Levantine Entanglements; Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean; Stordalen; LaBianca

Edited by

Terje Stordalen [+–]

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Øystein S. LaBianca [+–]

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

This volume represents the final output of a long-standing collaboration by an international and cross-disciplinary team sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. It aims to tell the history of human cultural production in the Eastern Mediterranean rather than the history of specific states or religions. Simultaneously, the volume argues that the agency of local communities is a key to understand the history of long-term change and cultural production in the Levant. It narrates the story of the crystallization of a type of sub-imperial power, illustrated by the canonical discourses associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Prelims

List of Illustrations xi-xii

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Preface xiii-xvi

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Abbreviations xvii

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Introduction

A New Format for Writing the History of the Levant: Introduction to the Volume [+–] 1-17

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

This cross-disciplinary volume makes the case for the Levant, including the use of the term, as a unit of analysis for the study of cultural production and change over the long-term in the Eastern Mediterranean. It offers a new perspective on the history of this region that overcomes Orientalist approaches and introduces a global history perspective. It posits a way forward for studying the agency of the local as a key to understanding the long-term history of cultural production over the long-term in the region. Finally, it tells the story of the crystallization within the region of a type of sub-imperial power, illustrated by the canonical discourses popularly associated with the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Part I: Levantine Localities and Long-term Change

1. The Region of the Levant and the Importance of the Local Perspective [+–] 21-32

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca £17.50

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

This chapter introduces the rationale for studying global history from the context of specific localities and viewing the Levant in a longue durée perspective. The relevant lands are geographically defined and the editors offer a reflection on different conventions for naming these lands. Certain salient characteristics of the Levant are identified and elaborated, such as its perennial internal fragmentation, its geopoliticially strategic location as a corridor connecting cultural epicenters at three different continents, and the resultant constant exposure to successive world empires and trade networks.

2. Cultural Production in the Iron Age Southern Levant [+–] 33-45

Terje Stordalen £17.50

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

From the small, peripheral and fragmented region of the Levant came products that spread throughout world history, some still influencing current geopolitics. Most conspicuous among these are sacred scriptures and pilgrimage practices, but there are many other cultural hallmarks. Why did the marginal Levant come to produce such influential and resilient cultural paradigms? This essay considers the processes that generated and circulated cultural forms, practices, and values with an eye on the distribution of social power inherent in such production and circulation. It seems that Levantine fragmentation and connectivity, internal rivalry, and external exploitation (see ch. 1) generated a situation with cultural surplus and blending. Elite products imported from hegemonic cultures in the Levantine corridor were exposed to wider and less disciplined audiences than they had been designed for. Local elites adapted incoming cultural products to their own purposes, generating a venue of interplay between elite and popular cultures—generally in a sub-imperial discourse, passing under the radar of interest for the ruling empires. As examples of this mode of cultural production, the essay discusses the use of roll seals for branding pottery, the invention and use of the alphabetic script, and (briefly), the emergence of socially canonical collections of scriptures. All these demonstrate, in different ways, how the interplay between elite production and everyday practice adapted existing cultural products into forms that, in some cases, made them very resilient.

3. Lenses on Accumulative Cultural Production in the Southern Levant: Toward a Middle-Range Interpretive Methodology [+–] 46-77

Øystein S. LaBianca £17.50

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

In this chapter, I discuss a number of analytical perspectives that have presented themselves as relevant for elucidating long-term patterns of accumulative cultural production and change reflected in finds from five decades of archaeological research at Tall Hisban in Jordan. The core concern of this chapter, and in particular of this investigator’s contribution to the LDG project, has been to posit a methodology for operationalizing research on long-term cultural change in the Southern Levant. To this end, Fernand Braudel’s tri-part schema of history is deployed as a point of departure: histoire événementielle, or the short-term history of individuals, governments, and social movements; conjunctures, or the quasi-long-term history of nations, empires and civilizations; and la longue durée, or the long-term history of humans in their environments (Braudel and Mayne 1995; Smith 1992). The great merit of the Braudelian schema is that it provides a much needed rationale and legitimacy for this quest to derive analytical lenses by means of which drivers of accumulative cultural production could be identified and appraised. The chapter identifies and describes a number of different analytical lenses such as the Braudelian tri-part history, time geography, cultural production, Ratchet effect, world systems theory, political economy and political ecology, global history, extreme events, fragmentation-connectivity, ethnoarchaeology, food systems, intensification and abatement, resilience, polycentrism, great and little traditions, cultural memory and desired pasts, canonical ecology, connectivity, Great Acceleration, Anthropocene, and finally entanglement. The pertinence of these various lenses for operationalizing research on Braudel’s three-partite history is adumbrated and discussed. The chapter concludes by gathering these various lenses within a single analytical framework, namely the Accumulative Cultural Production Model (ACP).

