Beyond the 'Biblical World' Paradigm: Reflections on a Problematic Concept

Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm: Reflections on a Problematic Concept * 1 Christoph Uehlinger Abstract This article offers an epistemological critique of the concept ‘Biblical World’, still widely used in scholarly discussions on the history and archaeology of the ancient Levant and neighbouring regions. I argue that while many scholars especially in the West may have been drawn to the study of ancient Near Eastern history and culture via exposure to the Bible and biblical literature, the historian’s task is to revert the logic of that initial encounter and to resist the misleading classification of the ancient Levantine world as a ‘Biblical World’. Addressing the Levant in its own right will open up wider perspectives – even for the study of biblical texts or the Hebrew Bible as such. The article concludes with an outlook on Gaza, its (generally unintended) marginalization in recent scholarship and a call to restore Gaza’s memory to its proper place in southern Levantine history. 1. Introduction The contributions to this issue of Die Welt des Orients address critical issues pertaining to the study of second- and first-millennium BCE southern Levantine religion, gender, material and visual culture. What holds them together is a concern to overcome dichotomies and to combine a data-based, thus empirical and inductive approach to ancient Levantine societies and cultural production with theoretical questioning and critical self-reflection. Another common denominator is the consent of those among the authors who deal with biblical literature that texts from the Hebrew Bible should be addressed on the same epistemological premises as any other literature, which means to approach them as social and cultural historical data reflecting, among other things, a significant yet particular strand in the history of knowledge formation and exchange in the ancient southern Levant and connected regions. * The basic argument sketched in the following essay crystallized when the editors of this issue of Die Welt des Orients (all members of the Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant project then employed by the University of Zurich) prepared a panel titled “Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ paradigm” for the 24th Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, held in Zurich in August 2022. The panel’s central concern could be characterized similarly as by Pfoh (2020: 43), namely to offer colleagues “a moment of reflexivity in which we think about our own categories and models and our own social locations to understand and explain our production of knowledge.” I thank the co-editors of this issue, Bruno Biermann, Fabio Porzia and Silas Klein Cardoso, as well as my friend and colleague Ido Koch (Tel Aviv University) for commenting on a preliminary draft of this article. All shortcomings are mine. 130 Christoph Uehlinger Isn’t that an obvious and common sense principle at work in all (or most) contemporary studies on the ancient Near East (or West Asia) and ancient Egypt, and thus in the historical-critical study of biblical literature and ‘the Bible’ as well? There are reasons to think it is not. The following discussion addresses a concept that, in my opinion, betrays a misconception of the social, political, economic and cultural realities of the ancient southern Levant, namely the notion of a ‘Biblical World’ (sometimes uncapitalized ‘biblical world’), suggesting an epistemological critique of the concept’s underlying assumptions. I argue that while many scholars especially in the West may have been drawn to the study of ancient Near Eastern history and culture via exposure to the Bible and biblical literature as a result of their own socialization and educational background, this role of the Bible or biblical literature as an entrypoint to the ancient world of southern Levant should not determine the ongoing conceptualization of that world as a ‘Biblical World’. The critical historian’s task is to revert the logic of that initial encounter and to resist the ancient world’s misleading classification as a ‘Biblical World’. Instead of approaching the ancient world through the lens of a Bible-based framework of assumptions, scholars should address the ancient Levant, its history and cultural production in their own right. This is not to question that biblical literature and the Bible as such are particularly consequential products of the ancient Levantine world, but to ask that they be addressed as such, in their complex entanglements with the cultural production of the southern Levant and its neighbouring regions. The historian’s task should be to put the horse before the cart, so to speak. 2. The Currency of a Phrase, Reflecting What May Be a Paradigm Major scholarly achievements of the past decades have been tagged with the label ‘Biblical World’, or in German Welt (resp. Umwelt) der Bibel. A search with the Google Ngram viewer1 for the use of the stock phrase ‘Biblical World’ (‘biblical world’) in books and articles published in English over the past 150 years produces an interesting result (fig. 1a): The capitalized phrase started its career in the late 19th century, reaching a first momentum shortly after 1900 and a second, even higher peak just before and during WWI; after that the curve progressively declines, to slowly recover since the 1960s and rise up to a new, if considerably lower, peak by the turn of the millennium. The non-capitalized phrase2 started to be regularly used only after WWII, following an 1 The following observations do not assume data produced by Google Ngram to be exhaustive let alone consolidated, reliable scientifically data. Nevertheless, Google Ngram searches can be useful to identify major trends and changing emphases in the use of scholarly concepts. While I do not consider Google Ngram authoritative in any way, I draw on it here as a feed for critical reflection. 2 The difference between capitalized and non-capitalized spelling may be explained by distinct Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 131 ascending curve quite similar to that of the capitalized phrase and even overriding the latter quite significantly since the 1980s, until the two would meet again in the 21st century. Fig. 1a The phrase’s or concept’s career mirrors important stages in the Western ‘rediscovery’, exploration and scholarly study of Palestine (here understood geographically to include what would become the modern states of Israel and Jordan, and the Cisjordanian ‘Westbank’ territories).3 The first peak mirrors a period of imperial reappropriation, by British, French, German and US-American scholars and explorers, of what had been for centuries a province of the Ottoman Empire. The ‘Biblical World’ was brought to life through large-scale archaeological expeditions by W. M. F. Petrie, F. J. Bliss, R. A. S. Macalister, G. A. Reisner, G. Schumacher and E. Sellin at sites such as Gezer, Jerusalem, Megiddo, Samaria and others. The ‘Biblical World’ lost traction as a discursive topos between the 1930s and the 1950s, which is remarkable since precisely this period has been called “the golden age of biblical archaeology”.4 It stands to reason that crises and political unrest both in the region and worldwide made orthographic conventions (e. g., US vs British spelling). It could also indicate a trend towards a more secular approach in post-WWII discourse to the Bible and the world from where the latter originated. 