Henri Lefebvre, Marxist philosopher and social scientist, one-time member of the French Communist Party, parent of numerous offspring, director of the Institut de Sociologie Urbaine in Paris (Nanterre), intellectual inspiration for May `68 in France (at the tender age of 67), author of no less than 66 books, remains one of the under-translated giants of the great tradition of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1980s.

I undertake here a rather specific task, which is to engage in a critical discussion with Lefebvre's The Production of Space in order to consider the construction, or, as Lefebvre insisted, the production of space in the ancient world, specifically in this case the Bible. The book was the final product of an intense investigation, as David Harvey points out in the Afterword, into urbanization and the question of space between 1968 and 1974, the year the book first appeared in French, after a number of others from the same project.

Before I plunge into the stream of his work, I need to make some comments about method. Lefebvre operates with a few crucial moves, strategies that are distinctive marks of his dialectical Marxism. To begin with, he constantly seeks to link the abstract realm of theory with the concrete reality of praxis, speaking of the connections needed between mental and social space, describing in detail features such as urban traffic and human dwellings and then moving into theoretical discussions of habitus, flows and so on. But there is also the retrospective-prospective dialectical habit he assumes, running back, sometimes to his favored Greece and Rome, to pick up a certain topic and trace it through to the contemporary situation, only to cast a view into the future.

Dialectical thinking, Hegelian or dialectical Marxism, has been a characteristic feature of western Marxism, and one finds it in operation, and explored, in the work of the Frankfurt School, especially that of Theodor Adorno, and those closely connected with the school, such as Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. It is also central to the methods of others, like Georg Lukacs, Fredric Jameson and, of course, Henri Lefebvre. The dialectic has not necessarily been restricted to Western Marxism (although that term, a product of the Cold War, is now falling by the wayside); for dialectical thinking, termed dialectical materialism, was also central to the intellectual endeavor of the old Eastern European communist countries. The taint of Stalin always meant that many Western Marxists trod warily, seeking out less mechanical and deterministic forms of the dialectic. A few have indeed sought out a non-dialectical Marxism, among them Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze, whose thinking may indeed provide one of the ways forward for a post-Cold War Marxism.

Another may indeed be from Lefebvre, whose Marxism runs to the left of the French Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1957 after a thirty year membership. Calling his dialectic a "dialectical materialism" as well, but finding the Stalinist line of the French Communist party too restrictive and stifling, Lefebvre developed a Marxism profoundly touched by situationism and surrealism, but also with a deep sensitivity for human living. He wanted to take up what he felt was Marx's unfinished project in so many ways: he saw that work less as a fixed body of texts to be exegeted with the reverence accorded sacred texts and more as the beginning of much larger program of intellectual and practical work. The introduction of the question of space is but one of the ways in which Lefebvre undertook to expand Marx. (For instance, he argued that the tendency to reduce society to questions of economics and politics in both Marxism and liberalism was incredibly restrictive: the issue of space was one of the ways of shifting away from such a fixation.)

Less a process that, like Hegel, called for Aufhebung, a supersession that kicks the whole problem, the impossible contradiction or antinomy, onto another level in which the problem in question suddenly becomes a much smaller issue in a wider context, Lefebvre's dialectic is one that plays with the opposition or contradiction in question. Toying with it, looking at it from myriad perspectives, and inevitably favoring the lesser term of the opposition in order to move through the whole problem, Lefebvre kept his dialectic open and running. At times he picks up the threefold dimension of a more conventional dialectic, speaking of, for instance, energy, space and time, or of truth beauty and rhythm, or, as I have already suggested, economics, politics and space. They might be analyzed separately, in conflictual pairs, or on an entirely different tack (see 1986: 42), bringing in an item from elsewhere with which to raise questions about one of the terms under discussion. He does this effectively in Critique of Everyday Life (1991b: 141, 145-7, 226), where he connects the notion of the quotidian with religion, especially the popular, half-conscious practices of religion (for Lefebvre, traditional French Catholicism). One distinctive feature of Lefebvre's dialectic is that it produces a profound destabilization of the received notions concerning particular terms and their relationships, which is distinctly reminiscent of the practices of a certain poststructuralism that arose at the time Lefebvre was himself doing his most influential work.

A dialectical reading of the construction of space in the ancient Near East might run in a number of directions, seeking out the play and flow between rural and urban, contrasting the production of space in seats of religious and political power and that of the peasants, or tracing the interaction between the crucial commerce of the sacred and that of space, or contrasting texts from the MT and the LXX in order to read for their different productions of space. In fact, I have found, due to a spasmodic practice of what might be called spatial reading over the last decade or so, that many of the texts of the Hebrew Bible, my specific focus of expertise, give over to spatial analysis.

A distinct form of Lefebvre's dialectic appears in his discussion of space. It is perhaps best to refer to Lefebvre here on the conceptual triad that recurs time and again in the book:

1. Spatial practice, embracing production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society's relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance. This is space perceived (perçu) in the common sense mode.
2. Representations of space (représentations de l'espace): the discourses on space, the realms of analysis, design and planning, which are tied to the relations of production and to the "order" which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to "frontal" relations. In other words, the conception of space (l'espace conçu).
3. Spaces of representation (espaces de la représentation): the deeper presuppositions behind plans and definitions. Coded, recoded and decoded, these spaces embody complex symbolisms, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art. It provides partially concealed criticism of social orders and the categories of social thought, and may happen through bodies, aesthetics, gender, and so on. As the third part of a dialectic it offers, as lived space (l'espace vécu), as historical sediments or glimpses of the new, utopian possibilities of a new spatialization of social life (see Lefebvre 1974; 1991a: 33, 245; Shields 1999: 160-170).

