Exodus and Deuteronomy

Chapter 2. Territory and Identity: The Beginnings and Beyond

29 Athalya Brenner ChAPtEr 2 territory and identity The Beginnings and Beyond A Double Disclaimer My personal location contains nothing worth noting for anybody apart from my family, my friends, and me. However, it would serve as an explanation of why and how I understand the bible beyond binary oppositions of land/ exile, own territory/diasporas, promise/actuality, exodus/conquest. I shall articulate the personal at the end of this study, pointing out clearly how my personal situation influences my reading. Territorial population shifts, especially when experienced as involuntary, are a hot topic in the current global, supposedly postcolonial world (dis)order. It is therefore hardly surprising that concepts of exile in the Hebrew bible have received much attention in the last two decades. This article is not intended as a survey of the recent scholarly literature on this politically hot topic. Rather, it presents personal reflections—not necessarily new, not necessarily original—on a vexed and vexing cluster of questions. General Considerations One of the Hebrew bible’s chief underlying motifs is the locale, the territory, and how matters relating to it are conceptualized. Working backward from loss of territory control—that is, from the destruction of Judah, perhaps also of the Northern Kingdom—we see that the loss of control over a certain Originally published in Crossing Textual Boundaries: A Festschrift for Professor Archie Chi Chung Lee in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Nancy Nam-Hoon Tan and Zhang Ying (Hong Kong: Divinity School of Chung Chi College, 2010). This version has been modified, expanded, and produced by agreement. 30 Exodus and Deuteronomy territory, that is, the symbol of the loss, seems like a central concern, more so than the loss of the territory itself. The control seems to be the issue, since it is obvious that the land did not become empty of all its previous inhabitants at any given time; this is the first point. The second is, that the inhabitants have continued their existence elsewhere. The third: some people apparently did not feel an urge to “return” to the territory considered sacred and appropriated , in spite of vociferous propaganda. And the fourth: not everybody who—according to the Hebrew bible second-temple-period authors—should “return” did so; not everybody felt “in exile” out of the borders of the Hebrew god’s land, be the boundaries what they may; and diasporas of Israelites, Judahites, and later Jews have continued to exist alongside an ideal center, an earthly and heavenly, metaphorical Jerusalem, until today. There are various spaces where one can start looking at issues of territory, ideology, history and identity in the Hebrew bible.1 One of them is the semantic field of “exile” and “diaspora.” Another is a contents analysis, looking at texts that cover, or uncover, ambiguity toward the “here” and the “there,” depending on the beholder’s stance or, to be more precise, apparent focalization. Yet another is to examine ideologies of sanctified and lay spaces, and their attributed locations. The Hebrew Root hlg (g-l-h) and Its Derivatives The Hebrew verb formations of hlg (g-l-h) in the Qal, Hiph. and Hoph., once also in the Niph., meaning “go away, be sent away, remove/d,” have different significations than the Piel and some of the Qal formations denoting various instances of “uncover.”2 The distribution of the two signification groups varies as well: while hlg = “uncover” is regular in the Torah and the historical books, also in some prophetic books where the second signification is altogether or mostly lacking, whereas hlg = “move, remove, be moved” begins appearing in the middle of 2 Kings and abounds in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah from chapter 40 onward; it is present also in Ezra and Nehemiah 1. In this article, as is her usual habit, the author does not capitalize the words god and bible, and the Hebrew God’s name is given as yhwh. These forms represent the author’s view that the commonly accepted usages (God, Bible, yhwh) reflect a privileging of the words’ referents, which the author does not share. Capitalization in quoted materials within the article, or its lack, follows the original materials exactly as they are. 2. For our discussion it hardly matters whether etymologically or semantically the root should be recognized as one or more original sequences. 31 Territory and Identity (four times), Amos, Lamentations, Esther, and once in 1 Samuel (4:21). The...