CHAPTER 2

Borders, Space, and Identity in Second Temple Literature

Second Temple Jewish literature, written between the second half of the first millennium B.C.E. and the first century C.E., was remarkably diverse. The writers whose work is examined in this chapter lived in the land of Israel from the time of the return of the exiles (538 B.C.E.) until the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.). As residents, they each felt a link to the land they viewed as belonging to the Jewish nation.

The variety of works we possess represent groups and individuals who were active in different centuries, regions, and political circumstances. Indeed, perspectival differences may exist between authors living at the same time and in the same place. As such, the categorization of these works as one is based primarily on the identity of their authors as Jews within a particular—if broad—time frame. The umbrella of Jewish identity includes those with different worldviews—followers of various systems of Jewish law, myriad political affiliations and sympathies, and distinct theological beliefs. Yet given their self-identification as Jews, these writers shared an important common foundation: they all relied on the Jewish scriptures as their central, organizing, cultural authoritative tradition.

The prominence of the Jewish scriptures in the literature is pervasive; ancient Jewish works are dominated by biblical commentaries or apocryphal revisions and expansions of biblical texts. Yet this common textual heritage did not impose unity on these writers’ approaches to the question of the borders of the land of Israel and/or the role of those borders in shaping identity. This is, in part, because the biblical heritage itself was heterogeneous on this topic. The holy scriptures lay out several different schemes explicitly.

MAP 3. Biblical borders. Copyright Reuven Soffer.

These diverse narratives facilitated the development of different ideas regarding the borders of the land and Jewish national territory. Each was influenced by one or more of the available biblical border schemes. The differences in the approaches reflect demographic changes and shifting geopolitical constellations within Jewish society and in the surrounding areas, both near and far. This chapter describes and examines divergences and permutations of the territorial component in Second Temple Jewish identities, using contemporary works to illustrate how the authors’ diverse Jewish identities relate to the region they present as Jewish national territory.

The reality of the Jewish existence in the land was a primary factor in shaping perception. In this context, the demographic dimension of the shifting space in which Jews continually resided, along with the administrative and political reality—which was also fluid—molded the way space was perceived by the Jews at this time. However, as we have noted, compositions written in similar geopolitical and demographic conditions can present divergent pictures of the scope of the land. This is a result of varying views on the different authors’ identity—in one case, even within the writing of the same person.

The chronological approach is key in this chapter, and it will help guide the discussion through the historical and geopolitical settings of the various compositions. Even within relatively stable political contexts, different perspectives on the borders of the land demand close analytic attention. While the Persian period witnessed neither significant geopolitical nor dramatic demographic change, contemporary biblical texts—Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles—differ radically in their depictions of the land. An examination of this difference can help us understand the objectives of the texts and consequently the range of concerns within Jewish society at the time. Territorial orientations in these and later works—the book of Judith and 1 Maccabees, for example—reveal the diversity of the Jewish political-historical imagination. Compositions such as Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon raise the question of the attitude toward a foreign populace and the understanding of God’s promise of the land to Abraham. Finally, in looking at the works of Flavius Josephus, we see depictions of borders, reading them in the context of the author’s multifaceted persona and complex biography. This serves to elucidate the various territorial schemes and their applications at that pivotal moment.

But the divergences and variance in the way the land is presented in the different compositions are an outgrowth of more than just a changing geopolitical and demographic reality; they are a question of identity.

BOOKS OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD

The Edict of Cyrus, authorizing the return of the Judean exiles to Zion (539 B.C.E.), initiated a period of approximately two hundred years of Persian rule that held until the conquest of the region by Alexander of Macedon (332 B.C.E.). Persian imperial holdings across the Euphrates were broken up into administrative provinces governed by satraps. One such province was named “Yehud,” as it extended more or less across the former territory of the historical Southern Kingdom of Judah—Yehudah—destroyed by Babylonia in 586 B.C.E. Thus, the land to which the exiles returned was geographically the same as that from which their forebears had been exiled, but it had developed into a very different political and cultural milieu. For instance, Yehud differed from the defunct kingdom both in its political identity as a Persian province and in its religious ethos. The latter is clearly demonstrated; while archaeological findings of the First Temple period include plentiful cultic figures and idolatrous images, Jewish communities in Yehud in the Persian period are marked by the near-total absence of such objects.1

The Hebrew Bible contains two sets of historiographic works on the period of the Return to Zion, which are distinguished by different concerns that both explain and likely motivated an understanding of their identity. The first set consists of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which we see an exclusive focus on the community returning from Babylon. These books show a complete disregard for the descendants of those subjects of the Kingdom of Israel who were not exiled at its destruction.² Perhaps more surprising is that they do not address the descendants of subjects of the Kingdom of Judah who were not exiled, those fellow Judeans present in the province at the time of the return.³ The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, in contrast, employ an expansive view of both the land and the ethnos as they relate to the entire chain of events from the primordial Adam to the Edict of Cyrus.4

Ezra and Nehemiah devote considerable attention to the places the exiles passed on their way back “to Jerusalem and to Judah, each man to his city” (Neh 7:6) and where they resumed residence, presenting lists of both the exiles themselves and the places to which they returned.⁵ From these lists a map can be generated that partially overlaps with the one created from the locations of Persian coins found and seals inscribed with “Yehud,” the province that extended from Ein Gedi in the southeast to Bethel in the north and Jericho in the northeast.⁶ None of these lists indicates locations in the Galilee or the coastal plain. Samaria is chronicled as the region that Sanballat presided over as governor, a figure listed among “the enemies of Judah” (Ezr 4:1; Neh 6:1). None of these locations is portrayed as belonging to the inheritance of the biblical patriarchs then held in foreign hands.