In order to make sense of these three central categories of his spatial dialectic, there is some philosophical legwork to be done. Although it seems like a commonplace now, the idea that certain givens of human experience are social and economic constructions rather than immovable and eternal, natural, objects, was an argument that still needed some work in the early 1970s. The constructionism that now reigns across the humanities and social sciences owes a large debt to the work of Marx and Marxists like Lefebvre, so that it has become possible to see how bodies, genders, sexualities, apart from the more common targets of religion and the family, are constructed in certain ways in certain social formations. But in Lefebvre there is a crucial difference that I want to emphasize. He speaks not of the "construction" but of the "production" (la production) of space. In the first point of his spatial dialectic, production is closely tied in with reproduction, the perpetuation of the means of production in question.

More than a linguistic quibble is at issue here, for "production" evokes the crucial Marxist category of mode of production, into which I need to diverge for a moment or two. For Marx and Engels (and I draw here from The German Ideology), human beings both produce and are produced: they are produced by the conditions in which they live but they also produce those very same conditions. The production of the means of subsistence through the organization of physical resources affects their social and cultural life, but it also acts to remake the material life of the people in question. That is, their very being and nature as human beings is produced by their production of subsistence in relation to nature.

In other words, for Marx mode of production is the way human beings produce their means of subsistence in relation with nature and the existing mode of production. It is the means required for the production of the necessary and luxury items of human existence. Marx identified two dimensions: the forces or means of production, which designates human interaction with nature in terms of raw materials, technical knowledge and the uses of labor; and the relations of production, which refers to the patterns of human interaction and allocation of labor.

At this point we find some of the terms in the first two categories of Lefebvre's spatial dialectic - (means of) production in spatial practice and relations of production in the representation of spaces. Indeed, the ultimate category for any Marxist criticism worthy of the name is mode of production, a notion simultaneously abstract and concrete, since it deals directly with the understanding of history.

Let me provide a few examples that will return in some form in my discussion of the biblical texts. In capitalism, the great focus of Lefebvre's work, the means of production involve industrial (a euphemism for capitalism is sometimes the "industrial revolution") and now electronic or cybernetic technologies, the extraction of minerals, the massive farming process of agribusiness, unequal wages and the mobilization of masses of low paid workers, especially women, children and workers in the "Third World." The social relations of production involve the fundamental distinction between bourgeoisie and working class, which is now thoroughly globalized. The ideologies of such a mode would include liberalism and the oppositional Marxism. Its culture is marked by the growth of popular and media culture over against high culture, as well as the all pervasive presence of commodification. Its politics involves the rise of the nation-state and democracy, and a legal system whose prime focus is the protection of private property, whether that be the individual person or non-human objects. Along with commodities, money and capital itself, Lefebvre argues that a particular form of space has also been produced: the city, as successor to the medieval town, has become the center for finance, government, human and social living. In relation to this the rural has been transformed into an area for the capital production of food and other raw materials, supplying the cities from whom it expects its money; and human dwellings have been produced in terms of the bourgeois family, "boxes for living in" on private lots.

Or, at the other end of the scale, the so-called Asiatic Mode of Production has as its means of production the various techniques for widespread hand-tooled agriculture with domesticated animals. Any new developments in technology are directed towards agriculture (improved quality of implement metal, or irrigation, and so on). The relations of production involve a multitude of small landholders that pay tribute to various layers of a significant bureaucracy, at a local, "national" and imperial level. At the top of the bureaucracy is the imperial center - Babylon, Egypt, Asshur, Beijing etc. - where the tribute is lavished upon a standing army (used to ensure the regular payment of tribute and increase the empire), buildings of imperial government and religion and the relatively large number of officials required to keep the system running. Culturally and ideologically religion or the sacred was the central language for expressing political, philosophical, juridical, political and other matters (except that it is a little anachronistic to put it this way). The production of space in the Asiatic mode of production depended upon the layering of tribute payments enforced upon the peasants: very few centers of bureaucracy (the ancient "city") towards which all tribute was directed, and then the subservience of even these spaces to a larger center, of which the smaller centers seem like various points on the spokes of a wheel. The spatial practice was then focused upon the flows towards and away from the centers, and this was inextricably tied up with the religious centralization in the places of power and the destination of tribute. If the language and ways of thinking could operate only in the sacred, then the spatial direction always looked towards the point of tribute payment. Domestic space was then ordered in terms of the need to maintain such a system, and the family unit was a much larger affair focused on ensuring that there was produce to survive and pay tribute: many generations, as many children as possible, single room dwellings in which humans and animals all spent the night, if not a good part of the day as well.

With these kinds of descriptions, bare though they are, one gets a sense of the difference between modes of production - something Marxist criticism is able to highlight. Of course, the problem with any approach that seeks to periodize history according to one pattern or another is how to account for longer patterns, the carry through of one item into other modes of production, whether they are sacred texts or the status of the peasant. So, in Marxism a growing awareness has arisen of many overlaps, foldbacks and glimpses of new forms found at any one moment, but the assumption is that one mode of production will end up being dominant.

