for Third Isaiah. 1

9. Geography and Vision

211

of urban desire. The urgency of need for water is balanced in v. 20 by the comment that now people will know that their fate is in the good hands of the deity. This change of view is achieved by the sign of rivers of water owing on mountain peaks, which are described as barren sites in v. 18, and the parallel image of desert land, once watered, producing many different trees in v. 19. The tree fed by living water re-shapes the urban wilderness into a scene which more nearly resembles that of Arcadia. In these textual passages the use of wilderness as a symbol for a social and spiritual aridity in urban life extends the reader’s gaze beyond the immediate borders of city space to nd a solution outside the realities of current city life. The future of the city lies with the creation of a wider community which can be achieved with the in-gathering of the exiles. In this symbolic world the wilderness functions as the intervening location between a place of exile and the home site of the city. As a barren site it poses a threat to those who try to live there or to travel through it. But it is also the geographical location of visionary landscape in that it permits exiles to return to their “home” and to repopulate the city. The text suggests that the real threat of urban sterility is negated by divine creation of a safe space in the wilderness, which becomes a connector-route for external re-development of Jerusalem. Hence Arcadia and Wilderness provide spatial locations with a visionary reach. Their use in the imaginative geography of the book of Isaiah is the revelation of the possibility that Jerusalem will live again; as such, they are tools for the common goal of establishing the foundational status of the city as a good site for human beings. The two motifs converge in the site of utopian vision. The prophetic narrative moves the reader to an understanding of the elision of past and future through a series of journeyings through the cosmic and regional map, stopping now on the heights and now in the empty space of the desert. Narrating Utopia McKay comments that running a community garden involves taking responsibility for the totality of the urban situation, for instance by clearing trash from the site and making the gardening community’s presence felt in that site.81 The community so-formed is inclusive of all those who wish to take part in its life. “Diggers, dreamers and the damaged ourishing around and because of, a garden” is, he thinks, a utopian

81. McKay, Radical Gardening, 170. 1

212

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

vision.82 This embodies an “attempt at a practical arcadia.”83 Gardening as a social action demonstrates the underlying parallelism of people and greenspace. McKay reminds his readers of the seventeenth-century movement of the Diggers: people who squatted on common land in Surrey and used it for cultivation as a political witness to human equality and against the elitist regulatory culture incumbent on private land ownership. This group, too, promoted a utopian society without hierarchical distinctions. It is possible to read Isa 62:7–9 as performing this kind of utopian vision. Working the land provides certain ownership of the fruits of human labour. Thus vv. 7–9 insist that grain will not feed foreigners, nor will they have “your” wine to drink; instead, those who harvest the grain will eat it and those who toil in the grape harvest will drink the results of their efforts.84 This promissory note serves as an indicator that the city will live again as “the city no longer deserted” in v. 12. All these good results are to be worked for also by demands for cosmic intervention. The text indicates the necessary link between human desire and the achievement of utopia by engaging the function of the watchman as guardian of urban fortunes. The watchmen on the walls must not be silent but should call out to God to remedy the city’s loneliness in v. 6. This call to petitionary prayer is extended to include the whole citizen body in v. 7. The combined yearnings of urban ofcials and inhabitants are depicted as all-embracing in scope: not even the deity is to be spared. The passage resonates with urgent, dynamic activity, the opposite of rest. There can be no rest until the peace of Jerusalem is secured: the state of no rest balances with the no peace of the city. The message of the prophet turns on this tension and the need for it to be reversed, so that nature can produce an abundance of good things—a condition which is the practical prole of the more general concept of being at ease. There will be no need for husbandry in the ideal time, but to get there requires religious effort. Chris Fearns denes utopia as “an ideal place that does not exist”85 and as “more perfect than the real world.”86 Yet, as well as seeking a material utopian space which would be essentially a static place, it is possible to understand the role of utopia as more dynamic, as an “enabling vision.”87 82. Ibid., 113. 83. Ibid., 28. 84. Whybray, Isaiah, 250. 85. Chris Fearns, Narrating Utopia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 2. 86. Ibid., 3. 87. Ibid., 7. 1

9. Geography and Vision

213

Fearns argues that “the utopian ideal which seeks to recover a lost harmony by the creation of a new order may be seen as looking both forward and backward.”88 Certainly the prophetic voice of Isa 40–65 follows that mode of operation in linking symbolic events of the past with those of the future in order to convince the reader that urban reconstruction is legitimate and will happen. Thus 64:10 makes an appeal to the deity to intervene, the reason being that Zion is desert and Jerusalem desolation. Here desert is qualied by the view that such space cannot sustain life; hence the city itself is emptied of meaning since both terms are used as adjectives to describe Jerusalem. Moreover, as vv. 10–11 narrate, the temple has been burnt to the ground, the temple itself now being a symbol of an urban space without signication, having no access point to cosmic space. In the face of that disaster the prophet reminds the deity of the past era when there was divine intervention in a grand manner in vv. 3–4.89 Even though there has been no action by transcendent energy, imaged as storm and earthquake, for some time the power of the past enables the writer to envisage similar acts in the present day. This narrative sequence provides an enabling vision since it brings present loss into dialogue with religious tradition which includes the story of divine actions which founded a people, in vv. 3–5. Elsewhere in these chapters the link between former and latter time is similarly made through the prole of the deity. In 42:8–9, the Name of God is connected with former things that happened. Since they are markers of potential creative force they lead directly to the announcement of new things which will be, which are to come. In 41:4 the same appeal is made. The deity has raised up new powers on the surface of the earth, yet who is he? He is the Lord, dened as with the rst and with the last and hence One who is. In 45:21 an appeal is made to the sovereign nature of cosmic space, for there is only one voice which declares all things in the created world, who foretold the destiny of the exiles to return to their city, and that is the Lord, who alone is truly divine. In these instances the prophetic voice provides enabling roles because it offers a sure hope that the wished-for situation will occur. The reader is encouraged to focus on the deity as the only force which exists absolutely, who dwells in cosmic space but can be prevailed upon to listen to urban need and to respond pragmatically. It is cosmic space which is the linchpin of the visionary landscape, creating a dynamic which is both historical in mode and practical in intention. The goal of this portrayal of 88. Ibid., 47. 89. Whybray, Isaiah, 262–63. 1

214

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

new things is not a purely cosmic event, but resides in the rebuilding of one city and its temple, thus recalling the life of a vanished regional culture. Fearns, like McKay, notes how achieving an ideal society can be envisioned via “nature almost wholly domesticated. The desire to impose order on nature is part of the dream of order.”90 Yet utopian geography’s tendency to move to a static spatial site in which reality can give way to a utopian alternative can encourage human passivity whereby citizens “lapse into a fantasy of infantile dependence—the utopian promise of absolute security.”91 It could in fact be argued that the very stress on the divine power of restoration leaves the citizens as consumers of a reality which they have not had to labour for in the sense of hands-on manual labour. Chapter 65, which was examined above, can be interpreted from this angle as leading to human passivity. There may be a struggle to get to the idyllic landscape of Jerusalem as set out in the text of ch. 64, but once the goal of urban regeneration is gained there is no real challenge to the residents. The force controlling the sacred city-space ensures that there is no internal social tension and that there is no challenge from the force of death. The citizens have work to do but this is easy labour, without the need for innovation, for the crops respond well to human tending. On the one hand, this is indeed idyllic: all that is left is to sit back and enjoy life. Although this picture is approved in the text as the height of divine nurture, in real terms it places human beings in a state in which they do not have to think for themselves, something which modern psychology would regard as retarding human development. So intense is parental care that the citizens do not have to tell their needs since the deity knows what they will ask and has the necessary answer ready, in v. 24.92 It might appear that all powers of reection, of an “examined life,” are reduced to a minimal level in this utopian worldview. Carto-city Cosgrove sums up his viewpoint on geography and vision in the concept of carto-city in which the actual city is aligned with the maps which depict and describe it. The city-as-map is physically bound: it is what is on the ground. Yet “maps of cities are balanced between creating and 90. Fearns, Utopia, 97. 91. Ibid., 157. 92. Ibid., 278. The promise counters communal laments that the destruction of the city shows that God has no care for his people. 1

9. Geography and Vision

215

recording the city.”93 Mapping is thus an act of imaginative energy. Urban cartography is “instrumentally effective and symbolically signicant.”94 On the one hand it enshrines power over the city due to its bird’seye view of the urban space. On the other it pursues a rational enquiry concerning the city and its prole through engaging at a grass-roots level. Cosgrove argues that from the bird’s-eye view the “city is revealed as a theatre.”95 This metaphor assumes the panoptical perspective which reduces the city to a single space with a single value, that of the elite government. By contrast, the aneur seeks “to emphasise the breadth of embodied, sensory experience in the city—rening hierarchy, celebrating the casual,” suggests Cosgrove.96 From the panoptical viewpoint the concept of the image of carto-city returns the reader to reection upon the nature of visionary geography and the signicance of cosmic space. Prophetic use of landscape depiction draws on human attachment to pragmatism as a resource for telling truth. Earth which is fruitful provides a robust symbol for more abstract possibilities of human benet, including that of urban habitation. The practical and material aspects of life are access points opening up debate concerning the ultimate worth of human existence viewed from the outside, as one part of the universe. To share the divine outlook on urban society is to own a rigorous critique of the work of urban governments and to subsume city life to the sphere of celestial movements within the wider creation: religion and politics work together to create and analyze urban identity. The approach from below, from the multiple activities found on city streets, prioritizes plurality and variety above the monolithic explanation of urban society. The tension thus produced between denitions of the city as either singular or plural is the topic of the second chapter in this nal section. In “prophetic cities” the desire of human beings to build an ultimate, ideal urban environment will be measured against the lived experience of city-dwellers that the city constantly escapes their control and produces new and different faces to those who walk its streets.

93. 94. 95. 96. 1

Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 171. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 180–81.

