A Brief History of Space
The longstanding and frequently debated issues of modernity and postmodernity relate directly to discussions of borders and territoriality. In an earlier article, I began to explore how space and time related to these issues (Flanagan, 1995). Although the article centered primarily on time (and is in a sense a companion to this paper), a summary of its main points may be integrated with important aspects of modernist/postmodernist geography that focus directly on spatial subtexts.
The sequence and development of the so-called modernist and postmodernist periods and cultures is debated extensively. Here, I can only briefly outline significant attitudes that pertain directly to our topic. I do not include discussion of the "primary texts" written by central figures in the debates that persons espousing a particular stance would consider required reading. It is not my purpose to discuss all the issues that surround the terminology, but rather to illustrate that the periodization, whatever one thinks it is, influences spatial subtexts in cultures.
Postmodern architectural critic, Charles Jencks, fixes a specific time and place when modern architecture ended: St. Louis, Missouri, July 15, 1972, 3:32 p.m. (Jencks 1991: 23; in contrast see Jencks 1989: 47 that suggests ca. 1960). Then part of the prize-winning modernist Pruitt-Igoe low-cost housing project was demolished because it was deemed uninhabitable and unredeemable. The sterile straight lines of modernist architecture and the space they organized had failed. The symbolism of the demolition, for Jencks, represented the collapse of an entire world of ideas and expectations, a world that inspired and was inspired by modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe.
Many studies of modernity and postmodernity, on the other hand, detail a gradual shifting in philosophical and historical circumstances accompanying the transition from one stage to the next. Sharp breaks are not detected, and competing paradigms are thought to coexist for shorter or longer periods of time. It is only with hindsight that pivotal episodes, major shifts, and significant personalities are identified.
Philosopher Stephen Toulmin is one who would deny the sharp break that Jencks sees and opt for a transformed modernity that he labels "humanized modernity" (Toulmin, 1990: 180). In order to demonstrate, he traces modernity from its origins, which because of associations with the origins of modern science and technology, he situates in approximately 1630. The great minds of the seventeenth century were responsible for new ways of thinking about nature and society. Science and reason were accepted as potential solutions to society's ills (Toulmin, 1990: 9-10).
Descartes' prominence is important. His famous mind-body distinction gave rise to a series of dichotomies that allowed physical and human worlds to be divided (Toulmin 1990: 180 81). The distinction also allowed an idealized human world to be modelled in an orderly fashion on the "real," i.e., physical, world. Newton's role was similarly, if not more, important. His physics established the limits and stability of a physical world that could be accurately tested, measured, and controlled. It too became the model for an ordered human society, acted out to its fullest in the dominance of nation-states (Toulmin, 1990: 107). The concepts of space and of time were definite and distinct. Space was three dimensional, separate from time, a place where objects were naturally at rest, but also a place to be filled and in which to move around. Everything and everybody had a time and a space, which with the proper care and instrumentation could be discovered. Order and regularity were principles of life. Someone has observed that with this vision of a container-like world, one might reasonably ask, "How would the world differ if the deity had created it three feet to the right or left?"
David Harvey, however, equates the shift from modernity to postmodernity with a shift in the experience of space and time. They are basic categories of human experience, but subtexts that are taken for granted and whose meanings, unfortunately, are seldom discussed (Harvey, 1990: 201).

I think it important to challenge the idea of a single and objective sense of time and space, against which we can measure the diversity of human conceptions and perceptions . . . we must recognize the multiplicity of the objective qualities which space and time can express, and the role of human practices in their construction. Neither time nor space, the physicists now broadly propose, had existence (let alone meaning) before matter; ...It is, however, by no means necessary to subordinate all objective conceptions of time and space to this particular physical conception, since it, also, is a construct (emphasis added) that rests upon a particular version of the constitution of matter and the origin of the universe. The history of concepts of time, space, and time-space in physics has, in fact, been marked by strong epistemological breaks and reconstructions. The conclusion we should draw is simply that neither time nor space can be assigned objective meanings independently of material processes, and that it is only through investigation of the latter that we can properly ground our concepts of the former. This is not, of course, a new conclusion (Harvey 1990: 203-4).

