The two maps of Israel's land

Journal of Biblical Literature

Volumn 126, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 649-667

  Havrelock, Rachel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249430206     PISSN: 00219231     EISSN: 19343876     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/27638460     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. For the dynamic through which space becomes place, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 179
2. Such boundary lists seem to be among the oldest cartographic relics; Sumerian documents of this nature from 2500-2200 B.C.E. have been discovered. See A. R. Millard, "Cartography in the Ancient Near East," in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 107
3. "The map is really a diagram to show the relation of (these) places to the world of the Babylonians. Each place is drawn as a triangle rising beyond the circle of the salty ocean.... Enclosed by the circle of the salt sea lies an oblong marked 'Babylon' with two parallel lines running to it from mountains at the edge of the enclosure" (Millard, "Cartography in the Ancient Near East," 111)
4. "Turin map of a gold-bearing region, dating from about 1150 B.C., remains the only map of interest from ancient Egypt" (A. F. Shore, "Egyptian Cartography," in History of Cartography, ed. Harley and Woodward, 117)
5. Genealogies involve similar literary and historical complexities. See, e.g., Frank Crüse-mann, "Human Solidarity and Ethnic Identity: Israel's Self-Definition in the Genealogical System of Genesis," in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. Mark G. Brett; Biblical Interpretation 19; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 58-76
6. J. B. Harley (quoting Foucault), "Texts and Contexts I: The Interpretation of Early Maps," in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (ed. Paul Laxton; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 45
7. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in New Nature of Maps, ed. Laxton, 77
8. Kalinda Rose Stevenson, The Vision of Transformation: The Territorial Rhetoric of Ezekiel 40-48 (SBLDS 154; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 46
9. Hierarchy finds its place even amidst equality: "The sons of the concubines Zilpah and Bilhah are farthest away from the Portion" (Stevenson, Vision of Transformation, 86)
10. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 56
11. For the similarities between Ezekiel's mountain and Sinai, see Jon Douglas Levenson, Theology of the Program of Restoration of Ezekiel 40-48 (HSM 10; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 43-44
12. In terms of the Edenic component: "Jerusalem's temple symbolized God's cosmic mountain towering into the cosmic expanse. There, humans came closest to Eden, God's holy realm" (Stephen L. Cook, "Cosmos, Kabod, and Cherub," in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World: Wrestling with a Tiered Reality [ed. Stephen L. Cook and Corrine L. Patton; SBLSymS 31; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 185
13. Cook, "Cosmos, Kabod, and Cherub," 185
14. Picking up on the parallel between this "fructifying river" and the rivers of Genesis 2, Susan Niditch observes that the ideology of hierarchy expressed here is more in line with the boundaried cosmos of Genesis 1. She saves herself source-critical somersaults with the brilliant proposal that Ezekiel 37-48 parallels Genesis 1-11, "the main corpus of cosmogonic material in the OT" (Niditch, "Ezekiel 40-48 in a Visionary Context," CBQ 48 [1986]: 217, 216)
15. Katheryn Pfisterer Darr argues, contra Walther Eichrodt, that "the regions transformed by the river's healing waters are located within the boundaries of Israel's homeland" (Darr, "The Wall around Paradise: Ezekielian Ideas about the Future," VT 37 [1987]: 271-79)
16. "Indeed, the cosmogonic process of creating and rightly ordering the new world of Ezek 40-48, in which Ezekiel participates, is a task that resonates with priestly overtones" (Iain M. Duguid, "Putting Priests in Their Place," in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, ed. Cook and Patton, 56)
17. "That there is a particularly close relationship between Ezekiel and the Holiness Code is undisputed" (Andrew Mein, Ezekiel and the Ethics of Exile [Oxford Theological Monographs; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 107)
18. Jacob Milgrom notes that Ezekiel differs from P in its greater restriction of access to holy spheres (Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AB 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991], 452)
19. There are "point by point similarities between the instructions to the priests in Ezekiel 44:15-31 and the instructions to the priests in the Holiness Code (especially Lev 21:1-22:9), which make it clear at least that a common tradition underlies these two texts" (Steven Shawn Tuell, The Law of the Temple in Ezekiel 40-48 [HSM 49; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992], 139)
20. For P's predating of Ezekiel, see Avi Hurvitz, A Linguistic Study of the Relationship between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel: A New Approach to an Old Problem (CahRB 20; Paris: Gabalda, 1982)
