Dissertation Spotlight | Marshall Cunningham

Biblical scholars have generally agreed that the fall of the Judean monarchy at the beginning of the 6th century BCE was a universally traumatic experience among Judean populations in the homeland and especially for those who found themselves forcibly resettled in places like Babylonia. Importantly, this trauma is understood to have redefined the new community(ies) it produced, transforming the Yehudim of the monarchic period — a primarily cultural and political group —into a religious community defined by the “exile” and its theological (and geographical) consequences. However, this formulation, which is often marked by a shift in terminology (“Judeans” become “Jews”) fails to consider the numerous ways in which collective identity was expressed, conceived, and constructed by the Yehudim, Yaḫūdāya, and Yǝhudāya who found themselves spread across the Babylonian and Persian empires.

This view of the ‘exile’ and its consequences does not appear in biblical studies out of nowhere. Rather, it is rooted in a particular and problematic view of ‘Judaism’ as a category that is part and parcel to 19th century views on the burgeoning German state and its relationship to Protestant Christianity. Despite a general recognition of these origins in the field, this interpretation of the exile in the early 6th century as a watershed and transformational moment in the history of the Yehudim has often gone un- or undertheorized in subsequent scholarship on the period. In fact, this view of the ‘exile’ has become so entrenched that its influence has bled beyond the borders of biblical studies and and into social scientific fields like diaspora, ethnicity, and trauma studies.

In my dissertation I establish a new model of Judeanness — my term for the collective identity of Yehudim, Yaḫūdāya, and Yǝhudāya of the post-monarchic period. Rather than assuming a monolithic cultural concept defined by trauma and displacement, I argue that the construction of Judeanness — like all collective identities — was a complex, contextual, and continuous process of identity formation that was undertaken, consciously or unconsciously, by individuals and communities throughout the Babylonian and Persian empires. And it’s worth emphasizing here that there were multiple Judean communities spread throughout the empire during this period; in Judea and Babylonia, of course, but also all along the Nile in Egypt, within the Persian heartland, and even on islands in the Mediterranian like Cyprus,  My project offers a reevaluation of evidence for three of those communities — Upper Egypt, rural Babylonia, and Judea — and a shorter discussion of Samaria (Judea’s neighbor to the north). Through my analysis of this evidence, I show that Judeanness was a contextually-determined expression of social identity that differed according to, among other factors, geographical, political, and linguistic contexts. In other words, Judean identity could be expressed in extremely local terms (e.g. recognition of native deities, relationships with neighbors and imperial representatives, origin stories), even as some of its defining features looked outward, beyond those local boundaries (language, worship of Yahweh, ties to Judea).

Crucially, I show that these local constructions of social identity — often the product of the intercultural interactions facilitated by imperial population movement — do not signal a dilution or diversion from some ‘ideal,’ ‘natural,’ or monolithic form of Judeanness that was defined by trauma and displacement; rather they reflect productive and adaptive processes that exemplified the diaspora and homeland experiences of Judeans in the 6th and 5th centuries. In other words, there was no normative expression of Judeanness from which these other forms split or emerger; rather context informed the variety of equally “valid” or “authentic” expressions attested in the evidence.

My dissertation is divided into two major sections and a conclusion (ch. 6). In section I, chs. 1–2, I establish the theoretical foundation that guides my analysis of the evidence available for Judean communities during this period. In section II, chs. 3–5, I offer detailed analyses of Judean communities in Egypt (ch. 3), Babylonia (ch. 4), and Judea (ch. 5). In addition to demonstrating the different constructions of Judeanness that each of these communities produced, I also focus on the limits of what particular kinds of evidence might be able to tell us about them: a personal letter written by a Judean from Elephantine is going to highlight different aspects of Judeanness than administrative documents written by a  Babylonian scribe in Nippur, or even material remains from Judea. In other words, what it meant to be a Judean after the fall of Judah depended a great deal on which of the Judean communities you found yourself belonging to — including those in “exile,” those in the “homeland,” and those who found themselves in any number of other circumstances. This means that there is no single definition of Judean identity during this period, but rather a series of answers to the question of what it meant to be a Judean during this period.

