My topic is the construction of ancient space. I intend to offer several considerations needed for fathoming ancient spatiality, reading ancient texts, and drawing maps of ancient space. The paper builds on earlier arguments, some of which were presented in the Social Scientific Section of the Eastern Great Lakes Biblical Society in 2000 (see earlier version). Therefore, I will summarize those comments; expand two points introduced there; and finally demonstrate a critical spatial reading of several biblical passages. This, I hope, will suggest the importance of the trialectics of biblical studies.

Assumptions:

My summary can be expressed as a set of assumptions or presuppositions defended in the earlier paper, most of which will not be expanded here.

1.  Space is a fundamental subtext in all social understandings. And space is constructed through praxis and therefore based on experience.

2. Because perceptions of space derive from experience, technology and economics affect societies’ spatiality, and their spatiality modulates as technologies and economies change.

3. In the 21^st century, experiences ranging from social transformations to computer technologies influence spatial subtexts.  As illustrations, I discussed space exploration and the burgeoning of cyberspace.

I noted the impact that the images from Apollo 8 have had on everyone’s spatiality. Today I stress the importance of seeing the images. Visualizing is profoundly more effective than merely reading about our earth.

The second experience, the World Wide Web, is more persistent in most of our lives. In a previous presentation, I showed two maps of Internet traffic from 1993. They are fairly simple and not very challenging. Color coded for frequency, they suggest that our experience of cyberspace requires a different mode of representation.

5. Spatial theorists are supplying the concepts and language for studying space critically. One of the most useful has been Edward W. Soja of UCLA who has developed a theory of Thirdspace.  Simply stated, Soja insists that the human world comprises three dimensions. Humans are historical, social, and spatial.

Beyond that, Soja argues that spatiality itself comprises three understandings or three ways of producing and knowing space, each with its own epistemology: Firstspace (perceived space) is physical or demographic space; Secondspace (conceived space) is designer space such as informs an artist’s or architect’s work; and Thirdspace (lived space) is the spacthat gives meaning to our lives and makes us feel "at home," so to speak. For Soja, all spaces are all three (private communication 5/27/99).

Thirdspace is the most important for our discussion. Soja's describes Thirdspace as "dominated spaces," spaces of peripheries, margins and the marginalized, the "Third Worlds," the corpo-reality of the body and mind, in sexuality and subjectivity, in individual and collective identities from the most local to the most global. They are the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation, and emancipation (1996: 68).

Thirdspaces, he insists, have been lost or suppressed and need to be restored. A trialectic that brings lived space into tension with physical space and mental conceptions of it is required. Soja believes that postmodernism is doing this.

For Parks, the restricted area of the bus was lived space. It was significance not because it was the physical Firstspace front of a bus or the Secondspace design that made it more comfortable.  Rather it was what the front stood for that gave it meaning.

A Sinai Bedouin is accustomed to roaming freely with his camel, water, and flour. He contrasted himself to an Israeli guide who was constrained by boundaries, borders, and check points. The two men lived in the same physical Firstspace zone, but their Thirdspaces differed substantially.

I may summarize these assumptions by quoting Kevin Hetherington:

First, space and place are not treated as sets of relations outside of society but implicated in the production of those social relations and are themselves, in turn, socially produced. Second, space and place are seen to be situated within relations of power and in some cases within relations of power-knowledge. Power is said to be performed through spatial relations and encoded in the representation of space or as 'place myths.' Third, spatial relations and places associated with those spatial relations are seen to be multiple and contested. A place does not mean the same thing for one group of social agents as it does for another (Hetherington: 20).

Here, I will expand on two of these issues: Rosa Parks and civil rights on the one hand, and cyberspace and the Internet, on the other. With that, I turn the theses of this paper.

A first thesis is to repeat that new experiences of space are forcing new mental equipment that prepares us for new ways of thinking. These allow us to sense and grasp past spatialities that we have been overlooking. These senses of space are rooted in, at least in part, our experiences such as the civil rights movement, on a social level, and cyberspace and the Internet on a technical level. They provide frames of reference and analytical tools for investigating other kinds of space, including ancient space.

A second thesis is that historical biblical studies comprise three elements: historicality, sociality, and spatiality. This means that historical-critical studies and social world studies have both been incomplete. The former constructed images of the past by relying solely on historicality; the latter by bringing historicality and sociality together. Here I am claiming that a trialectic that includes spatiality must supersede the singularity and dialectic to which we’ve become accustomed.