3 Holloway 2013 discusses the “expansion of the historical context of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament” through the study of geography and monuments during the 19th century (and see most recently Pfoh 2022). The history of archaeology in the southern Levant has often been told, with various emphases ranging from narratives of exploration and discovery (e. g., Moorey 1991) to critical discussions of social and political context (e. g., Silberman and Small 1997; Kletter 2006; Pfoh and Whitelam 2013; most recently, Rosner 2023). 4 Moorey 1991: 54. 132 Christoph Uehlinger it difficult to apprehend sine ira et studio a ‘Biblical World’ in Palestine, even after the State of Israel was established in 1948.5 The ‘Biblical World’ would only become tangible again (or so it seemed) from the 1960s onward (think of renewed excavations in Gezer, Hazor, Jerusalem, or Shechem), and even more so after 1967. The occupation of the Westbank (“Judea and Samaria” in Israeli administrative terminology) opened the ‘biblical heartland’ to unprecedented archaeological exploration. Unsurprisingly, the second peak in fig. 1a equals the first when capitalized and non-capitalized uses of the phrase under study are added together. Fig. 1b reflects a slightly more focused search, here without smoothing, for the fifty years between 1967 and 2019.6 Note that the Ngram viewer registers scanned books more consistently than journals, and the two searches are based on slightly different corpuses (2012, 2019).7 Nevertheless, the two graphs demonstrate the currency of the phrase or concept of a ‘Biblical World’ over the past 125 years; moreover, they agree on a second tide since the 1980s and the trend seems to be ascending. Fig. 1b A search for the related phrase “world of the Bible” produces the following result: 5 It would be rewarding to compare Euro-American with Hebrew discourse during that time. An Ngram search for ‫( עולם המקרא‬ʿolām ha=miqrāʾ) indicates a first peak just before WWII, highest results in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and a third peak around 1980. Since then, usage of the phrase has constantly decreased. Similar results were obtained for ‫( עולמ התנ“ך‬ʿolām ha=tanaḵ), although the latter’s use was less prominent overall. 6 2019 being the last year available for computation on the Ngram viewer I used. 7 See Younes and Reips 2019 on problems of and means to enhance the reliability of Google Ngram analyses. Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 133 Fig. 2a “World of the Bible” does not seem to have enjoyed significant use before the 20th century; its career started only after WWII, with a first peak in the 1960s. Its use grew almost constantly over the decades, to reach something of a climax around 2010. Interestingly, a search for German Welt der Bibel produces a different result (fig. 2b): This phrase had its momentum around 1960, but the peak was of short duration and the curve quickly fell back to its previous level, before rising again until the turn of the millennium. It never reached the earlier peak again, in contrast to ‘Biblical World’ in English/American discourse. It stands to reason that the last peak was triggered by the launch of a quite popular magazine titled Welt und Umwelt der Bibel (adapted from the French Le Monde de la Bible) in 1996. Fig. 2b 134 Christoph Uehlinger If all graphs except fig. 1b seem to indicate a decline in the use of ‘Biblical World’ and related phrases when we approach the present, this is due to technical and methodological reasons of data collection and of the software applied; it does not signal a deep change in scholarly or media discourse after 2010. The following list of publications, randomly collected from this author’s personal database of bibliographical resources and thus rather idiosyncratic, may give us a sense that the phrase ‘Biblical World’ continues to enjoy ongoing popularity in 21st century scholarship: Coogan, M. D. (ed.). 2001. The Oxford History of the Biblical World, Oxford – New York. Rainey, A. F. and Notley, R. S. 2006. The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World, Jerusalem. Wills, L. M. 2008. Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World, Lanham. Way, K. C. 2011. Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol (History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant 2), Winona Lake, IN. Lubetski, M. and Lubetski, E. (eds.). 2012. New Inscriptions and Seals Relating to the Biblical World (Archaeology and Biblical Studies 19), Atlanta, GA. Jacobus, H. R., de Hemmer Gudme, A. K. and Guillaume, P. (eds.). 2013. Studies on Magic and Divination in the Biblical World (Biblical Intersections 11), Piscataway, NJ. Russell, S. C. 2016. The King and the Land: A Geography of Power in the Biblical World, New York. Smith, M. S. 2016. Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World (AYBRL), New Haven, CT. Dell, K. J. (ed.). 2019. The Biblical World. 2nd ed., London and New York. Betsworth, S. and Parker, J. F. (eds.). 2019. T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World, London. Heide, M. and Peters, J. 2021. Camels in the Biblical World (History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant 10), University Park, PA. Quick, L. and Ramos, M. (eds.). 2022. New Perspectives on Ritual in the Biblical World (LHBOTS 702), London. Eshel, E. and Langlois, M. (eds). 2023. The Scribe in the Biblical World: A Bridge between Scripts, Languages and Cultures (BZAW 547), Berlin. Buccellati, G. 2023. “When on High the Heavens …”: Mesopotamian Religion and Spirituality with Reference to the Biblical World, London and New York. The list could easily be extended. A closer look at the various items (single-author volumes alongside edited volumes with multiple authors) would show significant differences in the use and understanding of the phrase by various scholars. A major epistemic divide runs between works in which ‘neighbouring cultures’ are considered part of a ‘biblical world’ (e. g., Smith 2016), and others that distinguish between one or several neighbouring cultures and the ‘Biblical World’ even when stressing commonalities (e. g., Buccellati 2023). In the latter case, the phrase may explicitly designate the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah or the later provinces of Samaria and Yehud (e. g., Russell 2016); it may include and actually focus on the biblical text and tradition itself (e. g., Wills 2008, or Heide and Peeters 2021), or point to the ‘real’ world (society, culture, religion, etc.) around the Bible’s literary one. The two datasets are explicitly distinguished in the phrase “the Bible and the Biblical World” (Betsworth and Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 135 Parker 