Worlds that Could Not Be: Utopia in Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah 9780567664068, 9780567664051, 9780567664044

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Testing Utopia as a Contemporary Method in Biblical Studies
Worlds That Could Not Be: Realism and Irrealism in Thomas More’s Utopia
“Utopia where it is to be hoped that the coffee is a little less sour”? Dr Who’s “Utopia” and Chronicles
World-Building and Temple-Building: A Game of Utopian Pastiche in 2 Chronicles 1–9
Part II: After Exile, Under Empire: Utopian Identity Negotiations in Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles
Exile, Empire, and Prophecy: Reframing Utopian Concerns in Chronicles
Re-Negotiating a Putative Utopia and the Stories of the Rejection of Foreign Wives in Ezra–Nehemiah
Writing and the Chronicler: Authorship, Ambivalence, and Utopia
Utopia in Agony: The Role of Prejudice in Ezra–Nehemiah’s Ideal for Restoration
Part III: Searching for the Place: Theologies of Utopia
Taking the Reader Into Utopia
Die Suche nach dem Ort in der chronik: Eine U-topie?
Response
Index of References
Index of Authors

Citation preview

LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

620 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

WORLDS THAT COULD NOT BE

Utopia in Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah

Edited by

Steven J. Schweitzer and Frauke Uhlenbruch

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Steven J. Schweitzer, Frauke Uhlenbruch and Contributors, 2016 Steven J. Schweitzer and Frauke Uhlenbruch have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schweitzer, Steven James, editor. Title: Worlds that could not be : Utopia in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah / edited by Steven Schweitzer and Frauke Uhlenbruch. Description: New York : Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015040645 (print) | LCCN 2015041622 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567664051 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780567664044 () Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Chronicles–Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Bible. Ezra–Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Bible. Nehemiah–Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Utopias–Biblical teaching. Classification: LCC BS1345.52 .W67 2016 (print) | LCC BS1345.52 (ebook) | DDC 222/.606–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040645 ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-405-1 PB: 978-0-56768-456-1 ePDF: 978-0-56766-404-4 ePub: 978-0-56766-910-0 Series: Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, volume 620 Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com) To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments List of Contributors Abbreviations INTRODUCTION Frauke Uhlenbruch

vii ix xi

1

Part I TESTING UTOPIA AS A CONTEMPORARY METHOD IN BIBLICAL STUDIES WORLDS THAT COULD NOT BE: REALISM AND IRREALISM IN THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA Terje Stordalen

13

“UTOPIA WHERE IT IS TO BE HOPED THAT THE COFFEE IS A LITTLE LESS SOUR”? DR WHO’S “UTOPIA” AND CHRONICLES Gerrie Snyman WORLD-BUILDING AND TEMPLE-BUILDING: A GAME OF UTOPIAN PASTICHE IN 2 CHRONICLES 1–9 Frauke Uhlenbruch

38

59

Part II AFTER EXILE, UNDER EMPIRE: UTOPIAN IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS IN EZRA–NEHEMIAH AND CHRONICLES EXILE, EMPIRE, AND PROPHECY: REFRAMING UTOPIAN CONCERNS IN CHRONICLES Steven J. Schweitzer 1

81

vi

Contents

RE-NEGOTIATING A PUTATIVE UTOPIA AND THE STORIES OF THE REJECTION OF FOREIGN WIVES IN EZRA–NEHEMIAH Ehud Ben Zvi

105

WRITING AND THE CHRONICLER: AUTHORSHIP, AMBIVALENCE, AND UTOPIA Donald Polaski

129

UTOPIA IN AGONY: THE ROLE OF PREJUDICE IN EZRA–NEHEMIAH’S IDEAL FOR RESTORATION Jeremiah Cataldo

144

Part III SEARCHING FOR THE PLACE: THEOLOGIES OF UTOPIA TAKING THE READER INTO UTOPIA Matthias Jendrek

171

DIE SUCHE NACH DEM ORT IN DER CHRONIK: EINE U-TOPIE? Thomas Willi

183

RESPONSE Vincent Geoghegan

193

Index of References Index of Authors

205 209

1

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The essays collected in this volume are based on work originally presented in two sessions at conferences: in an invited session by the Chronicles–Ezra–Nehemiah Section at the 2013 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Baltimore, and at the workshop “Chronicles and Utopia” held at the 2014 international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the European Association of Biblical Studies in Vienna. These essays build on previous work in biblical studies that brings utopian studies into conversation with the biblical text, providing an alternative lens for reading these particular biblical books that opens up new possibilities for engaging new questions generated as a result of shifting the types of questions being asked. The editors would like to thank series editors Claudia Camp and Andrew Mein for encouraging us to create this volume of essays that we hope will provide a helpful resource for scholars studying Chronicles– Ezra–Nehemiah and for those desiring to explore utopian readings of biblical and other texts.

CONTRIBUTORS Ehud Ben Zvi, University of Alberta Jeremiah Cataldo, Grand Valley State University Vincent Geoghegan, Queen’s University, Belfast Matthias Jendrek, Theological Faculty Paderborn Donal Polaski, Randolph-Macon College Steven J. Schweitzer, Bethany Theological Seminary Gerrie Snyman, University of South Africa Terje Stordalen, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Centre for Advanced Study, The Norwegian Academy for Science and Letters Frauke Uhlenbruch, Independent Scholar Thomas Willi, University of Greifswald

1

ABBREVIATIONS AB BEATAJ Bib BibInt BKAT BN BZ BZAW ESV FRLANT HAR HAT HTKAT IBC JBL JSOT JSOTSup JSPSup LBH LHBOTS LXX

MMT MT

NCB NEB NM NSK-AT RB SBH SBLAIL SBLDS SBR SBS SJ

Anchor Bible Beiträge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des Antiken Judentums Biblica Biblical Interpretation Biblischer Kommentar, Altes Testament Biblische Notizen Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft English Standard Version Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Hebrew Annual Review Handbuch zum Alten Testament Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament. International Bible Commentary Journal of Biblical Literature Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series Late Biblical Hebrew Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Septuagint Miqৢat Ma!aĞê ha-Torah Masoretic Text New Century Bible New English Bible Nehemiah Memoir Neuer Stuttgarter Kommentar - Altes Testament Revue biblique Standard Biblical Hebrew Society of Biblical Literature Ancient Israel and Its Literature Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Studies in the Bible and Its Reception Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studia Judaica

xii SJOT SR STAR WMANT

1

Abbreviations Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses Studies in Theology and Religion Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament

INTRODUCTION Frauke Uhlenbruch

What Is Utopia? The de¿nition of utopia is disputed. Often de¿nitions are drawn from works by scholars like Darko Suvin or Lyman Tower Sargent, two important contributors to the ¿eld of Utopian Studies from its initial emergence in ca. the 1970s. Many of the de¿nitions referred to today stem from around that time. By the time scholarly engagement with utopia began in a systematic way, works that we would refer to as utopias had been produced more or less constantly since the sixteenth century, when Thomas More invented the word utopia. Arguably, utopian content could be found even in works that pre-date More’s. Utopia is an open canon, constantly changing and amended, always involved in a game between proposal, fantasy, reality, and de¿nition. I have proposed to approach the concept apart from de¿nitions in order to glimpse beyond the classic trinity proposed by Lyman Tower Sargent of literary genre, communal movement (utopian/intentional communities), and social theory.1 It is possible to move away from a strict de¿nition mainly in order to see clearly utopia’s core as a heuristic model.2 However, this is not to say that an engagement with what is meant when we say utopia is not necessary: it is crucial. De¿ning utopia at least for a given purpose is essential, because too many assumptions about what utopia is and does Àoat around, which can make reading an essay that engages with the topic of utopia seem blurry and out of focus if one has to infer what its author thinks of as constitutive of utopia. For example, utopia is not a one-off power fantasy. It is a serious engagement with a fundamentally changed society. It is not the imagination of one day of rage, victory, and vindication, but an image of lasting change for the better. Utopia is more than an annual day of role-reversal and 1. Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5 (1994): 4. 2. Frauke Uhlenbruch, The Nowhere Bible (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015).

2

Worlds That Could Not Be

carnival, and more than ritual sanctioned mocking of authority—it is serious heuristic play with a given social situation and how it might relate to a hypothetical different situation. Utopia being ¿rst and foremost a heuristic model it really cannot but be applied with a level of remove. Utopia is a methodological restriction put upon the discussion of a text or an artifact as utopia. This restriction may be applied in addition to other methodological restrictions such as historical-critical method, critical theory, social scienti¿c approaches, and theological exegesis, which are all present in this volume. Adding utopia mixes things up and adds the aforementioned level of remove: Before discussing anything in conjunction with the concept of utopia, it is worthwhile or even necessary to step back and consider what utopia means with regard to literature, sociology, history, and theology. Ideally, methodological questions must be considered, such as: is joining historical-critical approaches and utopia possible at all? If so, on which level and with which constraints? A consideration or re-consideration of the axioms of the “home discipline” should be part of a utopian reading. Utopia is always “not here.” I have pointed out elsewhere that really getting at a biblical text—be the focus its redaction history, its theological meaning to the creating community, the authorial intention, its mirror value (or not) of a historical situation—might just be a utopian endeavour.3 It is a large-scale critical project that sometimes seems achievable if only the right approach, the right material, the right insights (or—I dare hardly mention it—the right consensus) could be found. In fact the biblical texts and their meanings are always one step removed from joining us in reality. It seems that we can only ever tiptoe around hard facts, if we apply methods and come to conclusions responsibly. But tiptoeing is what utopia does, too: those fantastic, ideal places can never quite be found, the question of how to get there in reality is never quite answered, there always seems to be yet another bridge to cross when we get to it (but we never even get to it). We are in good company. Utopia—as I hope to show in the next two paragraphs about utopia as a warning and utopia as freedom—is a heuristic tool and it is, at the very least, a conversation starter. The conversation does not need to become a ¿ght if the participating parties acknowledge that the aim is probably beyond realistic reach and that the achievable goal might just be the journey (der Weg ist das Ziel).

1

3. Ibid., esp. Chapter 7.

UHLENBRUCH Introduction

3

Utopia as a Warning Anti-utopians often argue that systems described in literary utopias are conforming, even oppressive, conservative, and if that were not enough, plain boring. Everyone is aware of this point of critique by now, but utopia is still around as a genre and a concept, now, however, inextricably intertwined with critique and attack of it. It has been pointed out abundantly that enforcing a utopian proposal will not bring about utopia, because utopian systems hardly ever cater to a viably large number of individuals. There will not be a happy consensus society, simply because of human difference.4 The warning to take away from anti-utopian discussions of utopia is that overly much enthusiasm in favor of a utopian proposal may bring about negative real consequences for those excluded by the proposal. The only solution to this conundrum would be to take into account everyone’s opinion, let everyone have a voice. Biblical Studies is only just now starting to pay attention to the voices of a signi¿cant number of scholars from different backgrounds and with different approaches (doing so kicking and screaming, I might add). Paying attention to all voices can be safely considered an in¿nite project. We cannot enforce a scholarly utopia—working towards it involves opening the conversation up to hear the voices of all those affected. This is a never-ending process as it will also incorporate future political, scienti¿c, and social developments. The anti-utopian’s warning is acknowledged and heeded but the concept of utopia is still present and useful. Utopia As Freedom/Chance Quite often these days, audiences seem to be especially eager to pay for entertainment that shows them dystopian extrapolations from given reality rather than utopian ones. In a utopia nobody needs to rebel because everybody is numbly happy, but this is not the stuff stories (or realities) are made of. Dystopia implies rebellion.5 Even in dystopias the utopia tends to be present in undertones—Katniss’s utopia within her dystopian world of The Hunger Games is freedom from oppression and selfdetermination, for example. 4. Isaiah Berlin discusses this in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Pimlico, 2003). 5. There are interesting examples of literary dystopias in which rebellion is hauntingly absent. These works seem to critique system-enforced numbing to issues, passivity, and conforming non-action. Examples are Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours (2014) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).