A third thesis: the first two factors affect our understanding of biblical texts and the way we conceive biblical space and biblical mapping projects. It is a truism that every map encodes the spatiality of its cartographer as much as or more than the spatiality of the people’s being mapped. Critical spatiality attempts to sort out this confusion.

From Territoriality to Civil Rights Legislation:

To illustrate the tension between Firstspace and Thirdspace and how the former tends to control the latter, I cite four legal texts that were played a role in the evolution of the civil rights movement.

First is the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Standford case. 60 U.S. 393, 417, 450-451 (1857). Scott was a slave who lived in Missouri (a slave state), then Illinois (a free state), then Minnesota when it was still part of the Louisiana Territory (by treaty a free territory), and final Missouri again where he was sold to Standford from New York.

Chief Justice Taney’s opinion against Scott who had sued for his freedom is an embarrassment. Arguing that the "people of the United States" and "citizens" are synonymous terms, he goes on to declare,

The next chapter is the XIVth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in order to free the slaves and grant them full citizens’ rights. After stating that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside...," it goes on to the privileges and immunities clause, the due process clause, and the equal protection clause. The Amendment states,

The third text is the 1896 Supreme Court ruling on the Louisiana case Plessy v. Ferguson. 163 U.S. 537 (1896). It is the classic "separate but equal" doctrine. Although Plessy was seven-eights Caucasian and passed for white, under Louisiana’s "one drop" (of blood) law he was classified as black. In order to push his rights, Plessy boarded a whites’ only car on a train, announced that he was black, and refused to leave.

The Supreme Court observed that,

The final glimpse is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the so called Brown I. 347 U.S. 483 (1954). This 1954 decision written by Chief Justice Warren effectively made the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy unconstitutional. Note that Warren had no judicial experience before his appointment, and as governor of California had championed the evacuation of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.

The decision is vague, probably because Warren wanted the unanimous decision that he got. Drawing on social scientific studies claiming that "the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group," he wrote,

I take this abbreviated excursion for three reasons. First, to demonstrate the tension and ambiguity that exists when space is perceived solely as a physical entity defined by borders and boundaries. Some things, some peoples’ spatialities, are thereby suppressed.

Second is the message in this tradition. "New mental equipment" based on experience can enable individuals to see things differently than they did before. Harlan and Warren are parade examples of reversals by people who abandoned Firstspace law for Thirdspace interests. As Dred Scott led to the Civil War, so Brown I and II led to Rosa Parks, marches, sit-ins, and the entire civil rights movement – all tensions between First- and Thirdspace.

Third, critical spatial theory such as Soja provides can illumine real life situations in way that bring clarity and understanding.

Developing A Cyberspace - Biblical Space Relation:

Moving to our other prong, I will examine the relationship between cyberspace geography and biblical geography, picking up another theme I summarized earlier.

Life on the Internet – Life on the Screen, as Sherry Turkle calls it (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995) – is raising our consciousness regarding spatial studies and spatial analyses.

This happens in two ways. First, a plethora of Internet images in vivid color bombard us from across the planet. We know that these are having a profound affect on the way we write. More is pictured and less is written. Technological writing, in fact, is now a subspeciality of its own. If Ong and Goody were correct that writing is a technology, then writing for the Internet is a specialization within that field.

A second way that the Internet shapes consciousness is more directly relevant. In order to understand this, we must recognize that cyberspace is a real space.

Gregory Staple, editor of the online journal TeleGeography, defines cyberspace as "information space."  As such, it can be mapped. A dated attempt to do this is the 1994 map drawn by John December. He recognized that the Internet is more than the World Wide Web.

(click image for larger view)

December’s map "conceptualizes spaces as distinct, self-contained domains, but with fluid, irregular boundaries and many intersections and overlaps between them" (Dodge at wysiwyg://225/http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_010/). December’s own description (communicated in a email to Martin Dodge at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis [CASA] in University College London) is most relevant:

Staple continues to draw the contrast between such illustrations and those we are accustomed to on Western maps by comparing Native American maps.

These maps are "different from post-Renaissance European maps in two fundamental respects: geometrical structure and the selections of ordering of information content" (Malcolm Lewis quoted in Staple). European maps have co-ordinates whereas Native American maps conserve connectivity even if it means distorting what Westerners perceive as distances, angles, and shapes. The differences are not merely in the maps. They are also in the spatiality of the two cultures. Compare the images immediately above and below.

