The Sons of Jacob and the Sons of Herakles: Myth, Genealogy, and the Construction of Identity
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THE SONS OF JACOB AND THE SONS OF HERAKLES: MYTH, GENEALOGY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY BY ANDREW TOBOLOWSKY B.A., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2007 M.PHIL, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, 2008 M.A., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2011 Ph.D., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2015 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Andrew B. Tobolowsky This dissertation by Andrew Tobolowsky 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 Olyan, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_________ ----------------------------- Stanley Stowers, Reader Date_________ ----------------------------- Pura Nieto Hernandez, Reader Approved by Graduate Council Date_________ ----------------------------- Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Andrew Tobolowsky was born April 17th, 1985. He attended Brown University as an undergraduate, receiving a B.A. in Religious Studies in 2007. Subsequently, he attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he received an M.Phil in Literature, which he used to teach literature in various ways in Dallas, Texas. He began his PhD at Brown in the fall of 2009 and received an M.A. in 2011. He has taught classes in biblical Hebrew and World Literature and assisted in classes ranging from Greek Myth, to Modern Problems of Belief, to Introductions to Islam and Biblical Literature. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the constant support of my friends and family. It would have been much less than it is without the tireless work of my advisers, especially Saul Olyan, but Stanley Stowers and Pura Nieto Hernandez very much as well. I am very grateful to all of them and hope that this completed work justifies their effort and support. v Table of Contents Introduction: The Purposes of Ethnicity 1 Chapter One: Chronicles and the Catalogue 26 Chapter Two: The Return of the Herakleidae and the Sons of Jacob 74 Chapter Three: Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence for Israelite Identity 113 Chapter Four: Israel and Judah in Biblical Literature 158 Chapter Five: The Building Blocks 197 Chapter Six: Building the Bible 264 Conclusion: Future Directions in “Biblical” Ethnicity 302 Bibliography 310 vi Introduction Unwittingly or not, (Andrew) Jackson himself touched on this feeling in a proclamation he ordered read at the head of each corps of his army near New Orleans on January 21, 1815…Jackson proclaimed: ‘Natives of different states, acting together, for the first time, in this camp; differing in habits and in language, instead of viewing in these circumstances the germ of distrust and division, you have made them the source of an honorable emulation, and from the seeds of discord itself have reaped the fruits of an honorable union.’” --Walter Borneman, “1812: The War that Forged a Nation”. 1 The Purposes of Ethnicity It is not easy to create an identity, and once created, it is probably impossible to make it stand still, as Andrew Jackson would eventually discover to his deep regret. In this speech, given after the Battle of New Orleans, and well before his presidency, Jackson was clearly gesturing towards the transformative power of shared conflict to dissolve differences, a power demonstrated again and again.2 But within 20 years, Jackson would find himself so opposed to the Southern sympathies of his own Vice President, the fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, that he would force the latter’s 1 Borneman, Walter R. 2005, 303. 2 Certain recent approaches to ethnicity actually give considerable credit to conflict for its creation. As Miller notes, referring specifically to ancient Israel “although one often thinks of ethnic conflict taking place between quite different groups, studies show that ethnic conflict often occurs between similar groups, sparked by internal debates over who is truly ‘one of us’ and who is not” (Miller, J.C., 2008, 174). Brubaker adds “it seems to be mere common sense to treat ethnic struggles as the struggles of ethnic groups, and ethnic conflict as conflict between ethnic groups….I agree that this is the—or at least a— commonsense view of the matter. But…apart from the general unreliability of ethnic common sense as a guide of social analysis we should remember that participants’ accounts…often have what Pierre Bourdieu has called a performative charter. By invoking groups, they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being” (Brubaker 2004, 9–10). 1 resignation, serving without a Vice President for an entire year.3 And this collision of sympathies was only a prelude, of course to Civil War, an event in which the identity, “American”, like America itself, was a category taken apart and put back together. The point, where this introduction is concerned, is not that American identity was unstable in the early 19th century, but quite the opposite: that where identity is concerned, this fluidity represents business as usual.4 The subject of this study is biblical history, largely the narrative spanning from Genesis to the end of 2 Kings, as well as the same story, presented differently, in the books of Chronicles. The term “biblical” history is, of course, a problem, and it is worth stating at the outset why I will use it, despite difficulties, and what I mean by it, and by the related term “biblical identity”. What I am particularly concerned about is two common but contradictory definitions of the term “biblical literature”. On the one hand there are those for whom material which ultimately appears in the finished Bible is in some sense always biblical, and for whom there is no reason to imagine a considerable difference between how an 8th century B.C.E. text might be read in the 8th century and how it is read in its biblical context. Others are troubled by the other end of biblical history, in which context what matters is that the full, fixed canon of biblical literature did not appear until centuries later, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls, largely dating from 3 In this he may have done a little better than Thomas Jefferson, whose Vice President, Aaron Burr, is still, and presumably forevermore, the only one to have killed a political opponent in a duel while in office. 4 As Lincoln puts it, “because there are virtually infinite grounds on which individual and group similarity/dissimilarity may be perceived and the corresponding sentiments of affinity/estrangement evoked, the borders of society are never a simple matter. In practice there always exists potential bases for associating and for dissociating one’s self and one’s group from others, and the vast majority of social sentiments are ambivalent mixes…such borders being neither natural, inevitable, nor immutable, affinity may in the course of events come to predominate over estrangement, with the consequent emergence of a new social formation in which previously separate social groups are mutually encompassed” (Lincoln, Bruce 1989, 10). 2 the 2nd century B.C.E to the first century C.E., make clear that though its major components had all been written by that point, a “biblical” canon remained in considerable flux, still. Thus, using the term “biblical” literature even in the Persian period, which is largely the focus of this study, is fairly fraught. There is more merit, in my opinion, in this cautious second approach than the first. We now seem to know that even the same story told in two different contexts can have considerably different meanings, a phenomenon which Stephen Greenblatt has called “representations”, noting that these are “relational, local, and historically contingent” and that they are “not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being” (Greenblatt 1991, 6). Irad Malkin has already applied the idea of representations to ancient Mediterranean myth, to, in my opinion, brilliant effect.5 In this important sense, both retelling and preserving a narrative or tradition in and into dramatically new contexts produces different meanings meant to serve different purposes. Thus, our confidence as scholars that we can read an early text as it was read in its pre-biblical form should be low, even if we acknowledge that the Bible does indeed contain early texts. However, as I hope to demonstrate, the evidence suggests that at least the biblical historical narrative, the arc of history from Genesis through 2 Kings, was largely intact by the end of the Persian period, something we can see particularly in two observations: 1) 5 Malkin notes “representations change throughout the centuries,” and in this book he describes investigating the Return of the Herakleidai charter myth of Spartan colonization, in his words, “at one point in terms of continuous validation of the Spartan royal houses, at another in terms of its impact on and use for legitimating the attempts of the Spartan Dorieus to settle in western Sicily at the end of the sixth century, at a third point in terms of its relationship to the religious festival of the Karneia, and at a fourth in relation to the Dorian invasion” (Malkin 1998, 22–23). 3 this narrative sequence appears in nearly identical form in the books of Chronicles and 2) the primeval history and other key elements of the narrative arc do not appear anywhere else in biblical literature. Thus, it seems to be the case that “biblical history”, defined in this way, appeared at the latest at the time of the construction of the Chronicles genealogy which will be a significant focus of the following study (1 Chron 1:1-9:1a) and that it may have appeared in full for the first time in this period.