The quotation rivets attention on the foundational subtexts. It makes explicit that changes in those concepts result in changes that must be considered in all other levels of life and expression. This can be nowhere more true than studies of the past, especially the remote past. There our imaginations, conditioned by our presumptions about space and time, are all important (compare Ermarth 1992). It is our hypothesis that we carry our subtexts into our interpretations. But with the emergence of postmodernism, the three-dimensional box or cube of space that leaves time outside implodes with the discovery of space-time. Science and Literature specialist, Katherine Hayles, has shown that it is no coincidence that deconstruction in philosophy and literature and chaos theory in science came in the same age. Both point to an underlying cultural shift (Hayles 1991). Options for imagining alternative spatial-temporal relationships that previously would not have been thought possible, indeed, that would not have been thought, open out. Harvey's thesis is crucial: the shift from modernity to postmodernity is a shift in perceptions of space and time.
Like Toulmin's and Sack's claims, many disciplines have associated the voyages of discovery in the Renaissance period with a radical reconstructions of spatiality (see Edgerton 1987; Soja 1989,1993). Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, Man in a Circle and a Square, offers an early metaphor because it is often cited as the "trademark" of the Renaissance (Edgerton, 1987: 10). It portrays the human (in this drawing male) as the measure of all things and illustrates faith in mathematics as the communications link between heaven and earth.
Although the roots of modernism are found in that period and its experiences, the perspective that preceded is necessary in order to appreciate both the continuity and the radical nature of the shifts that occurred in the subtexts. The earlier periods exhibited contrasting cosmology, cosmography, and cartography that tried to replicate the order in the vault of the sky on the face of the globe.
Views of these attempts are found in many early drawings that pictured the space above and below in relatively the same configurations. The interaction of earth and sky and the dependency of humans, human affairs, and human geography is commonplace in texts and images from antiquity including the ancient Near East. The desire to have humans' earthly abode conform to the heavenly sphere is age-old and widespread. Ordered life is symbolized by placing rulers' houses and sacred places at axial crossings in town plans, and in regional designs there is an attempt to organize geometrically. Placing towers and columns at the axial points -- the axis mundi -- extends the organization on the x and y axes and connects it with the third axis, the z, in this case spatial rather than temporal. The ziggurats of Babylon and the altar pyramids of the Aztecs illustrate the associations (Edgerton, 1987: 17). They join heaven and earth. The cultures' theologies dictate their cartography, or more exactly, their cosmology (subtexts) control their cosmography.

(click on figure to enlarge)
The Man in a Circle and a Square continues the earlier emphasis on the omphalos, and introduces the value of human geometric order (Figure 6). The drawing was originally intended to illustrate Vitruvius's De architectura written during the reign of Augustus Caesar. Vitruvius had observed that a circle around a person whose arms and legs were extended would center on the navel, a place of prenatal nourishment and cosmological significance. Rome, for Vitruvius, was the omphalos of the world.
Leonardo adopted the centralized view, but he also modified it. In contrast to the center of the circle, he drew the square to center on the figure's groin, "implying that the male phallus has the same symbolic significance as representing the procreative link between earth and heaven" (Edgerton, 1987: 12). In so doing, he symbolized his era by shifting the locus of attention to the human sphere while retaining an interest in order, integrity, and unity such as he found in the mappa mundi of Ptolemy's Cosmographia which was also influencing his age. He cited Ptolemy's work as an ideal model for his treatise on human anatomy and referred to it in his preface where he called the human body the minor mondo, i.e., the microcosm of the macrocosm world.

There will be revealed to you in fifteen entire figures the cosmology of this minor mondo in the same order as was used by Ptolemy before me in his Cosmographia. And heretofore I shall divide the members of the body as he divided the whole world into provinces, and then I shall define the function of the parts in early direction, placing before your eyes the perception of the whole figure (quoted in Edgerton, 1987: 12).

For the purposes of this paper, we need not delve further into this interesting period of history. It is sufficient to note that although order, real and symbolic, was prized since antiquity, and the geometry needed to plot it accurately and cartographically was available at least since Ptolemy, it was not until the Renaissance that mapping became obsessed with the unity of an image, the relationship among the parts, or the primary role that humans played in the globe's organization. Da Vinci's Man in a Circle and a Square expresses each in a unified, single drawing.