Examples could be multiplied ad infinitum, but I will limit myself to three more that illustrate how experiencing space affects and informs the way space is perceived and mapped.

A "map" of telecommunications in 1990 borrowed from a "cover" of the electronic journal TeleGeography is more provocative than the ones I used earlier. It shows the territorial outline of the United States superimposed on exaggerated or diminished outlines of other nations. The fine print below the globe describes the endeavor.

The degree of overlapping and extending between the U.S. and other countries indicates the percentage of U.S. telecommunications traffic to and from those nations. For example, Canada overlaps and covers approximately 20% of U.S. territory. This is proportional to the percentage of U.S. traffic to that country, i.e., 20% of U.S. messages go to Canada. Conversely, the percentage of Canada that extends into the U.S. is approximately 71%, the percentage of Canadian traffic directed toward the U.S. In other words, Canada receives 20% of U.S. traffic, and the U.S. absorbs 71% of Canada’s.

This is not easy to describe in words. If one did not seen the image, I suspect that I could not describe the map clearly, a fact that supports my thesis. Where spatial analyses are required, imaging assists. For assisting, the Internet aptly intervenes. The image, I contend, illustrates the problem of trying to map one kind of space according to a second spatial calibration. Land-based territoriality is a different spatiality from cyberspatiality.

We may draw a lesson from this. One reason why spatial analyses have been omitted and overlooked in biblical studies is because the Bible is a text that is in turn described by other texts.

The scarcity of images in the second or interpretive phase of this process has three additional causes: 1) the Bible contains no images or drawings; 2) modern copyright protection militates against using images; and 3) even if the first two factors did not exist, the economies of hard copy printing technology would work against including images. In the print world, it is more expensive to publish a photo or drawing than to publish a text. This creates a strong disincentive against including images, especially color images that are proportionately more expensive than half-tones.

In an earlier article, I borrowed from a conversation with David Gunn to note that the scholarly revolution in the early 1970s that gave rise to Scholars Press and what is now Sheffield Academic Press was made possible by several technological innovations: the daisy-wheel printer, the IBM Selectric typing element that included a bar code that could be read by optical scanners, and photo offset typesetting that displaced linotype (see:  Semeia 87 [1999 (pub. 2001)] 15-43 = http://www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/papers/jwfpapers/CBA2000/CBA.html). The communication advances introduced by these technologies enabled individual scholars to become hands-on participants in the production of their own articles and books, thereby eliminating many of the middle stages of publishing processes. Who published and what was published changed almost overnight. New opportunities opened for a different breed of scholars – younger, more diverse, and less established.

Today, I contend, the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web is again transforming the way we do scholarship and communicate its results. They are creating new spaces and forcing us to think differently not only about space, but also about our "place" in our own endeavors.

Application to Biblical Material:

As we turn to the Bible, I am presuming several truisms about ancient Israel, or the peoples portrayed in the Bible whomever they may be.

1.  The first has already been stated: maps reflect the spatiality of their producers.

2.  Second, the early Yahwist community was organized according to the principles of segmented societies. In other words, they were tribal.

3.  Third, the tribes were eventually organized into two moieties – Israel and Judah – each being a network of alliances among groups of tribes. Alliances within each moiety and between them were fluid, so that membership changed often and perhaps rapidly.

4.  Fourth, segmented tribal societies and moieties have their own spatiality that is not rooted in territory. Studies like Robert Sack’s on Middle Eastern geography demonstrate that tribal space is "people space" not territorial space. Consequently, some peoples are invited and others excluded from a tribe’s space, depending on allegiances. The point is that whatever they are, those spatialities contrast with the spatialities of persons committed to nations and territories. For the tribal groups, territory is where ones allies and family are. People count; territory by itself does not.

5.  A fifth assumption is that genealogies are records of relationships in segmented societies. In effect, I am saying that genealogies are biblical maps! Like Native American maps, they "conserve connectivity" and demonstrate the spaces that individual units of the segmented society may access or must avoid. Because of the fluidity among tribal groups, genealogies also changed frequently in order to keep them current and accurate representations of the power relations that exist among the peoples.

In order to demonstrate the application to biblical studies, I choose three well-known portions of the Books of Samuel.