The only mention of Jews living in other lands is found in Nehemiah 4:6, which refers to “the Jews living near them” (emphasis added), in the midst of “the enemies of Judah.” The verse relates their reports of the oppressive restrictions under which they live. In other words, it represents them as Jews among the enemies of Judah, where they suffer oppression; there is no other territorial designation for their dwelling place, nor connection to this territory.

Ezra and Nehemiah’s focus on the harsh reality and experiences of the returning exiles involves a relationship between ethnos and territory that is highly local. There is no yearning for the historical districts of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, such as the Galilee and Samaria, and certainly not for the farthest reaches included in the biblical borders of the promised land, such as the southern regions of what are today Syria and Lebanon. Furthermore, there is no hint of a relationship with the population that had remained. As Sara Japhet has noted, this approach dovetails with the separatist approach of the ideology expressed in Ezra and Nehemiah and with Ezra’s character. Ezra acted to banish women who were not Jewish and who were not from the “seven Canaanite nations” so that they would not integrate into Jewish society (Ezr 9–10). This isolationism is also expressed in the author’s refusal to include the “enemies of Judah and Benjamin” who wished to join with the returnees and rebuild the Temple (Ezr 4:1–4).7 Thus, these works depict their geographical borders in minimalist fashion; they suggest estrangement from the population that remained in the districts that had been the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel.⁸

Unlike the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which depict events that occurred in the Persian period,9 Chronicles, which was composed at the same time, eschews focus on the returning exiles and instead recounts the entire history of the nation up until the Edict of Cyrus. So instead of depicting exiles returning to their land, it primarily relates the history of Israel living in its land prior to exile. Furthermore, the author emphasizes the glory days of the united kingdom of David and Solomon.

Accordingly, Chronicles foregrounds a geographical focus on the land of Israel, an area extending “from the River Shihor in Egypt to Lebo-hamath” (1 Chr 13:5). It focuses on the entire region in which the biblical people of Israel lived, scarcely addressing other nations dwelling there.¹⁰ Even when it relates to the period of the schism between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, Chronicles depicts the land and the people as connected. For instance, it describes Hezekiah sending his “decree . . . throughout all of Israel, from Beer-sheba to Dan that they come and keep the Passover for the God of Israel in Jerusalem,” by means of “couriers” who summon “all Israel and Judah” (2 Chr 30:5–6). Unlike Ezra and Nehemiah, this text addresses the population of Israel that remained after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel and the expulsion of its residents, demonstrating its expansive demographic as well as geographic orientation.

A similarly expansive picture arises from the description of the religious reforms of Josiah, who purified “Judah and Jerusalem” and “the towns of Manasseh and Ephraim and Simeon, as far as Naphtali” (2 Chr 34:6–7), three of which are tribal districts of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. No parallel passages in the books of Kings’ recounting of the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah display this interest in the region of the Kingdom of Israel and the population that was not driven into exile. Additionally, there is a relative increase in frequency of the use of the name “land of Israel,”11 nomenclature that is not found in Ezra and Nehemiah, which only refer to Judah. Neither 1 nor 2 Chronicles ever mentions or recognizes the existence of non-Jews dwelling in the land, suggesting that the foreign groups living there were considered organic parts of the nation.¹² In contrast, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah focus on the struggle of the returnees to Zion against “enemies of Judah and Benjamin” (Ezr 4:1) that surrounded Yehud, emphasizing the tribes that made up the Southern Kingdom after the schism that occupied territory largely coextensive with Yehud.¹³ Accordingly, Chronicles, which is not restricted to events contemporary with its composition but relates a broader sweep of more ancient history, features a more extensive geographic and demographic perspective. Unlike Ezra and Nehemiah, whose territorial orientation is restricted to the districts to which the Babylonian exiles returned, Chronicles expresses the links between regions of the land and the survivors of “Israel,” considered in its broadest demographic and geographical senses—comprising the populations and domains of the historical Kingdoms of Judah and Israel extending “from Beer-sheba to Dan” (2 Chr 30:5) and even beyond.

Thus, biblical works written in the Persian period—in the province of Yehud, as far as we can tell—contained divergent concerns. The differences between Ezra and Nehemiah, on the one hand, and Chronicles, on the other, are not limited to the fact that Ezra and Nehemiah described the dreadful present and Chronicles the glory of the past. Their approaches to identity led to a crucial difference in the understanding of territory. As Japhet has shown, Chronicles features an expansive, autochthonous national perspective, with an inclusive approach that deemphasizes the exile and represents all the residents of the land, considered broadly as the land of Israel, as part of one entity called “all Israel.” Connections between its constituent groups are represented mainly through marital ties.14 This demographic focus involves a broad territorial perspective that includes all regions of the land of Israel. In Ezra and Nehemiah, with their more ethnic approach and isolationist, exclusionist tendencies, the territory extends over a much smaller area. This region overlaps with the boundaries of the province Yehud and approximates the area of the Kingdom of Judah. These contrasting examples demonstrate the intersection between each text’s mode of Jewish national self-identification and its territorial orientation.