4. Local Power and Social Discourse: Villages in Early Globalizations of the Southern Levant [+–] 78-139

Terje Stordalen £17.50

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

This essay calls for a revaluation of the roles of basic local communities in the social matrix of the Iron Age Southern Levant, challenging conventions that prevented scholars from identifying such communities adequately and from recognizing their significance. It is argued that the basic local communities were villages (cast as clans), rather than families. While almost invisible in biblical literature, these communities conditioned the everyday life for the vast majority of people. Aiming for an analytical construct to help recover the social discourse of this silent majority from the biblical record, the essay collects and co-ordinates historical and social scientific studies related to village politics and the social production of space (and place). It then undertakes a reconstruction of local social discourse in villages in the late Iron Age Southern Levant, based on a fruitful tension between seeing villages as governed by social tradition (Bourdieu, Fei Xiaotong) and as produced in the interplay between conceived, perceived, and actually lived space (Lefebvre). The final part of the chapter considers how local social discourse may have worked to promote or discard changes initiated by trans-local forces or globalizing processes such as empires, state officials, soldiers, or merchants. Recent discussions on early globalizations tend to see changes as generated by intentional action in what Braudel calls l’histoire événementielle. This essay finds that the significant change in Levantine local communities was probably a slow transfer of social power and influence from local elites in communities into the hands of trans-local leaders or local traders, craftsmen, and experts. This transfer of power plays out in what Braudel sees as l’histoire conjoncturelle, and its end phase seems to be playing out in the current-day Levant, as exemplified at Tall Hisban.

Part II: The Levant through Time: Case Studies

Panel A: Places and Ideologies [+–] 143-145

Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Panel A illustrates three different disciplinary approaches to studying cultural production and change over time where the focus of investigation is a particular geographical location or place, in this case Tall Hisban in Jordan and Palmyra in Syria. In so doing, the panel offers examples of possible ways that many of the theoretical constructs introduced in Part I can be adopted as a means to interpreting archaeological and historical data of particular places.

5. Drivers of Accumulative Cultural Production in the Southern Levant: The View from Tall Hisban, Jordan [+–] 146-188

Øystein S. LaBianca,Jeffrey P. Hudon £17.50

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Andrews University and Bethel College

Jeffrey P. Hudon (PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology and Old Testament Exegesis, Andrews University, 2016) is staff archaeologist and research associate for the Horn Archaeological Museum and adjunct professor at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He has excavated at sites in Israel (Jerusalem, Ramat Rahel) and in Jordan (Tall Jalul, Tall Hisban) and currently serves as administrative director for the Khirbet Safra Excavation Project in Jordan. Additionally, he teaches as an adjunct professor at Bethel University and Grace College in Mishawaka and Winona Lake, Indiana. Dr. Hudon is on the editorial board of Conversations with the Biblical World and his current research focuses on the southern Levant during the eighth century BCE. His recent publications include contributions to Tall Hisban preliminary reports and a chapter in the edited volume What Difference Does Time Make (Scurlock, J. and R.H. Beal 2019).

In this chapter, our goal is to lay open for criticism and discussion an approach to interpretation of Tall Hisban’s past that foregrounds the role of various drivers or agencies in shaping cultural production and change over the long-term at this important Jordanian archaeological site. Our approach thus departs from more conventional approaches to such interpretations that typically focus on prevailing discourses about particular historical periods and transitions. Inspired by the research agenda of the LDG collaboration, our focus is instead on Tall Hisban (or simply Hisban) as a window on long-term, local cultural production as impacted by various local and global agencies of cultural persistence and change. To carry out this analysis we deploy the analytical tools or lenses of the Accumulative Cultural Production model (ACP) introduced in Part I of this volume. The primary focus of our analysis using these tools are the well-documented cycles of intensification and abatement that characterize Hisban’s multi-millennial history. Our goal with this analysis is to distinguish empirical instances of Fernand Braudel’s tri-part schema of history in the archaeological record of Tall Hisban.By means of this line of analysis our research enabled us to bring to light ten key drivers of accumulative cultural production and change at Tall Hisban: the ecology of local food systems; the leveling effect of endemic polycentrism; the flourishing of variously anti-imperial social and Scriptural canons; the hard and soft cultural legacies of dynastic and imperial powers; local-level resistance and resilience strategies; accumulative world system economic expansions and pulsations; incidents of extreme events such as earthquakes, famines, and epidemics; cycles of environmental regeneration and degradation; cultural transformations occasioned by the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene; and accumulative patterns of entrapment and entanglement. The chapter concludes by noting certain limitations of the proposed collection of drivers and by positing a way forward for further refinement of both the ACP model and the proposed drivers.