Chapter 10

PROPHETIC CITIES

This book has addressed the theme of urban imagination in biblical prophecy from the vantage point of psycho-geography, both at the level of city as subject and through the subjective nature of the reections of individual prophetic aneurs. The rst part of this book set out this framework, while Part 2 turned to the role of spatiality in textual accounts of the temple-city. The spatial dimension of the prophetic books includes both their exploration of the topic of the city though engagement with symbolic urban places and the construction of meaning made possible by their organization of narrative space. The investigation of these two spatial modes provides for a spatial aesthetics which draws on the literary style of individual prophetic books. Using these narratival perspectives as a resource for reading prophetic books, three separate urban imaginaries have been developed in Part 3, which examined prophetic cityscapes of inter-urban relationships, urban transcendence and city as site of death. In this nal chapter the several elements discussed in the rest of the book will be brought together and considered under the title of ‘prophetic cities.” A key issue to be explored is how far the urban imaginaries which have been examined produce many individual urban portraits and to what extent these are aspects of a single reality—the city in biblical prophecy. At the historical level there is clearly a stress on the major city known to the prophet, which is usually Jerusalem. However, both Samaria and Nineveh offer points of interest to the Judahite community.1

1. Both Samaria and Nineveh feature in the historical context of Jerusalem, the rst as a parallel local kingdom and the second as the capital city of Assyrian kings whose aggressive territorial expansion led to the collapse of local rule. It is reasonable to assume that the symbolic use of these city sites in prophetic text would draw on regional politics although the purpose of the present volume is to examine the poetics within the text rather than to offer an opinion regarding historical events.

10. Prophetic Cities

217

Even in Jerusalem’s case, however, we can note a narrower eld of interest than everything which takes place in an urban site; as has been shown above, it is often the urban monument of a temple which is the place of specic prophetic interest. The topic of debate is frequently to what extent a sacred site encapsulates the meaning of urban existence—a viewpoint which is developed by reading the material site as an example of comprehensive space. It can be argued, following Lefebvre’s approach to the production of space, that the explanation for a textual poetics in which a temple site is central is to be found in the category of “lived space” in which a material site is constructed from a pre-existing concept of what such a building should look like, and the use of that space adds the capacity for the temple icon to act as geo-symbol.2 As geo-symbol a worship site focuses urban identity, functioning as a space of emotional attachment on the part of citizens. The essential work of narrative temple-space is to comment on actual temples and the aspirations of the community for which this is a vital cultural signier. The business of carrying out that commentary leads into a variety of sub-themes in which city space is depicted as violent, transcendent, idyllic, a wasteland. These urban proles form individual urban imaginaries but may also be understood as the plural identities of any one city and as stereotypes of urban living more generally. The task of this chapter is to explore aspects of city-production in biblical prophecy within the framework provided by the balance between the universal and the individuated identities of cities. In order to carry out this task the chapter will engage with resources drawn from the work of cultural geographers such as Pile and Benjamin, and from the imaginative writing of Italo Calvino.3 Calvino’s narrative balances the embodied experience of Marco Polo of his home city of Venice with the proles of many possible cities which may exist within the empire of the Great Khan. The narrating of urban identities is depicted as a function of the poetic imagination, which is fuelled by physical reality but capable of creating many cities within its own space. These inter-disciplinary resources will be used to provide a commentary on the twin models of city as singular and as plurality; this will be discussed in relation to selected urban imagery from the book of Ezekiel.

2. The role of the temple as geo-symbol was addressed in Part 2 of the present volume. 3. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997). 1

218

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Power, People and Place Exploration of the topic of urban space nds a basis in the importance of place for the human community. Harm de Blij notes that the places where people live are shaped by a number of human constructs, including religious activity which provides one mechanism for investigation of the geographies of place. The practice of religion provides a cultural statement expressed through ritual practice, modes of dress, food consumption and moral regulation of the acts of which the body is capable.4 Religion offers a key to social identity in which religion and place are coupled.5 Hence societies often express the view that the territory they occupy was given to their ancestors by a benign deity.6 This latter view is a major player in biblical prophecy, which assumes as a given the argument that the local city-state continues to exist through the protective work of a patron deity. But this theme is not easily held in a context of political upheaval in a local area. The book of Amos addresses the underlying issues of national security, regarding as too simplistic the view that the deity will always look after a community whatever the nature of its own activity. The prophet, characterized as a source of resistance and subversion, provides a literary mouthpiece for the delivery of an uncomfortable message to an elite regime which sees itself as having secured its authority through the provision of a temple for the urban patron deity. The dramatization of radical disagreement about the weight to be attached to local government, achieved through the speech and acts of an urban prophet who is in many ways an outsider gives due weight to the line of radical critique of the establishment. This leads into the geography of jeopardy whereby a city can be measured against the likely risk to its future life.7 The dangers of urban annihilation, described by de Blij as “real, perceived, denied,” play an important role in measuring the power of place.8 Some of the threats to cities come from natural events such as earthquake and volcanic explosion, and the prophetic iconography of the Day of the Lord has been shown, in Chapters 5 and 8 of this book, to draw on the upheaval of cosmic disruption as a suitable image to convey the authority of a personalized transcendent force. The narrative space of Joel is constructed via 4. Harm de Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization’s Rough Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 56. 7. Ibid., 108. 8. Ibid., 109. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

219

graphic depictions of a cloud of locusts approaching the territory of Jerusalem, a scene which allows for reections concerning the vital role of the sacred site as a power broker between urban community and divine control. Whereas de Blij’s study stresses the material dimension of the production of cultural meaning, the work of Lewis Holloway and Philip Hubbard examines the eld of behavioural geography as productive of social identity.9 Behavioural geography engages with the discipline of psychology, as in Rodaway’s development of sensory geography.10 Work in this eld prioritizes subjective understanding as a tool for the provision of cultural values.11 It is the mind of the individual society member that is central to the development of wider spatial evaluations; the subject produces mental maps which summarize a person’s “knowledge of surroundings in a way helpful to them,” as a form of “mental atlas.”12 The individual body nds its identity via being placed relative to sites on the map, whether other people or buildings and this enables the subject to work out a suitable way of moving through the mapped space, whether material routes or appropriate ways of relating in society. Behavioural geography is a form of humanistic study which suggests that people nd meaning more through identiable places than through an abstract notion of spatial reality.13This comment is directly relevant to the reading of narrative text, where the thoughts and actions of characters are shaped by the places in which they occur. On a number of occasions prophets stand in public urban places in order to make their message heard and understood. Chapter 3 of this book depicted the placing of Amos in the sanctuary of Bethel as a narrative device to highlight the theme of “contested space”; the prophet and the priest both claim that they have primacy of speech in the royal site in Amos 7, but only one of the claims can be true. Behind the scene is the deeper issue of who will control the fate of Samaria. Is it the king or the deity who is in charge? The political debate is illustrated via two opposed urban voices exemplied by the characters Amos and Amaziah, each of which claims to have divine support. A dynamic which ties space to individual bodily experience owes a debt to the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, and his approach is addressed by Holloway and Hubbard. Tuan’s foundational work in humanistic geography 9. Holloway and Hubbard, People and Place, 38. 10. Ibid., 40–41. 11. Ibid., 43. 12. Ibid., 49. 13. Ibid., 71. 1

220

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

highlights two parallel relationships between space and place. Places give meaning to the term space because they are where people reside and where they therefore nd content for the idea of space: meaningful places in turn become part of who we are.14 Value is attributed to space in that “certain places have their own unique spirit and personality.”15 These are usually places that draw upon the emotive side of human nature by, for instance, commanding awe—a function which can be attached to religious sites which link with the mythology of a community tradition. This form of attachment leads to the production of graphic icons which become “public symbols which rely on stereotype and imagination” to symbolize the collective identity.16 Tuan explores the nature of spatial attachment through the lens of the “homeland.” The place to which this title is given by cultural tradition is identied as territory, the place which belongs to a particular group and by ownership of which that society provides a sense of social cohesion for its members. Tuan notes that societies often regard this land as the centre of the universe and situate it in relation to planets and stars; there is a vertical spatial axis which goes from heaven to underworld, passing through the homeland site on the way.17 The destruction of a city which operates as such a homeland space will completely disorient a group, Tuan suggests, since it literally signies the ruin of their cosmos.18 Tuan’s arguments about the ways in which human experience leads to spatial mapping clearly resonates with the spatial dynamics of prophetic texts. The historical destruction of the temple site and the ensuing disruption of the daily cultic round represent the absence of the deity and thus strike at the roots of social cohesion. No longer can Jerusalem be a temple city, the Zion where God dwells. The book of Ezekiel dramatizes this religious crisis in chs. 8–11 where the text pictures a spatial icon of the divine presence and then shows that icon moving out of the temple and nally leaving the city, abandoning it to its fate. The construction of the narrative allows the reader to reect on emotional attachment to Jerusalem within the Judahite community and to engage empathetically with the grief caused by the fragmentation of city identity. Ann Buttimer and David Seamon focus on the intricacy of the links between the human body and urban space in their examination of

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 1

Ibid. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Tuan, Space and Place, 149. Ibid., 149–50.

10. Prophetic Cities

221

place-ballet.19 This concept draws on the emotional attachment of people to sites, as well as their aversion to other places. Each group creates for itself a network of sites which are preferred or avoided, which are safe and dangerous: they do this partly by their use of such places in the daily round. It is possible to map the journeys of group members through these places and hence to demonstrate the signicance of place in human social identity.20 The maps so produced convey a picture of lines of movement sometimes criss-crossed by many other trajectories or at other times resolutely singular; it is as if the group is unconsciously performing a ballet of social space. David Seamon suggests that each body has a set of habitual actions which perform body-space. By virtue of these movements “the person knows where he is in relation to the familiar objects, places and environments which constitute his everyday geographical world.”21 This understanding of how social meaning is produced and maintained through spatial performance is clearly of interest to readers of prophetic books. Chapter 4 of this book dealt at length with the spatial poetics of Ezekiel’s journeying through temple-space. The mapping of his footprints within the temple building serves to provide a commentary on the moral worth of liturgy for urban survival. His lone path criss-crosses those of many others, thus producing points of convergence on rooms where ritual acts are taking place. This focalizes the message of the text through an encounter between practitioners and viewers of cult. Following the map of the prophetic walk gradually empties the sacred site of its identity as a place of divine–human encounter. Imagined Communities These explorations of the interactive relations between people and places and how issues of political importance are worked out in spatial terms opens up consideration of the function of narrated space in identifying community identity. Benedict Anderson’s study of the rise of nationalism in the modern world suggests that nationalism is a cultural by-product of social activity.22 The nationalist model provides an imagined political 19. Ann Buttimer and David Seamon, eds., The Human Experience of Space and Place (London: Croom Helm, 1980). 20. Ibid., 27. 21. David Seamon, “Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines and Place-Ballets,” in Buttimer and Seamon, eds., The Human Experience, 161. 22. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (4th ed.; New York: Verso, 2006). 1

