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

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

9. Early Forms of Judaism as a Mixture of Strategies of Cultural Heterogeneity and the Re-embedding of Local Culture in Archaic Globalization

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

Diana V. Edelman [+-]
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).

Description

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.

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Citation

Edelman, Diana. 9. Early Forms of Judaism as a Mixture of Strategies of Cultural Heterogeneity and the Re-embedding of Local Culture in Archaic Globalization. Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 242-292 Nov 2021. ISBN 9781781799123. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=38449. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.38449. Nov 2021

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