6. Heshbon in the Biblical Record: A History of Remembering [+–] 189-201

Terje Stordalen £17.50

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

This essay takes for granted that biblical texts should be seen as historical sources not for the events that are remembered but for the remembering of these events. That is: biblical texts are sources of collective remembering. Such remembering, of course, was also set in history—it had a genealogy and a history of reception. I analyze the memory of Heshbon in biblical literature in three distinct dimensions: a) a mapping of the memories of Heshbon enshrined in biblical passages, b) a reflection on the history of these memories, and c) a consideration of the history of the place Heshbon. Due to the nature of the material, my discussion will shift back and forth between these dimensions, focusing more on the first two. As a fourth dimension, I take into account that biblical memories became canonical and so they are also part of current collective remembering (cf. the reflection on canonical ecologies in chapter 11). As will become clear, the biblical canonical process harmonized the perception of memories of Heshbon in the nascent biblical collection, and modern reception (in biblical studies and archaeology) drastically expanded upon such harmonization—indeed to the effect of making parts of the memory of Heshbon enshrined in biblical passages virtually mute and forgotten.

7. Place-Making in the Jordanian Madaba Plains: The Contested Space of Tall Ḥesbān and Its Village Surroundings [+–] 202-221

Frode F. Jacobsen £17.50

Bergen University College

Frode F. Jacobsen (PhD in Anthropology, University of Bergen, 1997) is professor at Bergen University College, professor II at Betanien University College and research director of the Center for Care Research—Western Norway, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Jacobsen has previously worked as associate professor at the University of Bergen for many years. Jacobsen, a trained medical anthropologist with a background in health studies, has performed fieldwork in Northern Sudan, Indonesia, and Norway. He is presently conducting comparative research on the organization of elderly care across Europe and North America, and on local social and cultural dynamics concerning international involvement in an archaeological excavation taking place in the village of Tall Ḥesbān in Jordan. Dr. Jacobsen took part in the preparations for and program of the research group at CAS 2014–2015.

The chapter is a cultural anthropological exploration of the social memories and perceptions of the Tall Hisban summit among the present-day residents of the village of Hisban. By focusing on place-making processes aimed at the highest topographical point of the village, Jacobsen is able to map out how different dynamics contribute to the cultural production of various perceptions of this particular place: political, biographical, but also legendary and even historical dimensions. In the perceptions of local residents interviewed in this study, the village of Ḥisbān has for thousands of years been at the center of trends and forces of a scale far bigger than the village; forces and trends which one may label global forces. Still, the local realities of their lives and their village here and now loom larger than the attention toward past and present entanglement with, for example, other states and regimes, international NGOs, and even archaeologists. At best, aspects of their past and present entanglement are acknowledged as they become relevant for conceiving and speaking about present-day conditions of daily life. Place-making in Ḥesbān is thus a continuous and very local process imbuing the landscape of the tall, the village, and its surroundings with meaning, setting sacred places, artifacts, and events apart from the more mundane reality. At the same time, such local meaning-making and place-making processes employ and adapt motifs and sentiments that have been generated in trans-local settings.

8. Local Dynamics of Globalization in the Roman Near East: The Case of Palmyra [+–] 222-239

Eivind Heldaas Seland £17.50

University of Bergen

Eivind Heldaas Seland (PhD in History, University of Bergen, 2007) is professor of ancient history and premodern global history, Department of archaeology, history, cultural studies and religion, University of Bergen, Norway. His research interest is in the interaction between environment, economy, ideology and political power in shaping complex societies/early states in the ancient world. Seland is the author of Ships of the Desert, Ships of the Sea. Palmyra in the world trade of the first three centuries CE (Harrassowitz 2016). Seland took part in the research program of the group at CAS during 2014–2015.

