Mapping Ideologies

Much of this essay is based on chapter one of my book, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

I am the first to decry the sacrilege of dissecting a beautifully composed text in order to make a list of A, B, and C verses belonging to a substrata of sources, yet still must insist on the literary and social value of distinguishing between them.

It is something of a truism that in order to understand a book you must understand its author’s intention. Intention helps to explain what an author wants to say and how he or she says it. It can also shed light on the society in which the author lives and the relationship of the text to that society. Several repeated patterns within biblical texts make clear that traditions in the Tanakh had oral corollaries and likely were recited at different sorts of religious and political gatherings. We can call such traditions folklore and, insofar as it belongs to the people, folklore is without an author. Does it then follow that the authorial intention of biblical writers is lost to the ages? Does the authorlessness of the Torah provide the final proof of divine authorship or at least express a sense of collective much more powerful than a sense of individual achievement? Possibly so. It is no small feat to reconcile the views of rival parties in a common history.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas spoke of the concentric circles that define priestly thought and the biblical scholar Ron Hendel has shown the repetition of binary distinctions in its literature.

The Jordan River, which bifurcates territory into two recognizable banks, becomes an image that helps the priests to advance their idea of a distinct, circumscribed homeland. Because in Priestly ritual water works as a transformative agent that facilitates the change from impurity to purity, the Jordan River further enhances the image of a sanctified Israel. 

“There is good reason to think that already in the seventh century BCE, under the pressure exerted by the Assyrian empire, Judah’s Deuteronomic theologians reinterpreted earlier legal traditions in a manner that established the priority of national ‘brotherhood’ above the obligations of clans and tribes.” Mark G. Brett, “National Identity as Commentary and as Metacommentary,”in Historiography and Identity (Re)formulation in Second Temple Historiographical Literature, ed. Louis Jonker (London: T & T Clark International 2010), 39.

For more on this, see Yigal Levin’s TABS essay, “Historical…

Nili Wazana stresses the degree to which the Deuteronomistic maps are literary creations that lack definitive or authoritative demarcation lines. She inquires whether the Euphrates with its impressive span should be understood as the northern or the eastern border. Should it be understood as the northern border, then Transjordanian lands would not be included in the Promised Land. She stresses that such geographic generalizations do not operate under strict directional principles. At the same time that I continue to speak of the Euphrates as an eastern border in the Deuteronomistic maps, Wazana’s point furthers my sense that the maps follow mythic rather than topographic logic. See Wazana, All the Boundaries of the Land, 107.

Ed Noort distinguishes between Priestly and Deuteronomistic versions of the land on the basis that Priestly texts present the land as the place where God is present and Deuteronomistic texts see the land as “a function of the law,” where the Torah can “be lived and where without Torah there would be no land.” “‘Land’ in the Deuteronomistic Tradition,” in Synchronic or Diachronic? A Debate on Method in Old Testament Exegesis, ed. J. C. de Moor (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 137.