2019). Quite often, however, the phrase tends to designate that world in a rather wide sense: geographically, it is rarely restricted to Israel and Judah alone but embraces at least the southern, if not the entire Levant, going so far as to cover ancient Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia as well; chronologically, the phrase may often include data from the third and second millennia BCE, in spite of a growing scholarly consensus that Hebrew prototypes of biblical literature were written no earlier than the eighth or seventh century BCE. My aim here is not to criticize the scholarship offered in the above-mentioned publications, but to make readers aware that the concept of a ‘Biblical World’ is alive and with us, at least as far as the discipline of Biblical Studies is concerned.8 In contrast, the phrase has lost currency in other disciplines concerned with the ‘worlds’ of the ancient Mediterranean, ancient Egypt or ancient West Asia (that is the main regions covered by this journal). These disciplines have adopted alternative designations such as ‘the world of ancient Egypt’, the ‘Ancient World’, the ‘Greco-Roman World’, or the like. One might object that scholars use ‘Biblical World’ as a commonsense stock phrase, rarely ever reflecting on it explicitly as a concept, let alone a critical one grounded in theory. Indeed scholars rarely define what they mean by that phrase; when they do so, they tend to apply a broad understanding.9 The phrase thus reflects scholarly habitus rather than expressing a program let alone a theory. Moreover, it may well be that its use in book titles and subtitles reflects audience-, market- and reader-oriented strategies by editors and publishers rather than choices by the scholars themselves.10 Note the recent launching of at least two new book series using the term (Routledge Studies in the Biblical World, since 2018; Archaeology of the Biblical Worlds, since 2019).11 Consider 8 An inventory of SBL, EABS and other professional conference seminars, program units and panels mentioning the ‘Biblical World’ in their title could provide an additional dataset. For example, current SBL program units incude “Children in the Biblical World”, “Cognitive Science Approaches to the Biblical World”, “Economics in the Biblical World”, “Historical Geography of the Biblical World”, “Meals in the HB/OT and Its World”, “Poverty in the Biblical World”, “Ritual in the Biblical World”, and “Senses, Cultures and Biblical Worlds”. 9 Note Jacobus, de Hemmer Gudme and Guillaume 2013, ix: “the editors defined ‘biblical world’ to apply to any text or artefact from any historical period that illuminated or encompassed the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament”. 10 Note that the phrase allows to preserve a sense of familiarity in the scholarly and public engagement with archaeology, a field witnessing increasing specialization and in which conventional historicist and culturalist approaches are challenged and renewed by methodologies borrowed from natural sciences. 11 The latter mentioned is interesting in several respects: note the plural “Worlds”, which leaves open to hypothesize whether it should be understood narrowly (in the sense of the conventional distinction of ethno-‘nationally’ defined states), or more broadly in terms of different regions, types of subsistence and ways of life, levels of society, status groups, milieus and/or communities, milieus etc.). According to the publisher’s presentation, “the topics covered in this series will span the cultures in which the biblical texts were created and received, mostly but not exclusively in the eastern Mediterranean world” (https://www.degruyter.com/serial/ abw-b/html, accessed 30 April 2024). See further the series Archaeology and Bible, equally launched in 2019, which aims to provide “original, cutting-edge critical studies on the liter- 136 Christoph Uehlinger the case of two outstanding 21st century reference works: The Context of Scripture, a four-volume compendium of literary compositions, monumental inscriptions, archival documents and other texts “from the Biblical World”12 edited by W. W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger (1998–2016), is an essential resource for researchers far beyond the field of Biblical Studies, in spite of its scripturalist and Bible-centric title and sub-titles. The same could be said of the recentlypublished Encyclopedia of Material Culture in the Biblical World: A New Biblisches Reallexikon edited by A. Berlejung and others (2022), the entries of which were authored by archaeologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, historians of the ancient world with only a few scholars from the guild of Biblical Studies among them.13 That a phrase should have currency whithout any substantial reflection about what it means or implies should invite the discipline to pause.14 After all, ature and the material culture of ancient Israel in its Levantine context from archaeological, epigraphic and biblical perspectives” (https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/monograph-series/ archaeology-and-bible-archb?no_cache=1, accessed 30 April 2024). After a period of disciplinary refocusing and emphasis on Levantine regional perspectives, does the recent increase in specialized series bridging archaeology and biblical studies reflect a new trend towards a kind of “biblical archaeology 2.0”? 12 The phrase occurs in the various subtitles of Volumes 1–3. 13 Main editor Berlejung states briefly that compared to its German-language predecessor Biblisches Reallexikon, “the EBW is not so much a biblical handbook. Therefore the biblical evidence (sic) is not its main concern. It is a new lexicon on the material culture in the biblical world. Accordingly, it is a reference book for biblical scholars as well as for archaeologists” (ibid., XVII). To be fair, the same characterization could have been given already for the former Reallexikon. More significant for the argument made in the present article, Berlejung seems to consider the emphasized phrase “in the biblical world” as self-explanatory. 