222

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

community in which “members of even the smallest nation never know most of their fellow members but each subscribes to a commonly-held picture” of what makes “Us.”23 Anderson comments on the way in which cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers map out this identity. The anonymity of the empty tomb or the mass of inscribed names both play out a public, state-level identity which promotes the good of the whole society above the particularity of the individual citizen. Chapter 8, with its focus on deathscapes, made a study of places of memory and how this iconography serves community and political purposes. Such sites encourage viewers to align themselves with the public face of social grief and loss: a theme which was applied to the narrative construction of the death of cities in prophetic books, as with Nahum’s portrait of the destruction of Nineveh. Death sites work to remove the responsibility for the death and immortality aspects of human existence from the space of the individual to that of the state community, which provides a mechanism for attaching value to death incurred for the benet of the group as a whole, according to Anderson.24 Insofar as this process engages with religious worldviews, it also elevates the human being to the status of “man-in-the-cosmos,” uniting personal and social life with that of the universe. National destinies may be dened through the language of life, death and re-birth; the urban communities pictured in prophetic narratives share these marks of developmental history. In visionary geography use of death and resurrection imaging of the natural landscape associated with urban territory provides a means of assuring city populations that their culture has a future, as shown in the treatment of the book of Isaiah in ch. 9. Within this spatial framework one repeated motif is the blossoming of the desert; hence the seasonal cycle of wet and dry periods is turned into a metaphor for the wheel of urban fortune. The city is thus treated as an organism which has its own life spirit and which can grow in meaning as it grows in size, can reach a state which is its best expression before decline and death. As was noted in Chapter 6, the textual move of putting a plant and a city in the same category, in Jon 4, provides a spatial tool for conveying to the reader the emotions of pity and compassion and a resource for understanding even the great city as a place of innocent ignorance and impotence. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. Ibid., 9–10. See also a discussion of the role of violence in the production of meaning in Zeph 2 in Robert Haak, “Mapping Violence in Zephaniah 2,” in Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets (ed. Julia O’Brien and Chris Franke; New York: T&T Clark International, 2010). 1

10. Prophetic Cities

223

Anderson notes that people are greatly attached to their invented community prole and are even prepared to sacrice their lives in pursuit of the common good suggested by a given imaginary. The biblical prophets are portrayed as at one with their messages and often have to sacrice their own interests for the sake of the common good. Thus Jer 1 shows the prophet to be chosen from before birth for his role as messenger, while Ezekiel loses control of his bodily functions as the deity takes possession of his personal space, directing him to cut off his hair in ch. 5, for example. Although the prophets survive all threats to their existence they do so “on the edge,” whether this is social isolation as in Jeremiah or close encounters with death in the book of Jonah. There is an intimate connection between the social space of the urban community and personal space in prophetic identity. City-interpretation The role of the prophet as interpreter of the city provides a major entry point to the study of urban imagination in prophecy and can be linked with the modern gure of the aneur. Merlin Coverley, discussing the historical development of this gure, describes the origins of this character as an engagement with the gothic and subterranean, a view discussed in Chapter 2 of this book in relation to the work of Peter Ackroyd. It is the isolated and estranged gure—both in the crowd and not of it— which is the central motif in this perspective. The Parisian version of this gure is initially a more relaxed and elegant stroller, but the rapid expansion of Paris promotes the image of city-as-mystery and changes the function of the walker into the task of demonstrating and explicating that mysterious quality of urban life by traversing dark and secret routes across the city, as does Ezekiel in his rst temple journey. A further shift of aneur identity is from physical stroller to the one who walks through imagined sites, in mental travel. The freedom of the stroller is transferred to the inner imaginative space—an image drawn from Defoe’s depiction of Crusoe as a voyager and a social isolate. The use of this gure in novels means that “a journey is given meaning only through the intervention of its author’s imagination.”25 There are thus two strands to the aneur: as the means of depicting the aesthetic value of the city as a work of art and as the tool for transforming that gaze to political purpose, the revolutionary denial of value to contemporary urban mores.26 25. Coverley, Psycho-geography, 70. 26. Ibid., 74, 76. 1

224

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Walter Benjamin underlines the creation of space within the material environment through the loosening up of “the self by intoxication” and praises the surrealists for their “fruitful living experience that allowed [them] to step outside the domain of intoxication.”27 By setting the self free from absorption into the cultural mores of bourgeois society the surrealist performs a space for new and demanding perceptions of reality. Far from producing a trivial and irrelevant commentary, the attitude of a determined rejection of the regulatory framework of society produces deeper knowledge and understanding of the social. This serious political endeavour is the measure of the prophetic aneur. The major prophets enter into their role as interpreter via an experience which “intoxicates” them with divine energy, inspiring them to speak and act as urban interpreters and setting them aside from the mass of urban society. After this experience two of the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, speak metaphorically in ways that can both be understood and yet not grasped. The gap between speech and meaning is indicated in the construction of text in Isa 6:11–13, where the message is that of destruction, but this is aligned with the statement in v. 9 that the people will not follow the prophet’s meaning and perceive the value of its radical social critique. The third prophet, Ezekiel, achieves the same gap by metaphorical acts, such as the street theatre of ch. 4, in which he takes domestic tools and turns them into a performance of siege and collapse. The guiding force for Ezekiel’s work is his ecstatic experience of eating a scroll whose words he successively enacts for the social body of the urban community. Like the historical surrealists, these prophetic gures are regarded with disgust and distrust; but the outsider stance can be the best vantage point for seeing what is energizing the city elite and how far this social dynamic is to be trusted. As Benjamin proposes, “we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognise it in the everyday world— the everyday as impenetrable: the impenetrable as everyday.”28 Prophets descry divine intention through the outplaying of historical phases of city life and offer their readers urban meanings which can be bizarre and ambiguous, as in the book of Zechariah’s rst chapters. The subject of metaphysical materialism brings us back to Anderson’s work, where he comments on Benjamin’s Angel of History which has its back to the future and faces the past. The angel sees one single catastrophe rather than a series of individual events and “would like to stay there, awaken

27. Benjamin, Reections, 179. 28. Ibid., 190. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

225

the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”29 This thought provides a fair description of the purpose of biblical prophets. Chapter 1 of this book looked to the work of Steve Pile on psychogeography as of value for understanding urban prophetic imagination. His approach links human engagement with material space with an understanding that the physical environment acts as a sounding board for human fears and desires. This viewpoint stresses the variety of topics within the space work of cities since phantasmagorias are “composed of contradictory elements which leave impressions” and of “juxtaposed images and gures whose histories and geographies disrupt the smooth ow of time and space.”30 Pile uses his theoretical approach to interpret life in New Orleans with its history of Voodoo magic and subterranean interests. This chapter will now address the city portraits of Jerusalem in the book of Ezekiel, from a psycho-geographic stance which examines a single urban site via the variety of its symbolic treatments in the literary world of the prophet. Although there is a single historical site at issue in the book, there are a number of different proles of the city provided in the text. Ezekiel 5:8–17 pictures the site as a “city of violence” in which death stalks the streets, leading parents to consume the esh of their children.31 This motif expresses the tone of the chapter, which is to create terror in the minds of readers as they view the city as a deathscape where human beings are reduced to savagery against their own kind. The message climaxes in v. 14, where the urban community is depicted as a ruin and a dreadful example to other groups who gaze at its fate. The city of violence is ultimately a city targeted by an enduring anger from the outside; it is a city doomed to extinction. Chapter 10 equates the city with an extended description of the icon of divine presence, indicating that city space can be framed within cosmic space, as a “city of God.” The narrative structure of the chapter is bounded by the metaphysical materialism of the throne-chariot, which sets action up in vv. 1–2 and ends the action in vv. 18–22.32 In between these markers the chapter gives extended space to the depiction of the cherubim who form the divine throne attendants and plot activity is limited to vv. 6–8. The focus of that unit of text is the taking of divine re from within the burning, ery chariot with the implication that these 29. Anderson, Communities, 161. 30. Pile, Real Cities, 165. 31. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 113–14. 32. Ibid., 194–96, which discusses the complex issue of textual composition and redaction in this unit. 1

226

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

live coals will be cast onto the city as a symbol of destruction. The presence of the deity within city borders denes it as a place within cosmic space, completely under the control of God, whose voice alone can command its destiny. Ezekiel 12: 1–11 portrays a “city of departure” by making Ezekiel take up his bundle of possessions and exit the site through a breach in the walls, a symbolic rendering of the Exile in which the fate of citizens is to be gathered at the broken walls in order to travel far from home. Verse 7 describes the prophet packing his bags and digging through the wall with his hands, dragging out his bundle while citizens look on.33 When he is asked for an explanation of his bewildering acts he is to say to them “As with me, so with you.” In this manner the text plots the identity of the city as a departure point; gathered at the walls the line of exiles will leave at dusk for another place in another country. Chapter 21 denes the city by the repeated imagery of the sword; as the “city of the sword” Jerusalem is destined to captivity at the hands of a ruthless warrior-king. Verse 9 introduces the theme of the sword with a graphic description of a sharpened and polished blade, an image strengthened in v. 11 where it extends to the sword-wielder, the killer.34 The poetic symbolism of the sword is extended to the great killing event it will bring about in vv. 14–17, which sets alongside this prole the wail of lament that it will produce. Finally, in v. 18 we hear that the sword is a sign for a human warrior, the king of Babylon. It is his army whose attack will transform Jerusalem into a site-of-the-sword. These imagined cityscapes of negativity are balanced in ch. 36 by “city as mountain,” a symbol of the community ingathered and growing abundant crops in its own elds.35 In v. 4 the text sets bounds to the image which are inclusive of mountains, valleys, ruins, towns. This symbolic urban site is in poor condition, owned by outsiders who ravage it. But the text performs the reversal of this in vv. 8–12. The same list of urban place-markers is given but the dominant theme is now abundance and prosperity. The stress here is on the suffering and relief of the earth. It is the mountains who are the icon of the city; it is they who will be fullled by the return of many people to their old home. The city is one with the natural environment and also with the high peaks which symbolize the bridge between heaven and earth. 33. Ibid., 210, notes the text statement of a “setting-out for exile.” 34. Although Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37, 415–50, describes the unit as dealing with God’s Sword since the deity sets the foreign king up as slayer of Israel. 35. Ibid., 724–25, which argues that the origin of the passage is a contested view concerning YHWH’s ownership of land and his control over its disposal to the use of other nations. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

