Cultures of Mobility, Migration, and Religion in Ancient Israel and Its World

Eric M. Trinka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000544114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book examines the relationship between mobility, lived religiosities, and conceptions of divine personhood as they are preserved in textual corpora and material culture from Israel, Judah, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.

By integrating evidence of the form and function of religiosities in contexts of mobility and migration, this volume reconstructs mobility-informed aspects of civic and household religiosities in Israel and its world. Readers will find a robust theoretical framework for studying cultures of mobility and religiosities in the ancient past, as well as a fresh understanding of the scope and texture of mobility-informed religious identities that composed broader Yahwistic religious heritage.

Cultures of Mobility, Migration, and Religion in Ancient Israel and Its World will be of use to both specialists and informed readers interested in the history of mobilities and migrations in the ancient Near East, as well as those interested in the development of Yahwism in its biblical and extra-biblical forms.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003215813-1

The Origins and Direction of the Project

Biblical scholars have long observed that key stories of Israel's origins and existence are stories of movement. However, it is only in recent years that scholars have begun to explore the biblical texts using the modern category of migration as a heuristic device. The primordial myths of Genesis ground the human condition in the experiences of expulsion, wandering, and dispersion. Ancestral traditions catalog the movements of Abraham and Sarah's journeys, Hagar's eviction, Jacob's flight from Esau, and the sale of Joseph into foreign servitude. The stories of exodus from Egypt and Wilderness wanderings, as well as repeated moments of displacement and relocation at the hands of different hegemonic powers, reveal cyclical themes of promise, salvation, judgement, and restoration. Collectively, these narratives establish the claim that Israel's story of coming to know their God, Yahweh, unfolds primarily through the experiences of people who are on the move.

In a similar way, historians of ancient Israel have spent the better part of half a century attempting to clarify which aspects of textually recorded movement are verifiable within the historical record. The importance of answering questions of this latter type revolves around the concerns to elucidate not only the particulars of Israel's emergence but also to better understand how historic instances of movement, namely those of the so-called exilic period, relate to the compositional history of the biblical text.

All societies operate according to socially patterned norms of space and movement. These cultures of mobility influence, among other things, conceptions of divinity and religious praxis. This book investigates prevailing cultures of mobility and migration in the ancient Near East and their influence on religious life in Israel and Judah. My primary goal is to reexamine familiar evidence of mobility and migration in ancient Israel, Judah, and their environs through the lens of modern mobility and migration studies. The need for such a treatment arises from the reality that much biblical scholarship that has so far attempted migration-informed readings of biblical texts has frequently done so with limited reference to the fields of mobility and migration studies or, more problematically, by shallowly representing migration studies literature for the purpose of introducing sleek or provocative readings.

Readers have become increasingly attuned to the reality that race, gender, class, and other subjectivities have a purchase on the interpretive enterprise. It is time that our own ideological assumptions about mobility are explicitly accounted for as hermeneutical factors and that cultures of mobility within and around the biblical corpus become part of our historical reconstructions and textual expositions. Just as with readings that pay careful attention to other subjectivities, mobility and migration-informed readings must account for the world of the reader and the world(s) of the biblical corpus. This is no simple task since modern cultures of mobility do not always maintain parity with the world of the text. Nevertheless, our readings will be enriched by exploring texts for the cultures of mobility that they contain, affirm, and contest.

This book does not present a theology of migration. Many such works already exist and scholars who exegete biblical texts in response to current contexts of migration should be lauded for their efforts. The findings of this monograph may even be useful for such work. Nevertheless, the purpose of this volume is to present dominant cultures of mobility in ancient Israel and Judah and their worlds with a view to how religiosities were responsive to both mundane and extraordinary experiences of human movement. In this vein, I aim to accomplish two primary tasks. The first is reinterpreting material cultural assemblages for evidence of migrations and mobility-related uses of objects and spaces. The second, and broader task, is analyzing biblical and extra-biblical texts for patterns of religiosity and trajectories of internal religious pluralism evidenced in contexts of mobility. An important area of research that lies beyond the purview of this volume is the networks of mobility and exchange between the Aegean and the Levant during the same time scope. Much research has been conducted on such Mediterranean mobilities. I refer readers to the appropriate starting points for such scholarship below.¹