14 I should point out that the conference proceedings titled “What is Bible?” (Finsterbusch and Lange 2012) caught my attention only at a very late stage of redaction of this article. The book explores various meanings and extensions of the two concepts “Bible” and “biblical” in their relation to second order terms such as “archaeology”, “history”, “literature”, “interpretation” etc. The phrase “biblical world” is discussed in two contributions: André Lemaire distinguishes between many different uses, suggesting that “there was no unified ‘biblical world’ but several biblical worlds”. He concludes that “it is important to emphasize that these ‘biblical worlds’ only reveal a limited aspect of the ancient civilizations and will never take the place of the study of these ancient civilizations for themselves” (Lemaire 2012: 128–129). Assessing advantages and disadvantages of the phrase “biblical world”, Regine Hunziker-Rodewald remarks that “the adjective ‘biblical’ signifies a scope of interest which permits prioritization, concentration, and emphasis” and that it “implies a cultural unit, expressed particularly in terms of background, content and effect” (Hunziker-Rodewald 2012: 135–136). In her view, “The idea of biblical world as an interface linking the exchange of knowledge between various fields of research (archaeology, exegesis, epigraphy, history and iconography) by their shared interest in the same literary source implies that these fields and their results could eventually be compatible” (ibid.: 139). What starts as a promising interest in interdisciplinarity seems to get caught in a unifying perspective, which runs a risk of hegemonial reduction. Interestingly enough, Hunziker-Rodewald’s case study of “female beauty” as expressed in biblical literature and in Iron Age terracotta figurines points to a higher degree of resonance with Judahite pillar figurines than with figurines from other regions (and periods), a conclusion which might help to anchor the relevant biblical expressions in a specifically Judahite cultural tradition. Whether one agrees or not with the analysis and conclusion, the study thus confirms rather than disproves Lemaire’s diversity of worlds, not all of which are equally prone to be characterized as “biblical”. Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 137 we are supposed to think, and to think critically, about our object of study and the concepts we use to apprehend it. 3. Questioning the Concept of a ‘Biblical World’ A journal titled Die Welt des Orients – whatever difficulties one may see associated with this title and especially the term “the Orient”15 – is an appropriate venue to question what still seems to operate as a guiding principle in much historical research on the Bible’s so-called Welt or Umwelt, namely, (1) that there ever was such a thing as a ‘Biblical World’ and (2) that the first and foremost purpose of its study should be to illuminate our understanding of ‘the Bible’.16 Are we justified to so label the antique worlds of Egypt, West Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean? That those worlds, rediscovered in the context of 19th and 20th century European and American imperialism by means of archaeology and philology, were first approached through the lens of the Bible, that foremost reflection of Euro-American cultural capital and hegemony, is a historical fact and circumstance which invites historical explanation but also requires de-colonial modesty and distanciation. Many colleagues active in Levantine archaeology, Assyriology, Egyptology, and ancient history may initially have been drawn to their field through early exposure to the Bible, whether read religiously or as a cultural monument, although this is probably less the case today than it was for previous generations. And while the community of biblical scholars still outnumbers by far those of the mentioned ‘neighbouring’ fields, this state of affairs is itself the product of (mainly) Europe’s and the America’s religious history, or in other words, of the entanglement of religion (via theology) and higher learning in societies long framed by Christianity and (to a lesser extent) Judaism. 15 As far as I can see, Orientalism and the concept of ‘the Orient’ have never been addressed in terms of an epistemological critique in this journal (in stark contrast to US-American journals and institutions, such as ASOR, whose name changed from “American Schools of Oriental Research” to “American Society of Overseas Research” in 2021, or the University of Chicago’s former “Oriental Institute”, which has been renamed the “Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures” in 2023). It is interesting, however, to browse through the volumes of Die Welt des Orients since the journal’s founding in 1947, and to ponder on changes in scope and editorial strategy. A major shift occurred when contributions dealing with the Islamicate world and Islamic studies ceased to be published in 2007, a decision that coincided with the retirement of Heinz Halm as area editor and no doubt took into account the existence of other ‘Orientalist’ journals such as the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Only since 2007, Die Welt des Orients has thus become a journal focusing exclusively on the ancient (i. e., pre-Islamic) ‘Orient’. 16 This journal’s initial background with regard to the correlation of archaeology, philology (biblical and otherwise), and history has been recently explored and discussed under the heading “Martin Noth’s legacy” by Blum 2023 and Vanderhooft 2023. 138 Christoph Uehlinger Among the constitutive fallacies of the ‘Biblical World’ paradigm, let me mention the following: (1) its implicit, a-historical teleology considering the Bible as the focal point or receptacle of the most relevant cultural traditions of an ancient ‘Oriental’ past; (2) the privileging of biblical texts and their interpretive challenges as starting-points for historical inquiry (rather than intermediate steps in a history of knowledge formation and transmission); (3) conceptual biases inherited from biblical literature, not least historiography, such as a focus on ‘national’ and ethnic units of description, comparison and explanation;17 (4) its systemic privileging of Israel and Judah vs. other ‘neighbouring’ societies and cultures. To be sure, these aspects can be understood on the background of the Bible’s reception and diffusion as a religious and cultural blueprint of global importance, and of its place in the history of modern Western knowledge formation. Today, they need to be reconsidered and historicized, not least in light of post- and de-colonial critique. Time seems ripe to reconsider the epistemological subjection of Western Asia’s and Northeastern Africa’s ancient history to the centrality of the Bible, to question and (perhaps) to ultimately dismiss the historically explicable, but misleading and ill-founded notion of a ‘Biblical World’.18 How can we face the challenge without throwing out the baby with the bathwater? 4. Alternatives and Their Potential Advantages ‘The Bible’ and its constituent writings and the traditions, oral or written, processed therein are products of a real past world ‘out there’ (a jargon phrase current in anthropology): to affirm this is stating the obvious and beyond doubt for the historically-minded scholar. The question raised here is whether that world which produced biblical writings and ultimately a Bible (or indeed, many different versions of it) is best understood when we qualify it explicitly with the adjective ‘biblical’. I argue that this is not the case: On the one hand, the adjective subsumes all aspects of the ‘world’ to be investigated under the hegemonic 17 To the effect that at times even the large-scale societies of Egypt, North Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia are treated as discrete units and compared to much smaller-scale units such as the Levantine putative ‘nations’. 