227

Chapter 47 continues this alignment of nature and city in the portrait of Jerusalem as “city of healing”: a pictured context in which the temple city becomes a source of life for the entire region. The key symbol here is living water; water which ows but also provides life because it is itself a life force. A trickle of water leaves the temple sanctuary, the holy place of divine energy in the heart of the temple.36 The text emphasizes the role of divine waters of life by having the prophet encounter the stream at a number of stages on its journey to the sea; equally the images of wading across and swimming across are used to depict its mighty force. Finally, it cannot be controlled by human beings but itself becomes life for sh, birds, plants and people. This extended metaphor links cosmic space to material space and thence to social space—for the waters give growth to plants of healing which are there for all who live on the river’s banks. Invisible Cities The city of Jerusalem can then be portrayed as a number of individual “cities,” each of which adds signicance to the over-arching urban identity, making the city more—or less—easy to dene. Calvino follows this style of city-work in his novel, where he sets up a dialogue between two voices, that of the traveller Marco Polo and that of the ruler Kublai Khan. Polo is by denition a city dweller, coming from Venice, and who also has the opportunity to visit many cities as part of his travels eastwards through the empire of the Khan. His narrative function is thus as an active aneur, one who has stood on the streets of many places where he is the foreign observer. The Khan stays in the centre of his territory and can only travel in the mind and imagination; he listens to Polo and creates mental maps of the cities described. He also seeks to nd longterm principles of urban order which could underpin the stability of his empire and also prevent its senescence and decay. But is material reality a measure for the ideal and are there many cities or really only a single site in view? Marco Polo’s descriptions of strange urban places are interspersed with the narrative voice of the spectator who explores the gradual unfolding of meaning within the ruler’s mind. Eventually he realizes that Polo’s cities are also imaginative constructions like his own.37 Moreover, all the cities are drawn from Marco 36. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 230–31, suggests that the reader should keep in mind the narrative ow of the water as emerging following the return of the Kabod, despite the textual interruption of that theme by regulations for cultic practice. 37. Calvino, Cities, 93–95. 1

228

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Polo’s experience of just one city—Venice—in its many guises.38 The city is thus capable of elaboration through graphic visual imagery which points to the deeper signication produced by urban existence. But can the city be reduced to a single model? Calvino plays with the city as universal idea and cities as unique places whose life cannot be replicated anywhere else. There is also the issue of whether a described city is the same reality as a material city. Calvino writes that “the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. Yet between the one and the other there is a connection.”39 The gap between description and physical reality provides a literary tool for Calvino to highlight both the homogeneity and the heterogeneous nature of the city. The Khan’s perspective that “I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced—created everyway according to the norm” stands for a monolithic approach to urban identity.40 His version of city space is that of a conformity which emerges ultimately into utopian space—the ideal city beyond all cities.41 On the side of difference is Marco Polo’s version of the city-universal as “a city only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions.”42 The dialogue of attitudes to city identity leads Polo to search the atlas which has a map of all the cities of the empire, but this material reality opens out into a mystical mode in which the atlas “reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form or a name,” a challenge to imputing xity to material reality through the naming of places.43 The book ends on a nal note of challenge. The city is the inevitable human context and draws citizens into mindless engagement in its busy-ness. There is a site of resistance to the bustle of human commerce, within the mind of the observer of city space. This requires the energy to stand aside from absorption into the phenomena of daily life to watch for those presences which provide an access point to the urban as a site of difference.44 City as Sign Calvino suggests that an essential function of the city is to act as a sign. In the section “Cities and Signs 1” Polo describes in detail a city and its 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 1

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 61. The Khan is constantly in search of the positive dimension of utopia. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 147–48.

10. Prophetic Cities

229

spaces, but none of these have meaning in relation to their outer manifestation. The shop signs and place names appear to give information, but the real nature of the city cannot be found by exploring the spaces of signage. The city attempts to convey itself through the redundancy of repeated images of stereotypical citizens, in “Signs 2,” which leads on, in “Signs 3,” to the patterns of difference which assail a visitor only for that person to register an underlying homogeneity of all urban space— palaces of the rich, temples of priests… This survey climaxes in “Signs 4” with reection on signs and meaning. In a nightmare world which deceives the human eye and where one image shifts swiftly into a different reality, how can the observer nd a city’s meaning. To gain knowledge of how to negotiate city space protably the traveller must abandon all previously acquired systems of interpretation. In prophetic literature also there is a gap between the depiction of city space and the urban identity it produces. The visionary space of prophetic narrative is a symbolic world which utilizes graphic visual images to simulate material reality; but the reader may nd it hard to decipher the message. In Ezek 17 the prophet recounts a tale of two eagles and a vine.45 This scene is intended to communicate an urban critique, but its content is not immediately intelligible. It becomes clear only in vv. 11– 21 that the topic under discussion is in fact the fate of the current ruler of the city who rst made a treaty with Babylon by which he was set up as a puppet king and then broke his oath of loyalty by seeking alliance with Egypt and asserting his independence.46 This chronological event of Jerusalem’s history is subject to interpretation under a series of signs. The behaviour of the king does not ensure the city’s safety, and the complex images of eagles planting vines whose roots seek out the source of nurture is not a straightforward comment on viticulture, despite its depiction of actual tree-activity. It is necessary for the prophet to lead the reader safely through the wealth of signs to the plain understanding of a city government under threat of erasure. But even this message uses metaphor to provide meaning since v. 20 depicts the deity as a birdcatcher who sets out a net to ensnare the unwary prey. The nal image of the city as a cutting taken from a tree and planted on a mountain growing into a vast network of branches which shelters all varieties of bird provides yet another symbol: this time for the future city which will draw its citizens from many different groups. Under the weight of allegorical 45. Greenberg, Ezekiel, 1:317–18, notes that duality pervades the textual construction. 46. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 1:363, notes that this is an allegorical fable which is told throughout as a secular narrative. 1

230

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

discourse the reality of city space moves from the domain of the human inhabitants of Jerusalem to that of cosmic space. The transcendent signicance of the city withdraws itself from readers’ understanding even as it is played out in each mapping symbol. The reader unravels the value of each sign but that is only the start of grasping city identity. The volatility of the sign in urban discourse is a subject with which the surrealists engaged and is one in which Henri Lefebvre also took an interest. Sarra Nadal-Melsio points to Lefebvre’s interest in surrealist theory and his re-working of their aesthetic as a medium for conveying spatiality.47 The surrealist city is marked by fragmentation, however, whereas in creating his urban aesthetic Lefebvre wove together the visionary and the everyday, through the categories of event and encounter.48 It is in and through the city as a fundamental reality encountered in the daily round that a spatial aesthetics emerges. In the bodily encounter of the individual with city space, both contingent and possible, the city reaches its potential as a tool of change. “The Lefebvrian city functions like the aesthetic expression of the body in space,” understood as a work of art.49 This encounter within material space becomes an “event” and the power of the event is the stimulation of the human intellect, via embodied experience, to fresh and possibly subversive understanding of the aesthetic function of the city. Applying this approach to the textual production of urban space in Calvino’s novel and the biblical text demonstrates the power of the urban imaginary to perform cultural aesthetics; the ambiguity of the sign marks an openness which is benecial, suggestive of the potential for new meaning rather than a depiction of ambiguity for its own sake. The interweaving of meaning which can be plainly accessed and meanings which may be hidden within narrative discourse is a major tool for spatial aesthetics and Calvino plays on the capacity of text to draw the reader into deeper evaluation of the world of cities by providing a description of a city scene which teasingly provides puzzles for the reader to address. The most basic of these puzzles is the link between the many cities and the one city: material difference and a unitary ideal, as discussed above.

47. Sarra Nadal-Melsio, “Lessons in Surrealism: Rationality, Event, Encounter,” in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid; New York: Routledge, 2008), 161. 48. Ibid., 163. 49. Ibid., 165. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

231

Cities and Sky It is now possible to address aspects of the textual material which a reader encounters in Calvino’s novel and in Ezekiel and to consider what “event” results for that encounter. In this section the chapter will take three of Calvino’s categories as a useful lens for reading Ezekiel’s urban imagination. Calvino uses a set number of thematic approaches to the city, repeating these themes in a chain of short descriptions of cities, all of which have their own name and stand as autonomous places. The use of repetition, however, allows the book to move beyond urban characteristics to philosophical interests such as perception, life and death and order. In the section “Cities and Sky” the focus is on city as an ordered space which models the world order indicated by cosmic “sky” space. Seen from this angle the city is like a carpet, intricately woven and having a number of sub-units within its design while remaining a coherent whole. The town which treasures this carpet thinks it is treasuring cosmic space, for “the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions.”50 However, the true map of the universe is not the carpet but the city, says the narrator. The carpet is only a copy as it is a human artefact; it is the city which is the truly cosmic space of order. The capacity of human beings to value the material rather than the spiritual dimension of existence is also indicated in a second scene. In this narrative scene the city is thought by its inhabitants to be a copy of an absolute urban form which exists in cosmic space: for the city this is a form to which they look up. The heavenly version is a site of “pure value” and is symbolically imaged as constructed from gold, silver and rare gems. The presumed unity between heavenly truth and earthly copy leads the city to venerate the symbolic markers of purity as the manifestation of that invisible city. But this turns the image into a material object, reifying purity in “noble metals” and “rare stones.”51 As a result the potential of urban space to reach upwards is lost as the city turns downwards into greed and possessiveness. The reication of the material closes the city in upon itself. It is useful to apply this problem of human desire to pin down city meaning becoming a self-defeating act to the text of Ezek 43. As a sky city the temple site is dened by the motifs of order and copy. Chapters 40–42 emphasize this view in their depiction of the temple as located within visionary space and as a highly ordered series of segmented 50. Calvino, Cities, 86. 51. Ibid., 100. 1

