I frequently find myself on the summit of the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem’s Old City and modern West Jerusalem. A visit to the mountain affords breathtaking views to the west. Spectators peer out over the Kidron Valley toward the site known to the English-speaking world as the Temple Mount. But different sightseers have different terms for what they see.1 Jewish and Christian visitors view the “Temple Mount,” focusing on the Temple that occupied this space until 70 C.E. This name disregards—or at least verbally suppresses—the early Islamic structures on the mountain, which are prominently visible when looking from the east. Muslim visitors, including the Arab merchants who ply their goods to the tourists, refer to this space as “Haram al-Sharif,” the Noble Sanctuary, or “Al Aksa,” meaning the farthest.2 Most, if asked, would not recognize the past existence of a Jewish Temple on the Haram. This is a prime example of how religions and identities organize the perception of space.3
In recent years, various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have undergone a revolution: history and identity are now viewed through the prism of space. This is the foreground and theoretical framework for the analyses in this book and for my discussion of the meaning of territory for Jewish identity in the ancient world.4
Identity and Territory: Jewish Perceptions of Space in Antiquity examines the role of territory in postbiblical Jewish identity from the Second Temple period through the first centuries of the Common Era. The discussion revolves around two interrelated axes: the influence of territory on shaping Jewish identity throughout the period, and the way forms of this identity influenced the concept of territory in Jewish consciousness. This study explores the different Jewish approaches to the land’s shifting boundaries and to the sites that were considered holy by diverse groups.
The issue of identity and territory will be engaged from two perspectives. The first addresses territory and its role in Jewish identity during the Second Temple period and, later, in the rabbinic period. The second considers the character and status of the “map of holy places.” Here, we discuss the holy sites from a rabbinic perspective, against the backdrop of popular or nonrabbinic Jewish culture; the rabbinic perception of space is also compared to the map of Christian holy sites.
Territory and holy places are central to how Jews of that time apprehended space. The hierarchy of spaces understood as holy and the boundaries of the territory belonging to an ethnos are, generally speaking, essential to the perception of a space. Therefore, the relationship to territory engages both external borders, more generally, and the sites of memory in this space, in particular. In fully appreciating the attitude of the Jewish community and the rabbis to both of these dimensions, we can come to a deeper understanding of the varied Jews’ identity and connection to the land and holy sites during the Second Temple era and in the early centuries of the Common Era.
Various groups possess divergent concepts of space, often treating the same places in a different way, in part because the meaning they attach to the space is based on their specific collective memories. Maurice Halbwachs, distinguishing between memory and historiography, links memory to place and time, and explains how memory connects with place or space to become part of the way these concepts are understood. Memories are partial by definition and maintaining them requires context. Every collective memory uses the frameworks of space and time, and the memories of the individual are maintained and preserved within that collective context.
Halbwachs, who studied the Holy Land in medieval Christian memory, describes an imaginary map on which various groups had placed scenes from the life of Jesus.5 In Halbwach’s view, collective memory, unlike physical observation—which requires presence and visual confirmation—develops in inverse proportion to the event’s proximity in time and space. The place becomes a collective symbol.
But while Halbwachs saw collective memory as a homogeneous unit, others pointed to the necessity of distinguishing between communities, periods, and religious groups, rather than relating to a common national collective memory. These critics suggested the terms “communicative memory” and “cultural memory” in place of “collective memory.”6
In this volume, “collective memory” and “cultural memory” refer to the diverse and dynamic notion of national territory, the perceptions of the land’s borders, and the understanding of holy sites in the land during the Second Temple period and the first century C.E. The transformation in the concept of the land, its borders, and its holy places in various epochs, and the differences between contemporaneous groups, is an expression of cultural memory as a central component—together with other political and sociological elements—in shaping the perception of territory and place. I assume in this book that identity shapes territory and vice versa.
Immanuel Kant established that reality in itself can only be apprehended through the prisms of space and time.7 Ernst Cassirer argues that different symbolic frameworks—including language, mythography, and science—organize the perception of space and time differently, emphasizing the determining sovereignty of cognition over reality.8 He highlights the differences between the mythographic and the scientific frameworks, but posits that in spite of them, the mythographic framework has the power to shape space and reality.