THE BOOK OF JUDITH: A DUAL CONCEPTION OF TERRITORY AND IDENTITY

While in biblical literature from the Persian period different spatial approaches are evident, the book of Judith reflects a dual approach to the land and its confines. The first of these approaches views the space in which the nation lives as a “mountain,” extending from northern Samaria south to Jerusalem. The second favors a space that includes the Galilee and the eastern banks of the Jordan, an area that overlaps with the biblical united kingdom that included both Judah and Israel.

Written as a historical novella, the text focuses on a heroine named Judith (Yehudit), who rescues the returning exiles. While Judith’s name recalls Judea, the Southern Kingdom, and its people, the text refers to the returnees from Babylonian exile as “Israel.” Judith saves Israel by killing Holofernes, the general leading Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army, who had sacked Jerusalem, burned the First Temple, and initiated the exile, making this text historiographic but ahistorical.

Dating of the book of Judith varies from the Persian until the Hasmonean period. Persian control ended in 332 B.C.E. From that year until the Hasmonean revolt (167–164 B.C.E.) and the establishment of the Hasmonean state, control over the land of Israel changed hands a few times. First, the land was ruled by heirs to Alexander’s generals in accordance with the resolution of the Wars of the Diadochi in the twenty years following Alexander’s death. After that, the Ptolemaic kingdom from the south took control; later, the Seleucid kingdom from the north reigned. As we have no historiographic work that can be dated conclusively to these years, it is difficult to glean the orientation of the author of the book of Judith—which may have been written during this period or slightly before or after it—with any precision. This intermixing of the Persian and Babylonian periods necessarily contributes to the difficulties in dating the book.15

However, from the Persian period to the reign of the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus, the Jewish community maintained the boundaries of the Persian province of Yehud. Therefore, at least vis-à-vis demographic-political concerns, fixing the date of its composition is less crucial; instead, we must focus on the gap between the district of Jewish settlement, limited to Judea, and the region of “the mountain,” which in this text includes Samaria, emphasized as the area occupied by the Jews. At the time, Samaria was not part of the Persian administrative unit Yehud and was, in fact, settled by Samaritans, not Jews.¹⁶

Judith interweaves a dual conception of the boundaries of the land. The first layer, which prevails in most of the work, displays a regional orientation focused on the mountainous area extending from Jerusalem to the northern slopes of Samaria. The plot is structured around Holofernes’s military as its campaign proceeds south, conquers the coastal plain, and encamps in the foothills of northern Samaria. “The Israelites living in Judea” (Jdt 4:1) are seized with panic.¹⁷ They prepare for battle and close the “passes up to the hill country because access into Judea was through them” (4:7). This situates the nation of Israel in the central mountain region. A similar picture arises from an analysis of the speech of Achior, king of the Ammonites, who relates the history of Israel as the “people living in the hill country” (5:5) and who have done so since they crossed the Jordan “and took possession of all the hill country” (5:15). After returning from exile they “reoccupied the hill country because it was uninhabited” (5:19). This speech answers the question Holofernes asks: “Who is this nation that lives in the hill country?” (5:3).18 Thus, according to this textual layer, the nation is represented as “Israel,”¹⁹ dwelling on the mountain, and the boundaries of its land are those of the mountain. This is also what we see in Judith’s song:

Assyria came from out of the mountains from the north;

He came with myriads of warriors.

Their numbers blocked up the wadis;

And their cavalry covered the hills.

He boasted that he would set fire to my territory. [Jdt 16:3–4]

Assyria made threats but did not accomplish its intent, although the coast that functioned as the gateway to the hill country fell into its hands. Accordingly, we see the region of “Israel” identified with the hill country.

The territory of the “Sons of Israel” is described as extending from the far side of the mountain in northern Samaria. The text maintains a resounding silence regarding the presence of ethnic Samaritans; it treats Samaria as a territory exclusively occupied by and belonging to Israel.²⁰ This presentation implicitly erases the boundary between the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and treats Samaria and Judah as a single territorial unit. Surprisingly, it refers to this region as Judea rather than the broader geographic nomenclature, “Israel.” Thus, for instance: “He went towards Esdraelon, near Dothan, which is opposite the great ridge of Judea” (Jdt 3:10). Dothan is located at the northwest edge of Samaria and referred to as the “gate” of Judea.