4

Worlds That Could Not Be

The aspect of utopia which is often discussed with some internal conÀict is its potential to inspire action: not destructive oppressive fervor, but creative empowerment to take charge and to change the world (nothing short of that). It inevitably contains both the danger of forcing one’s own utopian views upon those who would prefer the world to function according to different principles but also the powerful positive drive towards change (I am consciously not saying “for the better” or “towards perfection”). As long as the utopian impulse is not inhibited by totalitarian-minded oppressors hogging “the truth,” it is what it also always has been: a catalyst for re-thinking, or thinking differently, exploring alternatives to what is. This volume is thus very much part of that endeavor of re-thinking. The contributors hardly discard anything, but rather—another utopian feature—extrapolate from what is already there: previous scholarship in Biblical Studies and theology and also other disciplines, combining the existing approaches with the concept of utopia in different ways to explore different aspects for the ¿rst time or anew. Utopian Binaries Exploring the concept of utopia is often done by testing it in binary opposition to other concepts, it seems: “Utopia versus History”—what does this opposition tell us about utopia and also about history or historical positivism? “Utopia versus Reality”—how does or did a fantastic proposal relate to an author’s or an audience’s reality? How can we tell what the reality was? “Utopia versus Theology”—how do different ideas of different futures differ in utopias and in religious imagination? Are the terms even comparable? a. Utopia and History One important opposition we should explore in theoretical terms before embarking on the essays presented in this volume is the opposition—or binary pair—utopia and history. How do we deal conceptually with proposals for and imaginations of the future found in ancient works? Probably in a similar way as we deal with works such as Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—both were once set in futures, but are now set in pasts. They are never taken as prophetic visions or as political extrapolations whose authors were convinced they would come true. They are read nowadays as visions appropriate to the time and circumstances of their creation. When time “overtakes” the year in which these visions are set they are not automatically ridiculed for being “outdated” or seen as false prophecies, but rather they become 1

UHLENBRUCH Introduction

5

culturally important artifacts. They are not usually condemned because their authors “failed” to predict the future accurately, but rather praised as innovative and culturally important explorations at their time, which often happen to contain more abstract messages that are relevant beyond their time. We may observe, for example, that in contemporary surveillance society, Nineteen Eighty-Four may not be understood as dystopian anymore, simply because surveillance has actually become such an inevitable part of reality. Unfortunately biblical literatures contain many texts whose readers still claim that they are “true” in some way—true predictions of salvi¿c futures, true accounts of the past, visions of the future, whose ancient authors honestly thought would come “true.” Luckily, it does not detract from the texts’ importance or signi¿cance to admit that this need not be so. The utopian approach is sooner inclined to attribute visions of the future from the past to a sophisticated utopian impulse of negotiating identity in an historic present rather than to fanciful visions of what would surely be “if only…” (the community would not intermarry, be faithful, not worship idols, keep all commandments, follow their elite leaders, be docile etc., etc.), that can then—futures later—only be smiled upon as naive power-fantasies. Using utopia we are approaching many different historical levels of such utopian proposals that were crafted by past communities from accounts about their respective historical pasts. Fredric Jameson’s brilliant paradox (and title of a 2005 book) “Archaeologies of the Future” comes to mind here. We are in a way conducting a textual excavation, but of an authoring community’s futures, constructed from authoritative accounts of their pasts. Using utopia (or any modern method for that matter), we cannot pretend to be detached observers, because we become active agents by imposing our contemporary methodology upon the already entangled situation of past–future–past. We must admit that since we are adapting this modern concept and applying it to a realm of the past, we are committing an anachronism. While a utopian proposal may be set in the future (or far away), the concept of utopia as a response to current circumstances is ¿rmly lodged in history. It came into being at a speci¿c moment in history, but has thence developed until it became a concept deemed ¿t to use by an academic discipline as a new method or approach. The word and the concept “utopia” are connected to Thomas More and the Renaissance. More’s work is so potent as an ever-open, ever-newly-interpreted artifact due to the impossibility of More’s island. From the start, the island remained open to interpretation and raised interest throughout history, because it could not be located. More’s Utopia and the Bible are both texts of perpetual relevance, among other reasons because they are still

6

Worlds That Could Not Be

open to interpretation. When speaking of history and utopia, this is one aspect, easy enough to grasp: Utopia goes back to More but how did More engage with his contemporary reality? This question is still open to research, discussion, and speculation. How can we relate the different aspects of the historicity of More’s work to the Bible?—another question still open to discussion. The wish for better places and states (of being) is at the same time ahistorical by being set in intangible futures or far-away fantastic places, but also historical (Thomas More used the word for the ¿rst time in 1516) and contemporary (there is now such a thing as Utopian Studies). The utopian impulse is something almost everybody will be able to relate to. It is one of those traits of common humanity that connects contemporary selves to the realm of the past whose faint traces we are encountering when we are reading the Bible. As Vincent Geoghegan points out in his response to the essays presented in this volume, in utopian theory, utopia is not seen as temporally one-dimensional, i.e., not exclusively future-oriented yet also not simply dreaming about bygone days of a Golden Age: “the forward and the backward glance,” so writes Geoghegan in his response, “have complex modes of interaction in any given present.” This insight is utilized by the contributors of this volume when exploring biblical texts in conjunction with concepts such as utopia, but also concepts such as memory and prophecy. b. Utopia and Reality What is real about utopia is its ubiquity. Utopias were produced more or less since humans ¿rst began writing. But utopia’s relationship with reality is an opposition that brings about all kinds of heuristic trouble. The utopia’s reality is its unreality: it is never there, it is always removed from “a” reality, but this reality might not be the reader’s reality. Since it may not be the reader’s reality, the reader may misunderstand a utopia as once having been a realistic proposal or somebody’s sincere conviction that this is what their future was to look like. The contributors to this volume are careful to point out exactly whose reality they are speaking of—the past community’s, the intended readers’, or contemporary believers’ or scholars’. The problem is, of course, that utopia is always meant to be read as juxtaposition to reality, and that we are frequently left making assumptions or guesses about exactly which aspects of a utopia a past reading community would have picked up on. What would they have read and understood? What could they have read and understood and how can we re¿ne contemporary methods to reach any insights into this aspect of a utopia? 1

UHLENBRUCH Introduction

7

A literary utopia is not an ideal candidate for a New Critical reading: its meaning is bound to the environment in which it was produced, bound to its “author” (by extension, speaking of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, its authoring-redacting community) and the dialogue of the author with the intended audience to which the piece was addressed. Attempting to read a utopia in a historical vacuum is a superÀuous exercise, because it is often extrapolated from a concern the author of the utopia shares with the intended audience. Both author and audience will have had access to the same cultural “libraries.” So this aspect has to be added to the list of caveats that come with utopian readings: we must check whether we are convinced that we know enough about the historical situation and those cultural libraries before making any ¿nal statements about utopian content. A big problem appears of course when we are not certain what exactly the historical circumstances were—not sure exactly about dating, not sure exactly about authors, whether authors are reliable or unreliable narrators or whether their accounts of their situation and their past are apologetic white-washings or polemic blaming. The jury is still out on many of these aspects in Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah. So attempting utopian readings on these texts is usually a thought-experiment: “what if” we assumed for a moment that the account is not accurately historical? “What if” we assumed for a moment that ancient authors were capable of calculated narrative construction, capable of cynicism, inside jokes, exaggeration, and acid polemics? “What if” we took the ancients completely out of the experiment for a moment and dealt with the text as purely contemporary artifact? A de¿ning element of utopia, it turns out, is its intertextuality. Geoghegan reminds us in his response that already Ernst Bloch drew upon the Bible and its contradictions and intertextualities in his work The Principle of Hope (1954, 1955, 1959). Sometimes inner-biblical intertextuality can be shown or traced, sometimes “external intertextuality” is made explicit by a scholar consciously approaching the biblical text in an intertextual way. Intertextuality is always present, whether made explicit or not. Once again, thinking about utopia before reading brings to the front of one’s mind a heuristic axiom: the text that is being read stands in an intertextual relationship with the texts that were read. This is true both for the redacting ancient communities and for the contemporary scholar/ reader. From a utopian theoretical point of view the reality of the text is multiple texts and multiple eras.

8

Worlds That Could Not Be

c. Utopia and Theology Suvin once declared religion and utopia to be incompatible: one, he says, strives for change in this life, the other, for perfect happiness in the beyond.6 Since most other binaries in discussions about utopia are not clean-cut, the incompatibility of religious or theological enquiry and utopia should not be declared too sweepingly and too quickly. All terms involved are too volatile to make a sweeping statement: the relationship between utopia and theology can be explored in speci¿c case studies, but grand conclusions both from utopian scholars and from biblical scholars or theologians should only be made after wider engagement with both “religion,” “theology,” and “utopia.” Geoghegan, at the conclusion of this volume, puts theology and utopia into a relationship by referring to Edmund Burke’s investigation of the sublime, and by exploring astonishment and awe as overarching notions found both in utopia and in accounts of encounters with the divine in the Bible. Geoghegan sketches for us once again the interplay between utopia, a biblical theological reÀection, and a much later response to it (by Ernst Bloch, responding to Job and Corinthians, in this case). Once again, we seem to have two concepts emanating from two sources, coming together in an external focal point: the Bible, and the concept of utopia becomes focused in Bloch’s thought. In this way, we can put many other concepts, passages, philosophies, and approaches into relationships and sear new holes by focusing different existing rays of thought through new lenses. Theology and utopia are probably related in many ways. The element of continuous searching, discussing, and improving that is not aimless but implicitly directed is an aspect that theology and utopia may have in common: a sustained search, a never-quite-arriving, but a strong hope of an arrival, some time, somewhere. Even if one were to follow Suvin’s rather sweeping implicit de¿nition of religion as a search for heaven, the steps necessary are taken in this world—the same with utopia, as said above: the aim may or may not arrive, but utopia can urge action in this world. Between the contributions presented here, different de¿nitions of utopia are found, proposed by different theorists—each relevant and appropriate to the respective essay. This variety is expected and welcome. It testi¿es to the breadth and depth of utopia as a phenomenon, method, and

6. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 43. 1

UHLENBRUCH Introduction

9

heuristic tool. It also testi¿es to the challenge that utopia is not an easy way out or a method or concept less slippery than other methods and concepts. Utopian Studies is a thriving academic discipline, and employing the concept acknowledges that a dialogue is entered with a large interdisciplinary ¿eld. All the happier are we to contribute to the interdisciplinarity of Utopian Studies (and Biblical Studies/theology) by making available our authors’ insights from Biblical Studies/theological point of views in this volume. Bibliography Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. London: Pimlico, 2003. Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Penguin, 2000. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. More, Thomas. Utopia. London: Penguin, 2003. O’Neill, Louise. Only Ever Yours. London: Quercus, 2014. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harlow: Longman, 1991. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5 (1994): 1–37. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Uhlenbruch, Frauke. The Nowhere Bible. SBR 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015.