This is basic Marxist theory, but it provides the background necessary to understand Lefebvre's insistence on the "production" of space. One of the results of a shift to "construction" over against "production" in the more recent development of the idea is that "construction" conjures up the notion of social construction, the social context that constructs the individual, bodies, genders and so on. What are lost in the transition are both the specific historical dimensions of a Marxist theory of modes of production, and its connection with economics, politics, ideology and so on.

I have also been speaking, albeit somewhat briefly, of the whole issue of the spatial practice that is produced in different modes of production. But Lefebvre points out that a mode of production needs to perpetuate itself, to reproduce itself, a process carried out at all levels from the macro-economic (the investment of capital and the deployment of finance capital), to class (the reproduction of the labor power of the working class) to the personal (a point close to home for Lefebvre and his many offspring from a series of partners). Indeed, the reproduction of modes of production is a distinct way of introducing the sexual into the most fundamental of Marxist categories, for Marxism has not been noted for its ability to deal with Eros in a positive fashion: the ability to do so has usually been imported. Lefebvre shifts gear and argues that production and reproduction cannot be separated, taking a tip from the traditional Marxist notion that the basic means of production (technology and resources) also includes the numbers, patterns and distribution of human population. But in order to think about this adequately one needs to think about sex, and not just the processes of breeding, but the libido itself.

Yet, the spatial practice of which Lefebvre speaks, and the space that is produced, refers primarily to social space, the space created by humans in their interaction with nature, each other and former modes of production. Social space appears in relation to, and over against, physical or natural space, the space of a nature in which human beings increasingly have the upper hand. Since capitalism is now rampant, Lefebvre, while admitting that natural space remains the point of departure for considerations of space and the social process, argues that social space under capitalism now has nature at its mercy: everyone wants to preserve nature, yet everything now seeks to undermine such a desire. Natural space for Lefebvre disappears rapidly over the horizon, for the very "nature" upon which we now look has been produced by human beings (see 1991a: 30-1).

But there is one final distinction of the categories of space listed above that I have not explored: that between frontal and hidden, the overt and the covert relations of production. For this is the key to his distinction - an odd one on first reading - between the representations of space and spaces of representation. Not only does each mode of production produce specific types of social space (as well as all sorts of other forms from other modes that are subsumed as subvariants), but it also has a specific type of relations of production (the organization of human resources in terms of class, division of labor, and so on). But the issue here is how those relations of production operate spatially. In order to trace this, Lefebvre invokes all the complexity of his dialectical materialism. Under capitalism, he identifies three types of interaction between reproduction and the social relations of production: biological reproduction, the reproduction of labor power, and the reproduction of the social relations of production. Each of these three interacting layers is displayed symbolically, simultaneously exhibited and displaced, that is, concealed. Such a symbolic system works with relations of production that are both out there and not, in the forefront and clandestine, explicit and repressed. The former, overt type appears in the forms of monuments, public art, and buildings, especially those of state and business: this is the realm of the representation of space, the frontal, obvious node of the relations of production. The more covert and clandestine version, the shadowy realm of spaces of representation, is interested in what is hidden, closed over, spaces that represent in wayward and diverse fashions.

Lefebvre's oft-repeated example is one he in fact loathed - the bourgeois family home. The overt dimension of the house, facing the street (and do not all detached houses have to face the street?), is its sitting room or formal lounge room, where considerable expense is outlaid: lounges and tables and exquisite chairs, with expensive curtains and pieces of art either on the walls or standing. The public realm of the bourgeois house is one of decor, money and repression. Perhaps the only other room allowed such visual presence is the formal dining room, usually leading off from the lounge room. But there is another realm of such boxes for living in that marks a whole series of repressions: the preparation of food takes place out of sight, as do toilet functions, both evacuating and washing. If these are relegated to the back of the house, the most hidden is sex itself, restricted to night time in the parents' bedroom, with a locked door and when the children are asleep, or, if older, out of the house.

To return once more to the distinctions between spatial practice, representation of space and space of representation, it seems to me that any application of such categories must recognize that the distinction Lefebvre makes between biological reproduction, the reproduction of labor power, and the reproduction of the social relations of production is one that applies to capitalism. As he notes, "it should be pointed out that in precapitalist societies the two interlocking levels of biological reproduction and socio-economic production together constituted social reproduction - that is to say, the reproduction of society as it perpetuated itself generation after generation, conflict, feud, strife, crisis and war notwithstanding." (1991a: 32). All the same, the powerful distinction between the representation of space and space of representation remains in place, since the lack of distinction between reproduction and production applies directly to the realm of social practice. The notion of covert and overt, of hidden and clear, comes of course from the Marxist perception of class conflict as crucial to historical processes. And it is not for nothing that Lefebvre locates the opposition in the realm of relations of production, where class and class conflict operate in Marxist thought. The frontal class, the one of monuments and impressive buildings and the clear marks of power, stands over against that class which is repressed, beaten down and exploited. Lefebvre's innovation is to widen this to the symbolic field of relation of production, of class relations.

And since it is a symbolic field that is his primary concern, it seems to me that such an approach may be taken up in the reading and interpretation of texts as well. While spatial practice in the ancient world may be more difficult to trace in the texts that derive from it, the representation of space and space of representation are far more amenable to the consideration of texts, including texts from the Hebrew Bible.