232

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

spaces over which the temple presides and to which the residential quarter is attached. Chapter 43 guards against the over-identication of sacred and secular authority in the actual life of the temple-city, thus offering a critique of human failure to see which is the copy and which is the original. Ezekiel 43:6 depicts in visual terms the return of the thronechariot to its home, an event from which true understanding emerges for the prophet.52 Read in this way the temple site, with its intricate design of rooms and gates and walls, set out in chs. 41–42, resembles the intricately woven carpet of Calvino’s work. But like the carpet the temple is not the prime location of cosmic order which remains set in the divine sphere. As a result the temple must not be reied, not treated as valid in its own right as a pure, incorrupt monument. Ezekiel 43:8 emphasizes that reifying the city was the mistake made by the previous generation where only a wall separated the king from the deity. There must be a greater sense of gap between cosmic and material urban space, which the textual use of verbal repetition in v. 8 supplies. “Their threshold…my threshold…their doorposts…my doorposts” conveys both the similarity and the difference between sacred and secular worlds. Both can be imaged by metaphoric building terms but there is a radical difference between “their” and “my” which its population, especially its ruling classes, must never forget. The meaning of the sky city as opportunity for encounter with the divine transcendence is stressed in ch. 43 by the insertion at this point of a unit which focuses on the altar. In vv. 13–17 its dimensions are set out and in vv. 18–25 the regulations for its use are dened.53 The altar is thus an icon which draws together the motif of temple as access to the cosmos, while intimating that this role can be diminished or even aborted by human presumptions of the power of material sites. The text places the account of the altar in the mouth of the deity, thus stressing that it is the sacred and not the secular power which is in charge here. This is an altar of God in a very literal sense. There is a need for human ofcials to perform the ceremonies of ritual sacrice which permit reconciliation with the deity on the part of the community. However, these men operate inside temple-space as authorized to do so by the deity and not by human choice. The purity of order is 52. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:420, states that the scene of the return provides a graphic tool to demonstrate an intellectual truth about the temple. 53. Ibid., 2:423–28, discusses whether this passage contributes to our knowledge of the historical temple in the post-exilic period, noting the absence or pre-exilic comparative material. He points to the passage as showing divine control over human ritual praxis. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

233

thus established as an outworking of divine holiness.54 Since vv. 7–9 have reminded the reader of the deviant uses to which the old temple was put by the ancestors it becomes clear that the new temple is a place of striving, striving to be worthy of divine indwelling. The chapter leaves open the tension between a site whose true purity is guaranteed via divine voice and is thus irrevocable and a shrine whose value is contingent on human endeavour to maintain a correct distance from it. City of Death Calvino takes as another urban thematic the city and death. In one version of this theme the narrator depicts a visit to a city where the process of birth and death and the re-organization of urban systems all seem to indicate that this place is a site of change and difference with potential for innumerable new lives. But closer engagement reveals that the cast of characters never really changes. Different titles and roles mask the fact that the population is recycled endlessly. This model displays the redundancy of repetition and hints that city life is “dead” since there is a form of stagnation at work.55 The inability to experience the city as life-giving is imaged in a second snapshot in which the traveller walks along the street; however, instead of seeing new faces, he sees imposed on this citizen body the faces of those whom he once knew in his own past. Everywhere he looks for life he nds death symbolized in these faces of the dead past; he feels menaced by this manifestation of death, drawn himself into ageing and death and unable to nd life.56 The narrative plays on life and death as interior values and on the city as a place which promotes stagnation or change. This modelling of city as site of both life and death and the ambiguity caused by this can be used to read Ezek 37, where the world of living and dead impact upon one another.57 The scene starts with the aspect of death; there is a valley but it is full of old bones, a graveyard for an urban populace. This imagery engages the reader with an urban culture caught between annihilation and renewal. The transition from death to life is 54. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 214, suggests that the liturgy for the dedication of the altar may have the function of withdrawing this site from human control and placing it inside divine space. 55. Calvino, Cities, 72. 56. Ibid., 84. 57. Cf. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:258. He discusses the origin of this bizarre vision and suggests that it could be from experience of warfare or from listening to the people using symbolic language about their fate. 1

234

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

dictated by divine authority and enacted by prophecy and the apparent incapacity of the dead to signify life is heightened in the text by the image of complete desiccation in v. 2. This is an urban death scene parallel with those in Calvino’s novel. But, whereas the traveller there looks for life and nds death, here the prophet sees death and nds life. The reversal of the normal order of death as a nal state is played out in the text be a long narrative sequence which stages resurrection in logical phases, each of which is controlled by divine will and human speech. The body is re-ordered in a proper manner from bones to sinews to esh, to skin, in vv. 4–7.58 This is the end of phase 1 since there are now bodies instead of bones. But there is no life as yet; the bodies simulate life which they do not have. Phase 2 begins in v. 9 with the return of the breath of life to the bodies, a breath drawn from the four winds of the earth in a play on the meanings of the Hebrew word ruach. What emerges is urban population understood as resource—a vast host of people in v. 10. The meaning of this visionary encounter is as yet unclear; it does not dene the content of encounter as event. But the third section of the unit completes the urban aesthetic as one of life not death. The prophet reveals that the bones stand for the historical citizens of his day who consider themselves dead since there is no hope for their city and culture. They view themselves as locked into limitation, buried in the past event of urban destruction and exile. But the graves they have constructed around themselves will be opened and they will be brought back from the sites of exile in which they have been consigned to a living death, away from their homeland. The event’s material form is re-settlement in the site of home, symbolically the regaining of condence in self-worth and pride of place. Thus the dead live and the living “play dead.” The valley of death performs some of the same functions as the cities in Calvino in that it examines the ambiguity of human society as an encounter between life and death and in that it allows for the changing of cultural death into social forms which offer life through difference from the past. Cities and Eyes In this theme Calvino points to the incompletion or ambiguity of sight as a source of knowledge. In his rst scene a city visitor is shown to be capable of seeing both the totality and the myriad details of the urban site

58. Greenberg, Ezekiel, 2:747–48, discusses the powerful effect of this carefully constructed narrative. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

235

on a rst urban encounter. Once a person lives in that city space, however, they lose sight of the whole, seeing only what is pertinent to their individual functioning in urban space. They see which route to take while on matters of business and know which places they are aiming to arrive at and also which sites to avoid.59 In this way Calvino’s story is not unlike the depiction of place-ballet referred to above. The partial nature of sight as an intellectual resource is reinforced in a second story of city-sight, where the narrator argues that the stance adopted by the walker determines the image of city life which is produced. Each position of the human body produces a different city. “Eyes on the ground” means the urban site is made up of paving stones, discarded rubbish and fragments of buildings. “Eyes ahead” leads to a city of shop signs, human gures and bodily movement.60 It is possible to connect this approach with the work of both Bachelard and Tuan, who stress that spatiality is expressed in language which is drawn from the human experience of embodiment, as discussed above. How, then, does the book of Ezekiel relate to the value of sight as educational resource for human beings? The prophetic book also plays on different levels of gaze but tends towards a more monolithic view of the value of sight than that of Calvino’s hero. This happens not because of the skills of human embodiment but by the taking over of human capacity by a transcendent power which has a panoptical capacity for perception of the true meaning of what is seen. The importance of a thematic of sight has already been noted in Chapter 4 of this book, with regard to Ezekiel’s temple journeys. In Ezek 8 it is the quality which denes the process of coming to understand the true worth of temple cult by engagement in close observation of the entire context of ritual acts,61 including the images on the walls of the space in which worship occurs, in v. 10. In this motif the prophet’s human sight is re-shaped by divine interpretation of events which he is encountering. He sees from a different viewpoint from that of the ritual actors who are engrossed in the use of the spaces which they have created as the frame for their action. The symbolic use of sight means that interpretation of the ultimate value of temple-space can be mediated to the reader who is also encouraged to perceive a greater reality behind individual worship events.

59. Calvino, Cities, 81. 60. Ibid., 58. 61. Greenberg, Ezekiel, 168, notes that the imagery and language of this chapter is already located within the text as occurring within a Vision or night-dream. 1

236

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The sight motif continues to be an important narrative tool in ch. 9, where the prophet now attuned to seeing beyond the surface of material reality takes a different view of the daily routine of life on the streets.62 The city streets are lled with other actors whose purpose is the death of the human citizenry which is itself blind to the signicance of their urban space as doomed. There are a few members of society who can perceive how incorrect the religious and political life of the city is and they will be marked for survival. Hence sight/perception is the vital quality of a valid urban existence. It is life-giving and without it is the citizen is dead. So awesome is this vision of two urban populations interacting that the prophet is overcome with the encounter which becomes for him an event of entreaty for pardon. But his gaze is irrevocably directed to slaughter in vv. 9–10: destruction rules over pity in this urban event. The prophet’s vision is directed from the spatial icon of the divine throne in ch. 9. The use of this textual icon links the reader back to the start of the prophetic book and where the human person is over-taken by divine life.63 When the prophet is stood on his feet in 2:3 it is the upright stance of the possessed body which dictates the subsequent lived space of the visionary. It is a consequence of that divine–human encounter that there is an alteration of the human powers of observation through which Ezekiel now perceives the powerful event of urban destruction. In ch. 10 his gaze is lled with the forms of the cherubim, reminding us that his narrative space is within that static sphere of transcendent movement. He stands still but sees the breadth and depth of the temple city of Jerusalem. It is this encounter which turns the prophet into a cultural watchman in 33:1–9. The informed vision of the seer is narrativally played out through the metaphoric role of the watcher on the walls.64 This function provides the content for the event of his own destiny; it is on the quality of the communication between prophet and city that life and death turns: the death of others, but his own death, too. If citizens fail to accept as valid the watcher’s communication of warning, that is their responsibility and their fate is in their own hands. But if the watcher fails to narrate 62. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 56–57, locates these scenes within the dynamic of a court judgment which starts with setting out the case and then turns to the verdict and its enactment. Greenberg, Ezekiel, 179, notes that the hearing of the prophet is now engaged alongside sight. 63. Blenkinsopp, Ezekiel, 60, notes that for a Zadokite like Ezekiel the paradigm of divine presence is liturgical. 64. Cf. Greenberg, Ezekiel, 2:675–79, where he discusses the community’s acceptance of its sinfulness as a foil for the prophet’s clarication of his message of doom. 1

10. Prophetic Cities

237

what he truly has seen, then guilt falls on the body of the watchman. Even though the prophet is subsumed into divine vision, he has a human responsibility for the life and death of his city. His message must be of death if it is to produce life.65 These three instances of the symbolic use of sight in Ezekiel dene the ultimate nature of the city as an aspect of cosmic space. In each instance it is the perception of that truth which leads to proper urban behaviour and failure to understand it leads to the decay of city life. On the one hand there is awe and joy in the presence of the deity in city space, but on the other there is the requirement to engage with the divine disgust and even hatred directed at the material life of the urban community. Overall, only the enrichment of sight brought about by absorption into celestial society provides the necessary resources for carrying out the task of cultural guardian. Calvino’s exploration of sight and the city both validates the signicance of the power of sight for knowing a city and suggests that there can be a gap between seeing and knowing where incongruity indicates that the theme is capable of further development. The book of Ezekiel shares the perspective that sight and understanding do not always work together to reveal inner truth but equally intimates that prophetic vision provides precisely the kind of sight that can bring surface reality into dialogue with transcendent interpretation. The intention of the book is pedagogic, it seeks to inform by offering authoritative interpretation. Calvino’s book also educates, but in ways which leave the dialogic voices to offer their own individual viewpoints, making the reader into the nal arbiter of meaning. Prophetic Urban Imaginaries The combination of innumerable named cities and the repetition of a limited number of themes provide Calvino with a suitable mechanism for exploring the role of similarity and difference as markers of city space. While Marco Polo suggests that he could continue to spin cities out of his imagination, with different proles, the mind of the listening Khan turns inexorably towards the essential nature of urban space. Kublai Khan thinks that this will provide him with the means of creating cities which will stabilize his territory and save it from collapse, but Marco Polo intimates that this search for a material ideal could in fact kill city life altogether by excluding the possibility of variety. 65. Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:183, describes the watchman passage and its account of responsibility as structured in the form of a casuistic lawsuit. 1