Part I

TESTING UTOPIA AS A CONTEMPORARY METHOD IN BIBLICAL STUDIES

1

WORLDS THAT COULD NOT BE: REALISM AND IRREALISM IN THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA Terje Stordalen

Modern Concepts of Utopia Due to an unusually productive and connected history in European language and thought the word “utopia” (and “utopian,” “utopianism,” etc.) has a semantically wide and paradoxical pro¿le.1 Since biblical scholars too must rely on these contemporary semantics, we need to start with a brief reÀection on this term, or at least on those aspects of it that are relevant for the discussion at hand. Having been coined by Sir Thomas More as part of the title for his novel (1516), the term utopia(n) now means a genre of ¿ctional literature as a well as a discursive mode in literary genres, ¿lm, and other media. Known ¿rst as the name of an unreachable island, utopia can also designate imaginary or lost paradisiacal places. Since More’s book is read as a political text, utopia may refer to an ideal state or society: various historical ideological political projects, political ideologies, and even aspects of (urban) architecture or practice. Following Bloch, Ricoeur, Jameson, and others, “utopian” is also the name for a kind of hermeneutics or a mode of reÀection, funded for instance on hope of (Bloch) or desire for (Jameson) a better life. In addition, utopian may also signal evaluation, either positive (as in “paradisiacal”),2 but in recent years also often negative (as in “unrealistic” or “foolish”). 1. For the following, compare Fátima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (ed. Gregory Claeys; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3–27; Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 1–9; Klaus von Stosch, “Utopie,” in Lexikon philosophischer Grundbegriffe der Theologie (ed. Albert Franz, Wolfgang Baum, and Karsten Kreutzer; Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 422– 24; Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s.v. “utopia” [cited 30 June 2014]. Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/620755/utopia. 2. In More’s Latin novel an inhabitant of Utopia claims that the island would have deserved the name Evtopia (Greek ev-topos meaning good-place) instead of Utopia (Greek: ou-topos meaning no-place). In the English reception of the novel

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One dominant line of interpretation has claimed Sir Thomas’s novel as a charter text for the modern. When read as a modern book More’s Utopia is oriented towards social con¿gurations that are basically realistic, initiated by humans and carried out in a rationally conceived universe. Grey and Garsten exemplify this position on Utopia. Building upon Karl Mannheim’s analysis in Ideology and Utopia they declare that utopias are “related to reality” and therefore “can be analysed sociologically and politically (rather than, for example theologically).”3 Charles Taylor, too, thinks that the underlying idea of utopias is “that these things are really possible in the sense that they lie in the bent of human nature.”4 Fátima Vieira aptly sees a characteristic in the reception of utopia as “the tension between the af¿rmation of a possibility and the negation of its ful¿lment.”5 The central issue in European intellectual involvement with utopias has been the question of their relationships to reality. “Reality” is of course anything but a neutral concept to European philosophy. This term epitomized the transition in Europe from myth to ethics, from tradition to ration. And utopia, hovering as it were between fantasy and ration, got deeply entangled in this process. To those who saw myth and make-belief as dangerous, “utopian” became a negatively charged characteristic. Those who retained a positive sense of human social imagination, retained positive connotations for utopia. Leading theorist of Utopian Studies, Lyman Tower Sargent, identi¿es two lines of utopian ¿ction running alongside each other, from antiquity until today. One focuses on bodily pleasures and the good life in a world generated by gods. The other focuses on social organization manufactured by humankind.6 It was the latter that became important for political these two names are almost homonymous. So, in English parlance, at least, utopia is also the professed good place. 3. Christopher Grey and Christina Garsten, “Organized and Disorganized Utopias: An Essay on Presumption,” in Utopia and Organization (ed. Martin Parker; Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 9–23 (11). Similarly, Susan Bruce, ed., Thomas More Utopia; Francis Bacon New Atlantis; Henry Neville the Isle of Pines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii, quotes J. C. Davies with approval: “Ideal world narratives can be classi¿ed according to the way they negotiate the problem of supply and demand. Ancient narratives envision an ideal world of unlimited supplies, while early Modern utopias deal with the limitations of the real world.” See also Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias [1922] (LaVergne, Tenn.: Dodo, 2010), Chapter 4. 4. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 23–26. Later on Taylor refers to Bronislaw Baczko in support of the claim that this is also the idea of the narrator in Thomas More’s Utopia (p. 199 n. 2). 5. Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 6, cf. 9–15. 6. Sargent, Utopianism, 11–12. 1

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philosophers. (The picture seems more nuanced for literary scholarship.7) These philosophers thought that More’s Utopia addressed problematic aspects of European society and made a call for realistic political change. They saw the Republic of Utopia as an inspiration, sometimes even a blueprint, for such political change. In the heyday of modernist philosophy “proper” utopias—like those of Plato, Sir Thomas, H. G. Wells, and others—were emphatically contrasted to “false,” mythical utopias.8 In short, in current language there is a resilient impulse to see More’s Utopia as an expression of political ideals that are in some sense realistic, meant in some sense to be actually implemented in the process of social change.9 In current political discourse utopia seems to have been scaled down, and “by emphasising its pragmatic features, it came to be associated with the idea of social betterment…a program for change and…a means towards political, economic, social, moral, pedagogical reorientation.”10 Utopia in Recent Biblical Studies Turning to biblical scholarship on utopianism, the most striking feature is how little has been written on the topic.11 This may reÀect a negative evaluation of utopianism in modern theology.12 Turning to those who did address the topic, one may summarily say that scholars applying classical 7. Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 15–18. 8. The inÀuential work of Lewis Mumford launched this distinction between “real” and “false” utopias. False utopias were myths looking back “to a dim golden age in the past when all men were virtuous and happy.” The “Modern Utopia strikes a new note, the note of reality, the note of the daily world from which we endeavor in vain to escape.” Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 34 and 122, cf. 118–22 and Chapters 3; 6; 8–12. 9. See Bruce, Utopia, ix–xv. Cf. Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 12–15; Steven J. Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles (New York: T&T Clark International, 2007), 17–18. For a laconic commentary on the one-sidedness of such interpretation, see Sargent, Utopianism, 22–23. 10. Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” 22–23. 11. It is dif¿cult to document something that is not there, but here is one attempt: A search for “utop” in the online catalogue of L’école biblique in Jerusalem returns 126 results. For a catalogue indexing every article of every major publication in Biblical Studies spanning more than one century, this seems meagre. In comparison “eden” produced 1256 and “paradi” 757 search results, and during the period covered by this catalogue, literary scholars frequently discussed both Paradise and the Garden of Eden as forms of utopia. 12. Cf. Eyal Naveh, Reinhold Niebuhr and Non-Utopian Liberalism: Beyond Illusion and Despair (Sussex: Sussex Academic, 2002).

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twentieth-century paradigms of Biblical Studies tended to link the concept of utopia to discussions of paradise and the good life.13 A more recent line of scholarship emerged in the wake of a study by Roland Boer, taken up and further developed in the works of scholars like Steven Schweitzer, Ehud Ben Zvi, Kåre Berge, and Jeremiah Cataldo.14 This research reÀects the other line of utopian thought identi¿ed by Sargent (above); associating the concept of utopia with issues of social organisation. As a consequence, these scholars engage different biblical texts. Corresponding to the orientation towards social (and political) issues, there is also a tendency in this recent scholarship to see the concept of utopia as in some sense oriented towards the realistic. Roland Boer argued in favor of seeing the utopian politics of the Chronicler as a reduction and exclusion of certain aspects of reality, a reÀection of political desire, and a strategy for future ful¿lment.15 To Boer utopia has a paradoxical relation to reality: “…there [are] unexpected connections between the Utopian state and our own, but at the same time it is 13. Some examples: Yehuda Radday, “The Four Rivers of Paradise,” Hebrew Studies 23 (1982): 23–31; Yairah Amit, “Biblical Utopianism: A Mapmakers Guide to Eden,” USQR 44 (1990): 11–17. I would include also John J. Collins, “Models of Utopia in the Biblical Tradition,” in “A Wise and Discerning Mind”: Essays in Honor of Burke O. Long (ed. Saul M. Olyan and Robert C. Culley; Providence, R.I.: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 51–67, and my own work (although I did not employ the term “utopia” at the time): Terje Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth—Or Not? Jerusalem as Eden in Biblical Literature,” in Beyond Eden: The Biblical Story of Paradise (Genesis 2–3) and Its Reception History (ed. Christoph Riedweg and Konrad Schmid; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2008), 28–57; Terje Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth: Jerusalem, Temple, and the Cosmography of the Garden of Eden,” Biblicum (2009): 7–20. 14. Roland Boer, “Utopian Politics in 2 Chronicles 10–13,” in The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture (ed. M. Patrick Graham and Steven L. McKenzie; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999), 360–94; Roland Boer, “Review of Ehud Ben Zvi (ed.) Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature,” BCT 4, no. 1 (2008): 07.1–0.7.3; Roland Boer, “Review of Steven Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles,” BCT 4, no. 2 (2008): 30.1–3; Steven J. Schweitzer, “Utopia and Utopian Literary Theory: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 13–26; Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles; Steven J. Schweitzer, “A Response,” JHS 9, no. 11 (2009): 15–19; Ehud Ben Zvi, ed., Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Kåre Berge, “Literacy, Utopia and Memory: Is There a Public Teaching in Deuteronomy?,” JHS 12, no. 3 (2012): 1–19; Jeremiah Cataldo, “Whispered Utopia: Dreams, Agendas, and Theocratic Aspirations in Yehud,” SJOT 24 (2010): 53–70. 15. Boer, “Utopian Politics,” 370–83, largely relying upon Jameson’s perception of the relationship of utopia to reality and realism. 1

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impossible to see the way through to Utopia; for this we require the revolutionaries.”16 This keeps the utopian vision open rather than closed.17 Steven Schweitzer’s exciting study saw utopias not as blueprints for ideal societies but as revolutionary texts challenging and questioning the status quo.18 In their call for social change utopian visions are still in a sense realistic, depicting worlds as these could or should be—as is reÀected also in Schweitzer’s programmatic expression: “a better alternative reality.” Mirroring Boer’s emphasis upon openness, Schweitzer portrays the instability and adaptability in the Chronicler’s utopian vision. The “‘better alternative reality’…may adapt as historical circumstances change.”19 Indeed, the “Chronicler is not a radical, but a pragmatist,”20 who displays sensitivity but nevertheless applies the utopian ideal for basically realistic purposes.21 It seems fair to say that for biblical scholars who engaged theoretically with the concept of utopia,22 the view of utopia as somehow realistic (in “soft” ways) seems to dominate.23 Alternative views, associating utopias with the non-real, are fewer and less intensely theoretically argued.24 16. Ibid., 381. He continues: “This sharp relation of disjunction and connection is characteristic of Utopian construction: a Utopia requires a radical disjunction with its dismal world as a condition of its possibility, yet in order to be possible in the ¿rst place, it must ¿nd another way to re-open the connection… Utopias may be mentally assembled only on the building blocks supplied by the present.” 17. Boer, “Review of Steven Schweitzer.” 18. Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles, 18, cf. 14–23. 19. Ibid., 125, cf. 21–22, 74–75, 174–75. 20. Schweitzer, “A Response,” 18. 21. See Schweitzer, “Utopia and Utopian Literary Theory,” 18 (cf. n. 15). 22. My impression parallels that of Boer, “Review of Ehud Ben Zvi”: several recent studies used the concept of utopia without serious intervention in utopian theory. 23. See for instance Berge, “Literacy, Utopia, and Memory,” 9f, etc.; several authors in Ben Zvi’s Utopia and Dystopia, like Neujahr (see 48–49, etc.); Ben Zvi (56, etc.); O’Connor (86–87); Boda (247–48); Schweitzer (see above). Even Cataldo, who shows that the theocratic ideal of the golah community was not practicable, thinks it was designed as an “attempted creation of a blueprint for an entirely new state” (Cataldo, “Whispered Utopia,” 69). 24. To Collins “properly utopian” biblical texts imagine a place out of this world (“Models of Utopia,” 52). This is a concept of utopia as close to mythic, and apparently without any impulse for social or other change. The perception of utopia in Lea Mazor (“Myth, History, and Utopia in the Prophecy of the Shoot [Isaiah 10:33–11:9],” In Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume [ed. Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom M. Paul; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2004], 73–90) is similar, and also Harold Brodsky (“The Utopian Map in Ezekiel [48:1– 35],” JBQ 34, no. 1 [2006]: 20–26) takes “utopian” to mean non-realistic and