As we know that this area was populated by Samaritans in the Second Temple period, we can read this text as an anti-Samaritan polemic. Judith’s author considers Samaria, together with the Temple in Jerusalem, as belonging to one territorial unit called “Judea” yet refers to those dwelling on the mountain, which includes Samaria and Jerusalem, as “Israel.” This is significant, as Samaritans referred to themselves as Israel21 while not recognizing the Jerusalem Temple. The dynamic between the uncharacteristic employment of “Judea” as a broad territorial designation and the mismatched employment of “Israel” as the ethnic signifier that excludes Samaritans suggests a claim on the land that disregards—and even actively obscures—the people living there. In other words, when the author employs incompatible geographic and ethnic nomenclature to incorporate the entire mountain into Judea while extending the name Israel to the entire Jewish ethnos, it claims the land of the Samaritans while excluding them from the ethnic identity they assert.

The second territorial stratum appears near the end of the work, when Judith triumphs and the siege is lifted. Here we find mention of members of the “House of Israel” residing in Gilead, the Galilee, and Transjordan who join in the pursuit of Holofernes: “The men of Gilead and those in Galilee outflanked them, causing heavy losses until they were past Damascus and its borders” (Jdt 15:5). In other words, in the course of the great victory, members of Israel are revealed to be living in Gilead and Galilee.

While the Jewish people are referred to as Israel, the central region associated with the Kingdom of Israel is referred to as part of Judah. Indeed, over the course of the entire work the nation is represented as “Israel,” and its territory, identified as “the mountain,” includes Samaria as well as the historical Kingdom of Judah. The book thus aspires to identify as Israel as it pursues the Babylonian enemies of Judah in the wake of their defeat. This pursuit links the regions of the Galilee, Gilead, and Transjordan to Judea, exemplifying national territorial aspirations that are not limited to the specific area of Jewish settlement in Judea to which the exiles returned. Rather, the plot of Judith expands the boundaries of the region from those of the Southern Kingdom and Persian province to those of the biblical united kingdom of David and Solomon, both northward and east of the Jordan.22 The link between these territorial aspirations and the identity of Israel is twofold: first, in the focus on the area of “the mountain” that includes Samaria; second, through the aspiration to return to the boundaries of the historical Kingdom of Israel, including the Galilee and Transjordan. This passage embodies the conception of Jewish national territory that includes Samaria, Galilee, and Transjordan and its influence in the shaping of Israel as a national identity.

This second approach, then, is much closer to Chronicles; the more restricted layer, which depicts only the hill country, is much wider than that of Ezra and Nehemiah and includes Samaria.

1 MACCABEES

Unlike the obscurity surrounding both the dating of Judith and the cultural orientation of its author, 1 Maccabees is an explicitly historical work, written in the land of Israel in the Hasmonean period, and thus rooted in an identifiable time and place.²³ After hundreds of years during which Jewish life was contained in a Persian province that then became a district of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms, a province that extended only to the boundaries of historical Judah, the Hasmonean period witnessed significant expansion through a series of conquests.

During the reign of Jonathan (161–142 B.C.E.), evidently, Transjordanian areas were conquered. Under his successor Simon (142–135 B.C.E.), Gezer and Jaffa were seized, creating an access route to the sea. John Hyrcanus (135–104 B.C.E.) conquered Samaria and southern Judea or Idumea. Judah Aristobulus (104–103 B.C.E.), son of John Hyrcanus, expanded the Hasmonean state northward to the Galilee. But it was his brother Alexander Jannaeus who brought the Hasmoneans to the acme of their territorial expansion.

The book of 1 Maccabees was born of advanced political consciousness. One of the primary features of this awareness is its attempt to sketch the broad confines of the Hasmonean Kingdom as similar—though not identical—to the biblical confines of the twelve tribes and the united kingdom of David and Solomon.

The book is marked by the biblical style of a writer who supported and identified with the Hasmonean state.24 His proximity to the Hasmonean court provided him with access to official documents that he incorporated into the work. The composition can be dated, apparently, to sometime before the end of the reign of John Hyrcanus, who is mentioned at the end of the work. As his death is not related, the inclination is to date it to the period of his reign during the last third of the second century B.C.E. In the will of Mattathias, as it appears in the text, the central place that the author accords Simon, the son who became father of the Hasmonean dynasty, is evident: “Your brother Simon, I know, is a man of counsel; Always listen to him; he shall serve as your father” (1 Mc 2:65).²⁵ The will thus functions as the loyal author’s justification of the Hasmonean dynasty that descended from Mattathias.

The importance of the territorial dimension for the author of 1 Maccabees becomes unmistakable when we analyze the way in which he sums up the reign of Simon (142–135 B.C.E.). Simon, who established the Hasmoneans as rulers of an independent polity that was recognized by the Seleucids, appears to be the leading figure in the eyes of the author.²⁶ The panegyric summing up Simon’s reign emphasizes the lands he added to the country, the territories through which he broadened its borders:

The land was at peace as long as Simon lived.

He sought the good of his people.

They welcomed his rule

and his glory as long as he lived.

By means of his glory he captured Joppe to be a port

and secured access to the islands of the sea.

He proceeded to extend the territory of his nation

after conquering the land. [1 Mc 14:4–6]

Antiochus VII Sidetes refuses to recognize Simon’s conquests and approaches him in protest: “You are holding Joppe and Gazara and the Akra in Jerusalem, cities of my kingdom. You have laid waste to their territories and caused grave damage in our domains, and you have seized many districts of my kingdom” (1 Mc 15:28–29).