21. Julie Galambush, "God's Land and Mine: Creation as Property in the Book of Ezekiel," in Ezekiels Hierarchical World, ed. Cook and Patton, 91
22. David Jobling examines "the text's creation of Transjordan.as ambiguous land. It belongs, at some level, to Israel; yet there is the suspicion of another level at which it belongs rather to someone else, so that Israel's occupation of it is not Yahweh's intention (this 'someone else' is Israel's affines, Moab and Ammon)" ("The Jordan a Border: Transjordan in Israel's Ideological Geography," in The Sense of Biblical Narrative, vol. 2, Structural Analyses in the Hebrew Bible [JSOTSup 39; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986], 116-17)
23. Zechariah Kallai refers to the coordinates of the Euphrates map as "the patriarchal borders" ("The Borders of the Land of Canaan and the Land of Israel in the Bible: Territorial Models in Biblical Historiography" [in Hebrew], Erlsr 12 [1985]: 29)
24. See A. J. Wensinck, The Ocean in the Literature of the Western Semites (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1918), 23
25. and P. S. Alexander, "Geography and the Bible," ABD 2:977-87
26. The map "is universally admitted to be a copy made after 600 B.C." (Robert North, S.J., A History of Biblical Map Making (Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients: Reihe B, Geisteswissenschaft 32; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1979), 13
27. " The Babylonian Map of the World and The Bilingual Creation of the World by Marduk demonstrate that Babylonians, at least, believed that a cosmic ocean encircled the continental portion of the earths surface. The most familiar parts of this ocean were the Upper Sea (Mediterranean) and the Lower Sea (Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean)" (Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 321
28. and Nanno Marinatos, "The Cosmic Journey of Odysseus," Numen 48 (2002): 9
29. See Marinatos, "Cosmic Journey," 4, 11
30. Millard, "Cartography in the Ancient Near East," 131
31. Also P. R. Hardie, "Imago Mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles," JHS 105 (1985): 11-31
32. Homer, The Iliad (trans. Robert Fagles; New York Penguin Books, 1990), 487
33. The Shield of Heracles in Hesiod's Shield 314-15 portrays a similar encircling ocean; see James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13-14
34. "The idea of an encircling Ocean was a very old one, perhaps inherited from early Babylonian maps and reinforced by Greek mythology as interpreted by Homer" (O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps [Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1985], 24)
35. David Stephen Vanderhooft, The Neo-Babylonian Empire and Babylon in the Latter Prophets (HSM 59; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 36
36. In the Babylonian world map, the Euphrates "within the inner circle is portrayed as a band nearly vertical and almost as broad as the ocean" (North, History of Biblical Map Making, 20)
37. Henri Lefebvre speaks of sacred spaces found in Thomas Aquinas and in the Divine Comedy in a similar vein: "Such spaces were interpretations, sometimes marvelously successful ones, of cosmological representations" (Lefebvre, The Production of Space [trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991], 45)
38. In his study of the geography of the Davidic state, Baruch Halpern explains the Euphrates map as a result of the intentional vagueness concerning the river at which David established a stela (2 Sam 8:3). The omission of the river's proper name (filled in by the qere as the Euphrates), according to Halpern, aims to give the impression that Davids empire reached the Euphrates, when in fact it only spread to the Jordan or just beyond it. This missing name, in his estimation, is the seed that grows into the Euphrates maps. To begin, too much of this explanation rides on a missing term. In addition, the Jordan is never referred to in the text of the Hebrew Bible as "the River Jordan," but only as "Jordan" or "the Jordan." Thus if, as Halpern believes, the stela was set up at the Jordan, then the omission of the proper name is an instance not of ambiguity but of out-right deception, since the term "river" before the name of a river always indicates a river other than the Jordan. He makes a similar argument about the lack of specification of the river in 2 Sam 10:16. Again, the river here named cannot be confused with the Jordan since it is called "the river" - also a designation that never refers to the Jordan but more often to the Euphrates. See Baruch Halpern, David's Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Bible in Its World; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 164-259
39. For the intensity and Realpolitik of the pull, see Anthony Spalinger, "Egypt and Babylonia: A Survey (c. 620 B.C.-550 B.C.," Studien zur Ägyptischen Kultur 5 (1977): 221-44
40. Benjamin Mazar, The Early Biblical Period: Historical Studies (ed. Shmuel Ahituv and Baruch A. Levine; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1986), 115
41. Weinfeld, Promise of the Land, 64