There is one final issue before I turn to the Hebrew Bible. A substantial portion of The Production of Space seeks to refashion Marxist periodization in terms of space. This is a grand plan that involves a prior commitment to periodization as a viable way of considering history itself. Of course, if one is, like Lefebvre, persuaded by the power of Marxism and Marxist analysis, then historical periodization is an issue and a problematic that needs some thinking. And if space and its production are inescapably tied to mode of production, as I have argued above, then there will necessarily be different types of space for different modes of production. What is interesting about all of this is that the substantial part of The Production of Space is given over precisely to such a periodization; Shields, in his advocatory study of Lefebvre (1999) remains unimpressed by the larger system-building dimensions of Lefebvre's Marxism - to which he remained committed throughout his life - preferring the freer, playful, erotic and lived radicalism of this indefatigable writer. For me, however (and this may be symptomatic of a much larger dimension of my physical and intellectual life), the sheer imagination and ability to sustain thought in this way is one of the most impressive dimensions of Lefebvre's work. So, in the following table I have outlined in the first two columns the received Marxist periodization of history in terms of modes of production and what might be called the cultural dominant - a particular way in which culture, and in fact the superstructure as a whole, might be characterized. In the third column I have lined up the various productions of space as Lefebvre follows them through in the bulk of his book.
 

What I have done here is take the periodization of space in Lefebvre's work, linked it with Shields' discussion and tabulation (1999: 170-2), and then fine tuned a number of points where I think that Shields misses the point somewhat. I find it odd, for instance, for him to argue that such a periodization is linear rather than undialectical, for Lefebvre himself argues that each of the types of space is contained, albeit in subordinate or hidden forms, in each of the modes of production. Further, each mode of production and of space cannot exist without dialectical connections to those forms around it, especially the ones that precede and follow. Finally, in periodizing space, Lefebvre carries out the grandest dialectical move with space and time themselves, the inescapable categories (thanks to Kant) of thinking in the modern, capitalist world.

I need to close my theoretical section with a closer look at the realms of absolute space and sacred space, for they are relevant to the biblical material I want to visit next.

The original moment is the space of nature itself, absolute space, pure space. In this context the first social space of the tribe inscribes itself, specifically the semi-nomadic tribe of a hunter-gatherer society, with its seasonal paths, temporary camps and border zones. Whether hunting for game, engaged in limited agriculture or even in the first farming settlements, absolute space dominates. The production of space is here analogical, conceiving of the camp, settlement or village - ie. human society - in terms of a mythic body, with the layout of such settlements narrativized in mythic and magical narrative. There is a distinct anthropomorphism in the representation of space, the settlement and its environment, with settlement and its outside understood in terms of the body and its beyond.

Sacred space, that which follows absolute space temporally and logically in Lefebvre's schema, is produced with the emergence of the city-state, which he finds in the ancient Near East, traditional Asian societies such as that of China, and also the early stages of the Greek world. Rome and its empire comprises a new stage, that of historical space. In other words, over against the more conventional division that begins with Greece and the reliance of such a mode of production on slave labor - a system whereby the very economic and social, let alone the cultural, possibilities of the Greek and Roman worlds are enabled by the labor of slaves - over against this characterization, he posits the emergence of the city-state and then of the Roman imperial system as the points of transition. This is a larger argument that I don't need to pursue here, but it is symptomatic of Lefebvre, for whom the city was a vital dimension of his lived experience, as well as much of his writing and research, that the emergence of the first cities should be central.

But this is not capitalism (for which he reserves his most sustained analysis and critique): in the new city-state the sacred and the political are inseparable. The location of palace and temple in the one location, side by side and often connected as one building, marks the possibility of the city-state. The sacred city - Babylon, Beijing, Egyptian cities of the Pharaohs, Jerusalem itself - supersedes the village and the semi-nomadic tribe to constitute the new, central sacred space. Despot, city and the gods are inseparable: the despot is, in many cases, god, a descendent of a god, or in a relationship much closer than any other citizen; the city is where the god-despot dwells. In exacting tribute, such cities dominate the rural regions surrounding them, pushing back nature, the realm of absolute space, through the technologies of political, economic and sacred power. This form of the city mutates into the Greek polis and even dimensions of the Roman urbs, in which the sacred space of the city, as imago mundi, is set over against the barbarian outside, that realm beyond the power of the city-state.

Ironically, in light of my own particular use of Lefebvre, he is at his weakest with these early productions of space. His energy was of course directed to capitalism and its emergence and dissolution, but the realm of absolute space, although suggestive, is too much shot through with European, especially French, conceptions of the primitive and pre-historic. He is on better ground with sacred space and the emergence of the city-state, although, as some have argued, it is very much gendered in terms of heterosexual binary, with the realm of the city-state characterized as active and masculine and the outside as passive and feminine. Apart from the fascinating with the vast program of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, especially the urstaat, what is sorely needed for this kind of work is a detailed consideration of earlier modes of production and their construction of space.

My use of Lefebvre, then, while bouncing off this spatial schema, is more interested in reading for the production of space, specifically in terms of the threefold dialectic of spatial practice, the representations of space and the space of representation.

Let me begin in reverse and note a rather obvious item for spatial analysis from the New Testament: the journeys of Paul in the book of Acts, which are followed, in the space of the New Testament codex itself, with letters first bearing spatial names: Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonika. There follow the personal names, except for the letter to the Hebrews. Indeed, the pivot seems to be Rome, for Acts ends with Paul living in Rome, preaching and teaching "quite openly and unhindered" (Acts 28:31). Romans immediately follows, with a range of cities after Rome that spans the distance between Rome and Jerusalem until Hebrews, tardy and hidden and without a place designator, brings up the rear. Lefebvre sustained interest in Rome would be an unavoidable interlocutor in such a reading, as it would in reading the Jerusalem of the gospels, to which Jesus turns, or the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse descending from the sky without a temple. Is this city not a Roman urbs?