SECTION I: LAYING THE GROUND WORK

Chapter 1 offers a general introduction to the primary issues that the dissertation addresses. More than anything, I criticize what I call the “Exilic Rupture Model,” described above — the idea that the ‘exile’ represents an experience of traumatic rupture for all Judeans during that period. I argue that the “Exilic Rupture Model” isn’t particularly helpful for critical biblical scholarship. Rather than offering us insight into the texts and material culture produced by the historical communities of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, this model deeply misrepresents it in favor of a kind of singular or unified view of Judean experience.

In Chapter 2, I outline my own approach to this material that better addresses the variety of sources that speak to how Judeanness was expressed and recognized among the communities that I study. In order to offer a more flexible and dynamic model of Judeanness — and one that I argue better suits the evidence — I engage with social scientific subfields often neglected by other scholars — Trauma, Diaspora, and Ethnicity Studies. I present a reconstruction of Judean identity that was able to adjust with the developing historical realities of a world in which the kingdom of Judah was no longer a politically independent entity.

SECTION II: ANALYSIS OF JUDEAN COMMUNITIES

In Chapter 3, I begin my discussion of Judean communities with the colony of imperial soldiers on the island of Yeb on the Nile’s first cataract. Contrary to what biblical scholars tend to expect based on the evidence from the Hebrew Bible (see, for example, the sentiment expressed in Ps 137 or the general impression offered in the Book of Ezekiel), I show that not all Judeans were eagerly awaiting an opportunity to return migrate to Judea. Instead, the Judeans of Yeb were proud of their deep roots in Upper Egypt, even as they maintained connections with the ancestral homeland. I offer an analysis of the community’s own mythomoteur (‘origin story’), the narrative that Judeo-Egyptian leaders offered about their arrival on the island. I argue that the details of that story can tell us about the group’s values, which included deep roots on the island of Yeb, a history of cooperation with the Persian empire, dedication to the deity Yahu, and ties to the community in Judea. In the chapter’s next section, I discuss the role of religion and the community’s temple to Yahu in the construction of its identity. By applying insights from the study of Congregationalism among modern American immigrants — when members of immigrant communities unite to create a sacred space in their host country and rely on communal efforts to maintain that space — I argue for the importance of religion and religious institutions in the (re)production of collective identity. Finally, in the chapter’s last section, I highlight how the community’s adaptation to its Egyptian context are visible in the evidentiary record. I show that as these Judeans accommodated elements of the cultures of their neighbors, they also contributed to a broader cultural koine, or shared social identity, among the other ethnic minorities and subjected Egyptians settled around them in Upper Egypt.

This chapter also contains a short discussion of the relationship between the Judeans of Yeb and 5th century Samarians — the community who lived in the territory that had once been the kingdom of Israel.  The Yeb community has traditionally been analyzed through the relationship it maintained with Judea, which is evidenced by a number of references to that community in the papyri from Elephantine. That archival material, however, also shows connections with Samaria, Judea’s political neighbor to the north, as do other biblical and non-biblical literary reflections on the Egyptian diaspora. This discussion explores a number of areas of cultural overlap between Yeb and Samaria while it demonstrates the fluid and contextual nature of social identity in the ancient world. As political circumstances and cultural needs shifted over time, so too did the boundaries between Yeb, Judea, and Samaria. Thus, as we increase the visibility of other parts of the ancient Judean world, beyond the viewpoint represented in the literature of the Hebrew Bible, we see a much wider variety of experience during the 6th and 5th centuries.

In Chapter 4, I address the situation of Judean communities in Babylonia. I argue that despite the messaging that has been preserved in the literature of the Hebrew Bible, a significant number of resettled Judeans saw it fit to embrace Babylonia as their homeland, even as opportunities to return migrate to Judea presented themselves. The chapter begins with a reflection on the significance of the discovery and publication of Late Babylonian administrative documents from a settlement called Āl–Yāḫūdu — roughly translated as “the town of the Judeans” — in the environs of Nippur. In my treatment of these tablets, written exclusively by Babylonian scribes in the employ of the imperial government, I identify the salient features of Judeanness from an outsider imperial perspective. By reading these texts in their historical context, I analyze the value and function of the category of Yāḫūdi for the Babylonian and Persian administrations and the effects it might have had on those to whom it was applied. As I demonstrate, this material is indicative of a diasporic community adapting to its new geographic, political, and cultural context over the course of a few generations, with varying degrees of financial and social success.