238

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

The book of Ezekiel has been read also as providing many individual scenes of urban evaluation. Yet there is also a clear sense that the city of the text is a single reality, presenting a universal urban identity, which is that the city is most itself when it is “holy” and “pure.” It can only achieve this status by virtue of being the site of divine habitation and not by the efforts of its human population. Yet the urban community cannot afford to be complacent because of this fundamental truth of its identity; failure to respond suitably to being a “holy city” means that it will not be a city at all. There is no middle way between life and death. The deity stands by an absolute autonomy and freedom of will which is radically independent of urban cult and community. This city prole raises some of the fundamental questions about the moral worth of urban existence. Just as Marco Polo’s narrative accounts of cities, explored above, draw attention to the material city as site of meaning and of deception, of death and life, of vision and blindness, so also the book of Ezekiel encourages the reader to reect on the ambiguity found in an urban prole which appears to be clear-cut. The temple city requires a wholehearted commitment to its foundational ideals, but what happens if these ideals are reduced to the level of pragmatic acts of cultic ritual as all that is necessary? Then the city which is caught up into the timeless life-space of the deity is inherently wiped out, a spiritual truth which will be demonstrated in the ruination of the material site. If the gaze of the ruling elite turns in on itself and commends human government as the best form of urban endeavour, that access to visionary space with which a temple city identies itself is thrown away. The only moral certainty is that a “city of God” cannot expect to engage in compromise solutions to its socio-political problems and survive—but if human weakness threatens city space, the deity can and perhaps will restore its moral balance, since it is the nature of the divine so to act. It is this balance and tension between city as a singular entity and the plurality of cities which is present also in prophetic urban imaginaries more widely. There is no one blueprint for the physical city which serves all prophetic books, although some themes dominate the collection. All the books reviewed in this study have a connection with the role of the urban temple and thus with cosmic space. The subject of urban violence and the prevalence of urban destruction provide a major thematic. So also does the imagery drawn from the natural world in which urban society is critiqued through the motif of fertility and abundance. All of them assume the human context to be that of an urban site, whether the home site of their own community or the urban space of another society. What emerges from the literary representation of urban life is a form of spatial poetics which can be examined for its aesthetic of the urban 1

10. Prophetic Cities

239

condition. In this prophetic mode there is a mixture of artwork and serious political intent. The use of metaphor, the creation of iconic symbols such as the throne-chariot of Ezekiel, produce a narrative space which engages both with material and historical aspects of their audiences’ experience and with the invisible reality of transcendent space. The use of poetic oracles offers readers a wealth of possible meaning, but these have to be examined closely if that meaning is to be extracted by readers. There is a careful eshing out of the sign which leaves space for ambiguity of meaning. Meaning is produced by the interaction of the individual seer and the urban picture gallery for which his embodied self is a conduit which both introduces images and channels interpretation of them. The urban aesthetic to which this process gives rise is one that endorses the city as a home-place for human society, while also indicating that the city is not simply at the disposal of human intention. The city is the domain of king and deity, but more often the divine intention governs its destiny. Human fortunes are enhanced by city dwelling, but inappropriate styles of socio-religious practice negate that urban potential. There is a conditionality about human occupation of city space, while cities can exist forever. The city can nd a new set of inhabitants to raise it from the ground again, but the generation that lost control of the city disappears from view. The city is a subject for debate which can never be separated from human experience, and yet the city evades human grasp. The style of prophetic presentation can be labelled visionary geography— or metaphysical materialism. Insofar as the use of imagery seeks an affective response from the reader, which can translate into the sober political reality of regime change, the genre of psycho-geography provides a suitable basis for exploring the prophetic urban imagination since the ultimate task of the text is to engage the reader in city-work, in the analysis of city space.

1

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackroyd, Peter. Hawksmoor. London: Penguin, 1993. ———. London: the Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Adams, Paul, Steven Hoelscher and Karen Till, eds. Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Agnew, John, Katharyne Mitchell and Gerard Toal, eds. A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Allen, John. “Power.” Pages 95–108 in Agnew, Mitchell and Toal, eds. Political Geography. Allen, Leslie. The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976. Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. Cities, Re-imagining the Urban. Mahlem: Polity, 2002. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 4th ed. New York: Verso, 2006. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Barker, Margaret. The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem. London: SPCK, 1991. Barton, John. Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary. Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 2001. Barton, John, and David Reimer, eds. After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason. Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996. Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime, New York: Verso, 2008. ———. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Foster. California: Stanford University Press, 2001. Benedikt, Michael. “Cyberspace: Some Proposals.” Pages 119–224 in Cyberspace, First Steps. Edited by Michael Benedikt. Cambridge: MIT, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. Reections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978. Berquist, Jon. Judaism in Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995. Berquist, Jon, and Claudia Camp, eds. Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography and Narrative. New York: T&T Clark International, 2007. ———. Constructions of Space II. The Biblical City and Other Imagined Spaces. New York: T&T Clark International, 2008. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Ezekiel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990. Bonnemaison, Joel. Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography. New York: Tauris, 2005. Bowers, Maggie. Magical Realism. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Bibliography

241

Braaten, Laurie. “Earth Community in Joel: A Call to Identify with the Rest of Creation.” Pages 63–74 in Habel and Trudinger, eds., Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics. Brown, Francis, Samuel Rolles Driver and Charles Briggs. Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. Brownlee, W. H. Ezekiel. Word Biblical Commentary 28. Waco: Word Books, 1986. Buttimer, Ann, and David Seamon, eds. The Human Experience of Space and Place. London: Croom Helm, 1980. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London: Vintage, 1997. Camp, Claudia. “Introduction.” Pages 1–17 in Berquist and Camp, eds., Constructions of Space II. Carroll, Robert. Jeremiah. London: SCM, 1986. Chambers, Iain. Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Childe, Gordon. “The Urban Revolution.” Pages 3–17 in Gates and Stout, eds., City Reader. Childs, Brevard. Isaiah. London: SCM, 2001. Chyutin, Michael. Architecture and Utopia in the Temple Era. New York: T&T Clark International, 2006. Coggins, Richard. Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1987. Conrad, Edgar. Zechariah. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1991. Coote, R. Amos among the Prophets: Composition and Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981. Cosgrove, Denis. Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. ———. “Geography’s Cosmos: The Dream and the Whole Round Earth.” Pages 326–39 in Adams, Hoelscher and Till, eds., Textures of Place. Exploring Humanist Geographies. Coverley, M. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Darling, Eliza. “Nature’s Carnival: The Ecology of Pleasure at Coney Island.” Pages 75– 93 in The Nature of Cities: Urban Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Edited by N. Hynen, M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw. New York: Routledge, 2006. de Blij, Harm. The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization’s Rough Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. de Jonge, Henk Jan, and Johannes Tromp. The Book of Ezekiel and Its Inuence. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. de Vries, Simon. “Futurism in the Pre-exilic Minor Prophets Compared with that of the Post-exilic Minor Prophets.” Pages 252–72 Redditt and Schart, eds., Thematic Threads. Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Blackwell: Oxford, 2000. Delaney, David. Territory: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Dell, Katherine. “The Shaping of the Book of Jonah.” Pages 85–101 in Barton and Reimer, eds., After the Exile. Donald, James. Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone, 1999. Dozemann, Thomas. “Biblical Geography and Critical Spatial Studies.” Pages 87–107 in Berquist and Camp, eds. Constructions of Space I. Exum, J. Cheryl. Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1996.

242

Bibliography

Fearns, Chris. Narrating Utopia. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Francis, Doris, Leonie Kellagher and Georgina Neophytou. The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Gates, Richard, and Frederick Stout, eds. The City Reader. New York: Routledge, 1983. George, Mark. Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space. Atlanta: SBL, 2009. ———. “Space and History: Siting Critical Space for Biblical Studies.” Pages 15–31 in Berquist and Camp, eds., Constructions of Space I. Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Malden: Polity, 1996. Goldingay, J., and P. Scalise. Minor Prophets, vol. 2. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009. Goonewardena, Kanishka, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom and Christian Schmid, eds. Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, 2008. Gorringe, Timothy. A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Greenberg, Moshe. Ezekiel 1–20. New York: Doubleday, 1983. ———. Ezekiel 21–37. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. ———. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. Haak, Robert. “Mapping Violence in Zephaniah 2.” Pages 37–49 in O’Brien and Franke, eds., Aesthetics of Violence. Habel, Norman, and Peter Trudinger, eds. Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics. Atlanta: SBL, 2008. Handy, Lowell. Jonah’s World: Social Science and the Reading of Prophetic Story. London: Equinox, 2007. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association of Books, 1991. Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Hayward, C. T. R. The Temple: A Non-Biblical Source Book. New York: Routledge, 1996. Holloway, Lewis, and Philip Hubbard. People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life. New York: Prentice Hall, 2001. Houston, Walter. Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament. London: T&T Clark International, 2008. Howard, W. Scott. “Landscapes of Memorialisation.” Pages 47–70 in Robertson and Richards, eds., Studying Cultural Landscapes. Joyce, Paul. Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1989. ———. “Ezekiel 40–42: The Earliest ‘Heavenly Ascent’ Narrative?” Pages 17–41 in de Jonge and Tromp, eds., Ezekiel. Kapelrud, Arvid. Joel Studies. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948. Keel, Othmar, and Christopher Uehlinger. Gods, Goddesses and Images of God in Ancient Israel. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998. Kort, Wesley. “Sacred/Profane and an Adequate Theory of Human Place-Relations.” Pages 32–50 in Berquist and Camp, eds., Constructions of Space I.