42. Moshe Weinfeld, "The Extent of the Promised Land - the Status of Transjordan," in Das Land Israel in biblischer Zeit: Jerusalem-Symposium 1981 der Hebräischen Universität und der Georg-August-Universität (ed. Georg Strecker; GTA 25; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 65
43. The ambivalent status of Transjordan may also be an inheritance from Egypt. According to Kallai, at least two Transjordanian cities (Pahal and Zaphon), and potentially the Transjordan as a whole, are claimed in some Egyptian sources and not claimed in others ("Borders of the Land of Canaan," 28)
44. "Since Egyptian records never mention the Gilead or southern Transjordan - archaeology informs us that they were unsettled until the thirteenth century - it is clear that the Jordan was the eastern border of Egyptian Canaan" (Jacob Milgrom, "The Boundaries of Canaan," in Numbers [=Ba-midbar]: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation [JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990], 501)
45. Ideas of a centralized state and bureaucratic organization may have also been borrowed from Egypt. See Nili Fox, "Royal Officials and Court Families: A New Look at the yeladim in I Kings 12," BA 59 (1996): 225-32
46. The way in which the maps emulate empire while representing an Israel that is "strategically an insurgent counter-appeal" indicates an instance of what Homi Bhabha names mimicry. Resembling the maps of empire, Israel's maps diverge by replacing the colonists with the colonized. The ambivalence of mimicry, on which Bhabha also insists, arises from the maps' inherent difference from those of empire and the defense of Israelite hegemony on the one hand and the rights of conquerors to territory on the other. Both the presence of Israel in the land and the ubiquity of empire are justified through metonymy or, said differently, by the partial portrait of the map. See Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85-92
47. For the argument of Egyptian influence on Israel, see R. J. Williams, " 'A People Come Out of Egypt': An Egyptologist Looks at the Old Testament," in Congress Volume: Edinburgh 1974 (VTSup 28; Leiden: Brill, 1975), 231 -52
48. For the argument against such strong influence, see Donald B. Redford, "Specter or Reality? The Question of Egyptian Influence on Israel of the Monarchy," in Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 365-94
49. F. V. Greifenhagen, Egypt on the Pentateuch's Ideological Map: Constructing Biblical Israel's Identity (JSOTSup 361; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 3
50. rephrasing A. Malamat, "The Kingdom of Judah between Egypt and Babylon: A Small State within a Great Power Confrontation," in Text and Context: Old Testament and Semitic Studies for F. C. Fensham (ed. W. Claassen; JSOTSup 48; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), 117-29
51. "A river may serve as an emblem of the landscape and, as such, may advertise the identification of people with place" (Prudence J. Jones, Reading Rivers in Roman Literature and Culture [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005], 41)
52. Bill T. Arnold, Who Were the Babylonians? (SBLABS 10; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 96
53. This is the case, for example, in the Etemenanki cylinder, which "delineates the cities and regions that contributed corvée laborers or raw materials for work on Marduk's ziggurat in Babylon" (Vanderhooft, Neo-Babylonian Empire, 36, based on the edition of F H. Weissbach, Die Inschriften Nebukadnezars II im Wâdī Brîsā und am Nahr el-Kelb (WVDOG 5; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1906), 44-48
54. Vanderhooft, Neo-Babylonian Empire, 5
55. Malamat, "Kingdom of Judah," 119
56. th dynasty of Egypt" (Greifenhagen, Egypt on the Pentateuch's Ideological Map, 249)
57. "In the late summer of 616 B.C. as Nabopolasser and his troops ravaged the land of the middle Euphrates, an Egyptian expeditionary force appeared and in concert with Assyrian forces pursued the retiring Babylonians partway down the Euphrates" (Redford, "Egypt and the Fall of Judah," in Egypt, Canaan and Israel, 430-69)
58. The Judean population was itself divided along pro-Egyptian versus pro-Babylonian parties (Redford, "Egypt and the Fall of Judah," 449)
59. "Nebuchadnezzar's failure to invade Egypt in 601 only underscored the feeling that the supremacy of Babylon under the Chaldeans was a passing phenomenon....Consequently, the 'triumphal progress' of Psammetichus II to Palestine in 592, though basically a peaceful journey was intended... 'to galvanize his allies and subjects in hither Asia by his presence against the Babylonian menace'" (Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AB 11; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988], 323)
60. Moshe Weinfeld, "Protest against Imperialism in Ancient Israelite Prophecy," in The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (ed. S. N. Eisenstadt; SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 181-82
61. Jan Assmann, "Five Stages on the Road to Canon: Tradition and Written Culture in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism," in Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (trans. Rodney Livingstone; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 72