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An interesting middle position was taken by Erin Runions, who compared utopia to Homi Babha’s “third space”—a space where conÀicting realities are negotiated by way of de-realiziation.25 Two questions remain to be further addressed in the framework of this scholarship. One concerns the applicability of the concept of utopia to texts like Deuteronomy, Chronicles, and Ezra–Nehemiah. The other concerns the nagging potential that “realist utopian” ideology can be used to legitimize the status quo and ongoing domination or suppression. This essay shall not be able to address these questions explicitly. Rather, I hope to lay a foundation for doing so by returning to Sir Thomas’s novel and its potential link to biblical literature. The two main questions are: (a) What is the relation between the world of utopia and the everyday world in More’s text? (b) Is a similar con¿guration of ¿ction and reality known in biblical literature? To this, I add a third question: (c) Does that con¿guration in Utopia (and possibly biblical literature) have any potential for preventing totalitarian abuse? These three aspects are intertwined, and my analysis will oscillate between them. The Island of Utopia and the World of the Novel’s Audience a) More’s novel ingeniously activated a web of contemporary communicative competences, and it is impossible to read the story without engaging these competences. The novel explicitly mentions Plato’s Republic and obviously feeds on Renaissance engagement with the bulk of classical literature and culture. The narrative mentions the contemporary explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and it addresses certain social aspects of contemporary life. Relating to the issue of audience competences, one must remember that the novel—the text as well as the growing body of illustrations—was the result of a long and complex authorial process that included many individuals.26 And, as it turns out, symbolic. To Nathanael Warren (“Tenure and Grant in Ezekiel’s Paradise [73:13– 48:29],” VT 63 [2013]: 323–34) utopia seems basically to be a religious symbolism with a spatial dimension (cf. 325–26, 330). James L. Crenshaw (“Deceitful Minds and Theological Dogma: Jer 17:5–11,” in Ben Zvi, ed., Utopia and Dystopia, 105– 21) relies on Jonathan Z. Smith and sees utopia as primarily imaginative. 25. Erin Runions, “Playing It Again: Utopia, Contradiction, Hybrid Space and the Bright Future in Micah,” in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation (ed. Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer, and Erin Runions; Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999), 285–300. 26. For this and the following, see Terence Cave, Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 1

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precisely those aspects of the novel that are thought to connect to the social and political world of the sixteenth century were the parts that were the longest in the making and that involved the highest number of co-authoring agents. One can safely say that the novel’s connection to contemporary reality engaged an entire generation of European Humanist authors, editors, and book printers and that in the end it reÀected their combined sense of communicative competence on this matter. Thomas More (1478–1583) ¿nished the ¿rst part (in Latin), now known as Book II, possibly in 1515. This is the part in which the explorer Raphael Hythloday gives an account of the topography and society of Utopia. Framing the narration of Raphael, there is the voice of the narrator, let us call him Sir Thomas. This voice ¿lters what is rendered from Raphael’s story and occasionally reports a reaction by the audience to what is narrated (this audience being the narrator himself and Mr. Giles). In the last paragraph of Book II the narrator also reports a decision to save his objections concerning laws, institutions, and religion of Utopia for another day. If, indeed, the narrator Sir Thomas meant to offer these objections later his intentions were crossed by the author, let us call him Thomas More, who concluded the novel before Sir Thomas could air his objections. Book I was apparently written during 1516. In this book the narrator (still Sir Thomas) gives an account of the assignment and the travels that brought him into contact with Raphael in the ¿rst place. This story relates to an actual assignment of the author Thomas More. The introduction of Raphael links him to historical individuals like Amerigo Vespucci and to geographical locations like Sri Lanka and Calcutta. Book I also reports on the dialogue between Sir Thomas and Raphael about the journey that brought Raphael from the known world into the world of Utopia. Several characters are reported to react to Raphael’s story, in particular the characters of Mr. Giles, the Cardinal, and Sir Thomas. In many ways, therefore, Book I brings the story of Book II much closer to the historical world of the reader. The book was ¿rst printed in Louvain in 1516. Already two years later, in the 1518 version from Basel, Thomas More himself made revisions in the work. In subsequent years a number of editors, translators, and printers kept working on this textual complex. Whenever the text was printed there occurred a bulk of supporting material: maps of the land of Utopia, a chart of the Utopian alphabet, poems, letters written by and to members of the European Humanist circles concerning the novel, an address from the printer to the reader, etc. This body of additional material underwent changes during the four Latin editions (1516–18),

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and it kept changing and growing in posthumous English translations (1551, 1556) and in other vernacular editions.27 A ¿nal body of substantial additions in the English version were the marginal glosses entered by the English translator Ralph Robinson in the 1551 and 1556 editions. One central aspect of this entire body of additional material is that it continues to play with relations between the island of Utopia and the everyday world of the audience. This particular aspect of the novel was in the making during the ¿rst forty years of the book’s printing history. b) Importantly for our purpose, the parts of this collective authorial process that concerned the mapping of Utopia seem to be playing with a medieval cartographic genre called mappae mundi (World Maps). Potentially contributing to the web of communicative competences for the novel, there are the letters from Christopher Columbus to the monarchs of Aragon (1493 and 1503). In these letters Columbus made reference to the mappae mundi as evidence that he had in fact passed the terrestrial paradise when navigating islands off Cuba.28 These mappae mundi regained attention and status in European academic discourse after the wonderful study of Alessandro Sca¿.29 Sca¿ concludes that these graphic artefacts were not maps in the modern sense; they were, for instance, not used for travel purposes. These graphics chart geographic, historical, symbolical, and religious matters in one and the same space. Very often they accompany religious or cosmological reÀective texts. Reading a mappa mundi through modern geographical convention fails completely. For instance, one would expect that users of these maps should have been aware that the Don river does not connect to the Mediterranean Sea. Still, this is precisely what is drawn on most such maps. Sca¿ explains this as a function of the convention of a T-O pattern in this cosmography. This convention sketches the world as a circle (Oshape) divided by known watercourses that form a T-shape when seen together. Another feature in this convention is that all main world rivers connect to an ocean that surrounds the earth disc (see Fig. 1).30

27. See extensive discussion in ibid. 28. Kevin Rushby, Paradise: A History of the Idea That Rules the World (New York: Carrol & Graf, 2007), 69–78. Valerie Flint (The Imaginative Landscape of Cristopher Columbus [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992]) gives an elaborate reconstruction of the mental world of admiral Columbus. 29. Alessandro Sca¿, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 30. Sca¿, Mapping Paradise, 89–94 (et passim). 1

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Figure 1. Ideal Reconstruction of Medieval World Maps (from Meyers Konversationslexikon, 1895). Public domain.

For our purpose the salient point is that these graphic sheets also depict the Garden of Eden as a terrestrial paradise31 in the utmost east (that is: at the top) of the map.32 This choice of location was of course inÀuenced by the Greek version of Genesis in which God plants a paradise in the east.33 In the mappae mundi the terrestrial paradise is an island in the sea. A well on the island appears to be feeding the ocean that surrounds the earth disc, and through the ocean it also feeds those main rivers of the world depicted in the T-O convention. Again, this corresponds to the Genesis text, where the well in the garden supplies water to the main rivers of the world (Gen 2:10–14). These mappae mundi concepts of paradise seem to have been widely connected in 31. In contemporaneous philosophy one made a distinction between the terrestrial paradise (once inhabited by Adam and Eve), the celestial paradise (inhabited by saints and angels), and the spiritual paradise (already inhabited by the faithful through their participation in the Church). 32. An excellent example would be the Hereford mappa mundi (see Fig. 2). 33. ëÅ »¼Ä Á¸ÌÛ ÒŸÌÇÂÛË, Gen 2:8 LXX. Do note that the Latin Vulgate locates Eden in the distant past: paradisum voluptatis a principio (Gen 2:8 Vg.). The alternative translations go back to a linguistic ambiguity in the Hebrew, and it is possible that the Vulgate, which is siding with the Aramaic Targums, has the more original rendition; see Terje Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2–3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature (Louvain: Peeters, 2000), 263–70.

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medieval European culture. Paradise is imagined as an island in a number of classical Greek texts as well as in medieval and Renaissance European texts.34

Figure 2. Hereford Mappa Mundi. Public domain.

34. See for instance Sargent, Utopianism; Glyn Burgess, The Voyage of St. Brendan (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 10–19; Proinsias Mac Cana, “The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain,” in The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism (ed. Jonathan M. Wooding; Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 52–72; A. Barlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966). 1

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Turning to the question of realism, we note that texts accompanying the mappae mundi describe the region around Paradise as inaccessible and unknown: a terra incognita, sometimes hidden behind sharp mountains. So, while Paradise was perhaps a “place” on the map, the reader of the map would nevertheless not have expected to be able to go there. Returning to Thomas More’s Utopia, the situation seems to be much the same. Raphael, when reporting on the journey to Utopia, points out that the island is locked off from the mainland in marvellous ways. He also never gets around to revealing how, precisely, he was nevertheless able to visit the island. And Sir Thomas, the narrator, had intended to ask but, alas, he “forgets” to do so. Obviously, especially in connecting the island of Utopia to current society, the novel Utopia went far beyond conventional application of the motif of a remote terrestrial paradise. Nevertheless, on the speci¿c topic of the accessibility of the island, More’s novel seems to follow the inherited pattern. And it seems to me that precisely this combination of novelty and tradition produced the wonderfully unstable and playful relations between Utopia and the everyday world, which inspired the many printers and editors of the novel. Ancient Cosmography The cosmography celebrated in the medieval mappae mundi had precursors in ancient culture. I have argued this case at length elsewhere and cannot go into details here.35 Suf¿ce it to point to the so-called Babylonian world map (sixth century B.C.E.), ¿rst drawn and translated by Eckard Unger.36 This map has an ocean of salt water Àoating around the earth disc. Waterways from the periphery towards the center divide the world in a pattern that is unmistakably similar to the much later medieval T-O pattern. 35. See Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth—Or Not?”; Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth.” 36. Sca¿ (Mapping Paradise, 85) mentions a connection between medieval and late antique cosmography. P. S. Alexander (“Geography and the Bible [Early Jewish],” ABD 2:977–98) takes the case further. As for the tablet in question, see Eckhard Unger, Babylon: Die Heilige Stadt Nach der Beschreibung der Babylonier (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931), Plate 3, ¿g. 4. An up-to-date discussion is found in Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 402. For a drawing of the tablet before reconstruction, see Othmar Keel, Die Welt der Altorientalischen Bildsymbolik und das Alte Testament: Am Beispiel Der Psalmen (Zürich: Benziger, 1972), 17. A photo of the tablet along with an interpretive drawing is available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Babylonian_Map_of_the_World#/media/File:Baylonianmaps.JPG [cited 20 April 2015].

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Figure 3. Protection plate against Lamashtu. Neo-Assyrian era. Louvre, Paris. Public domain.

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Contributing to the impression of similarities between ancient and medieval concepts, let me brieÀy state my reading of Gen 2:10–14 as a narrative fragment reÀecting standard iconography for rendering cosmographic conventions.37 We should start by imagining this fragment to be a narrative reÀection of the contents of a tablet with two sides, not unlike the Neo Assyrian bronze tablet depicting Lamashtu (see Fig. 3). The textual breaking point between the two sides of our imaginary tablet is, as will become clearer, the odd description in Gen 2:10 of what happens to the river that emerged from Eden and divided into four branches: -'f: !3:+ !'!# (literally: “[and] it became four heads”). In the imaginary two-sided tablet, the obverse depicts the emergence of the water sources in mythic space, Àowing from one source and spreading in four branches, presumably to the four corners of the world.38 This motif is well known in Mesopotamian iconography. Special attention must be paid to the sources out of which, and indeed into which, water Àows. These sources have a particular iconography and they seem to serve as transit points: “portals” where water slips from one reality into another.39 This is, I believe, what is meant in Gen 2:10; water from the river “ports” from the mythic into the historical world, where it emanates in what seems to be perceived as the four main rivers of the world running from four peripheral points towards the center of the known world. At this centre, of course, is Jerusalem, the temple, and even a small branch of Gihon, one of the paradisiacal rivers. As would be evident, the idea of rivers dividing the known world and marking its center is not very different from what is seen in the mappae mundi and indeed in the Babylonian world map (above). Surrounding the narrative fragment is the story of the Garden of Eden. Now, the motif of iconic gardens is fairly widespread in ancient Near Eastern literature.40 Images of paradisiacal gardens at the border of the universe occur in Ugaritic as well as Akkadian literature, and they are known also in several Greek variants.41 Contrary to modern perceptions 37. This reconstruction is based on Stordalen, Echoes of Eden, Chapter 10; Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth—Or Not?”; Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth.” 38. An iconic presentation of this motif occurs in a Neo Assyrian wall relief, rendered for instance in Keel, Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik, no. 76. 39. This point is argued in Stordalen, “Heaven on Earth.” One illustration of the idea of vases used for transit points is found in a tenth-century B.C.E. Assyrian roll seal rendered in Keel, Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik, no. 23 (and see also no. 185). 40. See Stordalen, Echoes of Eden, in particular Parts II and IV. 41. See already Holger Thesleff, “Notes on the Paradise Myth in Ancient Greece,” Temenos 22 (1986): 129–39.