18 Emanuel Pfoh has recently expressed a similar evaluation when stating that “the idea of a ‘biblical world’, anchored in a ‘biblical period’, results for the historian in a conceptual restriction to a particular and limited amount of data dictated by the framework of the biblical text, and […] the ‘biblical world’ of modern biblical scholarship represents rather a distortive framework for an ancient reality” (Pfoh 2022: 9–10). Note that the issue is related to the late 20th-century debate over an appropriate label for the archaeological investigation of the region (“biblical archaeology” vs. “Syro-Palestinian archaeology”), about which see Zevit 2004. It does not concern the field of Biblical Studies alone, but affects neighbouring disciplines as well. Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 139 perspective of a single, particular (however exceptionally momentous) cultural artefact. On the other hand, it might narrow the perspective with which scholars investigate the world in question; they run the risk of privileging data which in a way or another, directly or indirectly, contribute to the study and interpretation of the Bible – which is not necessarily the central matter of concern the average historian would look for. Moreover, approaching extra-biblical data through the lens of a ‘Biblical World’ paradigm may lead to misreadings, misunderstandings and misappropriations of data which were not initially produced to enter a conversation with the Bible in the first place.19 Fig. 3 Can we think of better alternatives? Yes, we can – and as a matter of fact many of them are already in scholarly use. My suggestion and personal preference – by no means particularly original20 – is to prioritize geography (the typical longue durée instance in Braudel’s three-level conception of history) on the one hand, human connectivity and communication on the other hand in the study of the social and cultural history (or historical anthropology) of the southern Levant, of which the study of biblical literature is an integral part. This means to privilege geographically and ecologically defined units (regions) as well as networks connecting them over often static ethno-politically or religiously defined terms and essentializing taxonomies. Among other advantages, setting geography 19 See most recently Sonik 2024 on this issue. 20 Over the past 25 years, the geographical designation “(southern) Levant” seems to have joined and largely surpassed the phrase ‘Biblical World’ in scholarship on the history and archaeology of the region, without replacing it altogether (see Ngram graph in fig. 3). However, the adoption of an alternative term does not always nor necessarily entail full epistemological reorientation (note the critical discussion in Routledge 2017). 140 Christoph Uehlinger first allows addressing the (northern, southern, or entire) Levant on pair with neighbouring regions (Egypt, the Mediterranean world, the Arabian peninsula, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, etc.). And it could invite new vistas on old problems, including the (in my view, problematic) division of first-millennium Levantine history according to ethnic and/or national labels, a scholarly convention that fragmentizes the region’s history while, quite often, prioritizing the particular histories of only two of the fragments so defined (namely, Israel and Judah – provided the two are distinguished in the first place). Both the major division of Canaanite vs. Hebrew (or Israelite) or the smaller-scale divisions of territories, language, script, material culture etc. according to ethno-national labels (Ammonite, Edomite, Israelite, Judahite, Moabite, Philistine, Phoenician, etc.) are too often applied in a reifying, essentializing, static way to data which do not require such a classification. Both taxonomies have been created by modern scholars from biblical precedents. They are based on an ill-founded mixture of emic and etic terminology. In contrast, to let go the concept of a ‘Biblical World’ could after all open a new perspective to biblical literature and ‘the Bible’ itself. In a way, it would mean to turn tables and put first things first. Instead of approaching and reconstructing a world based on the (literary, historiographic, ultimately religious) premises of the Bible, decentering the latter would allow to approach it first of all from the perspective of the southern Levant’s social, political, economic, cultural and religious history. That history should be written first and foremost on the basis of non-biblical ‘external’ evidence: ‘primary evidence’ as has been said, a notion that as far as I can see has been contested mainly by those who feared to lose priority in the scholarly discourse about ‘ancient Israel’. The point of my argument is not in any way to diminish the significance of the Bible and the importance of its academic study within a particular disciplinary environment, whether biblical, Old Testament, Semitic or ancient Near Eastern studies. My plea is rather that instead of searching for a ‘Biblical World’ – which is a fata morgana of sorts unless we talk about the reality of an entirely literary world – we might engage in research trying to better contextualize biblical literature within and as part of the complex and entangled worlds and worldviews of the ancient southern Levant. The change of perspective may appear to be minimal. But to adopt it will help not only decentering, but also more radically historicizing and contextualizing biblical literature and – ultimately – the Hebrew Bible as such. One might consider this to be an almost post-colonial plea, namely to emphasize the “location of culture” (Homi Bhabha) when we try as scholars to locate biblical literature in the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts of its gestation. As long as these texts weren’t assembled in their own little library we call ‘the Bible’, they weren’t separated from the rest of ancient Levantine cultural production. This may sound like a truism to many students in Biblical Studies who deeply engage with precisely that extra-biblical production. On closer look, however, much of the discipline’s attention remains Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 141 imbalanced and driven by specific, non-historical interests that privilege the Bible or any given biblical text as the centerpoint of their inquiry. I suggest we consider the Bible as the result of complex cultural dynamics, as a node of sorts (or indeed many nodes) within a network of communication and connections we can only get a sense of when engaging with external evidence first. It is only when viewed from certain margins or peripheries that the putative center may appear in new light. As for the (putative) peripheries, once taken into proper focus, they may suddenly appear to have been centers which deserve to be studied as such in their own right, with undivided attention. The historian’s task and challenge is to get a broad understanding of all aspects of a particular region’s (or several regions’) past(s): subsistence and resource management within particular ecological zones, production, consumption and trade, social hierarchies and politics, cultural formations, languages, religion, etc. To subsume all this under a hegemonic, totalizing and essentially biased rubric such as ‘Biblical World’ does not