The seeds of this project were sown several years ago when I first read Anne Porter's Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilization.² Porter's work is not a history of mobile pastoralism, as she acknowledges herself, but a treatise on archaeological and historiographical methods. Ultimately, she views the divide between sedentary societies and mobile pastoralists as an intellectual construct and “not an inevitable condition of animal husbandry.”³ The question driving her investigation is: “What happens to our reconstructions of the past when the mobile and sedentary components of the ancient world are thoroughly interrelated parts of the same societies?”⁴ Porter's work has transformed scholarly discussions of the relationship between sedentary and mobile populations in the ancient Near East. It is no longer acceptable to speak in the traditional binary terms of agrarian vs. pastoral or urban vs. rural because ancient Levantine and Mesopotamian people might have been any combination of these things at different points in their lifetime.

The dimorphic social model that Porter challenges is rooted in an ancient metanarrative that society's essence is marked by the qualities of emplacement, sedentarism, and stasis. Accordingly, movers, in all of their various dimensions, are investigated primarily from the perspective of statis and often understood as undermining or destabilizing the structures of “real” (read: sedentary) society. Social dimorphism is not an invention of scholars studying the ancient world. Instead, the use of the model began through ethnographic comparison as anthropologists built on the basic premise of modern sociology that the sedentary is the core of social existence. Sociologists have since, however, begun to deconstruct this fundamental assumption on which their discipline was predicated. In response to the spatial and mobilities turns, some have championed the position that society is better understood as being constituted by persons and things that are essentially mobile and in dynamic entanglement with one another.⁵ Perhaps an understanding that society is generated through movement underlies the overlap in the terminology for mobility and ethics captured in words like the Akkadian alāku or the Hebrew הלך/הלכה.

Just as today, mobility, as both dynamic and symbiotic forms of movement, lies at the core of ancient people's existence. Even for those who themselves never traveled far from home, the political and socio-cultural environment of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages was one of intensive inter-regional movement and cross-cultural exchange. Although cities and smaller settlements constituted centers of political power and social control, we should not mistake such emplaced structures for immobility or assume that they were the only sites of encounter, exchange, innovation, or sophistication. Those aspects of society that appear to be unmoving are often created by social and resource flows that serve as points of circulation to facilitate movement. Many seemingly static places undergo movement on their own, albeit at different scales than other people and things.⁶

The cities of the ancient Near East – those places that historians often consider to be the most sedentary – required massive systems of mobilities for water and land management, evidenced in complex canal systems, interdependent herding economies, agricultural and resource distribution circuits, and circulations of labor capital. The oldest-known Mesopotamian nomenclature for a road is the Sumerian logogram KASKAL, which is written by drawing the intersection of two sets of parallel lines.⁷ Even though the sign is used in later Akkadian to signify harranu (road) or hulu (path), it serves as a reminder that roads are not simply linear connections between points. If so, one set of parallel lines would do. Instead, roads are construed primarily as cross-roads and therefore as nodes in networks of encounter and exchange from which society emerges.⁸ As we will see, it was frequently the mobile elements of society that both made centralized governance possible and could also most easily upset political balance. Mobility, then as now, was simultaneously a source of power and a means of response to it.

The ubiquity of human movement in these ancient contexts raises questions about the effects of small- and large-scale mobility on the religious lives of persons at all levels of society. Epistemologies (ways of knowing) are shaped primarily by ontology (ways of being). The ways we move through the world contribute to our constructions and conceptions of it. Prevailing cultures of mobility influenced the ways persons envisioned themselves as agents in earthly and cosmic landscapes and informed how religious practitioners understood/portrayed their deities. It was Porter's work that first caused me to revisit earlier claims made by biblical scholars about the relationship between Israelite religion and mobile lifeways, and to question whether experiences of mobility/movement instigate unique conceptions of divinity.