In the 1970s, Yi-Fu Tuan, one of the originators of the field of humanistic geography, laid the groundwork for the idea that one’s daily experience is central to how one experiences space.9 In recent years, a subfield of cultural geography has developed within humanistic geography and deals with the reciprocal relationships between culture and society, on the one hand, and space, on the other.10 History and collective memory of particular sites occupy a central position in these relationships, to which we could add the religious significance or status of a site or space.11 Accordingly, the concept of “place” is a function of human consciousness as it is determined by the values, beliefs, opinions, and experiences of a society and its members.
The heterogeneity of space thus depends on the different modes of its apprehension. Beyond material topography, additional perspectival and symbolic factors represent important threads in the manifold factors that contribute to “place.”12 The way in which space is understood differs among people or communities according to their mythologies and value systems. “Place” is the meaning assigned to a particular space at a particular time.13
To return to our opening scenario, a Jew and a Muslim standing on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem from the east, will look west upon the same space but see two different places.14 The Jew calls the place “Temple Mount,” referring to its function during the first millennium B.C.E., the era in which the Temple occupied this space; the Muslim refers to this place as “Haram a-Sharif” and connects it to its function over the past 1,400 years.15
Since space is also the product of social structuring and processes, society shapes landscape.16 We must thus study space through the intersection of social history and the various ideological frameworks that constitute different social layers and movements. Accordingly, a complex reality comprises the symbols, history, and cultural memory that attend a site or space.17 Experience, sensibility, and physical18 and mental events, together with the political regime or occasionally the religious significance related to that space, transform “space” or physical emptiness into “place.” The intersection of identity and space, and the characterization of identity with regard to space, is central to how space is conceived. As I demonstrate in the book’s first chapter, space forms and influences identity.19
Territory is associated with ethnicity and is dependent upon demographics. This working assumption is based on Stuart Elden, who devotes a study to the concept of “territory” in the Greco-Roman world.20 Following Edward Soja, he insists on distinguishing between land, terrain, and territory. Land is a concept associated with property; terrain refers to land that has already been delineated through relations of power. Here we can hear the influence of Michel Foucault, who argues that discourse distinguishes between “what is ours” and “what is not ours.” Soja sees territory as a method of spatial or social organization.21 In other words, territory is the product of three essential factors: the power—usually sovereign—that organizes people in said space, the way its borders are delineated, and its history.22
The paradigm according to which the human is joined with the spatial in the manifold components that constitute the concept of territory is demonstrated in a study of the Greek polis and the Roman Empire. The ancient Greek polis comprised the place and the people occupying it.23 In the speech that ends Sophocles’s Antigone, the polis, the city, and the state in ancient Greece are both social and physical; the line “O my polis all your fine rich sons” refers to “land of Thebes, city of all my Fathers.”24 Plato, and after him Aristotle, emphasizes the political dimension of the city-state. Aristotle, in his Politics, argues that “a legislator should look to just two things in establishing his laws: the Land (khora) and the people (anthropoi).”25 Aristotle emphasizes the importance of the human component over the locations.26
However, the concept of territory in the Greek world referred primarily to the Greek polis, which was an urban unit. Greek ethnic identity did not function with regard to the delineation of borders; prior to the Persian wars, Greek ethnic identity was “group ethnicity.”27 Therefore, Greek culture spread easily to the settlements that emigrants from the Greek city-states established around the Mediterranean. Greek cities occasionally made treaties with one another for the sake of mutual defense, but the primary political nucleus was always the polis rather than the state.
Rome began as a city and was characterized as a republic. However, over time, from the first century B.C.E. to the second century C.E., it expanded greatly beyond the Italian peninsula and reached enormous dimensions. The territorial perspective was of an empire ruled by a city and not necessarily an empire enclosed within borders. Borders and their delineation were primarily set between Roman provinces, and their main purpose was to organize the collection of taxes. The republic was actually a public conglomerate intended to aid in the protection of private property and the lands of its members. Caesar and Octavian/Augustus, his nephew and adopted son, transformed the republic into a monarchy.28 Although the concept is republican, Augustus was the first to characterize his personal rule of the city of Rome and the empire in its entirety as a spatially and temporally unlimited imperium.29
The question of the delineation of the empire occupied Romans sporadically, and it is difficult to find precise descriptions of its borders.30 The limes functioned more as a line of defense than as a border, as Romans operated on both sides. In contrast, provincial borders, significant for tax purposes, existed throughout the Roman world.31 Romans chose to mark only these internal borders with stones. The expanse of the empire was understood more according to the totality of the ethnic groups over which the Romans ruled rather than to any geographic line.
