The Two Maps of Israel's Land.

The general space of the world becomes more familiar as specific places through demarcation and domesticating practices that include identifying and naming natural features, building memorial structures, and telling stories of pilgrim ancestors. (1) Such acts also play central roles in colonization and settlement and can, for example, be easily located in the book of Joshua. (2) Here I investigate the making of Israel's place on the national level or, said differently, how the map of a nation comes into being. The examples are taken from throughout the Hebrew Bible and therefore the context is antiquity, yet similar processes also determine the nature of maps from subsequent eras. Biblical maps display how spatial representation of the nation relies on intersecting mythic and political standards. My analysis of this dynamic is driven by the question of why there are two different maps of Israel's land. One set of maps spans from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Jordan River in the east and a second set reaches from the Sea to the River Euphrates. A conceptual stability results from the parallel of land spanning from river to sea, while conflicting notions of the state arise from their discrepancies. I argue that the seemingly paradoxical existence of two topographies illustrates how maps reconcile the idea of the nation with regnant mythic conceptions as well as how the nation borrows the means of self-presentation from empire. The maps to which I refer are narratives that evoke place by consecutive enumeration of limits rather than by graphic symbols.3 We know of pictorial maps from the ancient Near East such as the Babylonian mappa mundi (4) and the Egyptian map of Turin. (5) The maps of Israel's land, in contrast, are mediated in language as boundary lists. Although they first read like an inventory, a geographical corollary to the genealogy genre, the maps are rich in literary nuance and historical suggestion. (6) J. B. Harley, the historian of cartography who initiated theoretical consideration of mapping, has shown how maps can be probed for their silences as well as for the concessions made in the margins that haunt their hierarchies. From maps we learn how those in power such as monarchs or priests circumscribe space in order that institutions such as the court or the priesthood be perceived as the center of state and cosmos alike. At the same time, the grandiosity or over-compensation of maps often bespeaks the tremulousness of power, and acknowledgments made in passing can point toward fronts of contestation or resistance.