The chapter investigates the interplay between the local and the global in the cultural production of the city of Palmyra, thus utilizing the city as a case study of the Local Dynamics of Globalization in the Premodern Levant. The settlement of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert emerged from relative obscurity around the turn of the Common Era. Building her prosperity on caravan trade between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, the city rose to become one of the most important of the Roman East, even vying for control of the Empire by the third quarter of the third century. Palmyra is famous for her cultural expression, which integrated strands from Iranian, Mesopotamian, Syrian, Arabian, Greek, and Roman traditions into a distinct Palmyrene blend. Trade and political imperialism are frequently perceived as agents of globalization in modern scholarly discourse, while cultural standardization and hybridization is seen as the result. The author, who has a long history of research with Palmyra, interprets how various spaces of the city contributed to differentiated identifications with local and trans-local ways of life. The Roman amphitheater, the Greek theater, the necropolis, the temple of Bel, and the agora were all arenas where the local elite took part in imperial and “globalizing” communication as well as in traditional local and regional discourse. The material record of these elites indicates how local and global discourse may have occurred in urban practice. The chapter reflects on the forms of such framing of the global. The lasting cultural entanglements of Palmyra, sadly illustrated in the fate of the city under ISIL, makes the case of this study all the more relevant.

Panel B: Scriptures – Ideology, Practices and Community [+–] 240-241

Terje Stordalen FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Panel B takes up an insight generated in chapter 4, namely that ideology—for instance in the form of local tradition or place-related social doxa—is among the factors that may contribute the most to conditioning the lasting success (or failure) of the local implementation of social change generated through trans-local connections. The ensuing three studies, all by scholars of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, are mining the biblical (and adjacent) record(s) to display various aspects of this role of religious ideology and different ways that ideologies may interact with state levels and local communities.

9. Early Forms of Judaism as a Mixture of Strategies of Cultural Heterogeneity and the Re-embedding of Local Culture in Archaic Globalization [+–] 242-292

Diana V. Edelman £17.50

University of Oslo

Diana V. Edelman is Professor Emerita of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. Her own research focuses on the history, archaeology, and literature of the southern Levant, the development of early forms of Judaisms, and ancient Near Eastern literature viewed from the perspective of social memory. She has thirteen seasons of excavation experience in Israel. While her research tends to focus on the Iron Age and Persian period, she is interested in earlier and later periods and a wide range of topics. Current interests include local responses to imperialism, royal ideology, the development of technology and agriculture, everyday life, issues involving religion and ritual, burial and afterlife beliefs, diaspora studies, migration studies, frontier studies, social memory, ancient economies, and ancient political organization. Her numerous publications include 17 authored or edited books, 44 chapters in edited volumes, 14 articles in refereed journals, 58 dictionary and encyclopedia articles, and 128 book reviews (as of 2/2015).

This chapter is an examination of the development of Judaism from earlier forms of Yahwism in light of J. Jennings (2010) eight trends of Archaic Globalization. In particular, two trends are important for understanding the cultural production of Persian and Achaemenid periods of Judaism, namely cultural heterogeneity and the re-embedding of local culture. The concept at the heart of Judaism, the religious community of Israel, can be characterized in part as a form of cultural heterogeneity, where new ways of living and thinking were generated through interaction with and in resistive reaction to socio-historical circumstances in a globalizing setting. At the same time, it is also the kind of re-embedding in local culture that is done by local elites to reject foreign influence. This involves a re-imagining of the past to meet the needs of the present and the envisioned future. Judaism thus emerges as a voluntary form of community identity that offers members or practitioners positive, supportive, localized networks as well as imperial-wide networks of connectivity that bridge the isolationism of the Levantine corridor and allow links to fellow religionists physically located in Egypt and Babylonia but who had historical roots in the hill country of Judah.