Edward W. Soja's interprets the Renaissance shifts (and their successors). Although given from a urban planner's perspective, his treatment is especially relevant to our investigation (Soja 1989,1993). Like Toulmin, he proposes that "modern" and "postmodern" are not polar categories or simple binary opposites. Instead, they coexist. Moreover, both can be viewed along three interpretive dimensions: spatiality, historicity, and sociality (Soja, 1993: 114). Together the dimensions allow him to describe modernity-in-general (emphasis his) against which he can compare and contrast various modernities and postmodernities. He argues that particular forms of modernity that gained dominance in the nineteenth century privileged historicity and sociality at the expense of spatiality. This caused the linearity that accompanies historicism and fuels historical criticism. Against these tendencies, he reasserts space in critical social theory. Discussions of postmodernism are righting the balance (1992: 125). In other words, there should be concern for "making geographies" the same way that "making histories" and remaking social order have been promulgated in this century's research (Soja, 1993: 114).
Soja sees four successive modernities (Soja, 1993: 115-117). He locates the first in the Enlightenment and associates it with the emergence of science. The second comes with the restructuring of thought in the Age of Revolution beginning in the late eighteenth century. This continues through the revolutions in America and France that gave way to the Age of Capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century followed by the era of fin de siècle at the end of the century. The third restructuring comes in the second quarter of the twentieth century (Depression, World War II, Stalinism, Fordism, etc.), and the fourth soon after, beginning in the 1960s.
The backdrop enables Soja to position reactions to each restructuring. He presents the reactions as varying dispositions more than sequential developments. Hence, the reactions are postures and are not tied to a single time or circumstance.
The reactions typify groups. The first is those who are associated (positively) with the established but relatively declining dominant situation; a second group develops alternatives to challenge the dominant group; and a third comprises mixed, subordinated categories of residuals, ancients, and those who feel excluded (1992: 117-118). Each grouping, therefore, represents an attitude toward change. As a result, to embrace modernism today is to be wedded to movements that consolidated between the turn of the century and mid-century. Postmodernism, on the other hand, embraces one of several reactions to modernism. The two postures are not chronological, but remain in competition with each other.
Soja associates the postures with attitudes toward "the real" and "the imaginary." Here, he borrows from Baudrillard's, Simulations (NY: Semiotex[e], 1983) for the category "precessions of simulacra" in order to assess changes between signifying "real" and representational "imaginary" (Soja, 1992: 119). Baudrillard defined four successive phases of image (imaging) that Soja identifies with critical epistemes of modernity.
The first is rooted in Greek thought and is associated with modernity-as-Enlightenment. It is captured in the metaphor of a mirror. In it rational thought is believed to be sensible reflection of the real empirical world. This is the episteme of science.
The second was developed in the nineteenth century and can be illustrated by the metaphor of a mask. Here, good reflections of the real are thought to be hidden by a shroud of false appearances. Practical knowledge requires getting behind the shroud or mask of surface appearances. Soja finds this episteme in structuralism, some kinds of Marxism, and cultural criticism. It has probably dominated during much of the twentieth century.
The third episteme is conveyed in the metaphor of simulacrum (simulation), the substitution of representations of the real for the real itself. Because the simulacrum is an exact copy of the real -- which may not exist -- it threatens to displace reality itself. Images mask the growing absence of reality as a referential.
The third episteme gives way to the fourth phase when images become their own simulacra with no relation to reality.
With this list Soja distinguishes antimodernists (who want to destroy old Enlightenment modernism), late modernists (who want continuity with modernism but innovative reforms), and avowed postmodernists (who divide among left-leaning, right-leaning, and non-leaning clusters). The left-leaning accept changes in simulation, reject totalizing visions, search for new combinations and alliances, and engage in hyperreality (Soja 1992: 122). The right-leaning provoke postmodernism of resistance by "spin-doctoring" simulations and dissimulations (e.g., Ronald Reagan's 1980's claim that unemployment was only a pessimistic, unpatriotic attitude). This reactionary postmodernism is termed "neoconservative," and it substitutes simulation of the real for the real itself.
The third group, the non-leaning, sits on the fence and patches together disparate fragments of spatiality, historicity,and sociality to "build a new and reenchanting 'sandbox' culture of space and time" that is usually highly marketable (e.g., Disneyland; Soja, 1992: 123).
To summarize: against this backdrop of progress and counterprogress, Soja insists on the need for a postmodern geography that restores spatiality to the status of equal member in the triad with historicity and sociality. The dominance of historicism since the nineteenth century has displaced spatiality resulting in weakened bases for sociality. He insists that space must be created or constructed just as history must be. A critical spatialization of history is required. By this he does not mean adding a synchronic geography to diachronic historical analysis or applying additive spatialization in the manner of Fernand Braudel. Critical spatialization "problematizes the combination of spatiality and historicity and sees in this problematic juxtapositioning the necessity to rethink them as co-equal modes of representation, inquiry, and theorization" (Soja 1992: 133).