This notion of the affinity between population and space is the cornerstone for the perception of territory presented in this book. On the foundation of the biblical story that shaped collective memory about the land of Israel, the demographic dimension vis-à-vis Jewish territory played a central role.
This volume deals with the conceptualization of the land and its place as a component of Jewish identity,32 a field that has developed primarily in recent decades. Sara Japhet, in her seminal work on the book of Chronicles, discusses the special place accorded to the land in that text.33 Doron Mendels has examined the issue of the land as a political concept as expressed in several Jewish compositions dating to the second century C.E.34 The works of Kelley Coblentz Bautch on the book of Enoch,35 Liv Lied on 2 Baruch,36 and, recently, John Vonder Bruegge on Josephus, Luke, and John,37 use modern theories of geography to examine the early writings.
The Jewish identity of those in the diaspora—primarily those living in Alexandria and those who had left Jerusalem for the desert—constitutes one branch of the wide-ranging research of Daniel Schwartz. In the Jews of the diaspora and the Jews living in the Judean Desert, Schwartz sees the roots of the Paulian approach, that of a Judaism devoid of a link to land.
Aryeh Kasher and others have examined the way in which Philo and Josephus depict the presence of Jews in the diaspora, with their patterns of Greek or Roman settlement in the Mediterranean Basin colonies. The use of the Hellenistic terms of colony, they contend, lent legitimacy to the presence of Jews in the diaspora. Isaiah Gafni38 and Daniel Boyarin are occupied primarily with the place of the land among the sages living during the Babylonian exile. These sages viewed the exile as a punishment but also one with a blessing and even a universal mission. Boyarin goes one step further;39 in his book A Traveling Homeland: Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora,40 he examines the view that the Talmud serves as a “substitute” for a homeland.41 The halakhic status of the land is discussed by Shmuel Safrai, a discussion that has been expanded of late by Ze’ev Safrai in his commentary on the Mishnah, in which he relates to halakhic dimensions and issues in reality.
The comprehensive research by William D. Davies on the place of the land of Israel in pre-Paulian Christianity includes an impressive preface on the place of the land of Israel in the scriptures and Second Temple literature.42 In a follow-up work, Davies highlights two factions—the land of Israel “territorial” and the exilic “wanderer”—that he identifies with Jewish culture since the biblical age.43 In his extensive The Land Called Holy,44 Robert Wilken discusses the shifts that took place in the various Christian perceptions about the land and Jerusalem from the inception of Christianity until the early Muslim period in the eighth century. The study of the theological status of holy places focuses primarily on the theology and history of early Christianity, and usually involves early and evolving Christian immigration.
In effect, for the majority of the period discussed in this volume—from the beginning of the Second Temple period until the Muslim conquest—the land was part of imperial space. This was true from the early Persian period, as well as the time of Ptolemy and the Seleucids. The only exception was the Hasmonean Kingdom, with its sovereign Jewish rule—first over Judah and later, in Alexander Jannaeus’s prime, extending to the coast, the north, and the eastern banks of the Jordan. The extension of the Hasmonean Kingdom to what was perceived to be the biblical regions of the land of Israel is highlighted throughout the first section of 1 Maccabees. With the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom and the Roman conquest, the land of Israel became the Roman province of Judea.
This process began after the expulsion of Herod’s son Archelaus in the year 6 C.E. His territory included Judea and Samaria, a region which had a Jewish majority.45 Provincia Judaea was subject to the Roman ruler in Syria and evidently became an independent province only after the Great Revolt of 70 C.E.
The primary demographic changes occurred as a result of the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 C.E.). Hadrian changed the name of the province to Syria Palestina;46 the new city that he founded on the ruins of Jerusalem was called Aelia Capitolina.47 The Bar Kokhba revolt resulted in the emptying of Judea of its Jewish population, and the center of Jewish population and leadership moved from Judea to the Galilee. Between the foundation of the province Syria Palestina in 135 C.E. and the seventh century C.E., changes took place in the subdivision of the province, primarily in the south.