Another item that begs a spatial analysis is the function of Egypt in the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible. Given that it is a longstanding imperial center, whose sway waxed and waned over a millennium or two, the perpetual presence of Egypt as a literary feature of the Bible deserves a closer, spatial look. On the one hand, it is a place of escape, rest, restoration of fortunes and the legendary birth of founding leaders (Joseph and the family of Jacob, Moses, Jeroboam, the remnant who were not transported to Babylon in 2 Kings 25:26, Jesus, Mary and Joseph and so on), as well as one of oppression and imperial expansion into Judah and Israel (Exodus 1-2, Ezekiel 29-32, etc.).

However, in 1 Samuel 1-2 we have a rather inconspicuous text that touches more with Lefebvre's lifelong concern with the quotidian, everyday lived life. I should make it clear that whereas Lefebvre assumes the representational function of texts, from architecture through human bodies to written texts themselves, the kind of representation he works with is not of the sort that is second nature to most biblical scholars, namely, the specific history of a people or a period, the acts of states, groups of people or individuals from day to day and year to year. Historical research remains focused on locating texts in such a history and reading them for reference to it. In this respect the energy now directed at the Second Temple period, arguing for very late dates, works with the same set of assumptions; it is only the period that has changed.

So, the referential function of a text like 1 Samuel 1-2, while it can tell us little about any figures such as Samuel or Eli, or the events surrounding them, or even the moves of story-tellers and scribes who may have told or penned such a story at an indeterminate later period, it can tell us something about the production of space, of broader economic and cultural patterns in a much larger time frame that beggars any effort at more specific dating.

Since 1 Samuel 1-2 is a written text, it speaks, according to Lefebvre's schema, of the representations of space and spaces of representation: that is, as a text it functions in some representational way. It can then speak only in a secondary manner about spatial practice; or rather, there is a spatial practice of the text that refers to the spatial practice of whatever social formation it comes from. As far as the representation of space is concerned - the "frontal" discourse of space, the logic, ideology and conceptual depictions of space in relation to modes of production - we need to begin with the last verses of Judges, which may be read as an introduction to this text: "And the people of Israel departed from there at that time, every one to his tribe and family, and they went out from there every one to his inheritance. In those days there was no king in Israel; every one did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:24-25). Following the suggestion of David Jobling, I read these verses as not so much a condemnation of the chaos just depicted, a conclusion to the story of the Benjaminites, but rather as the possibility of desirable state of affairs, without a king to rule over them and exact tribute and so on. In this case, the verses set up the spatial possibilities of 1 Samuel 1-2.

So there is a man from his own inheritance - Ramathaim-zophim of the hills of Ephraim - and from his own tribe and family - Elkanah the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, and Ephraimite (1 Sam 1:1). The representation of space here is a dispersed pattern of living, each person living in a particular geographical and tribal place, what Lefebvre would designate as a habitus. The issue is one of the relations of production, specifically the distribution of human beings and their relations to each other in the production of what is required for human existence. The naming of the two women of Elkanah, Hannah and Peninah, is part of the same logic, as is the crucial statement, "And Peninah had children, but Hannah had no children" (1 Sam 1:2). The problem as it unfolds in this story is the barrenness of Hannah, which, as the story makes clear, is distinctly her problem since Peninah had sex with the same man as she. This touches on the question of the reproduction of the means of production, as well the spaces of representation, to which I will turn in a moment. But what we have here is an economic unit here, given that families of whatever shape are at basis economic units in particular modes of production.

But let me stay with the representations of space: the immediate narratological event is the annual journey to worship and sacrifice at the sanctuary at Shiloh. This journey, the path taken from a small space in the hills of Ephraim to Shiloh, is one of those flows of which Lefebvre speaks time and again, open to what he also calls "rhythm analysis" (See Lefebvre 1996: 219-240). The annual journey frames the story itself, determining its rhythm: at the end of this particular trip, "they rose early in the morning and worshipped before the Lord; then they went back to their house at Ramah" (1 Sam 1:19). But then, after conception and birth, the family, minus Hannah and Samuel, travel to Shiloh again (1 Sam 1:21). Eventually Hannah goes up after weaning the child in order to dedicate him to the shrine (1 Sam 1:24), they return home (1 Sam 2:11), and then return year by year with a robe for Samuel which Hannah makes for him and gives to him at the time of yearly sacrifice (1 Sam 2:19) The annual journey to the major shrine of course indicates the importance of the shrine itself, with its priestly family, Eli, Hophni and Phinehas. The shrine, the place of worship, no matter how modest or grand, is a key representation of space, a frontal dimension which orders the lives of the smaller economic units of the extended families and tribes. The spatial pattern is like a wheel with unequal spokes leading in all direction from the center, or perhaps like an asterisk with lines leading out and coming into the point at the middle, the sanctuary. What we have here, then, is the production of sacred space and its organization of the social and economic patterns of human life.