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of the story of paradise as an isolated piece in biblical literature,42 the motif is richly nested in the Hebrew Bible. The motif of these cosmic gardens echoes not only in ancient literature but also in manners of popular speech as well as in iconography and architecture of royal palaces, national temples, etc. Cosmic garden symbolism seems to have been relevant to people’s daily life and perception of the world, and therefore also to political symbolism. All this is in the background when events associated with the Garden of Eden serve as a parable for caution (Ezek 28:11–19; 31) as well as for joy (Qoh 2:1–11). A Biblical Subtext in Utopia I would, of course, not claim that Sir Thomas and his co-workers had any particular interest in researching ancient cosmography and iconography. What they did know and relate to, however, were common adaptions of this cosmography in medieval culture and also the claim that such concepts had originated in the ancient world. These trajectories of ancient cosmography were mediated not only in the mappae mundi but in an entire web of cultural and philosophical topoi. One excellent entry point into this web would be the Glossa ordinaria of the late medieval Bible.43 For the current purpose I am referring to an early printed version of late medieval manuscripts: Bibliorum sacrorum cum glossa ordinaria, Venice 1603.44 It shows that the Glossa ordinaria too located the terrestrial paradise in the utmost, unavailable east (or, alternatively in the past, shifting between the Greek and the Hebrew rendition of Gen 2:8). In addition, there are comments going straight to the complex considered above. The gloss of the Venice copy to Gen 2:10–14 has an entry by Augustine, rendering conventional cosmological speculations about the location of the Garden of Eden, stating “…it should not be taken literally that [the four rivers] spread from one source, because the location of this paradise is beyond human cognition.”45 In the context of this remark 42. A view recently repeated by Collins, “Models of Utopia.” 43. For a general orientation, see Beryl Smalley, “Glossa ordinaria,” TRE 13:452– 57, and The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 44. This version was said to have been collected by Strabo Fulgensi and includes as an addition the postilla of Nicholaus of Lyra, which commented upon the Hebrew. The work was printed in Venice in ¿ve volumes, now commonly available through the Internet Archive, at https://archive.org/details/bibliorumsacroru01strauoft (for volume 1, being used here). 45. Latin: “… non videntur ad literam ex uno fonte diuidi, quia locus ille paradisi remonts est a cognitione hominium.” Venice Bible column 71, entry AVG (Augustine). 1

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Beda, Augustine, and Nicholaus of Lyra all depict the river from Eden as mysteriously feeding all waterways of the world, thus apparently perceiving the river from Eden to be a primeval water source. For the present purpose the interesting point is that these medieval speculations professedly anchored in biblical texts do seem to occur as subtexts in Utopia, as I now hope to demonstrate in some detail.46 For a start, let it be clear that there are explicit references to biblical tradition in the novel. For instance, when Raphael starts his attack on the death penalty—a cause, we might conjecture, that seems to lie close to heart of the author of the work as well—he claims support from Roman Law as well as from the laws of Moses. Neither of the two legal corpuses, he argues, would administer the death penalty for theft.47 Correspondingly, when Raphael reports on the royal law of the Macarians,48 the law that he summarizes looks much like the royal law which according to Deut 17:14–20 had been given by Moses. A more formal, and perhaps less obvious, connection lies in the strategy of the novel to use names with symbolic meaning where these meanings contribute to the plot of the story. Such popular etymology was conventional in ancient Hebrew literature, and the feature is prominent in Gen 2–3 (for instance for Eden, Adam, and Eve). Translators of Greek and Latin versions of Genesis had attempted to render this Hebrew technique into the target languages, which made the literary contribution of symbolic naming evident also for readers of the Greek and Latin versions. This insight was further strengthened by the gloss to the Gen 2–3 passage.49 The popular etymologies of Utopia are virtually countless. Among them are the name of the island itself Utopia, a pun on the Greek ou topos which means “no place.” The main river of Utopia, Anyder, would go back to the Greek an-hyder and translates “waterless.” A group of people in Utopia live in the land Achoria—a latinized rendition of the Greek a-choros, “no land.” And the Macarians encountered above can be 46. I have chosen, for reasons of convenience, to refer to the edition of J. H. Lupton, ed., The Utopia of Thomas More (London: Henry Rowde, 1895) [cited 20 April 2015]. Online: https://archive.org/details/utopiasirthomas00robigoog. Online access to the novel is also found at http://theopenutopia.org/ [cited 20 April 2015]. 47. Lupton, Utopia, 60–62. 48. Ibid., 95–98. 49. For instance Bibliorum sacrorum, vol. 1, column 68, where the entry of Theodoret shifts between naming Adam “the human” and “Adam”—thereby rendering the Hebrew popular etymology. Similarly, for the word !eden, which means “delight, luxuriance”: the Hebrew phrase -9/ 03 0 (“a garden in Eden in the east”/“in the ¿rst Eden”) is rendered as paradisum voluptatis a principio in the Latin: “a delightful paradise in the beginning of time.”

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easily associated with hoi makarioi in the benedictions in the Gospel of Matthew ch. 5.50 I do believe a reader among Sir Thomas’s peers would recognize the similar literary strategies in the respective reports on two landscapes, and indeed he himself made a note of this in one of his letters, stating that this naming business in the novel was for the learned.51 According to Raphael, Utopian philosophy dismisses any abandonment of natural pleasures (Latin: voluptas).52 The Latin Bible, of course, saw Eden as a lost “paradise of original pleasure” (paradisum voluptatis a principio). In one of St. Paul’s letters (Rom 5:12–21) this loss of paradise is also the reason why there is suffering and death in the world. Raphael, on the other hand, seems to think that it should be possible to restore the qualities of pleasure to common people.53 In an apparent follow-up he puts great emphasis upon distinguishing between pleasures that are honest and lead to continued pleasure for all, and those that are not. Among people who pursue unjust pleasures are counted “them that take pleasure and delight…in gems and precious stones, and think themselves almost gods…”54 The allusion to Adam and Eve seems quite likely when one considers ¿rst the desire of the ¿rst humans to become like God (Gen 3:5, 7, 22) and secondly the fact that the precious stones of the Prince of Tyre are associated with the Garden of Eden (Ezek 28:12, esp. LXX). Raphael seems to engage in a sort of Christian midrashic exegesis, saying that these precious stones were the reason that the humans in Eden were driven out of the garden. The pleasures sought by the Utopians, on the other hand, are good for the body and for the soul. There are two bodily pleasures: First, the one where delectation is felt, as in eating or “when we be doing the act of generation.” Corresponding terms are used in the Latin version of what happened inside the garden in the Eden story. The second bodily pleasure is good health, which is paired in the Latin appropriation of the story of Eden with the human couple’s living an everlasting life—boosted through the life-giving trees along the paradisiacal river in Ezekiel (Ezek 47:12, cf. Gen 3:22).55 In short, when Raphael pleads for the superiority of the philosophy of the Utopians, he argues that their religion and society had a biblical predecessor in the religion of Adam and Eve before the expulsion—while still in paradisum 50. 51. 52. pages. 53. 54. 55.

1

As noted also by Lupton, Utopia, 95. See Sargent, Utopianism , 23. Cf. Lupton, Utopia, 194. Citations are found on this and the ¿rst following Cf. ibid., 122. Ibid., 176, cf. 146–47. For Ezek 47, see Stordalen, Echoes of Paradise, 363–68.

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voluptatis a principio. And to Raphael voluptas designates not only the desires of the Utopians but also the social world that they had constructed. Utopia is the Land of Pleasure. A pun on this perception surfaces in the voice of Sir Thomas in a letter to Peter Giles in the accompanying material in the early versions. The letter relates “a professor of divinity, who is exceeding desirous to go unto Utopia, not for a vain and curious desire to see the news, but to the intent he may further and increase our religion which there already luckily begun.”56 One peculiar topographic matter concerns the River Anyder, which starts in a small well and grows to a world-class river comparable to the Thames. Because of ebb and Àow the lower parts of the Anyder are ¿lled with fresh water half the time and salt water for the other half. This aligns the Anyder with the rivers emerging from the paradises on the mappae mundi. These rivers not only feed all the important fresh water courses of the world, they also feed the world ocean, which is of course salty. Attached to the Anyder is a small rivulet that “riseth even out of the same hill that the city standeth upon, and runneth down a slope through the midst of the city into Anyder.”57 Because the well is outside of the city, the city’s inhabitants made defensive bulwarks to protect the well during times of enemy attacks—which is conspicuous, since external enemies do not enter Utopia and internally in the island there is no war. So what is the signi¿cance of this description? The entire section seems inspired by a topographical (and biblical) complex associated with the source Gihon in Jerusalem. Gihon was, of course, the name of one of the four rivers in Gen 2:10–14, and it was also the name of a small brook on the slope just outside of the old City of David in Jerusalem. Already in ancient times this well and its brook had military and religious signi¿cance, and it was surrounded by military bulwark and later by tunneling facilities. In times of siege this water was “the water of salvation” (Isa 8:5–8), and in Ezek 47:1–12 the river from this well creates marvelous trees and transforms the desert land and the Dead Sea into paradisiacal locations. In times of peace, this river was the source also of spiritual life, which is why Isidore in the gloss to Gihon in Gen 2 pointed to Ps 36:9 (= Vg. Ps 35) and its “rivulet of joy.” The mythology of Gihon extends into New Testament literature, where water from Gihon runs into the pool of Siloam, or the Bethesda. The Gospel of John ch. 5 reports 56. “…qui miro Àagrat desyderio adeundae Vtopiae, non inani et curiosa libidine collustrandi noua, sed uti religionem nostram, feliciter ibi coeptam, foueat atque adaugeat.” Lupton, Utopia, 7. 57. Ibid., 129–30.

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that people would wait for an angel to stir the pool so the sick would be healed. All these passages had been collected and further mythologized in medieval theology. In the gloss of Theodotion to 1 Kgs 1 (where Solomon is crowned by the Gihon), the connection between the brook Gihon and the Nile as one of the world rivers from Eden is established. As noted by Adrian Boas, the Gihon spring and associated waterworks were still in use during the times of the crusades and Gihon was commented upon in crusaders’ reports.58 So I suggest the educated reader of Utopia would see similarities between the Anyder (the “waterless”) and Gihon / the Nile, which was thought to have re-surfaced in the slopes of Jerusalem as a small brook only. Additional allusions could be named. Hopefully what has been mentioned is enough to render it plausible that a sixteenth-century learned Humanist reader of Utopia should recognize a biblical/Christian subtext in Utopia along with other trajectories like that of classical Greek literature or contemporary exploration narratives. The presence of such a subtext begins to answer my initial questions above concerning utopian connections in biblical literature. Worlds That Could Not Be The one point that I wish to bring out in this essay is simple: the ideal worlds presented in biblical and other ancient literature seem to have a con¿guration that made it unlikely for the common reader to expect them to actually have been or become simple reality. And, to my mind, a similar con¿guration occurs in Thomas More’s Utopia. The “irrealities” of the biblical myth with its magical fruit and speaking serpent are evident. Perhaps less appreciated is the fact that the story also holds elements that would presumably be strange or even morally questionable in the original setting. For instance, the apparent matrilocal paradigm in Gen 2 is peculiar. So is the fact that God appears to be ignorant that animals do not make for human companionship. More pointedly, biblical literature does not approve of exposing nakedness, and certainly not before God.59 But within the universe of the story the 58. Adrian Boas, Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades: Society, Landscape, and Art in the Holy City Under Frankish Rule (London: Routledge, 2001), Chapter 18. 59. Lev 18:7–16; Exod 20:26; Gen 9:22–23. For a summary of the discussion of a contrast world in Gen 2–3, see Stordalen, Echoes of Eden, 296–97. As for the challenges in the story for medieval readers, cf. the many attempts in the gloss to 1