I then move to a study of the Book of Ezekiel, a theologically idiosyncratic (if pretending-to-be-normative) narrative that is set in the same region as Āl–Yāḫūdu. In fact, the time frame of its narrative roughly contemporary with the earliest evidence for Āl–Yāḫūdu, even as it offers a very different perspective on that experience. I argue that the Book of Ezekiel expresses a view of Judeanness that is incompatible with life in the diaspora, at least in the long term. As such, the work is careful to construct boundaries (religious, social, economic) in order to maintain a distinct Judean community that Yahweh would, in time, restore to Judea. In so doing, it presents a counterargument to opposing views on life in the diaspora that are preserved in the text as seem to be reflected in the cuneiform evidence. Thus, a consideration of both bodies of evidence reveals the existence of debate, wrongly overshadowed by the dominance of the biblical narrative in scholarship.

Next, I explore the relationship between particular constructions of social identity and the decision of Judeo-Babylonians and contemporary diasporic communities to undertake return migration in the first decades of Persian rule. As a result of their associations with religious institutions and a commitment to what I call a “theology of place,” they privileged residence in their ancestral homelands over the hybrid experience of life in the diaspora. Finally, through a close reading of Isa 40–48, and 40.1–11 in particular, I argue that the rhetoric employed by the composition’s author is meant to convince Judeo-Babylonians who had come to feel at home in Babylonia that return migration was the divine will and that they were to play a definitive role in announcing that plan.

In Chapter 5, I shift focus from the diaspora to Judea. I argue for a middle ground between a view of Judea as an essentially undisturbed province following the dissolution of the monarchy and the so-called “Myth of the Empty Land,” an assertion that we find in works like Chronicles that envisions the territory completely depopulated during the middle of the 6th century. I analyze a local form of material culture — storage jars impressed with stamp seals — as evidence of a continuous sense of Judean identity that was constructed and reproduced widely among the reduced local population of Judea during the Neo-Babylonian period. The production of the stamped jars was supported by a new class of local elites who stepped into the power vacuum left behind those deported under Nebuchadnezzar. These elites were, in fact, able to maintain the system of redistribution of which the storage jars were a part. In so doing, this group facilitated the reproduction of the symbolic value of that institution and its material output.

I then move from the widespread discourse of material culture to the narrow focus of a series of mythomoteurs for the community in Judea during the Persian period. I have singled out four mythomoteurs — the book of Haggai, Zechariah 1–8, Ezra 9, and Nehemiah 9 — that reflect on the contours of Judean identity in Judea during the 6th and 5th centuries ʙᴄᴇ. These origin stories offer self-conscious narrative accounts of new beginnings and make implicit and explicit claims about in- and out-group boundaries. They are also important to the broader aims of this study because scholars have relied so heavily on them for reconstructing the history of Judea during this period. These myths have often served as unproblematic primary sources for the periods in which their narratives are set and have had significant influence on how scholars have understood the nature of Judeanness during the Persian period. Rather than accepting them at face value, I treat them as arguments reflecting the views of very small segments of the population about who could be considered “Judean” and under what circumstances.

CONCLUSION

Finally, in Chapter 6 I offer a conclusion that reflects on the variety of constructions of Judeanness in the different communities examined in the study. I highlight one of the primary takeaways of the study: different kinds of evidence speak to different aspects of communal identity. This means that reconstructions of the Judean experience that rely heavily or solely on biblical literature is skewed toward the political and religious predispositions of that literature’s authors and thus reflects only a narrow band of the broader Judean experience during this period. I conclude that in recognizing nature of this evidence we can observe a much broader spectrum of Judean experience throughout the Babylonian and Persian empires. In so doing, we can think about how other types of evidence like material culture, archival materials, and administrative records may further elucidate that spectrum, and from a variety of productive angles.

 “Marshall Cunningham is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and his work focuses on the construction of Judean identity in the post-monarchic era.