Scholars have intensively explored inter-cultural exchange between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Some have even interpreted the data using the general rubric of migration, exploring movement and trade as catalysts of contact and conduits of interchange.⁹ Yet, among most scholars working beyond the boundaries of the Agean/Mediterranean, integration of current migration theory and data remains lacking, and problematic diffusionist models of cultural transfer persist.¹⁰ Perspectives cultivated vis-à-vis the “new mobilities paradigm,” which has influenced practical and theoretical trajectories in migration studies, are also conspicuously absent.¹¹ To the extent that movement, mobility, and migration are acknowledged to play a part in the development of Israelite and Judahite religious identity, few, if any, scholars have attempted to explain the processes of religious exchange and development by reference to growing collections of data on migrants’ religiosities. The challenge, then, is to bring collective findings on how migrants actually move and on what migrants actually do with religion to bear on our studies of religious life in the ancient world.

My intention going forward is not so much to intervene in discussions regarding external religious influences from Israel and Judah's neighbors. Much work has been undertaken to shed light on such socio-cultural developments in Late Bronze and Iron Age Canaan.¹² I am instead more interested in showing how findings from mobility and migration studies provide new angles to approach the intersections of mobilities and religiosities in Israel and Judah. Reconstructions of the contents and functions of Israelite religion ought to rely on findings about how human experiences of mobility and movement catalyze processes of ethnogenesis, inform cultural production and transmission, and facilitate the exchange, translation, and accrual of practices. The outcome of analyzing relevant textual, iconographic, and archaeological data through the lenses of these foundational evidential bodies is a fresh set of conclusions regarding internal religious diversity in Israel and Judah from the time of Israel's emergence in the Central Highlands until the exilic period.

Bodies of Evidence Considered

In many ways, this project is an acceptance of Thomas Tweed's invitation for “scholars to attend to the multiple ways that religious flows have left traces, transforming people and places, the social arena and the natural terrain.”¹³ The primary objective at the start is to locate and analyze the various data points, be they textual, material cultural, or ethnographic analogs, that can shed light on the operationalization of religiosity in the ancient world.¹⁴ Investigations of mobility, migration, and religion in the ancient past share the common challenge of constructively integrating textual and archaeological data. Those working to reconstruct ancient mobilities and religiosities must challenge the oft-held assumption that mobile elements of ancient society and their cultural lifeways are not traceable in the archaeological record. Despite common misconceptions, mobile persons do leave traceable remains in the archaeological record. The problem is that archaeologists of the biblical periods often operate according to the assumption that society is to be understood primarily according to the activities and ideas of sedentary populations.¹⁵ Not only are scholars often looking for religion and mobility in the wrong places, they are also not always asking the correct questions about material culture found in what are presumed to be primarily sedentary contexts. This is where Porter's pursuit of indirect evidence proves such assumptions otherwise.¹⁶ The archaeological record is rich with artifacts that can be assessed to better understand the lifeways of ancient peoples when texts are silent on such matters; be it in non-literate mobile societies or in contexts of mobility where texts do not maintain the primacy of place in the religious lives of movers.¹⁷ What is required is simply a mindset to ask how seemingly situated remains bear the markers of previous mobilities.

The goal of understanding religion in the ancient world is not achieved simply by unearthing artifacts and cataloging them by relative location, dating, and material attributes.¹⁸ The objective of “thinking from things” in a way that moves beyond cataloging material attributes and establishing chronologies is also fraught with challenges but recognizing the inherent difficulties of studying religion in the archaeological record should not preclude further attempts to understand or make informed claims about the possible uses and attendant meaning(s) of material culture.¹⁹ In a similar way, we must approach the worlds of the text and the archaeological record with due humility, recognizing the very real chasms that stand between the lived experiences of ancients and moderns. Nevertheless, I do not assume that the essence of human personhood has changed so much across time so a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceptual Frameworks for Studying Mobility, Migration, and Religion in the Ancient Past
• 3 Cultures of Mobility in the Lands Around Canaan
• 4 Religiosity(ies) on the Move around Canaan
• 5 Cultures of Mobility and Migration in Canaan, Israel, and Judah
• 6 Yahweh: Israel's Mobile Deity
• 7 Mobility-Informed Religiosity(ies) in Israel and Judah
• 8 Conclusion: Final Reflections on Divinity and Religiosities in Contexts of Mobility
• Bibliography
• Index