Simon responds with a twofold retort: “We have not taken land that is not ours nor have we conquered anything that belongs to others. Rather, we have taken our ancestral heritage which had been unjustly conquered by our enemies using one opportunity or another. Now we, seizing our opportunity, lay claim to our ancestral heritage” (1 Mc 15:33–34).

The author of 1 Maccabees was strongly influenced by the scriptures. The identity of the nation that he invokes throughout the first part of the work is “Israel”; thus, the territorial region conquered by the Hasmoneans presented in the work relates to the borders of the united kingdom. The text displays a particularly expansive territorial orientation. The region is represented as the area ruled by Lysias, governor of the western Seleucid Empire, “from the Euphrates river to the borders of Egypt” (1 Mc 3:32); it corresponds to the borders of the biblical promised land now under Greek sovereignty.27 The name of the land in the first nine chapters is given as “Israel,” apparently under biblical influence. In these first nine chapters of the text, “Israel” is used exclusively to describe the nation residing in Judea, apparently expressing the author’s preferred national identity. Yet in the second part of the work, the author largely shifts to using “Jews” as a result of his incorporation of documents that employed the official name of the Hasmonean state,28 as used in its correspondence with foreign entities.²⁹

Throughout the book’s narrative, the territorial region from which Judah Maccabee and his brothers, Jonathan and Simon, wage their wars is referred to as Judea, although some battles occur in the Galilee, Transjordan, the far southern side of the mountain, and the southern plain, all areas historically associated with the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The map of battles discussed in chapter 5 aligns with a map of the broadly conceived biblical land of Israel. These battles aimed to rescue “brothers” from the hands of foreigners oppressing them in Edom, Gilead, the Galilee, and the southern plain. The names of the regions in 1 Maccabees 5 are given as the Sons of Esau (5:3), Ammon (5:6), and the land of the Philistines (5:66–68)—all biblical names that were not in use at the time of the book’s composition. It appears that the chapter is attempting to tie the battles of Judah and his brothers to the conquest of the land by Joshua bin Nun.³⁰ The Hasmonean brothers did not complete the conquest of the entire land; this was something accomplished by their descendants. Still, the language links the ethnos Israel, at least according to the way in which 1 Maccabees is structured,³¹ to the regions of the expansive land of Israel, which aligns with the boundaries of the united kingdom, or at least the boundaries of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel as finally attained by the Hasmoneans during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus.

This composition is unique inasmuch as it served as a form of propaganda for the Hasmonean court. It anchors the Hasmonean domain in the memory of the biblical past and creates a link between the territory in the glory days of the First Temple and the territorial apex during Hasmonean rule.

A VIEW OF EXPANDED TERRITORY IN THE BOOK OF JUBILEES AND GENESIS APOCRYPHON

The book of Jubilees and the work called Genesis Apocryphon found at Qumran32 are generally designated as belonging to the genre researchers call the “rewritten Bible.”³³ Both works are revisions of the biblical narrative in Genesis. The end of Jubilees additionally relates in brief the exodus from Egypt as well as the people’s entrance into the land.

Jubilees dates to the second century B.C.E., and the tendency in recent years has been to date it to the latter part of that century, placing it in the heart of the Hasmonean period.³⁴ The chronological framework of the book is organized according to biblical Sabbatical (shemittah) Year (the agrarian sabbatical cycles, units of seven years) and the Jubilee Year that occurs after seven sabbatical cycles. The Hebrew Bible stipulates that once every seven years the land rests for one year (Lv 25:1–7); after seven such cycles, the fiftieth year is celebrated as the Jubilee, a year in which the land lies fallow, slaves are released, and fields that were once sold return to their original owners (Lv 25:8–13). James Scott proposes a theory about the author’s choice in counting the chronology of world history according to Sabbatical and Jubilee Years, relating it to the land of Israel and the redemption of the land as expressed in Leviticus 25.35 This chapter lays out the commandments of agrarian cycles and the Jubilee Year, along with twenty references to “the land.” In the Jewish scriptures, periods of time are closely related to the land, often inseparably so, such that the climax of the book of Jubilees, chronologically organized according to Sabbatical and Jubilee Years, is chapter 50, the final chapter, which ties the commandments of the Sabbatical Year and Jubilee to the people’s entrance into the land.

Michael Segal has argued that according to Jubilees, unlike the Hebrew Bible, the special, chosen status of the people of Israel was established at the creation of the world.³⁶ Jubilees, it would seem, also considers another issue differently from the authoritative scriptures. The author revises the biblical account of the way in which the land was designated for the Jewish people. According to Jubilees, the name “land of Canaan” was attached to the area because Canaan, the son of Ham, stole the land from the descendants of Shem, even after being cautioned by his brother (Jub. 10:28–35).37 Accordingly, the chosen land was destined for the chosen people from the very dawn of creation, not as a result of the selection of Abraham and the covenantal promise, as related in the biblical narrative in the Covenant of the Pieces. This primordial link between the land and its people accords with the author’s denial of legitimacy to all foreign presence in the land.