The spatial patterns of the sanctuary itself, while not laid out explicitly as in so many places (the tabernacle of Moses, Solomon's temple, Ezekiel's temple plans and so on), appear as well. Eli, semi-retired (Hophni and Phinehas are the priests - 1 Sam 1:3), sits "on the seat beside the door post of the temple of the Lord" (1 Sam 1:9), able to observe Hannah praying. The line of sight is important here as well, for, apart from suggestions of voyeurism, Eli commands the sanctuary with his sight, although his insight itself is lacking with regard to Hannah.

What of the spaces of representation - the clandestine or underground side of social life, the sediments of lived space, of gender relations and family patterns, and the possibilities of something new? The annual journey to Shiloh is occasion for rivalry between Hannah and Peninah, for the latter taunts Hannah over her barrenness. Peninah provokes and irritates, so Hannah responds with weeping and refusal to eat. An ineffectual Elkanah, who "loves" Hannah, can only ask questions restricted to the space of representation - weeping, eating, her heart and her barren womb (1 Sam 1:8).

Apart from the family dynamics, the bodies of the women function as the major spaces of representation, specifically their wombs, the matrix of the story. It is as though the wombs are set over against the sanctuary, the other pole around which this story oscillates. Both hidden, and foregrounded, Peninah's fertile womb contrasts with Hannah's barren womb. It is the cause of their conflict, a marker of her economic superfluity (Elkanah gives her but one portion), and the focus of her prayer in the sanctuary. Her vow - to dedicate the son born as a Nazirite to the Lord at the shrine - focuses again on her womb, for she seeks the Lord to open her womb in reverse to the divine closure (1 Sam 1:6). Then it is time, after the blessing pronounced by Eli, for Elkanah's seed to find its way into her womb, where a son is conceived and born (1 Sam 1:19-20). Hannah's body is now the location of sex and impregnation, and it remains fecund, particularly after the dedication of Samuel and the annual blessing from Eli (2 Sam 2: 20-21). I will return in a moment to the pattern whereby various males - Eli, Elkanah and the Lord - all ensure Hannah's fertility.

Hannah's body works in one other way in this text, apart from empty womb, source of anguish, and then blessing, divine visitation and sex. I refer here to Eli's singular lack of perception: he observes her mouth and her lips moving. This is the realm of representations of space, for Eli, the priest in the sanctuary of the Lord, is in that realm. It is also, for Lefebvre, the zone of perception, space that is perceived. Spatial practice breaks in here, percieved space, for Eli perceives her lips and her mouth, but that is all, given his spatial role in the story, all that he can perceive. She, however, speaks in her heart, but her voice is not heard. The very use of heart in this sense, very different from the observed heart of medicine, or (to avoid too much anachronism), an open dead body, is in the realm of the symbolic and the mythic. The heart as lived is very different from the heart as thought and perceived. Desire, Hannah's desire, her anxiety and vexation (1 Sam 1:16), and mythification appear here. The contrast between Eli and Hannah could not be sharper in terms of space: the one comes from the representation of space, the other from the space of representation.

Eli sees her mouth and lips, but does not hear her voice. Hannah's heart acts as a metaphor for her womb, but her womb cannot be mentioned directly. In a perceptive tour de force, Eli concludes she is drunk. In response to Eli's rebuke, she admits not to pouring drink into her body, but pouring out her nephesh to God (1 Sam 1:15). Yet, even though her womb draws the prayer from her, she reveals to Eli none of the content of her prayer. Other parts of her bodily self, internal and external, have been revealed, but not her womb and its vexations. The spaces of representation in this case are not as myopic as Eli, for in the realm of the shrine, the external and frontal representation of space, it is not possible for her womb to be mentioned, seen or referred to. It is a realm both crucial to yet suppressed by the overt structure of space in this text. Hannah's womb remains unspoken and unperceived within the sanctuary, since sanctuary and womb are at odds with each other in spatial terms. If we pick up Lefebvre again, we find that in the production of sacred space, the realm of nature and of women's bodies is suppressed and removed from the domain of shrine, temple, and also city. But this space, what he calls absolute space, does not disappear; rather, it retreats into the interior, into the enclosed spaces of caves, nooks and crannies, alleyways, and of course bodies. The womb becomes a prime site for such an investment of alternative space, outside the bodies of males, of sanctuaries and cities, it yet remains crucial to the pattern of sacred commerce: hence the roles of Eli, Elkanah and God in relation to her womb. So here, it seems, we find the intersection of absolute space and sacred space, an overlap that Lefebvre himself was keen on locating.

Is there a utopian possibility in these spaces of representation, specifically with Hannah's womb and the way that it is the focus of the story? If we follow the work of Butler (1993), Grosz (1995) or Blum and Nast (1996), as well as Lefebvre, then bodies, especially female bodies, spatially exceed our representations and images, twisting away from patriarchal signs and controls. It would appear, on one reading at least, that the militant anthem of 1 Sam 2:1-10 fits the bill. It celebrates the strengthening, by God, of the weak and lowly, the bringing down of mighty kings, powerful, proud and arrogant men. The hungry, feeble and barren find food, strength and pregnancy. And yet, the central figure in this is God, which leads me to the final dimension of spatial practice.

Spatial practice appears at certain points that reflect an economy of the sacred, a sacred commerce in which issues of production and reproduction can only be perceived in terms of the sacred. So it is that Peninah taunts Hannah on the annual journey to Shiloh, specifically after the allocation of portions to each member of the extended family, for Hannah would be given only one portion (1 Sam 1:4, see also 7). Why not at other times, in this story? At this moment the role of the divine in reproduction is highlighted: on the journey, or rather at Shiloh, after the sacrifice, sacred commerce comes to the fore.