serve our disciplines well – not even, I would argue, the discipline or field of Biblical Studies. In contrast, appreciating biblical literature and ‘the Bible’ in a Levantine perspective, as one among many (if, to be sure, one of the most consequential) products of the intellectual history of the southern Levant in the first millennium BCE, could change the game.21 21 As Izaak de Hulster points out in his response, my paper presented at the Zurich IOSOT conference (see n. *) had a section introducing the SSSL project (for which see Uehlinger 2023 and all other papers published in Ben-Marzouk and Greet 2023/2024) plus a discussion of a recently-found stamp seal from Hazor figuring a hero fighting a seven-headed serpent (for which see Uehlinger 2024). The latter article reconstructs the journey of a mythological theme from third-millennium Mesopotamia through second-millennium North Syria to the first-millennium southern Levant and the Bible. It would be illusionary to consider this journey in terms of a linear genealogy. Historically, there must have been numerous variants and branches we don’t know yet, alongside others forever lost. Still, the factual observation that late second-millennium literary texts from Ugarit are almost quoted verbatim in biblical phrases suggests a special kind of resonance, that is, some form of epic, possibly even literary, transmission among ‘Canaanite’ and ‘Phoenician’ scribal circles and performing poets. My point in this paper would be that the relevant texts from the Bible (Ps 74:13–14, Job 26:12–13, Isa 27:1; 51:9–10) represent nodes in a complex network, or offshoots of a large tree, but neither endpoints nor a telos that would justify their genealogy or ‘prehistory’ to be conceived in terms of a “Biblical World”. 142 Christoph Uehlinger 5. Postscript: If I forget thee, oh Gaza …22 This is not the place to dissertate about the war currently raging in southern Israel/Palestine, following atrocities perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against innocent civilians on October 7th, 2023. Every reader of this journal will be sensitive to, if not haunted by the chain of events, the amount of suffering and trauma, the extent of human losses and material destruction. Do these horrible events speak to the historian of the southern Levant in a particular way, and if so, how? It might be premature to ask the question, but I do hope readers will not consider it inappropriate that it be raised. Historians of the eastern Mediterranean and of Egypto-Levantine relations know about the crucial role the city of Gaza, its satellites, and hinterland played in the southern Levant since the Middle Bronze Age, with earlier remains going back to the Paleolithic period.23 Limited soundings at the actual mound of Gaza (Tell el-Ḥarrube/el-Ḫarrubi24) were conducted at a time when it was already largely occupied by the modern city.25 W. M. F. Petrie, a pioneer in the region’s archaeological exploration, therefore turned to more accessible sites in the Gaza basin (Tell Abu Salima, Tell el-ʿAğğul, Tell el-Farʿah South). He did not touch Blakhiye, an important site nearby, which was probably Gaza’s port during the Bronze and Iron Ages.26 Keel’s Corpus der Stempelsiegel aus Palästina/Israel numbers 9 entries under the rubric “Gaza”27, that is only 0.075 % of all data assembled in Corpus of Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant (present count at the time of writing: 12.034 entries).28 However, scarabs and other stamp seals from the Gaza region and hinterland represent 22 Adapted from Ps 137:5 (“If I forget of thee, oh Jerusalem […]”). I hope not to hurt readers’ sensitivities by this transference of a phrase expressing deep religious sentiment – assuming the centrality of Jerusalem and its temple in the writer’s worldview – to a scholarly argument concerned with an exclusively academic problem of epistemology, historical methodology and an empirically observable, actual practice of oversight or forgetting in current scholarship. 23 My sincere thanks to Wolfgang Zwickel (University of Mainz) for having shared with me a paper titled “The Archaeology of the Gaza Strip from its Earliest Remains until the Islamic Period”, delivered in November 2023 at the ASOR annual meeting in Boston. I am told Zwickel has a monograph in preparation, which is about to be published (Zwickel, in press). Thanks also to Ido Koch (Tel Aviv University) for discussing various issues of the archaeology of Gaza with me. For recent assessments of Bronze and Iron Age Gaza in the light of archaeological evidence, see the following, among others: Burdajewicz 2000; Haldimann et al. 2007; Chambon 2012; Sadeq 2012; Sadeq 2014. 24 Different spellings are used in scholarly literature. The latter, relating to a wali and cemetery, is mentioned by Gatt and Guthe (1888: 151) and preferred by S. Moʽain, among others. 25 See Phythian-Adams 1923. I am grateful to Ido Koch for reminding me of the limits imposed by the modern city on archaeological investigation already at that time. Compare the map published by Gatt in 1888 with a map showing the site a few decades later (dated 1931) at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/09-10-Gaza-1931.jpg, last accessed 30 April 2024. 26 See Humbert and Sadeq 2000; Sadeq 2014: 146–148. 27 Keel 2013: 128–133. 28 See https://levantineseals.org, last accessed 5 August 2024. Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 143 a major part (c. 12.7 % for Gaza and its immediate satellites,29 even 23.5 % for its closer catchment area30) of the southern Levantine total. The city of Gaza represented by far the most powerful hub for both politics and economy in southern Palestine during millennia. During the Late Bronze Age, Gaza was known in Egyptian sources as “the Canaan” par excellence,31 representing an essential stronghold and power center for the Egyptian New Kingdom from where campaigns and colonial activities could spread to the entire southern Levant. After the Egyptian retreat, Gaza’s temple of Amun remained an important center for the region’s economy and religion (which explains, among other things, why Amun remained a significant reference on locally manufactured stamp seals of the so-called Early Iron Age Mass Produced Series,32 for decades). During the first millennium BCE, Gaza was an independent kingdom ruled by powerful kings who navigated among powerful Levantine rulers such as the kings of Damascus and Israel to hold its appropriate place in the region, balancing between independence and loyalty to their Egyptian neighbours and, from the later eighth century onward, Assyrian or Babylonian overlords.33 The city and its regional and significance are well documented in first-millennium BCE Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions, local coinage,34 biblical texts, and many other data. Due to a number of factors (relative political isolation since 1948, and even more so since 2005/2007, urban development, precarious infrastructure, ideological disinterest in a pre-Islamic past on behalf of Hamas authorities, etc.),35 the archaeology of the Gaza region remains fraught with difficulties in com29 These include Tell el-ʿAğğul (1280 items), Deir el-Balaḥ (149 items), Tell Abu Salima (80 items) and others. 