Resistance to foreign presence is expressed throughout Jubilees, something further demonstrated by the comparison between Jubilees and Genesis. In Genesis, Abraham commits to Lot, saying, “Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate: if you go north, I will go south; and if you go south, I will go north” (Gn 13:9). No such agreement appears in Jubilees. Rather, Lot chooses to separate from Abraham on his own; no commitment is made by Abraham to relinquish any of the land (Jub. 13:17). The covenant in Genesis between Isaac and the Philistines (Gn 26:26–31) is presented here as a covenant Isaac enters into under duress. The peace agreement between Isaac and the Philistines in the Hebrew Bible is different in Jubilees: Isaac curses them, telling them that they will be cast out from the land (Jub. 24:28–33). Isaac’s blessing of Esau includes a threat that whichever brother strikes against the other will forfeit the blessing of the land, so that Esau disinherits himself (Jub. 36:6).

The territorialism of the author of Jubilees is also expressed in the way that he deals with the disparity between the Hebrew Bible’s recounting of the expansive promised borders of the land and Abraham’s survey of it. Abraham is commanded, “Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you” (Gn 13:17). But according to the biblical account, after this promise Abraham’s journeys are restricted to the region between Beer-sheba and Hebron, an exceedingly limited area relative to the promised borders. The author of Jubilees changes the biblical command “Up, walk about the land” to a command of vision: “Rise and look upon the length and breadth of the land” (Jub. 13:21). Abraham’s view, according to Jubilees, is from the area around Shechem to Lebo-hamath.

Thus, albeit by way of hyperbole, the author of the Genesis Apocryphon also revises the text, demonstrating its designation as part of the genre of the rewritten Bible. Both works feature a division of the world between the sons and grandsons of Noah: in the Genesis Apocryphon in columns 16–17 and in Jubilees chapters 8–9. Thus, recognizable links can be seen between these texts.38

The Genesis Apocryphon is a more concise revision than Jubilees, and it does not feature the same sectarian characteristics (discussed in the next chapter). Likewise, Jubilees’ contention that Canaan stole the land is absent.³⁹ And yet the work contains a double establishment of the promised biblical borders, from the Euphrates to the Nile, as well as through Abraham’s visual survey and journey to survey the promised boundaries:

Then God appeared to me in a vision in the night, and said to me, “Go up to Ramat-Hatzor, which is to the north of Bethel, the place where you are living. Lift up your eyes and look to the east, to the west, to the south, and to the north, and see this entire Land that I am giving to you and to your descendants for all ages.” So on the following day I went up to Ramat-Hazor and I saw the land from this high point: from the River of Egypt up to Lebanon and Senir, and from the Great Sea to Hauran, and all the land of Gebal up to Kadesh, and the entire Great Desert that is east of Hauran and Senir, up to the Euphrates. He said to me, “To your descendants I will give all of this land, and they will inherit it for all ages.”

. . . So I, Abram, embarked to hike around and look at the land. I began to travel the circuit from the Gihon River, and came alongside the Sea until I reached Mount Taurus. I then traversed from alo[ng] this Great Sea of Salt and went alongside Mount Taurus to the east, through the breadth of the land, until I reached the Euphrates River. I journeyed along the Euphrates until I reached the Erythrean Sea, to the East, and was traveling along the Erythrean Sea until I reached the gulf of the Red Sea, which extends out from the Erythrean. I went around to the south until I reached the Gihon River, and then I returned, arriving at my house in safety [1QapGen, col. 21, lines 8–12, 15–19].40

The author of the scroll seeks to reconcile God’s initial promise to Abraham in Genesis, “Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you” (Gn 13:17), with the boundaries delineated in the Covenant of the Pieces two chapters later: “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates” (Gn 15:18). The Apocryphon’s author has to contend with a problem: following the divine promise, Abraham walks in the hill country and to Gerar in the northwestern Negev, making one trip to Dan and from there “as far as Hobah, which is north of Damascus” (Gn 14:14–15). The author opts for a maximalist solution, portraying Abraham as seeing far, traversing a huge area including Mesopotamia, Arabia, and northern Egypt. Thus, the author, in effect, creates a text that is external to Genesis yet aligns the space that Abraham is promised, if he walks it, to the promised broader spaces.

There is a link between the area that Abraham surveys and the place he traverses on his journey in Jubilees, which is actually the area of the original promised land. The excerpts from the fifteen scrolls of Jubilees found at Qumran⁴¹ suggest the significance of the work in the Qumran library. Additionally, the use of a solar calendar of 364 days similar to the solar calendar of the sectarians, together with other Jewish legal links,⁴² suggests that the author of Jubilees was close to the Qumran community. Yet beyond this, the work includes no explicit features associated with them, such as its collectivism and belief in predestination, which characterize the Damascus Document and the Community Rule. Therefore, even with the relatively large number of copies of Jubilees found among the Qumran scrolls, and the fact that the sole copy of the Genesis Apocryphon was likewise found at Qumran, it would be incorrect to identify the fervent and expansive territorialist bent in the work as linking the members of the sect with the territory of the land of Israel. The territorial dimension can therefore be instructive in the positioning of Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon in the circle surrounding the core group of the sect depicted in the Damascus Document and Community Rule. The status of territory differs here from its status in Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon. Thus, it appears that the author of the Apocryphon belonged to a group that used a solar calendar, but as to the question of territory his view does not accord with the aterritorialist approach that is reflected in the sect’s writings.