In order to maintain a mode of production it is necessary to reproduce labor power, ie. human beings. In different modes of production this may happen in different ways. For instance, in slave holding societies the slaves who do the work for the system to keep functioning are acquired through conquest, systems of debt, as well as children of slaves. However, in most cases human reproduction plays some role, especially in those where tribe or gens plays a fundamental role in the relations of production. The reproduction of large families, often polygamous, is crucial for the mode of production to sustain itself. So it is with this story, although with a few twists.

Firstly, there is the curious pattern of reproduction that seems to follow another rhythm from that of sex itself. In order for Hannah to conceive, she first goes to Shiloh, prays at the shrine, receives a blessing from Eli, is remembered (1 Sam 1:19) or visited (2 Sam 2:21) by God and then has sex with Elkanah. It seems as though she needs three men for the whole process to work (1 Sam 1:20; 2 Sam 2:21). As far as the rhythm of the story is concerned, it is only after the annual sacrifice and vow that the correct combination comes together for conception. This odd pattern is reinforced by the obverse, when she does not go (1 Sam 1:22), promising to do so when she has weaned the child. Then, when Hannah brings Samuel to dedicate him at the shrine, there is no pregnancy either, for there is no blessing, visitation, or sex in the story at that moment either.

It seems that the story has the making of a sacred commerce, a divine economy in which the system requires the activity of God to keep it running. But there is another feature that at first seems to undermine all this: is the dedication of Samuel as a Nazirite, to live and work at the temple, not an undermining of the need for labor power in the unit of the extended family? Would it not fit the logic of the system better if he were to grow up in the family and take his share of the workload? In the end, I would suggest, Hannah has the system at heart, for in dedicating the child to the Lord at the shrine she ensures that the sacred commerce will continue. Not only does she fulfil her vow (1 Sam 1:11) - necessary to avoid a divine curse - but she ensures that the role of the shrine and its priesthood in the production of sacred space is maintained. This is the reason, in a spatial analysis, why the sons of Eli, as well as Eli himself, must appear worthless and corrupt in the story (2 Sam 2:12-17, 22-36). Their sin is so great for it is a sin against God rather than other people (2 Sam 2:25). Samuel, therefore, is their designated replacement, and Hannah thereby performs a crucial function for the maintenance of this particular production of space and its mode of production (the Asiatic mode of production). Her boy, the product of her womb, must go to the shrine in order to underwrite its continuance at the hub of the spokes.

Do even the spaces of representation fall victim to the spatial practice of a particular mode of production? Does Hannah's womb also, despite the utopian glimpse it provides, reinforce the system as a whole? It would seem so, except for one detail: it all takes place at Shiloh, not Jerusalem. Here I make a dialectical move, characteristic of Lefebvre and other Marxists indebted to him such as Fredric Jameson, taking the whole discussion to another level and widening out the problem in a whole new way. What difference does Shiloh make? A whole lot, it seems to me.

The story is curious in the context of the larger scale into which it falls, especially if we keep Noth's construction of a "Deuteronomistic History" in mind. I want to pick up but one piece of this proposal, namely the centrality of the construction of the first temple by Solomon in the structure of the work. One of Noth's arguments was that the work exhibited an over-riding structure into which the ethereal author, creatively named the "deuteronomistic historian," fitted the bits and pieces cobbled together for the history itself. At the center of this planned work, and at the middle point of the chronology, Solomon begins building the temple (see 1 Kings 6: 1). But not only is the temple central in a chronological sense; it also functions as the only place for legitimate worship of Yahweh. The other places, especially the high places, but also the other shrines and minor places for worship are therefore illegal, not to be tolerated. And this applies even to those with some apparent pedigree, such as Bethel, Dan, and of course, Shiloh. So, a continual pattern becomes apparent in the "Deuteronomistic History," in which worship must be carried out in Jerusalem, at the temple, and nowhere else, and yet alternative worship continues. The various shrines and high places become contested zones, the subject of polemic and theological condemnation.

Spatially, such a conflict is crucial on a number of levels. The split between Rehoboam and Jeroboam is read in terms of the legitimacy or otherwise of the sanctuaries to which people travel for sacrifice and worship. Jeroboam, in order to stop the people going to Jerusalem, sets up worship in Bethel and Dan so that the people may go there, so that the hubs are now located within the territory of Israel and not Judah (1 Kings 12:25-33). This becomes a leitmotif for the rest of Kings, any condemnation now connected with the proverbial sins of Jeroboam. The contest closes with Josiah's destruction of the sanctuary at Bethel (2 Kings 23: 15-20). Indeed, Josiah's reform, with its long list of items destroyed, abolished, annihilated and ground into dust, embodies such a spatial contest in intricate detail, for the danger exhibited there is that if such a pattern of religious observance were allowed to go unchecked, it would infect the temple in Jerusalem as well.

Finally, there is not unexpectedly a theological glue to all of this that runs through from beginning to end. The basic theological bifurcation of this "history" is between obedience and disobedience: following the laws and wishes of Yahweh will lead to blessings, understood in terms of land, long life, wealth and offspring; falling away, worshipping other gods, and thereby disobeying Yahweh's commandments, which appear strategically at the beginning in Deuteronomy, will mean early death, misfortune, and ultimately, the spatial punishment of dispossession from the land, which is of course the punishment, according to this story, for continued apostasy.