This summary exposé affirms our attempt to examine space on two levels, spatiality in biblical antiquity and spatial subtexts in the culture of the modern researcher. It offers a positive, critical value by urging movement beyond Enlightenment and nineteenth century three-dimensional container-like static space that can be measured in length, width, and height.
Genesis 10, Joshua 13-19, and 2 Samuel 24
With this background we may turn to a highly selective list of biblical materials and interpretations in order to test our hypotheses.
Early Hebrew cosmology is usually portrayed as a three-tiered universe divided among the heavens above, earth below, with primeval waters and Sheol under the earth. The face of the earth is circular, its edges constrained by the horizons. The vault above is limited by the horizons as well, and from the perspective of earth, is concave. Whether the surface of the earth was flat or convex matching the vault above is not clear. A decision would depend in part on the meaning of hûg, as in Prov. 8: 27 ("When he traced a vault over [or drew a circle upon] the face of the deep"). Compare Job 22: 7; 26: 10; Isa. 40: 22. Opinions cited above, especially those associated with Pythagorean theory, would suggest a flat earth with an arching vault above. The entire configuration seems to be a container-like, inverted bowl and saucer framework.
The earth disk had a center. On the basis of Ezekiel's description of Jerusalem, at least at that time, the center was eventually located there (Ezek 38: 12). tibbûr ha'ares in the Ezekiel passages is translated as omphalos in the Septuagint.
Whether this description represents the ancient spatial subtext requires further research. In its absence, however, I accept it as today's common scholarly wisdom and use the description as a hypothetical frame for discussing specific biblical units.
Three disparate textual units are used. For variety and because of the forum where the paper is presented, I have selected as a pilot project the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, portions of the allotment of land in Joshua 13-19, and the census route in 2 Samuel 24. The first is widely referred to as a geographic text with ethnographic importance and has been cited above in association with Alexander's T-O map of Jubilees 8-10. The Joshua unit is commonly read as containing a wealth of geographical information that has been widely used in drawing biblical maps. The third depicts a final encounter between Yahweh and David in the Books of Samuel. Many dismiss 2 Samuel 21-24 by labelling them a later "appendix," but in a different reading, the texts may in fact control much or all of the foundational story of Israel's greatest hero.
Table of Nations
Genesis 10 now stands between the stories of Noah and the Flood survivors in chaps. 6-9 and the stories of babel in chap. 11 and the ancestral tradition beginning in chap. 12. It serves the dual purpose of on the one hand preparing for the linguistic confusion in the babel scene, and on the other hand inventorying and linking disparate peoples and regions to eponymous ancestors and the surviving family of Noah. Because of this, the Table is commonly interpreted as an etiological explanation of the peoples known to the biblical writers. It should also be noted, however, that the unit ties just as closely to the babel scene by setting the stage for the problem that will be faced in Genesis 11.
Many have insisted that the Table's geography stretches from the Black Sea to Nubia on a North-South axis, and from the Iranian plateau to Spain on the East-West axis. It may be no coincidence that the territory approximates the area that William Foxwell Albright ascribed to the biblical world (Albright, 1966: 13).
Source critics divide the text between J and P sources. The division and differences need not concern us greatly except to note that critics such as Speiser (1964: 71) draw the distinction by crediting the P source with a catalogue of states -- as opposed to tribes -- and with summaries that prefer goy (nation) to 'am (people) (vss. 5, 20, 31, 32). This change in description that accompanied a shift from a tribal to centralized ethos corresponds positively with the transformation in territoriality in nation-states discussed above. Alexander's appraisal is also interesting, and it provides a further clue for our reading. He notes:

. . . [the author used] the principle of genealogy (derived from family and tribal history) to organize certain geographical data, viz., the nations of the world known to him. He arranges them in families, relates them in terms of descent from common ancestors, or from each other, and, by tracing them back to Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet, integrates them into the narrative of sacred history (Alexander, 1992: 980).

Alexander's description casts the passage in terms of genealogy and segmentation. He comes close to grasping the fluidity that characterized ancient society, but does not seem to catch the sociological implications of his own remarks. Moreover, because the story extends the mythological Flood account and links it to the mythological babel scene, it is "astrobiological" -- someone's term for images and texts that link cosmological and human spheres of activity.