Our examination of the Jewish link to territory, then, is contingent on the complex scriptural memory of the land’s boundaries, maintained during the years of imperial rule, and the demographic reality—the space in which Jews lived together within the empirical subdivisions of the land. The division of the imperial space into subdivisions took demographics into account and simultaneously shaped the demographic reality. It is even possible that it was one of the factors that shaped the national territory in the Jewish consciousness.48 One example is the bounding of the “border of the Egyptian immigrants” and the space thought of as “Syria” in the rabbinic literature as extending from “Amana” in the northwest to “the river” in the northeast.49 The northern border of this space is the same as that given as Syrian territory by Strabo in the first century C.E.50 and Ptolemy51 in the second century C.E., with the Euphrates as the northeastern boundary and the Amanus Mountain range as the northwestern boundary of Syria.
The shifts in demographics and rulership over the land of Israel naturally influenced the Jewish population. In this volume, we examine the ways in which the territorial dimension formed and influenced the diverse Jewish identity, as well as how national and theological perceptions shaped the understanding of space.
Historically, Jews—especially in ancient times—viewed their world through the lens of the scriptures. The first two chapters of the present volume—based on chapters that first appeared in my book Between Borders, which was published in Hebrew—examine the interplay between identity, territory, and boundaries in the literature of the time: the Hebrew Bible and Judea’s Second Temple Jewish literature.
The Hebrew Bible uses territorial boundaries to distinguish between the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In the book’s first chapter, I discuss the territorial element of Israelite versus Judean identities. The “Judean” identity that characterized the early Second Temple period shifted to a “Pan-Israelite” consciousness. I argue that this shift came with the expansion of the Hasmonean Kingdom to the approximate borders of historical Israel. This identity, reflected in coinage from the later Second Temple period, was convenient for the rabbis, who lived and were active outside historical Judea.
In chapter 2, I discuss concepts of Jewish ethnic territory in Second Temple Jewish literature composed in Judea. The plethora of concepts reflects the multivocality of the Hebrew scripture on this subject. The different voices result not only from diverging methods of biblical interpretation; they are also connected to the context of each work, the identity of the author(s), and the tensions between different agents vying for control over the conceptual map of the Holy Land’s borders. In the chapter, I discuss the connections between authors and ideological movements, and the ways in which they represent Jewish territory in their work.
Chapter 3 moves from territorialist Judean composers to authors and movements that possessed a weaker concept of territory. This process is coeval with the slow parting of the ways between Jews and the nascent Christian communities, a development that reached its apex in patristic literature between the third and fifth centuries C.E. Over the course of this extensive process, a religious identity formed that was completely disconnected from territory. In the fourth century, however, the tide shifted: holy places again became central to the Christian community, and this continued until an entire map of holy places could be drawn in Byzantine Palestine.
Chapter 4, which builds upon the previous two chapters, discusses the rabbinic movement. Rabbis flourished in Judea/Palestina and, from the third century C.E., in Babylonia as well. Their deliberations on territory have, for the most part, been used in scholarship on the history of rabbinic law. But this is a body of literature that can be mined for sociological and historical content, as well, and, in our case, for an understanding of how space was perceived. This corpus, while ideologically multivocal, holds the land and its borders in high regard. The rabbis note several border schemes for their Holy Land. The smallest, the border of the returnees from Babylon, is elastic and dependent both on demographic trends and collective memory of biblical and Hasmonean pasts.
Chapter 5 deals with identity, territory, and holy places in rabbinic literature. The rabbis, I posit, often chose not to directly confront religious phenomena to which they were averse. In this case, they espoused a map with Jerusalem at the center of a land of Israel with flexible borders, ignoring other holy places inside and outside that land. A careful reading of the rabbinic corpus reveals that the rabbis dedicated significant resources to a polemic conducted with other approaches, some internal and some external. The Jewish community, it would appear, contained nonrabbinic Jewish groups that sanctified certain sites; the nascent Christians created a map of holy sites that were pilgrimage destinations. Rather than directly confronting these approaches, rabbinic literature employed a strategy of indirect polemic.
This book examines the Jewish perception of territory during the Second Temple and Roman-Byzantine periods. Over the course of this long era, diverse groups and streams held differing beliefs and values concerning the territory. The common denominator for the Jewish community was the commitment to Jewish scriptures as authoritative texts. This commitment, along with demographic, geopolitical, and economic considerations, created different worldviews about the land of Israel.
The combination of these factors, along with identity, shaped the way in which Jews in late antiquity perceived their space—a perception of territory that was directly related to the image and the scope of their land, as well as to the hierarchy of holy space it embodied. We begin at the foundation: the names of the land and its people, and how these reflected their evolving identity and territory.