30 In which one would have to include Tell el-Farʿah South (976 items), Tell el-Ğemmeh (215 items) and others. 31 See Hasel 2009 for a critical assessment of the phrase “the Canaan” in Egyptian sources. Whether or not the phrase as such points to the city of Gaza itself (a possibility rejected by Hasel), many sources leave no doubt that they mean Gaza when referring to one of the first and certainly the foremost major town encountered in Canaan by whoever arrived from Egypt. See Steel 2018 and Koch 2017, 2021 for wider perspectives. 32 This is not the place to discuss this ‘group’ in detail; suffice it to say that it should probably be divided in several sub-series and that at least some of the latter were produced in the southern Levant rather than Egypt (e. g., at Tanis), as has been argued. 33 See Na’aman 2004, Katzenstein 1994 and Katzenstein 1989 for summary assessments of Gaza’s history and status under Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian rule. Zilberg 2018 provides a thorough regional perspective for the 8th and 7th centuries BCE (but note critical observations in Radner and Tushingham 2019). 34 See Gitler and Tal 2006; Gitler and Tal 2016. 35 It is all the more remarkable that in the face of many difficulties, archaeological investigations did take place in the Gaza strip during the past 75 years, see above n. 18. From 1948 to 1967, sporadic work was carried out by Egyptian archeologists; between 1967 and 1993, some archaeological projects as well as salvage excavations were conducted by Israeli archaeologists. Since then and through the first decade of the 21st century, Gaza witnessed a number of Palestinian and international collaborative projects (e. g., at Tell el-ʿAjjul, Blakhiye, Tell el-Ruqeish, Tell es-Sakan, Tur Ikhbeineh and others). 144 Christoph Uehlinger parison to all other regions of the southern Levant, including the Cisjordanian territories administered by the Palestinian Authority. As a result, Gaza is often ignored, almost black-holed in current research on Levantine history – not only, but especially when it concerns the Iron Age, from the 12th to the 6th century BCE – in a way that mirrors the city’s marginalization in contemporary politics until recently.36 All disciplines engaged in the study of the ancient world must come to terms with the conundrum how to properly integrate historically controlled imagination to compensate for limited data and the (apparent, perceived or real) lack of positive material evidence. To begin with, what evidence there is should be valued more than what our disciplines did over the past four decades. That Gaza and its inhabitants should play a central role in any decent history of the southern Levant, be it concerned with Late Bronze Age Canaan, the Philistine city-states or the overall system of Iron Age territorial states, the Persian or Hellenistic periods etc., seems undisputable. Bibliography Ben-Marzouk, N. and Greet, B. 2023/2024. Special Issue: Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant, Pt. 1 and 2, NEA 86(4) and 87(1). Blum, E. 2023. Martin Noths kritische Aktualität: Zu Fragen des Verhältnisses von Archäologie, Philologie und historischer Rekonstruktion, WdO 53(2): 135–154. Burdajewicz, M. 2000. Gaza pendant les périodes du Bronze Moyen et Récent et de l’Âge du Fer, in: J.-B. Humbert (ed.), Gaza mediteranéenne: Histoire et archéologie en Palestine, Paris, 31–39. Chambon, A. 2012. Gaza: From Sand and Sea (Art and History in the Jawdat al-Khoudary Collection 1), Gaza. Finsterbusch, K. and Lange, A. (eds.). 2012. What Is Bible? (CBET 67), Leuven. Gatt, G. and Guthe, H. 1888. Legende zum Plane von Gaza, ZDPV 11: 149–159 (with Taf. II). Gitler, H. and Tal, O. 2006. The Coinage of Philistia of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC: A Study of the Earliest Coins of Palestine (Collezioni numismatiche. Materiali pubblici e privati 6), Milano and New York. ––. 2016. Reclassifying Persian-period Philistian Coins: Some New Identifications, Israel Numismatic Research 11: 11–21. Haldimann, M.-A. Humbert, J.-B., Martiniani-Reber, M. (eds.). 2007. Gaza à la croisée des civilisations: Contexte archéologique et historique, Geneva and Neuchâtel. Hasel, M. G. 2009. Pa-Canaan in the Egyptian New Kingdom: Canaan or Gaza?, JAEI 1(1): 8–17. Holloway, S. W. 2013. Expansion of the Historical Context of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, in: M. Saebø (ed.), Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation. Vol. 3: From Modernism to Post-Modernism (The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). Pt. 1: The Nineteenth Century – a Century of Modernism and Historicism, Göttingen, 90–118. 36 A recent edited volume titled The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Southern Canaan (Maeir, Shai and McKinny 2019) hardly mentions Gaza in its more than 280 pages – not even in Ido Koch’s otherwise highly informative synthesis on “Southwestern Canaan and Egypt during the Late Bronze Age I–IIA” (ibid.: 262–282; but note map 14.1 on p. 264). Let me stress that my intention is certainly not to blame anyone for what seems to be a massive oversight, but to raise critical awareness for a serious challenge we need to face as a scholarly community: How to offer appropriate space to a crucial segment of the region’s history in the face of the many difficulties (political, material, epistemic) that need to be overcome? Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm 145 Humbert, J.-B. and Sadeq, M. 2000. Fouilles de Blakhiyah-Anthedon, in: J.-B. Humbert (ed.), Gaza mediteranéenne: Histoire et archéologie en Palestine, Paris, 105–119. Hunziker-Rodewald, R. (2012). ‘Biblical World’: Diversity within Unity: Female Iron Age Faces in Palestine/Israel, in: K. Finsterbusch and A. Lange (eds.), What Is Bible? (CBET 67), Leuven, 131–150. Katzenstein, H. J. 1989. Gaza in the Persian Period, Transeuphratène 1: 67–86. ––. 1994. Gaza in the Neo-Babylonian Period (626–539 B.C.E.), Transeuphratène 7: 35–50. Keel, O. 2013. Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palästina/Israel: Von den Anfängen bis zur Perserzeit. Vol. 4: Von Tel Gamma bis Goschrim (OBO.SA 33), Fribourg and Göttingen. Kletter, R. 2006. Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology, Oxford. Koch, I. 2017. Early Philistia Revisited and Revised, in: O. Lipschits, Y. Gadot and M. Adams (eds.), Rethinking Israel: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Ancient Israel in Honor of Israel Finkelstein, Winona Lake, IN, 189–205. ––. 2021. Colonial Encounters in Southwest Canaan during the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age (CHANE 119), Leiden. Lemaire, A. 2012. Biblical World: Yes or No?, in: K. Finsterbusch and A. Lange (eds.), What Is Bible? (CBET 67), Leuven, 121–129. Maeir, A. M., Shai, I., and McKinny, C. (eds.). 