First is the lists of David’s sons and their mothers that are found in 2 Samuel 3, 2 Samuel 5, and repeated in 1 Chronicles3 and 1 Chronicles 14. The fact that they survived confirms that David’s rise and power depended on his affiliation with different tribal members and groups. The presence of mothers’ names in the Hebron lists and their absence in Jerusalem lists signals an emerging centralizing that decreased the role of favored wives in determining the choice of successor sons. Nevertheless, as the verse immediately before the first list states, David’s house grew stronger while Saul’s grew weaker (2 Sam 3:1). Many commentators think the lists are included in order to demonstrate that growth.

To summarize: the storyteller meant to portray a tribal situation wherein a network of alliances was being woven as a means of gaining and maintaining power. The weaving began before Hebron was David’s seat, and it continued throughout the Jerusalem days.

David’s links and locations:

So, how should one map David’s "territories," since they were not properly territorial?

The easy answer may be that we should not. In an early map by William Foxwell Albright, I have indicated places or areas that appear in the David story. Note that the primary stage for the story lies within a frame that is outlined by three major fault lines in Canaan, shown in green on the slide. The faults may be inconsequential, but they help us demonstrate that the David in the story built alliances both in his central area and outside it. The full reach of his influence in the story would, of course, depend on the reach of those who were in alliance with him.

John Rogerson has attempted to map this expanse by using multi-colors stretching from the Gulf of Aqaba nearly to modern Aleppo. This, I believe, is an exaggeration of the story teller, and anyone in the David story who might have the advantage of this construction would have been truly surprised.

The text of Joab’s census in 2 Sam. 24:2 states that David commanded Joab to "Tour all the tribes in Israel from Dan to Beersheba and register the people that I might know their number." The verb pdqw that this translation (NAB) renders as "register" is variously translated as "take a census" (McCarter), "muster" (Smith; NRSV), and "count" (JPS Tanak). Certainly there were censuses in the ancient world, and the author of 2 Samuel 24 may have intended some sort of survey. It is interesting to note, however, that dictionaries give the word a wide range of semantic meanings ranging from "number" to "worry about."

It seems that the meaning one assigns depends on the perceived spatiality. My hunch is confirmed by the elaborate and tortuous discussions that follow regarding the plague. Was the plague sent because the census was not conducted properly? Was there a taboo attached to counting heads? Did the census elicit some evil spirit? (see McCarter II: 512-516). However we answer the issue is not the counting. I would recommend a translation that goes something like this: "Go check on the tribes from Dan to Beersheba and confirm their allegiances so that I may know my strength." This it seems make more sense and respects the presumed spatiality of the tribes in the early society.

Against this background, the biases of biblical maps become apparent. Two attempts to fathom and map the census episode in 2 Samuel 24 – Aharoni’s and Avi-Yonah's and McCarter’s. Both are noble efforts to illustrate the limits of power in a story. It is interesting to note that Aharoni draws a line from place to place, like connecting the dots, while McCarter gives a grand sweep, an oval roughly surrounding the areas he envisages in the David story. Neither is as expansive as Rogerson’s depiction. But, as we know from reading their work, Aharoni and McCarter are both convinced that David was a real historical king, he amassed power by conquering clearly defined territories, and there was an outer boundary to his jurisdiction. In other words, they believed that they were mapping the Firstspace territoriality of a nation-state and not Thirdspace of a tribal world.

I have discussed each of these points at length elsewhere, and I have pointed to maps such as those from medieval Islam to show that such clearly defined borders probably did not exist. Here, I propose a map of tribal Saudi Arabia to illustrate the nature and complexity of the problem.

Reading the story of Ibn Saud’s rise demonstrates that each space assigned in this map can be understood only in a most generalized fashion. The lines are hardly territories. Instead they are what we might call "concentrations of power" where margins fluctuated continously. They are places where one might expect to find a particular tribe dominant and, as Ibn Saud knew, one might have to marry-in in order to cross the space.

Woman from Tekoa:

In this context, we may examine a third example of the need for a trialectic in a spatial reading found in wise woman of Tekoa story in 2 Samuel 14.

The story portrays Joab, David’s soldier, scheming in order to convince David to bring back his son Absalom who had gone into exile following his murdering of his brother Amnon. Absalom sought refuge in the house of his mother’s father, Talmai son of Ammihud, king of Geshur, a region north and east of the sea of Galilee.