JOSEPHUS’S FLUCTUATING IDENTITY AND SHIFTS IN THE BOUNDARIES OF HIS LAND

Relationships between identity and territory can be elucidated only through the comparison of different works and authors. Yet Yosef ben Matityahu, also known as Flavius Josephus, who claimed to be a descendant of the Hasmoneans, underwent many changes, particularly over the thirty years in which he lived and wrote in Rome (70–100 C.E.). These changes are revealed in, among other things, the way in which he renders the borders of the land. Although written entirely in Rome, these works relate to events and places from the first half of his life in the land of Israel (37–70 C.E.).

Josephus’s first work, his Jewish War, was written at the court of the Flavian dynasty immediately upon his arrival in Rome. He arrived there on the heels of the destruction of the Second Temple, while the embers of its destruction smoldered and the memory of its glory still burned. In accordance with Greco-Roman literary conventions, Josephus incorporated geographic excurses to illustrate his descriptions of the battles. Polybius, for example, included the excurses in his account of Rome’s wars in the third and second centuries B.C.E.43 At the heart of Josephus’s text (J.W. 3.35–58), one finds a description of the land as an introduction to Vespasian’s invasion. In fact, this is the only comprehensive description of the land as a whole in a work featuring many local and regional geographic descriptions. Even in this detailed description, the encompassing borders of the Roman province of Judea, which replaced the Hasmonean state, are not related. Rather, it comprises descriptions of districts: Galilee, Perea (Transjordan), Samaria, Judea, and the kingdom of Agrippa that extended across the Golan, Trachonitis, and the Bashan. In his regional descriptions, Josephus indicates the borders of the Galilee and the region of Perea, the northern and southern borders of Samaria, and the borders of Judea. This is characterized by the fact that it lays out four regions44 without establishing the outer borders of the entire area, which he later defines as “the land of the Jews” (3.58).

Josephus’s omission appears conspicuous, particularly when compared to the works of the Roman geographer Strabo, which were well known to him.⁴⁵ In contrast to Josephus, Strabo opens his description of Italy with a survey of its external borders (Geography 4.1.4). Josephus focuses on a geographic excursus to provide background for the progress of the war he calls “the war of the Jews against the Romans” (J.W. 1.1). He describes the land of his ethnos as the “land of the Jews,” indicating the people and not the countries of Judah or Israel.

One possible explanation for Josephus’s omission relates, in my view, to the fact that he incorporated opposition to Jewish national consciousness in his composition about the war of the Jews against the Romans. For Josephus, these aspirations led to the destruction of the Temple. He was, therefore, fearful of sketching the borders of the Jewish entity or the region of Jewish settlement; the description of geographic space had great significance for those aspiring to a sovereign Jewish existence in the land’s borders, which was the ideal of the rebels in Rome. These geographic descriptions were intended to outline the administrative districts in which Jews lived and in which the battles took place throughout the Great Revolt, battles he details in this work.

More than a decade after the end of the war of the Jews against the Romans, Josephus published his Jewish Antiquities, which attempts to relate the history of the Jewish people from the days of the patriarchs up to the eve of the Great Revolt. Here the changes Josephus underwent in Rome are revealed. This was a process that reached its climax in the 90s, with his composition of the apologetic Against Apion, in which he confronts anti-Jewish slander. In Jewish Antiquities, unlike Jewish War, Josephus delimits the borders of the land of Canaan, which he saw as the only land destined for the Jewish people. He therefore employs the biblical description of the boundaries found in Numbers 34:1–12. In Numbers, the Jordan River functions as the land’s eastern border.46 Josephus includes Transjordan, which he saw as part of the land of Canaan.

Josephus places the episode of the “Covenant of the Pieces” in the first book of his Antiquities, but omits the promised biblical borders, instead marking the land according to the region in which the Canaanites dwelt: “and they defeated the Canaanites in war and took their cities and their lands” (Ant. 1.185). He also describes the northern border as extending between Sidon in the northwest and Hamath-gader in the northeast. Josephus saw this entire region as designated for the Jews—in contrast to the biblically promised border—and consistently includes it throughout Jewish Antiquities.

Omitting the borders promised to the Jewish people enabled Josephus to divide up the region of the promised land between the sons of Abraham, descendants of both Isaac and Ishmael. According to Josephus, Abraham himself divided the area promised him between his sons’ descendants, bequeathing the region between the Euphrates and the Red Sea, east of the land of Canaan, to the sons of Ishmael.⁴⁷ In my opinion, Josephus’s alternating forgetting and remembering of the promised borders and his exchanging them for the land of Canaan result from the influence of the imperial idea in Roman society. The Romans viewed their empire’s success as dependent upon the virtues of its citizens, the training of its soldiers, and the circumstances of its geography.48 Thus, Virgil relates Jupiter’s promise to Venus regarding Rome’s future: “On them I set no limits, space or time: I have granted them power, empire without end” (Aeneid I.288–289).⁴⁹ Josephus is therefore careful not to ascribe an imperialist dimension and territorial aspirations to the Jewish population.

