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Religion, Xenophobia and Ethnic Foreigners in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia

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Religion, Xenophobia and Ethnic Foreigners in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia Non-Peoples and Foolish Nations: Religion, Xenophobia and Ethnic Foreigners in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia Brian P. Rainey Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies Brown University 2014 © Copyright 2014 Brian P. Rainey This dissertation by Brian P. Rainey is accepted in its present form by the Department of Religious Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date _______________ _________________________________________ Saul M. Olyan, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_________________ __________________________________________ Matthew T. Rutz, Reader Date_________________ __________________________________________ Stanley K. Stowers, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_________________ _________________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School ii Curriculum Vitae BRIAN RAINEY ______________________________________________________________________ Box 1927, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 401-480-3731 [email protected] ____________________________________________________________________________________ EDUCATION Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) (To be conferred, May 2014) Brown University, Providence, RI Religious Studies: Hebrew Bible, Mesopotamian languages and literatures Master of Divinity (M.Div), 2007 Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA Areas of study: theology, pedagogy, politics, biblical studies Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), 2004 Brown University, Providence, RI Concentration: Ancient Studies (Ancient Israel and Early Christianity) ______________________________________________________________________ RESEARCH INTERESTS Ethnicity and race in the ancient world, sex and gender in the ancient world, the development of monolatry and “monotheism” in ancient Israel, methods and theories in religion, interpretation and hermeneutics, in- group/outgroup perception ______________________________________________________________________ DISSERTATION Summary: “Non-Peoples and Foolish Nation: Religion, Xenophobia and Ethnic Foreigners in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia” looks at biblical and Mesopotamian texts that use caricatures of foreigners’ social practices to disparage them, with a special focus on how the texts accuse foreigners of improper worship and disrespect for the gods. The dissertation uses insights from cognitive and psychological theories of group perception to articulate a concept of “ethnicity” that is applicable to the ancient world. ______________________________________________________________________ EXAM AREAS Major: Ancient Israelite Religion and Culture (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) Minor: Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Culture Ancillary: Cognitive Science, Hermeneutics and Ancient Historiography ______________________________________________________________________ LANGUAGE PROFICIENCIES Modern Language Proficiencies: French, German, Spanish Ancient Language Proficiencies: Ancient Hebrew (biblical and Qumran), Akkadian (all dialects), Aramaic (all dialects), Greek (Septuagint, Attic), Ugaritic. Other languages studied: Sumerian ______________________________________________________________________ TEACHING EXPERIENCE AND TRAINING Brown University, Sheridan Center Teaching Seminar, Certificate I (2010) Brown University Sheridan Center Teaching Seminar, Certificate III (2012) iii Teaching Assistant Introduction to New Testament (Fall 2012), Prof. Nicola Denzey-Lewis The Apocalyptic Imagination (Fall 2010), Prof. Nicola Denzey-Lewis Liberation Theology in the Americas (Spring 2010), Prof. Thomas A. Lewis Ancient Israelite Religion (Spring 2009), Prof. Saul Olyan Introduction to Islam (Fall 2008), Prof. Nancy Khalek Philosophical Conceptions of the Self (Spring 2008), Prof. Thomas A. Lewis ______________________________________________________________________ PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS “Their Peace or Prosperity: Hereditary Punishment as Another Rationale for the Exclusion of Foreigners in Nehemiah 13” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Francisco, CA “Jeremiah the Prophet” Society for Biblical Literature Bible Odyssey Project (approved, forthcoming) ______________________________________________________________________ RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES Research Assistant, Professor Saul Olyan, Spring 2011 Assisted with final preparation of the manuscript for Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Significance of Ritual and Social Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011). ______________________________________________________________________ AWARDS Harvard Divinity School Institutional Grant (2004-2007) Davis-Putter Scholarship (2004) Honorable Mention, Ford Diversity Dissertation Fellowship (2012) iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank Saul M. Olyan especially for his help with the research and philological work in the Hebrew Bible section of this dissertation, as well as his support and guidance on the project as a whole. I would also like to express thanks to Matthew T. Rutz who helped me navigate the field of Assyriology and assisted with the translation and assessment of cuneiform texts. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Stanley K. Stowers for his insightful comments on the theoretical approach that I took in this dissertation. v Table of Contents Introduction Biblical Scholarship and the “Other” 1 Chapter One “Birds of a Feather”: Defining Ethnic Foreignness 30 Excursus Cognitive Science, Adaptationism and Group Perception 61 Chapter Two “Brood of Destruction”: Mesopotamian Caricatures of Foreigners 66 Chapter Three “A Non People, A Foolish Nation”: Caricatures of Foreigners in Deuteronomistic Texts 126 Chapter Four “And I Was Repulsed By Them”: Caricatures of Foreigners in Holiness Texts 204 Conclusion Non-Peoples and Foolish Nations 269 vi Introduction Biblical Scholarship and “the Other” “Ethnic Foreigners” in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia This study deals with some literary portrayals of peoples who were labeled foreigners in biblical literature with a comparative look at portrayals of foreigners in Mesopotamian literature. Because the peoples of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia held vastly different assumptions and expectations about nature, the world, and the divine and lived in societies with different social structures, simply using the word “foreigner” without any theoretical reflection is inadequate. This is not a particularly insightful observation, since many, if not most, people who study ancient cultures acknowledge that there is some kind of gulf between the worldviews of modern peoples and the worldviews of ancient peoples. Nevertheless, putting this observation into practice has proven to be, as the old cliché goes, “easier said than done.” This project explores a variety of perspectives—anthropological, sociological, psychological, and cognitive—to theorize the notions of “foreignness” portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamian texts. It is my view that the kind of foreignness that is portrayed in biblical texts and to a lesser degree in Mesopotamian texts can be described as ethnic foreignness. To put it another way, the writers of the biblical texts that I explore conceptualized the foreigners that they depicted as members of distinct ethnic groups. This introduction and the chapter that follows explore what I mean by “ethnic groups.” Of course, by referring to these foreigners as ethnic foreigners or members of ethnic groups, I believe that the notion of “ethnicity” is an appropriate concept by which to understand how ancient texts such as 1 the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamian literature portray foreigners. “Ethnicity” is not only a notion appropriate for analyzing concepts of foreignness in the modern world,1 but is a theoretical frame that can be used to analyze constructions of foreignness in antiquity as well. It is not uncommon to encounter biblical scholars—even scholars writing in recent years—who use words such as “ethnicity” and/or “race” to describe the kind of foreignness portrayed in the Bible, with little theoretical reflection on these highly controversial terms. Writing about the exclusion of foreigners in the book of Ezra- Nehemiah, a later biblical text likely written in the fifth century BCE, Hannah K. Harrington says that for the authors of Ezra-Nehemiah, “people of other races are simply not eligible for Israel's holy status.”2 In his Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament article on the word gôy (“nation”) in the Hebrew Bible, Ronald Clements holds that concepts of “race, government and territory” are a part of the definition of the term.3 To be fair, these articles do not directly engage sociological or anthropological theories of ethnicity, so a reader should, perhaps, not expect a long, drawn-out theoretical discussion about ethnicity. At the same time, considering that the terms “race” and “ethnicity” are contested, it seems prudent to insert a footnote explaining why the author does not delve into the thorny theoretical topic or refer the reader to other sources, or alternatively, offer a tentative, ad hoc definition of the terms. I would suggest that the casual references to 1 Zainab Bahrani argues that ethnicity is a term only appropriate for the ancient world. See “Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Antiquity,” World Archaeology 38 (2006): 48-59. I provide an extensive critique of Bahrani’s viewpoint in Chapter Two. 2 Harrington is following Peter Ackroyd's language
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