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morally necessary insight—that “people should wear clothes”—only emerges because humans violate a divine decree! Before that they seem to be strolling around naked before God. This very human negligence about sexuality is itself “irreal”: in a similar garden in the Song of Solomon sexuality is the main issue (Cant 4:12–16, etc.). And in Genesis Adam only “knows” Eve in the sexual sense once they are outside of the garden (Gen 4:1). These and other contrast features of the world depicted in Gen 2–3 call for suspensive laughter much in the sense of medieval mystery plays as analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin.60 And the Glossa ordinaria documents that medieval readers did in fact sense these dimensions in the biblical story.61 Often overlooked by modernist and “realist” readers, Raphael reports a number of opinions, positions, and practices from Utopia that must have seemed morally and socially strange to Renaissance readers. Some of these are in fact openly questioned by characters in the novel. Occasionally, they are questioned even by Raphael himself, who in fact opens his praise for the philosophy of pleasure in Utopia (cf. below) on a rather defensive note: “Wherin whether they belyue well or no, nother the tyme dothe suffer us to discusse, nother it ys nowe necessarye. For we haue taken vpon vs to shewe and declare theyr lores and ordenaunces, and not to defende them.”62 One of the presumably less defendable practices goes directly to the heart of the novel: the treatment of old and weak people. The principle of Utopia, we remember, is that everyone should be happy. In order for this to come through, Utopian priests may respect the wish of old and ill people to kill themselves in order to avoid pain and anguish.63 One gets the sense from Raphael’s careful exposition that he knows this practice of legal suicide, or even euthanasia, is going to be controversial with Sir Thomas (and with the reader). Lupton’s discussion reÀects how this continued to be so even in nineteenthcentury readings. Another example of controversial practices in Utopia would be habits for preparing for marriage.64 Again for the purpose of securing lasting satisfaction, the Utopians would let an old woman expose the girl naked interpret the couple’s nakedness allegorically, see Bibliorum sacrorum vol 1, col. 83–86. 60. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). 61. Isidore says the lack of shame in Eden signi¿ed “animal-like simplicity” (simplicitatem animæ). 62. Lupton, Utopia, 211. 63. Ibid., 222–24. For his discussion, see p. 223 n. 1. 64. Ibid., 225–26. The habit is characterized as foolish even by Raphael himself.

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before the man, and an old man would expose the young man to the girl, so they can see if they really desire each other. While a postmodern European might think of this as actually a good idea, Raphael appears more in line with Renaissance morals when airing his reservation towards taking this practice as a blueprint for Europe. After Marx, utopia is known ¿rst and foremost as a society without private property. Raphael, in Book I, argues that the lack of personal ownership makes for a better world. Sir Thomas is of a different opinion: “men shall never there live wealthily, where all things be common. For how can there be abundance of goods…where every man withdraweth his hand from labour?” Raphael answers Àat out that this problem does not apply in Utopia: society simply works differently. “…For you conceaule in your mynde…a very false ymage and symylitude of thys thynge.”65 This objection closes the discourse in Book I. A point in Book II, however, echoes that objection by Sir Thomas.66 Considering the possibility that a Utopian worker could withdraw from his duties and unproductively wander off, Raphael reports a Utopia without taverns and pubs, where everyone is constantly monitored by the others and there simply is no opportunity to even imagine non-productivity. Translated into theological discourse of the time, Utopia has no evil because society leaves no space for free will. I take it for granted that to Humanist Catholic circles of the time such a denial of free will would be undesirable indeed. And, as is well known, Thomas More was passionately engaged on the Humanist Roman Catholic side of the ongoing religious conÀict in Europe. In conclusion, Fritz Stolz argued that biblical reÀections on paradise, as well as comparable stories from around the ancient world, were not simply stories about an ideal or idyllic world. Instead, he claimed, they should be perceived of as depicting “contrast worlds” (Gegenwelten).67 In his view, these are worlds that admittedly convey “realistic” hopes or dreams, but which are nevertheless so different from the human everyday experience that they cannot be conceived of as “real.” Rather than providing simply dream-like ideals, these stories provide contrast per65. Ibid., 110. 66. “…There be nether wyn tauernes, nor ale houses, nor stewes, nor any occasion of uice or wickednes, no lurking corners, no places of wicked councelles or vnlawfull assembles; but they be in the present sight, and vnder the iyes of euery man.” (ibid., 169). The reference back to Book I is implicit only. This is a typical feature of Book II, which was apparently completed ¿rst. 67. Fritz Stolz,”Paradiese und Gegenwelten,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 1 (1993): 5–24; Fritz Stolz, “Paradies, I: Religionsgeschichtlich; II: Biblisch,” TRE 25:705–11. 1

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spectives from which one would see familiar features of the everyday world in a new light. In so doing, stories of contrast worlds would seem to provide as much critical reÀection on dreams and ideals as they provide on petty political experience. And to my mind this double critique, in diametrically opposite directions, is a very important feature if one were to employ utopian stories or literature successfully in an attempt at political reÀection. Hence I like to keep thinking of utopias as “places that could not be”: they seem to remain “real” and “irreal” at the same time. Potentials of Utopia Christopher Columbus thought he had veri¿ed the ecclesial dogma surfacing in the mappae mundi when ¿nding his terrestrial paradise. Thomas More, contrastingly, depicted a place where nobody could ever go. It seems to me that if either of these were to be associated with the much later modernist disenchantment with the world, it would in fact have to be Columbus. When bravely defending the existence of a terrestrial paradise, he was already under inÀuence of the realist mental paradigm that would eventually wipe paradise off any serious cartographic representation of the world. Thomas More’s Utopia, on the other hand, remained and retained public interest precisely because it was nowhere to be found. The days are past when historians referred to the time between antiquity and the Renaissance as “the Dark Ages.” Hopefully, I have demonstrated that we would do well in resisting the typical modernist impulse to canonize Utopia as a modernist European work by bridging directly over from More to Plato on the one hand and to Marx on the other. Seeing Sir Thomas’s book in its historical context raises several interesting possibilities for biblical scholars. One of them is that this move recognizes the Bible as an on-going cultural product rather than simply a past text. Another issue, and one that has been more fully explored here, is that this gaze may help clarify what quali¿es as utopian thought and utopian literature. The mine of playful representations in Utopia may inspire a sharper apprehension of the interface between the utopian and the more generally ideological also in biblical literature. (And for this purpose, of course, we would again also consult Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricoeur, and other philosophers.) If the utopian gains in speci¿city, it would perhaps also be more feasible to ask just how for instance Chronicles or Deuteronomy take part in this mode of writing and thinking.

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Another advantage of reading Utopia in historical context is a sharper apprehension of the communicative signi¿cance of any “irrealistic” trajectories of ancient medieval and Renaissance utopias. Like Erin Runions,68 who at this point relied on Louis Marin, I see the playful integration of the real and the unreal, the ideal and the impossible, as perhaps the most important characteristic of utopian writing and thought. Wishful realism pierced by the occasional fantasmatic or burlesque prepares for seeing status quo in a new light. Obviously, such a literary mode could be engineered in different ways and applied in different directions. It could be used to legitimate current power and state of affairs. In the biblical and medieval version discussed above, however, it seems to me that this con¿guration helped to take some of the dignity out of contemporary social doxa. Asking about the signi¿cance of utopian thought in Deuteronomy or Chronicles, I would probably have started here. Should we expect some signs of the “irreal” also in this kind of biblical utopian writing? And if so, what are they? And then, to the political implications of biblical (and other) utopias. In his excellent book Steven Schweitzer carefully points out that what he perceives as the utopian strategy of Chronicles does not simply provide legitimation of present reality. Good! But does it also help to take some social doxa out of contemporary ideologies—or is it rather the opposite: that it lends social and religious doxa to certain ideals that have fairly explicit implications for establishing social domination?69 Falling back on categories taken from Sargent,70 the picture drawn by Schweitzer seems to me to translate as a sort of settler utopianism, but one that nevertheless imagines the settlers as administrators over the indigenous. Is there not, therefore, a scent of colonialist utopian thought in that biblical book? I am not an expert on this literature, and I can only ask. But if there were such an impulse, would it not be part of the obligation of biblical scholars to address this political aspect of the text? And in that case, should we then not also address the possibility that religious utopias could be used in suppressive ways? I believe scholars curating a canonical cultural resource like the Bible need to be aware of these dimensions—without, I should hasten to add, taking neither utopias nor our interpretations of them too seriously.

68. Runions, “Playing It Again,” 291. 69. Cf. the argument in Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles, 173, on the role of the Levites in the future better reality. 70. Sargent, Utopianism, Chapter 3.

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Bibliography Alexander, P. S. “Geography and the Bible (Early Jewish).” Pages 977–98 in vol. 2. of Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Amit, Yairah. “Biblical Utopianism: A Mapmakers Guide to Eden.” USQR 44 (1990): 11–17. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968. Ben Zvi, Ehud, ed. Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Berge, Kåre. “Literacy, Utopia and Memory: Is There a Public Teaching in Deuteronomy?” JHS 12, no. 3 (2012): 1–19. Boas, Adrian J. Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades: Society, Landscape, and Art in the Holy City Under Frankish Rule. London: Routledge, 2001. Boer, Roland T. “Review of Ehud Ben Zvi (ed.), Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature,” BCT 4, no. 1 (2008): 07.1–07.3. ———. “Review of Steven Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles.” BCT 4, no. 2 (2008): 30.1–3. ———. “Utopian Politics in 2 Chronicles 10–13.” Pages 360–94 in The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture. Edited by M. Patrick Graham and Steven L. McKenzie. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999. Brodsky, Harold. “The Utopian Map in Ezekiel (48:1–35).” JBQ 34 (2006): 20–26. Bruce, Susan, ed. Thomas More Utopia; Francis Bacon New Atlantis; Henry Neville the Isle of Pines: Edited With an Introduction and Notes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Burgess, Glyn. The Voyage of St. Brendan. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Cataldo, Jeremiah W. “Whispered Utopia: Dreams, Agendas, and Theocratic Aspirations in Yehud.” SJOT 24 (2010): 53–70. Cave, Terence, ed. Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Collins, John J. “Models of Utopia in the Biblical Tradition.” Pages 51–67 in “A Wise and Discerning Mind”: Essays in Honor of Burke O. Long. Edited by Saul M. Olyan and Robert C. Culley. Providence, R.I.: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000. Crenshaw, L. James. “Deceitful Minds and Theological Dogma: Jer 17:5–11.” Pages 105–21 in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Flint, Valerie I. J. The Imaginative Landscape of Cristopher Columbus. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Grey, Christopher, and Christina Garsten. “Organized and Disorganized Utopias: An Essay on Presumption.” Pages 9–23 in Utopia and Organization. Edited by Martin Parker. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Horowitz, Wayne. Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998. Keel, Othmar. Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik und das Alte Testament: Am Beispiel der Psalmen. Zürich: Benziger, 1972. Lupton, J. H., ed. The Utopia of Sir Thomas More. London: Henry Rowde, 1895.

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Mac Cana, Proinsias. “The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain.” Pages 52–72 in The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism. Edited by Jonathan M. Wooding. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. Mazor, Lea. “Myth, History, and Utopia in the Prophecy of the Shoot (Isaiah 10:33– 11:9).” Pages 73–90 in Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume. Edited by Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom M. Paul. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2004. Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias [1922]. LaVergne, Tenn.: Dodo, 2010. Naveh, Eyal. Reinhold Niebuhr and Non-Utopian Liberalism: Beyond Illusion and Despair. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2002. Radday, Yehuda. “The Four Rivers of Paradise.” Hebrew Studies 23 (1982): 23–31. Runions, Erin. “Playing It Again: Utopia, Contradiction, Hybrid Space and the Bright Future in Micah.” Pages 285–300 in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer, and Erin Runions. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999. Rushby, Kevin. Paradise: A History of the Idea That Rules the World. New York: Carrol & Graf, 2007. Sargent, Lyman Tower. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sca¿, Alessandro. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Schweitzer, Steven James. Reading Utopia in Chronicles. New York: T&T Clark International, 2007. ———. “A Response.” JHS 9, no. 11 (2009): 15–19. ———. “Utopia and Utopian Literary Theory: Some Preliminary Observations.” Pages 13–26 in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Smalley, Beryl. “Glossa ordinaria.” Pages 452–57 in vol. 13 of Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Edited by G. Müller et al. 36 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984. ———. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. 3d enlarged ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Stolz, Fritz. “Paradiese und Gegenwelten.” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 1 (1993): 5–24. ———. “Paradies, I: Religionsgeschichtlich; II: Biblisch.” Pages 705–11 in vol. 25 of Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Edited by G. Müller et al. 36 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995. Stordalen, Terje. Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2–3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature. Louvain: Peeters, 2000. ———. “Heaven on Earth—Or Not? Jerusalem as Eden in Biblical Literature.” Pages 28– 57 in Beyond Eden: The Biblical Story of Paradise (Genesis 2–3) and Its Reception History. Edited by Christoph Riedweg and Konrad Schmid. Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2008. ———. “Heaven on Earth: Jerusalem, Temple, and the Cosmography of the Garden of Eden.” Biblicum (2009): 7–20. Stosch, Klaus, von. “Utopie.” Pages 422–24 in Lexikon philosophischer Grundbegriffe der Theologie. Edited by Albert Franz, Wolfgang Baum, and Karsten Kreutzer. Freiburg: Herder, 2003. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 1

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Thesleff, Holger. “Notes on the Paradise Myth in Ancient Greece.” Temenos 22 (1986): 129–39. Unger, Eckhard. Babylon: Die Heilige Stadt Nach der Beschreibung der Babylonier. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931. Vieira, Fátima. “The Concept of Utopia.” Pages 3–27 in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Edited by Gregory Claeys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Warren, Nathanael. “Tenure and Grant in Ezekiel’s Paradise (73:13–48:29).” VT 63 (2013): 323–34.