10. Dynamics of Power and the Re-Invention of “Israel” in Persian Empire Judah [+–] 293-321

Kåre Berge £17.50

Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo

Kåre Berge is Professor emeritus and guest researcher at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. His studies cover the Pentateuch, especially Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy, focusing on cultural memory, politics of identity, didacticism, and symbolization of power-relations. In particular, “Dynamics of Power and the Re-invention of ‘Israel’ in Persian Empire Judah.” Pages 293–321 in Levantine Entanglements. Edited by T. Stordalen and Ø.S. LaBianca. Sheffield: Equinox, 2021; and “Cities in Deuteronomy: Imperial Ideology, Resilience, and the Imagination of Yahwistic Religion.” Pages 77–96 in Deuteronomy in the Making. Edited by D. Edelman, B. Rossi, K. Berge, P. Guillaume. BZAW 533; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2021.

This chapter explores the possibility that the concept of “Israel” in the biblical book of Deuteronomy expresses a vision of an informal type of social and political organization, and of the leadership of that organization as an informal political group. By informal, the chapter means a social formation not ruled by the Persian Empire, and an authority not integrated into Persian governmental structure. In short, it was a sub-imperial kind of polity, passing under the Persian empire’s radar of attention, basing itself on a specifically religiously formulated kind of authority. That vision originated among Jewish elites in Persian Empire Judah. It was a vision of a society founded on religious scribalism, and at the base of its power system are the religious scribes and the book they produced. Importantly, however, this elite book is attentive to everyday life in local communities, and to everyday human needs, giving the impression of respecting and charting the value systems and the leadership of such communities. Accordingly, Deuteronomy creates a national identity, which is based on creative use and combinations of the imperial “generative grammar,” and local, traditional practices and ideas. It thus negotiates a specific format of interaction between elite and popular impulses—an interaction that is typical in cultural productions from the Levant. The result is an ideal, envisioned Israel with its own characteristics. Taking notice of the fact that religious and political power blend together in ancient political ideology and practice, the Israel of the biblical book appears as a political unit, although founded differently from what we know, for instance, of the Persian imperial ideology. The idea of informal authority-building has been adopted from Abner Cohen’s “re-invented communal relationships.”

11. The Production of Authority in Levantine Scriptural Ecologies: An Example of Accumulative Cultural Production [+–] 322-372

Terje Stordalen £17.50

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

This chapter reviews the beginnings of the cultural strategy of setting collections of professedly superb literature as symbols for social formation and group identity—what is in today’s world known as Scripture. This was a cultural paradigm that emerged slowly over three millennia (or more) in the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. During four or five centuries around the beginning of the Common Era, Jewish groups in the premodern Levant and Egypt adapted this paradigm particularly intensively. Their cultural production prepared the foundation for present-day Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptural canonical ecologies—all of which further adapted and implemented the cultural scriptural paradigm inherited from Classical Hebrew and early Jewish cultures. But what are the mechanics of production of authority in scriptural canons? In particular, how would it be possible, in the predominantly oral world of the Southern Levant during the centuries around the start of the common era, to stage a collection of scriptures as a means to produce social legitimacy? Exploring that question, this chapter discusses typical anatomies of canonical ecologies, including the canonical collection, its commentary, the canonical elites and their institutions, and the users: the canonical community. It then explores how texts would generally be used in popular culture in the oral–written interface of a predominantly oral world. Based on all this, the author argues that at one time a scriptural and an oral religious canon seem to have merged to form a symbiotic relationship, gaining each of the elites responsible for the respective canons.

Panel C: Pilgrimage- Localities and Global Discourse [+–] 373-375

Terje Stordalen FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Panel C, like Panel B, explores potential roles of religious ideology in early instances of globalizations, now focusing upon the religious ideology and practice of pilgrimage. As in Panel B, the focus is upon the interaction of local and trans-local/imperial interests and forces in these practices.

12. The Production of the Constantinian Holy Land [+–] 376-399

Øyvind Norderval £17.50

University of Oslo

Øyvind Norderval is professor of ecclesiastical history at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. His main fields are the ecclesiastical history and history of dogma of the ancient church. Norderval has devoted himself in particular to the hermeneutics of the ancient church, development of dogmas and creeds, and to the relationship between the Church, Imperium Romanum, and monasticism. Another field of interest has been recent Norwegian church history, especially revival movements in the nineteenth century, cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century, and the resistance movement within the Norwegian church from 1940–1945.