Bibliography

243

Lee, Nancy. Lyrics of Lament. From Tragedy to Transformation. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell: Oxford, 1991. Levinson, Jon Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Limburg, James. Jonah. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993. Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lindner, Christoph, ed. “Re-visioning Urban Space and Cityscapes.” Pages 1–13 in Lindner, ed., Urban Space. ———.Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006. Love, Mark. The Evasive Text: Zechariah and the Frustrated Reader. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1999. MacIntyre, Alistair. The Tasks of Philosophy, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Mandolfo, Carleen. Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations. Atlanta: SBL, 2007. Mason, Rex. Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Joel. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1994. Massey, Doreen, John Allen and Steve Pile, eds. City Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. “Cities in the World.” In Massey, Allen and Pile, eds. City Worlds. ———. For Space. California: Sage, 2005. ———. “On Space and the City.” Pages 151–74 in Massey, Allen, and Pile, eds., City Worlds. McConville, Gordon. God and Earthly Power: An Old Testament Political Theology: Genesis to Kings. New York: T&T Clark International, 2006. McKay, George. Radical Gardening: Politics and Rebellion in the Garden. London: Frances Lincoln, 2011. McKenzie, John. Second Isaiah. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Mills, Mary. Alterity, Pain and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. New York: T&T Clark International, 2007. ———. “Divine Violence in the Book of Amos.” Pages 153–79 in O’Brien and Franke, eds., Aesthetics of Violence. Muir, Richard. Approaches to Landscape. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Murray Robert. The Cosmic Covenant, London: Sheed & Ward, 1992. Nadal-Melsio, Sarra. “Lessons in Surrealism: Rationality, Event, Encounter.” Pages 161–74 in Goonewardena, Kipfer, Milgrom and Schmid, eds., Space, Difference, Everyday Life. Nast, Heidi, and Steve Pile, eds. Places Through the Body. New York: Routledge, 1998. Nogalski, James. “The Days of YHWH in the Book of the Twelve.” Pages 192–213 in Redditt and Schart, eds., Thematic Threads. Nogalski, James, and Marvin Sweeney, eds. Reading and Hearing the Book of the Twelve. Atlanta: SBL, 2000. Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace.” Pages 225–54 in Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace.

244

Bibliography

O’Brien, Julia. Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Nashville: Abingdon, 2004. O’Brien, Julia, and Chris Franke, eds. Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets. New York: T&T Clark International, 2010. Ollenberger, Ben. Zion, the City of the Great King: A Theological Symbol of the Jerusalem Cult. JSOT: Shefeld, 1987. Park, Chris. Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion. New York: Routledge, 1994. Park, Robert. “The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment.” Pages 1–46 in Park, Burgess and McKenzie, eds., The City. ———. “Magic.” Pages 123–41 in Park, Burgess and McKenzie, eds., The City. Park, Robert, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, eds. The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Parker, Simon. Urban theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City. New York: Routledge, 2004. Paul, Shalom. Amos. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991. Perry, T. The Honeymoon Is Over: Jonah’s Argument with God. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2006. Pike, Burton. “The City as Image.” Pages 242–49 in Gates and Stout, eds., City Reader. Pile, Steve. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge, 1996. ———. Real Cities, Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. Pile, Steve, and Michael Keith, eds. Geographies of Resistance. New York: Routledge, 1997. Prinsloo, Willem. The Theology of the Book of Joel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985. Redditt, Paul, and A. Schart, eds. Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003. Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976. Robertson, Iain, and Penny Richards, eds. Studying Cultural Landscapes. London: Arnold, 2003. Rodaway, Paul. Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. New York: Routledge, 1994. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. Edited and abridged by J. Links, London: Pallas Editions, 2001. Sack, Robert. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. “Place, Power and the Good.” Pages 232–45 in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanistic Geographies. Edited by P. Adams, S. Hoelscher and K. Till. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge: MIT, 1998. Sals, Ulrike. “Reading Zechariah 5:5–11: Prophecy, Gender and (Ap)perception.” Pages 186–205 in Prophets and Daniel. Edited by Athalya Brenner. Shefeld: Continuum, 2001. Schmidt, Francis. How the Temple Thinks: Identity and Social Cohesion in Ancient Judaism. Translated by Edward Crowley. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 2001.

Bibliography

245

Schuyler, David. The New Urban Landscape: The Redenition of City Form in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986. Seamon, David. “Body–Subject, Time–Space Routines and Place Ballets.” Pages 148–65 in Buttimer and Seamon, eds., Human Experience. Sherwood, Yvonne. A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Short, John. Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Simundson, Daniel. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah. Nashville: Abingdon, 2005. Slater, David. “Geopolitical Themes and Postmodern Thought.” Pages 75–91 in Agnew, Mitchell and Toal, eds., Political Geography. Smith, David. Moral Geographies. Ethics in a World of Difference. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. ———. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Spirn, Anne. The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Stevenson, Kalinda R. The Vision of Transformation: The Territorial Rhetoric of Ezekiel 40–8. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sykes, Seth. Time and Space in Haggai–Zechariah: A Bakhtinian Analysis of a Prophetic Chronicle. New York: Lang, 2002. Thrift, Nigel. Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. ———. Spatial Formations. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. Till, Karen. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ———. “Places of Memory.” Pages 289–301 in Agnew, Mitchell and Toal, eds. Political Geography. ———. “Re-imagining National Identity: ‘Chapters of Life’ at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.” Pages 273–99 in Adams, Hoelscher and Till, eds., Textures of Place. Tollington, Janet. Tradition and Innovation in Haggai and Zechariah 1–8. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic, 1982. Trible, Phyllis. Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method and the Book of Jonah. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Tumarkin, Maria. Traumascapes. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005. Valeta, David. Lions and Ovens and Visions: A Satirical Reading of Daniel 1–5. Shefeld: Shefeld Phoenix, 2008. Walton, John. Ancient Israelite Literature in Its Cultural Context. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. ———. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media in the Twentyrst Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

246

Bibliography

Weigel, Sigrid. Body-and-Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. Translated by Georgina Paul et al. New York: Routledge, 1996. Whybray, Norman. Isaiah 40–66. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975. Wildberger, Hans. Isaiah. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Winchester, Hilary, Lily King and Kevin Dunn. Landscapes: Ways of Imagining the World. New York: Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2003. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Witte, Bernd. Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by James Rolleston. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Wolff, Hans. Amos the Prophet: The Man and His Life. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973. ———. Joel and Amos. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Wright, Edward. The Early History of Heaven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Zimmerli, Walther. Ezekiel I. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. ———. Ezekiel II. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.

INDEXES INDEX OF REFERENCES HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT Genesis 1 194 2–3 208

1:8 2:1–5 6 6:4 6:9–10 6:9 6:11–13 6:11 11 11:1–4 11:3 11:4 11:6–9 24 24:4 24:7–9 24:13 24:18–19 24:18 39 40–65

Exodus 19–20

83

Joshua 6

111

2 Samuel 6–7 6 7 7:24–26

58 58 58 59

1 Kings 6–8 8 9

50 132 50

2 Kings 22 22:6 22:14–20 23:12–14

59 59 59 59

40–55 40–49 40–48 40

Psalms 19 132

198 83

Isaiah 1–39 1 1:7

132 51 51

40:1–49:13 40:2 40:6–8 40:8 40:25–26 40:27 41

51 207 60 224 60 224 224 60 208 205 205 205 208 40, 41 41 41 40 41 40 194 194, 196, 199, 202, 204, 205, 213 207 194, 210 17 17, 19, 51, 197–99, 207 196 19 206 206 197 18 210

41:4 41:8–10 41:17–20 41:18 41:19 41:20 41:27 42 42:1–4 42:1 42:3 42:5–7 42:5 42:6 42:7 42:8–9 42:10–12 42:10–11 42:17 42:18–19 42:22 42:23–24 43 44:26–28 45:21 49–55 49 49:2 49:7 52–56 52 52:13–15 52:15 53 53:3 53:10–12 55

213 197 196, 210 198, 211 211 211 198 201, 202 201 201 203 201 201, 202 201, 203 201 201, 213 201 202 202 202 202 202 18 206 213 197 202 202 202 196 205 205 205 204, 205 205 205 204

Index of References

248 Isaiah (cont.) 55:3 55:4 55:5 55:10–12 56–65 56 56:1–8 56:1–2 56:7 56:8 62:6 62:7–9 62:7 62:12 64 64:3–5 64:3–4 64:10–11 64:10 65 65:6–7 65:9–10 65:13–15 65:17–25 65:20 65:21–25 65:22–23 65:24 65:25 Jeremiah 1 1:18 7 7:2 7:5 7:18–19 7:30–34 8:13 11 11:4–5 11:10 11:15

204 204 204 204 207 69 67, 207 67, 207 207 67 212 212 212 212 214 213 213 213 213 197, 214 209 208 209 197, 208, 209 208 197 208 214 208

43, 202, 223 43 6, 28, 29, 51 28 28 28 28 43 54 54 54 54

12 14 15 27–28 27 27:2 27:8–10 27:12–15 27:14 28:12

43 43, 176 43 55, 57 55 55 55 55 55 55

Lamentations 1:1 1:6 1:7–8 1:9 1:17 2:20

38 39 39 39 39 39

Ezekiel 1 1:3 1:28 2 2:3 2:8–9 2:8 4 5 5:8–17 5:14 8–11

8 8:1 8:3 8:5 8:6 8:7–8 8:7 8:8 8:10 8:12 9–11 9–10

75, 91 150 77 90 236 91 90 26, 30 223 225 225 5, 30, 34, 72, 74, 78, 92, 220 33, 84, 89, 91, 235 89 83 83 78 85 33 85 235 84 88 87

9 9:9–10 10–11 10 10:1–2 10:6–8 10:18–22 10:18–19 10:19 11:1 11:13 11:23 12:1–11 12:7 13 13:10–12 17 17:11–21 17:20 20 21 21:9 21:11 21:14–17 21:18 33:1–9 36 36:4 36:8–12 36:24 36:27 36:33 36:38 37 37:2 37:4–7 37:9 37:10 37:15–28 40–48 40–44 40–42 40:1–2

34, 236 236 9 50, 225, 236 225 225 225 89 78 78 89 91 226 226 42 42 229 229 229 50 226 226 226 226 226 236 7, 226 226 226 7 7 7 7 7, 21, 90, 233 234 234 234 234 7 5, 74, 75, 77, 78 13 72, 73, 81, 88, 231 12

Index of References 40:2 40:3 40:4 40:5–9 40:48 41–42 42 42:1–12 42:13–14 42:13 43