“UTOPIA WHERE IT IS TO BE HOPED THAT THE COFFEE IS A LITTLE LESS SOUR”? DR WHO’S “UTOPIA” AND CHRONICLES Gerrie Snyman

1. Introduction In an episode called “Utopia” in the third season of the revived BBC television show Doctor Who the viewer is provided with a de¿nition of utopia as well as the problematic around the concept. Having just arrived at the end of the universe, the Doctor realizes that the rocket and its would-be passengers gathering around it he found a moment ago, were on their way to what is called “Planet Utopia.” He recognizes the project as an old dream that never goes away: “The perfect place. Hundred trillion years, it’s the same old dream.” He inquires into the meaning of utopia, but he never seems to get an adequate answer. For example, he receives the following response from his antagonist, the Master: “Oh, every human knows of Utopia. Where have you been?” Even when he narrows down his question: “What do you think is out there?” the Master is elusive as utopia itself: “Now perhaps they found it. Perhaps not. But it’s worth a look, don’t you think?” Utopia is part of our (I can only speak within the parameters of Western culture) common sense—a common sense not the least fed by visions of the eschaton, one of the main themes within the JudeoChristian tradition, as well as by Thomas More’s book Utopia in the sixteenth century, on which the genre of utopia has ever since been moulded.1 Throughout the centuries Judeo-Christianity grasped at the straw of hope given by the doctrine of the eschaton, a hope for a better time to come.2 The roots of science ¿ction’s depiction of catastrophes go 1. Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 2, argues that although utopia is not solely a product of the Christian West, as a genre of literature it possesses certain formal characteristics that are common in the Christian West. 2. Darren Webb, “Christian Hope and the Politics of Utopia,” Utopian Studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 113, speaks of the “intrinsic, positive relationship” between utopia and hope.

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back to Judeo-Christianity’s notions of the end of time, judgment day or the Day of YHWH, when a new order will come into existence, when sin and evil will be ruled out, a moment when the world as God’s creation will be consummated. In Judeo-Christianity the message of hope played a large role in the prophetic books in which utopian images are thought to be present.3 This hope that is particularly linked to a radically reconstituted society has proved to be quite resilient—for “a hundred trillion years” utopia is seen as a way of surviving amidst collapse of reality. Yet it remains elusive, and thus always worth a look. Whereas it is anachronistic to utilize the notion of utopia in reading biblical texts— after all, utopia only got its name with Thomas More’s Utopia in the sixteenth century—the religious link allows for such endeavours. And Doctor Who intersects quite often with religion.4 The depiction of catastrophes is a recurring feature of science ¿ction. In Doctor Who speci¿cally “the pressing danger of apocalyptic annihilation” is never far away.5 Most of the time science ¿ction reveals a sense of apocalyptic doom without hope.6 That sense of lurking hopelessness is exposed in one of the opening scenes where the Professor wryly remarks, “Utopia. Where it is to be hoped the coffee is a little less sour.” But the biblical text is not science ¿ction, and its origins are much earlier than utopia as a genre. Yet it is possible that these texts exhibit features usually associated with what came to be known later as utopia. With regard to the prophetic books Ehud Ben Zvi asks: What do utopian images teach one about the societies in whose midst the books emerged, and who were the targeted audiences of the utopian images in these 3. Ehud Ben Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias, and Why Utopias at All? The Social Roles of Utopian Visions in Prophetic Books Within Their Historical Context,” in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 55–85, provides a detailed analysis of utopian images in the prophetic books. 4. See Andrew Crome and James McGrath, Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith: Religion and Doctor Who (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2013), xix. The book draws on the way fans of the series have used the religious ideas expressed in the series to either question religion or promote it: “It offers a fascinating window into the way in which fans consume texts, and the way in which religious (or, indeed, anti-religious) communities reinterpret the product of popular culture.” 5. Andrew Crome, “‘There Never Was a Golden Age’: Doctor Who and the Apocalypse,” in Crome and McGrath, Religion and Doctor Who, 204. 6. Alex Wright, “An Ambiguous Utopia,” Political Theology 5, no. 2 (2004): 232. In the episodes that followed “Utopia” it becomes clear that Utopia was just another form of hell where humans were transformed from their original shapes into spheres killing for sport. See Crome, “‘There Never Was a Golden Age,’” 202.

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books?7 Jeremiah Cataldo reads in Persian-period Hebrew texts such as Ezra and Nehemiah “a schema of theocratic utopia” within a dystopic reality de¿ned by profanity and disobedience.8 Roland Boer reads utopia in speci¿c texts of Chronicles where he argues for a radical disjunction with the dismal world of the Chronicler—a disjunction between contemporary space and time and that of Utopia.9 Cataldo refers to boundaries around no land, with the walls of Jerusalem signifying the utopian state,10 or in Boer’s words, “independent and sharply separated from the Other.”11 My interest is to see what I can learn from the world of text production and text reception if I utilize the notion of utopia as a heuristic key to understand the book of Chronicles. Does utopia provide a framework for reading the book? If, in the words of Boer, the book is “an effort to represent an ideal world that resists the world as it is,”12 what does the world as it is look like? In other words, if Chronicles is the utopia where the coffee is a little less sour, what does the reality looks like where the coffee was indeed sour? Should one expect dystopian conditions or is it simply a difference in degrees?13 The essay will proceed as follows: ¿rst the notion of utopia and three kinds of utopia will be brieÀy discussed in the light of presupposed dystopian conditions in which a speci¿c utopia might be literary constructed; secondly, the relationship between utopia and science ¿ction14 will be touched upon with reference to the episode “Utopia” in the 7. Ben Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias, and Why Utopias at All?,” 55. 8. Jeremiah W. Cataldo, “Dreams, Agendas, and Theocratic Aspirations in Yehud,” SJOT 24 (2010): 53–70. 9. Roland Boer, “Utopian Politics in 2 Chronicles 10–13,” in The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture (ed. Patrick M. Graham and Steven L. McKenzie; JSOTSup 263; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999), 381. 10. Cataldo, “Dreams,” 64–66. 11. Boer, “Utopian Politics in 2 Chronicles 10–13,” 381. 12. Roland Boer, “Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4, no. 1 (2010): 21. 13. The question I pose is perhaps more focused on historical considerations than on literary aspects, although the literary should provide clues as to the historical context of text production. I can surmise that Chronicles creates a utopia over against the dystopia of Samuel–Kings (as suggested by Boer, “Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices,” 21) but it still does not say much about the circumstances of the real world in which the text was produced. 14. Wright, “An Ambiguous Utopia,” 233, warns one about the nature of utopia in science ¿ction. In fact, according to Wright, the utopias created in current science ¿ction not only “most truthfully” hold up a mirror to current Western society, but also project societies and worlds into the future that are “much too close to our own anxieties and preoccupations to be truly hopeful or utopian.” 1

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TV series Doctor Who in order to see how utopia works; and thirdly, there will follow a discussion whether there are dystopian conditions in the world of text production on which basis one may argue in favor of utopian qualities in the text of Chronicles. 2. Utopia As a literary work Darko Suvin de¿nes utopia as a verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.15

Suvin sees utopia as an “as if,” an imaginative experiment, making the literary text an epistemological entity and not an ontological one. The utopian text is a heuristic device for what he calls “perfectibility.”16 Lyman Tower Sargent differs regarding the issue of perfectibility, and rather de¿nes it in terms of time and space viewed by the reader “as considerably better than the society in which [the] reader lived.”17 One deals here then with a literary text whose story world constructs an alternative society based on what is lacking in the contemporary world of the readers (world of reception). There is a disjunction between the world of reception/production and the story world or utopian world. The text is based on an imaginary construction that provides an irreality as a world that could be but that is not existent. This alternative society can be deemed better or worse than the readers’ own world. In the confrontation with the disconnectedness with the utopian world in the text the readers become able to sharpen their awareness of the problems in their society in order to transform it.18 15. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 132. Dingbo Wu, “Understanding Utopian Literature,” Extrapolation 34, no. 3 (1993): 236, questions Suvin’s utilisation of the term “verbal construction” in order to distinguish between utopian literature from general and abstract utopian beliefs and programs. But Suvin’s book is about a particular genre in literature, thus subsuming textuality in the de¿nition. 16. Darko Suvin, “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 74. 17. Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; E-book, cited 11 May 2014), 27 (italics original). The notion of disjunction does not ¿gure very strongly in his de¿nition. 18. Wu, “Understanding Utopian Literature,” 243.

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I would agree with Steven Schweitzer when he reads into Chronicles the construction of an alternative society.19 As the book cannot be typically classi¿ed as a utopia in the generic sense of the word, the most a reader can do is to look for utopian content from a utopian literary theoretical point of view. In other words, one will be looking for certain phenomena that can be associated with utopia as a topos or utopian impulses in the text. What is important to note is the literary nature of utopia over-against utopian thought found in, for example, political sciences, philosophy or socio-political programs.20 What is of interest here is the ¿ctionalizing process.21 Utopia comprises of the construction of a radically different society as an alternative to the readers’ own world and it mirrors the de¿ciencies found in that world. But is utopia necessarily a good place? The word itself, coined by Thomas More in his work Utopia, is a compositum from ou and topos with the effect of a double entendre: no place and a pun on the Greek eu to mean a good place. In other words, utopia is a nonexisting good place.22 And it is a good place but not necessarily a perfect place.23 It is for this reason that Sargent utilizes in his de¿nition the word “better” and not “perfect” as Suvin does.24 Thus the Professor may refer to coffee in utopia as a little less sour than in his reality. And given that 19. Steven Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles (London: T&T Clark International, 2007), 14. 20. Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times. Optimism/ Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini; London: Routledge, 2003), 15–16, distinguish between utopia as system and utopia as process. They link utopia as system to political transformation and utopia as process to the literary. 21. Suvin, “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation,” 70, distinguishes in fact between two disciplines in utopian studies: The empirical focuses on history, political theory, planning, religion, ecology, futurology, but rarely philosophy or literary studies. The ¿ctional looks at science ¿ction, woman’s studies, literary theory, political philosophy. What connects the two could be what Suvin labels as “utopian thought.” 22. Sargent, Utopianism, 22. 23. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism,” 7. 24. Wu, “Understanding Utopian Literature,” 231, also thinks that the reference to “perfect” is problematic, since despite a qualitative difference between absolute perfection and more perfect, the point is that perfection forms part of the working de¿nition, a notion very few utopian writers ascribed to. Even More’s Utopia is far from perfect, given its totalitarian direction. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism,” 9, is very clear on the issue of perfection: it is not a notion that should be present in the de¿nition of utopia, because with the notion of perfection the logic of the antiutopian argument disappears. It is for this reason that Sargent employs the word “better” in his de¿nition. 1