The Roman emperor Constantine (reign 303-337 CE) instigated the construction of the Holy Land. His visions for the Holy Land, its sacred places, Christian settlements, and pilgrimages represent a radical shift in imperial policy. This shift related to Constantine’s struggle to dismantle the Diocletian tetrarchy and become sole emperor. His vision was to have one god, one emperor, one church. Soon after becoming the sole emperor in 324, Constantine sent his mother Helena to the Levant to work with local Christian elites to begin building the Holy Land as a physical reality—a completely new orientation in the Christian perception of the region. After the fall of the temple, Christians generally did not entertain interest in Jerusalem as a physical site. Subsequent to Constantine’s initiative, there was a rapid development of religious structures and pilgrimage to the region, as is seen in sources like Itinerarium burdigalense (330s), Itenararium Egeriae (380s), or Jerome’s Epistula 108 (after 400). The political center of Constantine’s empire was Constantinople, but the ideological foundation of his power was Jerusalem—a proof of his role as God’s chosen emperor. The initiative to pilgrimage was imperial, but actual constructions only emerged through co-operation, adaption, and performances by local elites. The empire and local communities became entangled in complex ways that, eventually, neither side could easily dis-entangle. A shared framework of liturgical and biblical tradition (harking back to issues discussed in chapter 10) facilitated the construction of the fairly unified concept of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This framework created space for individual adaptions and yet promoted a direction for the totality. Constantine’s construction of the Holy Land turned into a cultural paradigm that kept developing—even into the Islamic faith, a paradigm that is today widely entangled throughout the world.

13. The Agency of Women in Curating the Christian Holy Land [+–] 400-423

Jill E. Marshall £17.50

Emory University

Jill E. Marshall (PhD in Religion, Emory University, 2015) has held Research Fellowships at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She specializes in New Testament and the history of early Christianity, with a focus on the construction of gender, the roles of women, and the images of cities in biblical interpretation. Marshall is the author of Women Praying and Prophesying in Corinth: Gender and Inspired Speech in First Corinthians (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), as well as articles in Journal of Biblical Literature, New Testament Studies, and Novum Testamentum. She has participated in the Shikhin Excavation Project in the Galilee.

This essay demonstrates women’s agency in the production of the holy land in contrast to the process of scriptural canonization by discussing three key figures and their contributions to defining holy places and spreading Christian ideas about them. First, Constantine’s mother Helena, as well as other elite and imperial women, constructed and financed churches, thereby defining the vision of Jerusalem as a holy city and the East as a fully integrated part of the empire. Second, women shaped the holy land by participating in pilgrimage, a movement that became popular in the fourth century. Egeria is the prime example, and her correspondence to her community of women in the West shows how travel in Palestine sacralized sites and forged links between Christians in the East and West. Finally, Paula and her daughter Eustochium, friends of Jerome, settled in Bethlehem and wrote to Marcella in Rome, encouraging her to come to the holy land. Even though they were engaged in the same project of establishing scholarly and ascetical communities that defined the Christian presence in the area, Jerome and Paula had distinct views of land and scripture that make their correspondence valuable for the question of gender in the formation of the canon and holy land.

14. Local Cult, Transforming Miracles, and Global Discourses: Saint George in Lydda [+–] 424-443

Christine Amadou £17.50

University of Oslo

Christine Amadou (Dr. art., University of Oslo, 2006) is professor in the History of Ideas at IFIKK, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway. She has written extensively in several fields, especially on late antique Christianity and on subjects from the history of religious and political ideas, and she is a specialist of the Eastern hagiographic tradition. She has also translated from Greek, e.g. “The Life of Macrina” and “The Life of Symeon the Stylite.” Amadou took part in the research group at CAS mainly during the spring of 2015.

This chapter takes the cult of St. George as a case study to approach the entanglements of the local and the global in the premodern Levant. It presents the early traditions and the localization of the cult of St. George, and through miracle accounts and other textual representations from the Early Middle Ages, it explores how the dynamics between local ownership and imperial ideology is present through the history of veneration for St. George. This saint cult’s history is marked by two historical watersheds: The Christianization of the Roman army in the fifth century and the conflicts between Christians and Muslims in the seventh century. St. George is interpreted as a mediator, i.e. a “transforming intercessor” on several levels: between the local and the global, between death and life, and between one place and another. This role is taken to explain the immense popularity of St. George and the spread of his cult.