So, in the broader context there is a spatial dynamic at work that lifts the whole consideration of Shiloh to a new dialectical level. If Shiloh falls into the category of one of these shrines, a hub of sacred space outside Jerusalem, then it is, as a whole, part of the spaces of representation. If sacred space seeks to control worship and economics in the central city and temple - and for Lefebvre sacred space relies not so much on the shrine alone as on the sacred city - then Shiloh is in another place, namely, that of suppressed spaces, of the elements of an older spatial organization that has now succumbed to the new order. Along with the various high places, grottoes, trees and so on, it is now a space of representation, on par with domestic patterns and bodies themselves. What this means is that whereas in the story of I Samuel 1-2 Hannah's womb, the major space of representation in the text of 1 Samuel 1-2, acts as one pole over against the sanctuary of Shiloh, in the larger context, her womb and the sanctuary fold into one space. The spatial logic of this is that the very possibility of a story about her womb can only take place in a narratively marginal, suppressed space such as that of Shiloh. Were it set in the Jerusalem of Solomon's temple, then it would have faced a narrative fate comparable to the suggestion of Solomon that the baby fought over by the two sex workers in 1 Kings 3:16-28 be cut in two.

Also, the sheer absence of descriptions, plans and designs of the shrine at Shiloh marks it off as less a representation of space than as a space of representation. All I was able to glean from the text was the centrality of Shiloh for the annual journey of the family to worship. By contrast, the issue of plans, building programs, sources of finance, interior design, and so on is inseparable from the consideration of the temple in Jerusalem. Thus, 1 Kings 5:15(ET 5:1)-7:38, is concerned with various facets of the building of the temple, roughly a third of the total textual space given over to Solomon's reign (1 Kings 3-11), let alone the dedication in the long chapter 8. Chronicles pumps this up even further, with 2 Chronicles 1:18(ET 2:1)-4:22 devoted to temple construction, and then a further slab of text, three chapters (2 Chronicles 5-7), given over to the dedication of the temple. This is not all, for further temple plans appear in Ezekiel 40-48, and a good section of Ezra and Nehemiah is given over to the story of the rebuilding of the temple and then the city of Jerusalem itself. Various prophets (Haggai, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) agonize over the temple, Psalms sing its praises and hopes for the future rest there (the Maccabees). Finally, the only other stretch of text with as much detail about the construction of a sanctuary is of course that of the tabernacle. The detailed instructions of Yahweh, down to the fineries of interior design, curtain material and clothes for the priests, are passed on to Moses over forty days and nights on Mt Sinai itself (Exodus 25-30), and then replicated in the description of its construction (Exodus 35-40). This is no less a representation of space than the temple in Jerusalem, and the two are linked through the wayward track of the ark of the covenant, which makes its way finally into the temple in Jerusalem.

The fleeting description of Shiloh pales by comparison to the inordinate attention given to temple and tabernacle. Boring stretches of text to be sure, but interesting precisely because of their boredom and tedium, particularly in terms of space. Let me return, however, to the tension I noted earlier between the central sacred space of Jerusalem and its temple which is so characteristic of the Asiatic mode of production. In the same way that worshipers and their acts of worship flow to the temple, so also their tribute flows into the city and the ruling class that feeds on the surplus product extracted from the peasants. Should we read the narrative presence of alternative, submerged and repressed spaces as sites of resistance, as places where older types of space remain and also from where new possibilities might arise, especially if they are connected with patterns of bodies that we find there as well? On one level it seems as though this is indeed possible, but I want to make another point here: it is not so much that we should side with one or the other as a better space, but that the contradiction between the two is part of the very production of space for such a socio-economic system. That is, the centripetal site for sacred observance, with its temple and palace, the site for political and economic power that is simultaneously religious, cannot exist without the centrifugal spaces of alternative sites for worship, and so also political and economic activity. Jerusalem cannot exist without Shiloh, and vice versa, for this is the dialectical logic of such a production of space. It is therefore a mistake to argue for either the correctness of the henotheistic/monotheistic ideology of certain dimensions of the text or for the viability of widespread polytheism. Both exist within this particular mode of production as necessary counterparts to each other.

Thus far I have read 1 Samuel 1-2 at two levels - the immediate one of the story centered on Shiloh and then a larger one of the relation between Shiloh and comparable places with Jerusalem. But there is another, wider, level that reinforces my argument (but which cannot be argued at length here), for if we look at the larger context we find that for most of its existence Jerusalem found itself in tension with stronger imperial centers, whether of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks or Romans. On this level, Jerusalem becomes an outside rim on a much vaster wheel, perpetually oscillating between subservience to larger imperial centers and limited independence. On this level too, then, the fundamental contradiction of the Asiatic mode of production cannot be avoided, namely the centrifugal force of the periphery and the centripetal force of the centre. Such a pattern perpetually replicates itself on a range of scales.

I have relentlessly sought to read these texts with the methods of Lefebvre in mind, partly in order to seek out the extraordinarily fecund possibilities his work provides, but also as part of a larger project on Marxist Literary Criticism and the Bible. Of course, it is but one distinct way of reading such texts, and the danger is that the claims for a spatial analysis may be too grand. I would prefer to see it as part of a larger program that includes other Marxist categories, such as the class, ideology, the theory of value, and so on. However, the sustained discipline of a specific reading like this one is not without its pleasures.