The way Josephus describes the boundaries of the land in his works reveals the shifts in his identity.⁵⁰ In Jewish War, Josephus still identifies with his Flavian patrons and tends to justify Roman actions, even to defend them, as in his description of the burning of the Temple. In contrast, the works written during the reign of Domitian, Jewish Antiquities and Against Apion, express his identification with the Jewish people.⁵¹ Therefore, Josephus does not preclude assigning the land to the Jews in his Antiquities, even to the point of describing its borders as extending beyond the province of Judea, all the way to Sidon and Hamath in the north. Nonetheless, he consistently chooses to omit any description of the covenantal borders, as this could be interpreted as an expansion competing with Roman imperialism.⁵²

MAXIMALISM, MINIMALISM, AND IDENTITY

The question of how the land is portrayed in a subject’s perspective depends directly upon identity. Territory becomes identified as “the land” through a range of factors. In this chapter, we considered the ways in which the borders of the land were conceived in different texts, and how they related directly to the national identity of each author. I sketched two divergent approaches found as early as late Hebrew scriptural books. The author of Chronicles takes a more expansive approach, with regard both to the residents of the land and to its borders, positing a link between the way in which he perceives the nation and the way in which he perceives the land’s domain. Thus, the territory represented in the work as the land of Israel includes both Judah and Israel. However, the author of Ezra and Nehemiah betrays a more limited approach, one that considers only the returnees to Zion as the continuation of the “holy seed.” In other words, all other groups are not part of the nation; the areas that are outside of Judea and not inhabited by the returnees are not described as part of his land.

The dualism of the limited areas of Judea and the expanse of the mountains including Samaria, as well as the Galilee and Transjordan, is found in the regional-literary framework of the book of Judith. The area in which the Jewish people dwell in the majority of the work extends across the entire mountain, with no mention of the Samaritans. At the end of the book, with the triumph of the Jewish people, the author treats the Galilee and Transjordan as part of his land, in which his countrymen are dwelling.

An expansive national approach to the borders of the land appears in 1 Maccabees, a work composed in the land of Israel by an associate of the Hasmonean court. The national, pro-Hasmonean approach that motivated the campaign to conquer the entire area of the biblical united kingdom, including Transjordan, the north, and the south, is expressed in the biblical style of the work, a broad approach to nationhood also expressed in Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon. The zeal of the author of Jubilees and his Jewish national identity are interwoven with his interpretation of the link between Israel and its land, as well as with his unwillingness to legitimize non-Jews living in the land. This approach resembles the territorial orientation of the author of the Genesis Apocryphon.

The book of Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon both present an approach that links the nation and its territory closely using a maximalist territorial view. The author of Genesis Apocryphon revises and expands the borders promised to Abraham seen through the patriarch’s viewing and peripatetic journey; they are expanded to the maximal borders, from the Nile to the Euphrates, and concretized. This emphasis on the promised borders and their transformation from divine promise to real in Abraham’s journey—as opposed to Josephus’s consistent disregard of them—highlights the ideological and political differences between Josephus and the author of the Apocryphon. I propose that this disregard is due to the complex, shifting personal and political conditions in which he wrote.

But these varying approaches to the borders of the land are not merely the result of different authors living in changing political environments or their distinct worldviews. Our discussion of Josephus’s works serves to demonstrate that even in different works by the same author, dissimilar perspectives on the borders of the land may be related. Moreover, the differences in character between Josephus’s works owe something to the fact that they were written at different stages of his thirty-year residence in Rome. These circumstances caused him to relate differently to the land and to its borders in his works. In other words, shifts in Josephus’s identity are revealed in the different ways he chose to represent his land in his various writings.

We have discussed works that were all composed by authors who lived in the land during the Second Temple period in which the territorial component was an immanent element. The “territorial component” includes the question of the authors’ bond to the land as well as the extent of the land that they viewed as their own. Despite the variance between them and, at times, the complexity in one author’s own mind about the land’s scope, to my mind, the works of Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles, Judith, Maccabees, Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, and Josephus are all compositions in which the subject of territory is a key element and even one that shapes their Jewish identity.

Thus, the difference in perception of the land between Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah is an outgrowth of the difference between the ways in which the authors perceive the nature and scope of the ethnos. The view of the ethnos and the tension with the Samaritans, along with the hope to return to the biblical domain, stood at the base of the spatial outlook of the book of Judith. The maximalism of the Genesis Apocryphon, as opposed to the minimalism of Josephus, teaches us about different political ideologies. The vicissitudes of Josephus’s life led him to present the land and its confines in different, evolving ways over the thirty years in which he wrote.

Having viewed the Jewish writers who professed some kind of link to territory, we turn to a different group of Jewish, as well as Christian, writers. The compositions we will see all fostered an identity in which territory took a marginal role, to the extent of its very suppression in Christian thought and writing in the first centuries of the Common Era.