15. The Infrastructure of Shared Sacred Sites in Hatay, Turkey: Interreligious Dynamics of Saint Veneration in the Northern Levant [+–] 444-524

Jens Kreinath £17.50

Wichita State University

Jens Kreinath is associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at Wichita State University. He conducted research on interreligious relations in Hatay, the southernmost province of Turkey, with a focus on saint veneration at shared pilgrimage sites. His research interests include religious minorities in the Middle East, visual anthropology, semiotics of ritual, and aesthetics of religion. Kreinath edited The Anthropology of Islam Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-edited Dynamics of Changing Rituals (Lang, 2004), Theorizing Rituals (Brill, 2006–2007), and Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion (Brill, 2020). His most recent publications include articles in Religions (2018), Religion and Society (2018), History of Religions (2019), Journal of Ritual Studies (2019), and Anthropological Theory (2019). His contributions to edited volumes include Aesthetics of Religion (edited by Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston; Walter de Gruyter, 2017), Sensations and Figurations of the Invisible (edited by Birgit Meyer and Terje Stordalen; Bloomsbury, 2019), and Bloomsbury Handbook of Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion (edited by Anne Koch and Katharina Wilkens; Bloomsbury, 2019).

Historically, the cult for St. George transformed and became adapted into Islamic traditions of Hz. Hızır. Based on cultural anthropological field work in the Turkish region of Antakya (ancient Antioch) Kreinath is able to demonstrate that elements of Islamic cult for Hızır, Jewish lore of Elijah, and Christian cult for St. George are currently all integrated into what he calls a shared infrastructure of pilgrimage and festivals in the region, resulting in a practice that is remarkably inter-religious (when seen from the outside). By way of his anthropological inquiry Kreinath is able to identify local popular sub-current traditions that informs the practices at these sites—sometimes in recognized opposition to the more orthodox religious views promoted by local religious elites. The materials included in this study offer a rare opportunity to see the current local effects of an ancient cultural paradigm and networks of pilgrimage that first emerged in late Antiquity.

Panel D: Polycentrism – Local Communities and Trans-local Formations [+–] 525-526

Øystein S. LaBianca,Terje Stordalen FREE

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Panel D circulates around issues of social canons as the infrastructure of social networks. These studies therefore connect back to the concepts of canonicity (in a broad, social sense), developed in Panel B. In the first study, Håkon Teigen takes the Manichaean congregation in the Dakhlah Oasis, western part of Roman Egypt (fourth to fifth century CE) as a point of departure for a study on the production of canonical authority and social doxa. Focusing on the canonical habit of itinerancy and its impact on the relationship between the Elect—Manichaeism’s ascetical elite—and the Auditors, its laity, in the Levant and Egypt, Teigen argues that such itinerancy was practiced in a distinct way and took on a certain role in the Manichaean canonical ecology. This allowed a trans-regional Manichaean network to emerge, spread, and persist.

16. Itinerancy in Manichaean Networks of the Levant and Egypt [+–] 527-543

Håkon F. Teigen £17.50

Independent Scholar

Håkon F. Teigen received his PhD in history, University of Bergen in 2018 with the thesis “Limbs of the Light Mind: The social world of a Manichaean community in fourth century Egypt” (University of Bergen, 2018). His interests include Manichaeism, developments within late antique religion, and the application of sociological tools to historical evidence. Teigen held a scholarship with the CAS group during the spring of 2015.

The emergence of canonical scriptural ecologies has deep roots in the Levant, as described by Stordalen in this volume. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were the main carriers of this cultural paradigm. However, other movements also contributed to its development. Taking my cue from the project “Local Dynamics of Globalization,” this chapter explores religious authority in the context of Manichaeism, a movement that appropriated Levantine paradigms of cultural authority. I look at the interplay between social canons and social networks, examining how norms for interaction, or ‘canonical habits,’ shaped the Manichaean social networks. More specifically, I look at the canonical habit of itinerancy and its impact on the relationship between the Elect—Manichaeism’s ascetical elite—and the Auditors, its laity, in the Levant and Egypt. It is my argument that itinerancy was practiced in a distinct way and took on a unique role in the Manichaean canonical ecology, allowing a trans-regional Manichaean network to emerge, spread, and persist.