47:8 47:10

13 13, 81 13 82 13 232 82, 86 86 86 86 13, 50, 82, 89, 231, 232 91 13 78 232 233 13, 89 232 75 232 232 86 87 87 87 41, 92, 227 92 41

Hosea 8

168

43:1–2 43:6–27 43:6–7 43:6 43:7–9 43:7 43:8 43:10–12 43:13–17 43:18–25 44 44:16 44:17–19 44:20–23 47

Joel 1–2 1 1:1 1:2 1:4 1:6 1:8–20 1:8–12 1:8 1:13–14

115 95, 105, 110 99 110 110 110 106 110 99, 110 107

1:13 1:14 1:15 1:16 2

2:1–11 2:1–2 2:1 2:3 2:4–5 2:5–9 2:8–9 2:10–11 2:11 2:15–17 2:15–16 2:15 2:17–18 2:17 2:18–19 2:18 2:19 2:20 2:22 2:23–26 2:23 2:25 2:32 3 3:17 3:20 5 Amos 1–2 2–3 2 2:5 3:1 3:3 3:8–9 3:12

110 110 99, 100 109 37, 96, 99, 100, 103, 109–11, 113, 175 111 111 96 103 103 170 103, 175 111 103 111 107 96, 176 109 99, 101, 109, 176 99 96, 106, 109 110 110, 170 110 186 110, 186 186 96 103, 110 96 96 116

123, 127 168 16 16 171 38 171 16

249 3:15 4

7:7–8 7:9 7:10–17 7:10 7:13 8–9 8 8:3 8:4–5 8:8 9 9:1 9:11–15 9:13

16 62, 173, 177, 178 62 16 16 177 111, 168, 170, 175, 183 170 175 183 175, 183 56 16, 38 17 62 56 35, 61, 69, 219 62 35 66 61, 66 62 168 35, 183 183 35 183 35, 184 62 185 185

Obadiah 1

168

4:1–2 4:5 4:8–9 4:13 5

5:3–5 5:3 5:8–9 5:16–17 5:18–27 5:19 5:20 6:1–6 6:1 7

Jonah 1

1:4 1:5 1:6

121, 125, 126, 129– 31, 133– 35, 140 131, 133 129, 133 129

Index of References

250 Jonah (cont.) 1:7 1:9 1:12 2 2:4 2:7 3

3:5 3:6 3:7–8 3:7 4

4:2 4:3 4:5 4:10–11 4:10 Micah 1 1:2 1:3–8 1:3–4 1:3 1:7 2:1–2 2:6 2:8–12 2:16 4 4:4 5 5:11 7 7:1–2 7:2 7:3 7:6

131 131 129 124, 130, 132, 136 125 125 124, 125, 129–33, 140, 141 141 131, 132 131 132, 141 130, 134, 136–38, 140, 222 135 134 136, 138 124 137

178, 184, 185 63, 178 63 178 63, 65 63 65 179 179 179 63, 65, 184, 185 185 168, 171 171 40, 180, 187, 188 180 187 187 187

7:8 7:9 7:11 7:12 7:14 Nahum 2–3 2 2:3–10 3

180, 187 187 40, 180, 187 40, 180 187

3:2–3 3:3 3:4 3:5–6 3:10 3:12–13 3:12

173 174 182 40, 168, 171, 174, 181, 182 171 181 174 174 171, 181 171 40

Zephaniah 1 1:2–3 1:4 1:7 1:14 1:16–17 2–3 2 2:15 3 3:14–18

168 184 184 184 184 184 171 222 171 171 184

Haggai 2 2:6–7 2:6 2:7–8 3

36 36 36 36 168

Zechariah 1–8

37, 144, 145, 148, 149, 152, 153, 155, 159, 167

1 1:1–5:6 1:2–5 1:8 1:11 1:12–17 1:14–17 1:14 1:16 1:17 1:18–19 1:18 2

2:3 2:10 2:13 3

3:2 3:3–4 3:7 4 4:10 5 5:1–5 5:2 5:3 5:5 5:11 6 6:9–8:23 6:9–15 6:9 6:11 6:12–13 7 8 8:4 8:9–11 8:12 8:20–22

32, 37, 146, 153 144 148 145, 149 153 148 154 154 151 154 149 146 14, 33, 37, 148, 156, 157, 168 15 146 15 146, 148, 157, 159, 162 159 153 159 146, 158– 60, 162 158 157 151 149 149, 150 156 157 162 146 160 146, 153 162 163 146 148 148 163 163 148

INDEX OF AUTHORS Ackroyd, P. R. 38–40, 42, 43, 45 Agnew, J. 109 Allen, J. 103, 124 Allen, L. 63, 65, 106, 110, 112, 121, 122, 126, 130, 131, 135, 139, 176, 178, 179, 186–88 Amin, A. 8, 11–14, 23, 25, 26, 74, 134 Anderson, B. 221, 222, 225 Bachelard, G. 72, 79–81, 83–85, 87, 88, 90, 93 Barker, M. 83 Barton, J. 103, 107, 114 Baudrillard, J. 149, 152, 164 Benedikt, M. 155 Benjamin, W. P. D. 30, 33–36, 49, 224 Berquist, J. 19, 67, 162 Bhabha, H. 142 Blenkinsopp, J. 9, 81, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 227, 233, 236 Bonnemaison, J. 57, 58, 68 Bowers, M. 29 Braaten, L. 104 Briggs, C. 23, 162 Brown, F. 23, 162 Brownlee, W. H. 93 Buttimer, A. 221 Calvino, I. 217, 228, 231, 233, 235 Camp, C. 6 Carroll, R. 6, 28, 43, 51, 56 Chambers, I. 20, 25 Childe, G. 4 Childs, B. 18, 67, 194, 197, 198, 201–208, 210 Chyutin, M. 9, 14, 75, 88 Coggins, R. 15, 32, 156 Conrad, E. 37, 144, 147, 155–60, 162, 165 Coote, R. 122, 124, 136 Cosgrove, D. 195, 198–200, 203, 207–10, 215 Coverley, M. 10, 24, 45, 223 Cresswell, T. 78

Darling, E. 165 de Blij, H. 218 de Vries, S. 114 Dear, M. 20 Delaney, D. 68, 69 Dell, K. 122 Demetz, P. 30 Donald, J. 5, 8, 15–17 Dozemann, J. 97, 109 Driver, S. R. 23, 162 Dunn, K. 74, 170 Exum, J. C. 174 Fearns, C. 212–14 Francis, D. 185–87 George, M. 60, 97, 98 Gilloch, G. 29, 30 Goldingay, J. 36, 148, 169, 171, 173, 174, 181, 184 Gorringe, T. 60, 104 Greenberg, M. 7, 26, 34, 73, 85, 225, 226, 229, 234–36 Grosz, E. 13, 16, 25 Haak, R. 222 Handy, L. 123, 129, 136, 140, 141 Haraway, D. 163, 164 Hayden, D. 74 Hayward, C. T. R. 80 Holloway, L. 164, 219, 220 Houston, W. 168 Howard, W. S. 164, 169, 170 Hubbard, P. 219, 220 Joyce, P. 13, 76 Kapelrud, A. 37 Keel, O. 51 Keith, M. 93, 206 Kellagher, L. 185–87 King, L. 74, 170 Kort, W. 101–103, 105, 108, 113

252

Index of Authors

Lee, N. 101 Lefebvre, H. 59–63 Levinson, J. 52 Limburg, J. 134, 136 Linafelt, T. 45 Lindner, C. 137, 138 Love, M. 32, 147, 158 MacIntyre, A. 127, 128 Mandolfo, C. 39 Mason, R. 99, 101, 109, 114 Massey, D. 3, 14, 58, 64–68, 124 McConville, G. 52 McKay, G. 203, 205, 206, 210–12 McKenzie, J. 197, 198, 201, 202 Mills, M. 27, 37, 84 Mitchell, K. 109 Muir, R. 169 Murray, R. 100, 106, 107 Nadal-Melsio, S. 230 Nast, H. 77, 78 Neophyton, G. 185–87 Nogalski, J. 113, 167, 183 Novak, M. 155, 157 O’Brien, J. 15, 32, 156, 158–60, 165 Ollenberger, B. Z. 82 Park, C. 74 Park, R. 3, 5, 14 Parker, S. 138, 140 Paul, S. 16, 35, 38, 61, 62, 66, 170, 175, 177, 183–85 Perry, T. 31, 32, 122, 126, 129–31, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142 Pike, B. 5 Pile, S. 4, 11, 12, 14–16, 18, 20, 27, 28, 42, 44, 77, 78, 93, 124, 168, 195, 206, 207, 225 Prinsloo, W. 95, 99, 105, 110, 115 Redditt, P. 171 Relph, E. 93 Richards, P. 169 Robertson, I. 169 Rodaway, P. 25, 26 Ruskin, J. 200, 201

Sack, R. 82, 196 Sadler, S. 21 Sals, U. 156 Scalise, P. 36, 148–54, 156–60, 162, 163, 169 Schart, A. 171 Schmidt, F. 80 Schuyler, D. 189 Seamon, D. 221 Sherwood, Y. 130 Short, J. 6, 52–55 Simundson, D. 37, 114, 116, 121, 122, 135 Slater, D. 112 Smith, D. 123, 126–28, 130, 132–36, 138– 42 Soja, E. 4, 6, 7, 9, 25, 52, 97, 145, 147–49, 154, 155, 157, 161, 163, 164 Spirn, A. 93 Stevenson, K. R. 73 Sturken, M. 177 Sweeney, M. 167 Sykes, S. 146 Thrift, N. 8, 11–14, 23, 25, 26, 74, 134 Till, K. 172, 173, 175, 176 Toal, G. 109 Tollington, J. 157, 159, 160 Trible, P. 142 Tuan, Y.-F. 54, 77, 97, 130, 220 Tumarkin, M. 178–80 Uehlinger, C. 51 Valeta, D. 165 Walton, J. 83, 146, 180, 181, 202 Warner, M. 150, 151, 160 Weigel, S. 29 Whybray, N. 196, 198, 201, 204, 205, 207– 209, 212, 213 Wildberger, H. 40–42 Winchester, H. 74, 170 Winter, J. 181–83 Witte, B. 29, 30 Wolff, H. 35, 96, 100, 103, 110, 111 Wright, E. 82 Zimmerli, W. 21, 26, 42, 73, 77, 81–85, 87– 91, 229, 232, 233, 237