Joab solicited the assistance of a woman from Tekoa who presumably related a parable about her own sons, one of whom, like Absalom, had killed his brother. The community sought vengeance, intending to kill the surviving murderer-son. This would leave the mother without heirs and would cut her off from her nahalat yahweh. This is often translated "inheritance of yahweh," "estate of yahweh," or following Near Eastern parallels, "landed property of yahweh." Harold O. Forshey studied the construct chain and its parallel nahalat ‘elohim 25 years ago, focusing especially on two general meanings. He argued that nahalat at times refers to land or property, but at others to people. There are passages where ‘am (people) and nahalat are used in parallel. Forshey is uncertain, however, whether the parallels are synonymous or complementary.

Given the spatiality we have been implying, I am disposed to read it as "people." Hence, the woman is saying that she – and by implication, David – will be cut off from her people. The implications are profound. Absalom’s exile is not a moral issue – not simply a murder-son being punished and seeking refuge. Rather, Absalom’s allegiance, and all who would follow him shifted allegiance from David to Talmai. As we learn by Absalom’s revolt in chapter 15, it was a considerable group sufficient to overthrow David. Consider that David’s marriage to Absalom’s mother, Maacah, was a political marriage intended to strike allegiance with peoples aligned with her family living in Geshur. Hence, by sending Absalom into exile or allowing him to remain there, David threatened and sapped his own strength. The alliance would be broken, Talmai’s and Absalom’s power would increase and David’s decrease. This would be the reverse of the strategy David had used against Saul earlier.

Time does not allow a complete reading of the story, but these pointers are sufficient to illustrate the value of considering spatiality, and considering it critically when reading the Bible. In a segmented society, the expanse of a leader’s power, control, and influence does not depend on seizing territory but rather on striking alliances, however fluid and fragile. Marriage was the glue binding these, and separation would dissolve them. David had demonstrated his sensitivity for marriage alliances during his rise – as seen in the lists we viewed earlier – but especially in his demand for the return of his wife Michal, Saul’s daughter, in 2 Samuel 6. That maneuver linked him to the Israel moiety and secured his allegiance and leadership of the northern tribes. Sensitive as he was, he apparently failed to remember the lesson when dealing with his own son Absalom. Joab saw the flaw, and the woman from Tekoa, understanding tribal spatiality, wisely manipulated his judgment until he reversed his decision and returned the son along with his allegiances. The success was short lived, but the episode illustrates the need for considering the spatial implications in the story.

Conclusion:

To conclude: Critical spatiality is informed by experiences that move us to construct space. In today’s world, the driving forces are at least in part computer related and our own socio-political situation.

For the past, comparable forces shaped spatialities. In ancient Israel they were tribal and therefore oral, personal, and pastoral rather than territorial. The differences between them and ones to which we are accustomed in the industrialized West are diminishing under the influence of the new mental equipment that is being forced upon us. Tribal antiquity is not a conscious precursor of cyberspace (or for that matter the civil rights movement), but the inability to map tribes according to territorial grids and boundaries relates the present and past in theory. In order to use the former for understanding the latter, biblical studies need a new approach. It is a trialectic that incorporates historicality, sociality, and critical spatiality.

Works Cited:

Aharoni, Yohanan and Michael Avi-Yona, (eds.). 1977.   The Macmillan Bible Atlas.  Revised Ed.  New York: Macmillan.

Harvey, David. 1989.  The Condition of Postmodernity:  An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.  Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell.

____________2000. Spaces of Hope.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California.

Hetherington, Kevin. 1997.  The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering.  New York: Routledge.

McCarter, P. Kyle. 1984.  II Samuel.  Anchor Bible 9.  Garden City; NY: Doubleday.

Rogerson, John. 1985.  Atlas of the Bible.  New York: Facts on File Publications.

Sack, Robert D. 1986.  Human Territoriality.  Its Theory and History.  Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Soja, Edward W. 1989.  Postmodern Geography.  The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory.      New York: Verso.

_____________1993.  "Postmodern Geographies and the Critique of Historicism." Pp.113-136 in Postmodern Contentions.  Epochs, Politics, Space.  Eds.
                                    John Paul Jones,  III, Wolfgang Natter, and Theodore R. Schatzki. New York:  Guildford.

_____________1996.  Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

_____________1999.  "Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of Geographical Imagination," Pp. 260-278 in Human Geography Today.
                                    Eds. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre.  Cambridge: Polity.

Toulmin, Stephen 1990.  Cosmopolis.  The Hidden Agenda of Modernity.  Chicago:  University of Chicago.