2019. The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Southern Canaan (Archaeology of the Biblical Worlds 2), Berlin. Moorey, P. R. S. 1991. A Century of Biblical Archaeology, Louisville, KT. Na’aman, N. 2004. The Boundary System and Political Status of Gaza under the Assyrian Empire, ZDPV 120(1): 55–72. Pfoh, E. 2020. The Need for a Comprehensive Sociology of Knowledge of Biblical and Archaeological Studies of the Southern Levant, in: E. Pfoh and Ł. Niesiołowski-Spanò (eds.), Biblical Narratives, Archaeology and Historicity: Essays in Honour of Thomas L. Thompson (LHBOTS 680), London, 35–46. ––. 2022. Victorian Ethnographic Perceptions of Palestine and the Historiography of Ancient Israel: A Preliminary Exploration, Contemporary Levant 8(1): 35–51. Pfoh, E. and K. W. Whitelam (eds.). 2013. The Politics of Israel’s Past: The Bible, Archaeology and Nation-Building (SWBA II/8), Sheffield. Phythian-Adams, W. J. 1923. Reports on Sounding at Gaza, etc., PEQ 55(1): 11–17, 18–30. Radner, K. and Tushingham, P. 2019. Book Review: The Southern Levant Under Assyrian Domination, edited by S. Z. Aster and A. Faust […], PEQ 151(2): 155–163. Rosner, C. 2023. Creuser la terre-patrie: Une histoire de l’archéologie en Palestine-Israël, Paris. Routledge, B. 2017. Is There an Iron Age Levant? RIHAO 18: 49–76. Sadeq, M. 2012. Urban History and South-Western Palestine during the Bronze Age, International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology 2(7): 108–114. ––. 2014. An Overview of Iron Age Gaza in Light of the Archaeological Evidence, in: J. R. Spencer, R. A. Mullins and A. J. Brody (eds.), Material Culture Matters: Essays on the Archaeology of the Southern Levant in Honor of Seymour Gitin, Winona Lake, IN, 239–254. Silberman, N. A. and D. Small (eds.). 1997. The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present (JSOTS 237), Sheffield. Sonik, K. 2024. Gilgamesh and Tiamat Abroad: (Mis-)Reading Mesopotamian Epic, in: P. J. Lothspeich (ed.), The Epic World, New York, 104–117. Steel, L. 2018. Shifting Relations in Bronze Age Gaza: An Investigation into Egyptianizing Practices and Cultural Hybridity in the Southern Levant During the Late Bronze Age, JAEI 20: 15–30. Uehlinger, C. 2023. Honoring a Legacy, Inviting a New Generation: A Very Brief Introduction to the Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant Project, NEA 86(4): 256–265. ––. 2024. Mastering the Seven-Headed Serpent: A Stamp Seal from Hazor Provides a Missing Link between Cuneiform and Biblical Mythology, NEA 87(1): 14–19. Vanderhooft, D. S. 2023. Martin Noth, G. E. Wright, W. F. Albright, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien I, and the Founding of Die Welt des Orients, WdO 52(2): 192–225. 146 Christoph Uehlinger Younes, N. and Reips, U.-D. 2019. Guideline for Improving the Reliability of Google Ngram Studies: Evidence from Religious Terms, PLoS ONE 14(3): e0213554. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213554. Zevit, Z. 2004. The Biblical Archaeology versus Syro-Palestinian Archaeology Debate in Its American Institutional and Intellectual Contexts, in: J. K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds.), The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methods and Assumptions, Grand Rapids, MI, 3–19. Zilberg, P. 2018. The Assyrian Provinces of the Southern Levant: Sources, Administration, and Control, in: S. Z. Aster and A. Faust (eds.), The Southern Levant under Assyrian Domination, University Park, PA, 57–88. Zwickel, W. In press. Gaza – History and Culture (ÄAT 129), Münster, 2024. Correspondence address Prof. em. Dr. Christoph Uehlinger Department of Religious Studies, University of Zurich Kantonsschulstrasse 1 CH-8001 Zurich [email protected] Bruno Biermann/Silas Klein Cardoso/ Fabio Porzia/Christoph Uehlinger (eds.) Challenging Dichotomies and Biases in the Study of the Ancient Southern Levant Bruno Biermann, Silas Klein Cardoso, Fabio Porzia, Christoph Uehlinger (eds.) Challenging Dichotomies and Biases in the Study of the Ancient Southern Levant © 2024 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666560972 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Publiziert mit Unterstützung des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2024 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Robert-Bosch-Breite 10, D-37079 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill BV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany, Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill BV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International license, at https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666560972. For a copy of this license go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Any use in cases other than those permitted by this license requires the prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: Silas Klein Cardoso. Figures from Biermann, Fig. 1 (Drawing by U. Zurkinden; Courtesy: Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant), Fig. 6 (Drawing by D. Weinblatt; Courtesy: The Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University) Pyschny, Fig. 3 (Courtesy: Tel Dor Excavations), Klein Cardoso, Fig. 2 (Drawing by U. Zurkinden; Courtesy: Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant). Cover design: SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Proofreading: Ute Wielandt Typesetting: SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-666-56097-2 (digital) © 2024 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666560972 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Inhalt/Contents Bruno Biermann (Münster), Silas Klein Cardoso (Vitória), Fabio Porzia (Rome), and Christoph Uehlinger (Zürich), Introduction: Challenging Dichotomies and Biases in the Study of the Ancient Southern Levant . . . 6 Silas Klein Cardoso (Vitória), Beyond the Image-Text Divide. In Search of a Multidimensional Approach to Compare Visual Artifacts and Biblical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme (Oslo), The Agency of an Altar: A Material Semiotics-Inspired Investigation of the Relationship between Fumigation Altars and Texts about Incense Altars . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Fabio Porzia (Rome), Beyond Ethnicity: Outline of a Renewed Approach to the Levantine Divine Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Katharina Pyschny (Graz), Cultural Hybridity Instead of Ethnicity: The Persian (and Early Hellenistic) Woman and Child Figurines as a Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Bruno Biermann (Münster), Beyond Binaries in Biblical Studies and Levantine Archaeology: Challenging Binary Binds in Epigraphy and Iconography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Uroš Matić (Graz), The Ones Who Could Not pwy: Failed Masculinity of Syrian Princes in the Tale of the Doomed Prince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Christoph Uehlinger (Zürich), Beyond the ‘Biblical World’ Paradigm: Reflections on a Problematic Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Izaak J. de Hulster (Göttingen), Jointly Moving Beyond Dichotomies: Knowledge Production, Complexity, and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Martti Nissinen (Helsinki), Beyond Binaries: Towards an Integrative Approach in Ancient Levantine Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176