17. Reconstructing Homeland at a Time of Globalizing Change: Peasant Migration in Late Medieval Syria [+–] 544-582

Bethany J. Walker £17.50

University of Bonn

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Prof. Dr. Bethany J. Walker (PhD 1998, University of Toronto, Islamic art and archaeology) – Co-Director of the Khirbet Beit Mazmīl excavations and Co-PI of the Medieval Jerusalem Hinterland Project. Research Professor of Mamluk Studies and Director of the Research Unit of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn (Germany). Author of Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago, 2011), editor of Reflections of Empire: Archaeological and Ethnographic Studies on the Pottery of the Ottoman Levant (Boston, 2009), and author of 65 scholarly articles. Founding editor of the Journal of Islamic Archaeology (Equinox) and Co-editor of Equinox’s Monographs in Islamic Archaeology.

The lives of peasants across the Mediterranean were transformed by the greater interconnectedness of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which drove changes in land tenure and use, facilitated market agriculture, and encouraged rural migration. This chapter scrutinizes this phenomenon as it played out in Greater Syria at the end of the medieval era, making use of a closely integrated “reading” of the archaeological record and the contemporary textual record (namely Mamluk and Ottoman-era Arabic documents related to land use and daily life in village communities). This is in an effort to disentangle imperial interventions from local decision-making in regards to planting and water use and distribution (presented here as social canons in natural resource management). In this way it adopts a Bourdieu-esque approach to understanding how concepts of “homeland” developed over time and to documenting the changing contours of local “identity-making” on a small scale.

18. Honor, Shame and Hospitality: The Distribution of Power in the Premodern Levant [+–] 583-615

Eveline van der Steen £17.50

Independent Scholar

Eveline van der Steen is an independent scholar. She has worked extensively in Jordan, excavating and publishing on the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. Presently her main academic interests focus on the political, social and economic interaction between 19th century Near Eastern tribal societies, as a model for Bronze and Iron age societies in the region. Her latest book on the subject, Near Eastern Tribal Societies During the 19th Century was published in 2013.

The chapter makes a claim for a particular resilience in Levantine cultural production associated to local tradition and kinship structures. In particular, in her treatment of hospitality, honor and shame in the Levant, the author argues that sources from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries reflect how traditional values associated to local discourse (cf. Stordalen in the introduction) exerted considerable cultural and political influence long after tribal social discourse in the Levant had entered a modern pace. The author then argues for utilizing nineteenth century honor and shame practices as a heuristic prism for reading Levantine sources from the Iron Age.

Conclusion

Concluding Reflections: On a Way Forward for Understanding the Levant [+–] 616-627

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Ending this research initiative, let us return to the metaphor of this volume as a quilt (cf. introduction). At this point, the reader has been acquainted with the result: the quilt has been presented, with all its irregular pieces, uneven fabric, shifting patterns, and still many obvious blank spots—but also with hopefully fresh insights on the complex character of the Levant and on certain subtle lines of development going through the tapestries when explored from the vantage points engaged in this volume. Obviously, the volume is too complex, and too explorative, to be neatly summarized in a few pages. Nevertheless, we thought that we would share a few reflections and lessons about crystallizing a more inclusive narrative of the Levantine past that we learned in the process. We do hope that these might be helpful to future explorers.

End Matter

Index 629-650

Terje Stordalen,Øystein S. LaBianca FREE

University of Oslo

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Terje Stordalen is professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He also holds a chair as Obel Visiting Social Science professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Andrews University

Øystein S. LaBianca is research professor of anthropology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and associate director of the Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Michigan, USA.

Reviews

This volume will change the way we write our histories of Palestine and the Levant well beyond the next decade. It is a very important contribution to anyone working on the history of the Levant or Palestine.
Thomas L. Thompson, Professor emeritus, University of Copenhagen

This volume is a very important and a very fine piece of scholarship on the Levant. Its publication will without doubt enrich current historical, archaeological, anthropological and biblical approaches to the past of the region. I cannot wait to see the impact it will have on the field of ancient Levant studies.
Emanuel Pfoh, Researcher at the National Research Council, CONICET-Argentina, and Assistant Professor of History of Asia & Africa, National University of La Plata

This is an enormously ambitious project. It has set itself the very hard task of interweaving physical, social, and conceptual topographies which are all at least in some senses spatial, with cultural traditionality, the formation and vicissitudes of memory and record, and the everchanging behaviours of what we think of as ‘religion’. The volume sheds a good deal of often very exciting illumination on this quintessentially entangled zone.
Nicholas Purcell, Camden Professor of Ancient History, Oxford University

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Levantine Entanglements

Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean

Terje Stordalen [+–]

University of Oslo

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Øystein S. LaBianca [+–]

Andrews University

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