These descriptions merit unpacking and interpreting. Genesis 10 is obviously tribal and genealogical. And it mentions a great deal of what must have been the known world and known peoples in order to provide an inventory of the relationship among them. It is in fact a story of relationships and non-relationships. But can we be certain of what this means for the writers' perception of space? Whether they envisaged a T-O type map, or any map, is a related but different question from their principle of social organization.
In sorting our image from the image they may have held, we come face to face with the problems of "reading" someone else's subtexts. It is extremely difficult for us to suspend or filter out the cultural influence of Enlightenment, modernist Cartesian space and time grids that we use to structure our thought and map our world. We know that the ancient authors were not so influenced, and that they did not know about or understand longitude and latitude as well as the physical geography that such grids delineate. As Harré warned, we also know that we should not smuggle in an alien grid. Hence, we certainly cannot assume that they envisaged a geometrical, geographical world such as a Ptolemaic map would describe. Even if a late date is assumed for the passage -- one that might put it in the broad period of Eratosthenes, Anaximander, or Pythagoras -- we cannot presume cross-cultural links or similarity that would have made the Greek insights available to the biblical writers. (Would there have been a comparable influence from Babylonia?). And what about the T-O form?
It is here that I turn for help to Gellner's characterization of segmented societies and Sack's arguments for organic linkage between people and territory. The former's insistence on two essential elements in segmentary thinking (order through balanced opposition and relationships expressed in kin and territorial terminology) describes completely both the imagery and language of Genesis 10. It fits equally well the textual descriptions of most commentators, including Alexander, except where he and others cross the line into map making.
Sack's insistence on organic linkage among segmented peoples and their territories is also appropriate. The traditions available to the authors/editor held memories (or imaginations?) of disparate peoples who counted as friends or foes of the authoring group. Typically, they could be traced eponymously to a common ancestor, but the author understood that unity experienced in the distant past had eroded over time so that now dissensions as well as alliances characterized society. That is the story they encoded in Genesis 10 and that gets acted out in the Tower of Babel incident.
What does this say about their spatial subtext? In some ways, very little, in some ways a lot. It seems like very little if we judge by modernist standards that prize precise locations and distinct boundaries. Looking back from a society that now carries GPS (Global Positioning System) locators in its boats, car, and hands, it is difficult to see the Table as spatial unless it is read under the overlay of a Cartesian grid or T-O form. Postmodernist geographers such as Soja help us through this problem. (Below I will suggest that modern electronic technologies assist as well).
Soja's insistence that spatiality, historicity, and sociality are necessary for contextuality casts the issues in a different light and illumines a path that leads beyond our modernist biases. Recall that since the nineteenth century the social contexts have been a topic of critical interest, and that historical backgrounds that might illuminate, explain, or offer paradigms for such contexts have been examined extensively. The history that has been recovered and traced, however, is often very linear and limited. It may include occasional branches where the historian "fleshes out" an earlier period and even adds comments on the geographical setting of an earlier time. But this is not the critical spatiality that Soja proposes. His would require the researcher to take spatiality issues as seriously as historicity and sociality, and to treat them in a relational "trialectic" epistemology. In the case of the Table of Nations, we would have to say more than "this text is about geography and here are the boundary lines." We would have to explore why the space was described as it is and what assigned positions within that space mean, if anything. In this instance, I propose that the answers are in the character of segmented societies and those societies attitudes toward territoriality rather than in a T-O template that the biblical story may or may not approximate.
In this reading, Genesis 10 is a description of a three-branched kinship group seen from the perspective of a semitic genealogist. The description is universalistic in that it "traces" up to a common ancestor, but it is also strongly separatist. Its presumed interest in geography is actually an interest in people. Territoriality is envisaged only because of its organic relationship to the peoples. It insists that the other peoples and their territories are just that -- "other." Part of the outsider world that Peter Machinist aptly documents (Machinist 1994), they are different and distant outsiders, comparatively unknown relatives who can be explained away and dismissed. The unit serves the ancient writers and theologians admirably by expressing their religious beliefs and self-understandings stated in kinship and territorial terms. Non-leaning postmodernist biblical specialists may, if they wish, import the unit into their reenchanting sandbox of geographical scholarship, but in doing so they go beyond the intention and imagination of the biblical authors.