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his dystopian reality is not that far away from the utopian one that the people will encounter, it is only a difference in degrees. To summarize: Utopia can thus be de¿ned as a literary text that constructs an imaginary world as a disjunctive alternative to the contemporaneous social reality of the targeted audience who experiences their reality as de¿cient—a ¿ctional reality in which an imagined community is thought to be at a better place—although not perfect—than the one the readers currently inhabit. Utopias can be constructed in a variety of ways and with various purposes in mind. Of considerable importance for the discussion on Chronicles, are dystopia, critical utopia, and nostalgic utopia. Critical utopia disrupts the uni¿ed and homogenous narrative of traditional utopia, rejecting domination and hierarchy.25 It is linked to actual socio-historical movements, and it is aware of its own limitations, thus incorporating contradictions, ambiguities, and openness.26 In feminism, for example, existing patriarchal relations of domination are censured whilst “an alternative vision of social organization”27 is suggested that is thought to be better suited for the needs and desires of society.28 Whereas a eutopia is positive, dystopia is a negative utopia in which the author intended the contemporaneous reader to view the story world as considerably worse than the historical world of reception in which the reader resides. Moylan and Boccanelli de¿ne dystopia as follows: Unlike the “typical” eutopian narrative with a visitor’s guided journey through a utopian society which leads to a comparative response that indicts the visitor’s own society, the dystopian text usually begins directly in the terrible new world; and yet, even without a dislocating move to an elsewhere, the element of textual estrangement remains in effect since the focus is frequently on a character who questions the dystopian society.29

25. Michael Gardiner, “Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as Critique,” Utopian Studies 3, no. 2 (1992): 25. Gardiner argues that Michal Bakhtin’s concept of carnival in Rabelais and His World is an example of critical utopia. 26. Gardiner (ibid.) calls it “a heterodox manifestation of a diffuse ‘utopian impulse’ which steadfastly resists systematization and closure characteristic of the traditional utopia.” 27. Ibid., 28. 28. Ibid., 27: Utopia tends to play a central role in the critiquing of patriarchy, especially in the works of Cixous and Irigaray. 29. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Dystopia and Histories,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini; London: Routledge, 2003), 5. The text is constructed around a hegemonic order with a counter-narrative of resistance.

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Sargent combines critical utopia and dystopia in what he calls “critical dystopia,” which he de¿nes as a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced by a eutopia.30

A nostalgic utopia, by invoking a past idyllic or golden age, may have a critical function, but it can also simply play a compensatory or reactionary role.31 In idealizing the past, the reader is rendered powerless because the only legitimate form of political action is preservation and retrenchment in order to counter degeneration or to boost recurrent revival. A utopia that looks backward, into history, depends on traditional modes of legitimation, for example, appeals to customs, ancient practices, shared mythological origins. Backward looking utopias “seek to enshrine existing inequalities (or resurrect earlier ones), and so sanction hierarchy, received authority, and ‘stability’ in the interest of particular social elites.”32 It is common knowledge that the Chronicler utilizes Deuteronomistic history. Its disruption of that construction is also evident. Can one argue that there is something nostalgic in the Chronicler’s construction of the history, especially with regard to the whitewashing of David and Solomon and the tainted brush with which the rest of the royal dynasties of Judah have been portrayed? Most importantly, is their alienation and resistance involved in the construction of the story world, even to the extent that the story world is entirely dystopian with one ray of hope present, namely Cyrus? In other words, for the Chronicler to present readers with some kind of utopia, are there suf¿cient dystopian qualities in his world of text production that warrants utopian politics?33

30. Lyman Tower Sargent , “US Utopias in the 1980s and 1990s: Self-fashioning in a World of Multiple Identities,” in Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: a Comparative Perspective (ed. Paula Spinozzi; Bologne: COTEPRA; University of Bologne, 2001), 22. 31. Gardiner, “Bakhtin’s Carnival,” 23–24: “Particular institutions, rituals or symbols are valorized because they represent the immanence of the past within the present, and hence must be protected at all costs.” 32. Ibid., 24. 33. See Boer, “Utopian Politics in 2 Chronicles 10–13,” 382. 1

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3. Dystopia in Science Fiction and Doctor Who Whereas utopia does away with the ills that plague society, dystopia nurtures them. In Doctor Who’s “Utopia” any hope of apocalypse for change is denied. Ironically, it is only the enemies of the Doctor who can imagine change, but when they are brought about, they turn into nightmares.34 In the episode “Last of the Time Lords” the wife of the Doctor’s antagonist, the Master, reveals her impressions of utopia: death, pointlessness, darkness and cold. Utopia has turned into dystopia—a bad place characterized by suffering, tyranny, and oppression. Margaret Atwood argues that with each utopia a dystopia is concealed and vice versa.35 For this reason she utilizes the term “ustopia,” a mixture of utopia and dystopia.36 It is to such a place where Doctor Who takes the reader in the eleventh episode (called “Utopia”).37 The Doctor and his companion Martha land with the Tardis on Malcassairo,38 one of the last surviving planets and the last known outpost of humanity in the year one hundred trillion. It was a complete dystopia: no sun, the universe was approaching a heat death and the planet consisted of dead bush and hills. The only structure left was Silo 16, a rocket launching site where the last remnant of the human race took refuge in the hope of going to the planet Utopia. With them was the last surviving member of the Malmooth Conglomeration and Professor Yana, later revealed as the “Master,” the nemesis of Doctor Who. For all purposes they were an intentional community: people gathering to board the rocket in order to go to the planet Utopia. Outside 34. Crome, “‘There Never Was a Golden Age,’” 202. 35. Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 85. She mentions wars, social inequality, poverty and famine, and fallen arches. 36. Ibid., 66. To her, it is an imagined “perfect” community and its opposite, since each contains “a latent version of the other.” Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 104, suggests that utopia in Science Fiction provides “the theory for the world we would be living in now—if only its residents would behave as the theory requires.” 37. The next two episodes were called “The Sound of the Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords.” For the plot of each episode, see: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/ Utopia_(TV_story); http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki /The_Sound_of_Drums_(TV_story) and http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Last_of_the_Time_Lords_(TV_story) [cited 19 April 2015]. 38. “Malcassairo.” N.p. [cited 29 May 2014]. Online: http://tardis.wikia.com/ wiki/Malcassairo.

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the parameters of the silo were members of Futurekind,39 a humanoid race with fangs to cut into human Àesh. The episode plays on the audience’s common sense knowledge of utopia. Just after the Doctor arrived at Malcassairo, the viewer’s attention is drawn to a man running away from members of Futurekind (who are hunting him down) towards the safety of the silo where other human beings have gathered in the hope of boarding the rocket that will take them to Utopia. The Master as Professor Yana sees the commotion on a monitor and wryly remarks: “One more lost soul dreaming of Utopia.”40 Utopia is ¿ctional, a non-space, in fact a chimera and a delusion. Whereas he appears cynical towards the notion, his assistant admonishes him not to give up. His response by toasting Utopia with a cup of coffee, saying “Where it is to be hoped the coffee is a little less sour,” plays on the concept of utopia as a better place than the current dystopian one. In the meantime, the running man reached the gate of the silo and asks the guard if they can take him to Utopia, upon which they answer in the af¿rmative while opening the gate. Within the intentional community Utopia is a de¿nable place where people physically can go to. The Doctor and his companions enter the safe surrounding with him, exploring it as they enter the silo itself. They discover the rocket and realize that the people there are not refugees but would-be passengers in the rocket to a planet called Utopia, immediately de¿ned by the Doctor as “The perfect place. Hundred trillion years, it’s the same old dream.” The episode plays off the two de¿nitions of utopia against one another: a “better” place or a “perfect” place. And it recognizes the continuous presence of the idea within humankind, at that stage which is the end of the universe a hundred trillion years on since More’s Utopia that coined the term and de¿ned the notion. The episode links utopia to dystopia, and with the universe coming to its end the Doctor rightfully asks: “But if the universe is falling apart, what does Utopia mean?” Again the episode plays with utopia as a location that does not exist or an orientation towards a better place. The Master does not want to be drawn into a philosophical discussion on this matter, and brusquely replies: “Oh, every human knows of Utopia. Where have you been?” Utopia is part of common sense, or at least, common sense within the Western tradition. 39. “Futurekind,” N.p. [cited 29 May 2014]. Online: http://tardis.wikia.com/ wiki/Futurekind. 40. The text has been transcribed from the televised show by Chrissie’s Transcripts Site. N.p. [cited April 2015]. Online: http://www.chakoteya.net/ doctorwho/29–11.htm. 1

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Not satis¿ed the Doctor narrows down his question: “What do you think is out there?” Utopia is seen as a way of surviving amidst collapse of reality. But it is not certain whether it was really found. The Master answers: “Now perhaps they found it. Perhaps not. But it’s worth a look, don’t you think?” Utopia is a non-place, a chimera. But for the would-be passengers, the place is real: there is a rocket taking them there, a place one of the passengers claims to be made of diamond skies—irreality. Its non-existence is sharply underlined in one of the scenes where the Master takes a circuit board while throwing it away, shrugging his shoulders and murmuring nonchalantly “Utopia,” as if he knows these people in the rocket are not going there, but somewhere else. With Doctor Who one knows one deals with science ¿ction.41 Utopia in this episode of Doctor Who is a non-place and in fact very dystopian. The coffee is indeed sourer than at Silo 16 on Malcassairo. But what drives the community to utopia? The dawn of the apocalypse. With regard to Chronicles, then, the question would be what would have driven the Chronicler to embed utopian features in his rendition of the royal history of Judah? Can one detect dystopian elements in the world of text production and reception that would give credence to utopian politics in the book? 4. Chronicles and Utopia Utopia as a literary text concerns a story world an author constructed as an imaginary world in order to provide the readers an alternative to the readers’ social reality. This alternative that is provided is based on de¿ciencies and lacks the author perceives within the world of text production and text reception. These de¿ciencies create a disjunction between the real world and story world, which presents a ¿ctional reality that is perceived to be better than the reality the readers inhabit. In this 41. Cf. Graeme McMillan, “Why Doctor Who Is Pop Culture Sci-Fi At Its Best,” Time (15 March 2013). N.p. [cited 26 May 2014]. Online: http://entertainment .time.com/2013/03/15/why-doctor-who-is-pop-culture-sci-¿-at-its-best/: “Doctor Who is science-¿ction that takes humanity’s ¿nest points – our intelligence, curiosity and kindness – in every conceivable direction. Instead of celebrating combat and strife (Star Wars) or hive-mind conformity (Star Trek, arguably), Who stands for novelty and for being different, demonstrating the bene¿ts of our bene¿ts as a species. At its best, it’s about the best in us – and the endless possibilities when we remain open to them. Isn’t that the point of science ¿ction?” For a counter view, see Terry Pratchett, “Terry Pratchett vs Who,” SFX 3, May 2010. N.p. [cited 25 May 2014]. Online: http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/05/03/guest-blog-terry-pratchett-ondoctor-who/.

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imagined story world the readers are invited to identify in some way or another with an intentional community which inhabits the space of the story world. 4.1. The Literary Nature of Utopia and the Fictionalizing Nature of the Biblical Text In contrast to planet Utopia in the story of Doctor Who that is a nonplace yet somewhere the intentional community thought they were going to, utopia in this discussion is literary in nature. As a literary phenomenon it is a social product and not based on personal fantasies. Utopian images originate from particular historical circumstances and provide critical comments on these circumstances as a perceived reality.42 To Ehud Ben Zvi these utopian images shed light on the intellectual and social world of the literati in Yehud.43 As a social product utopian images are shared amongst people, in this case those who can read and write within society. Ben Zvi, whose focus was on utopia in prophetic books, stresses the imaginary character of utopia. Support for the imaginary character of the biblical text other than prophetic books or utopia can be found in Jon Berquist’s statement about the Deuteronomistic History, which he regards as a fantasy or a myth of origins that engages the reader’s imagination about an alternate world detached from the present realities of empire.44 It resists empire “by imagining an alternative world in which smaller communities (monarchies, clans, or villages) can live independently.”45 Much earlier, in 1992, Philip R. Davies made a similar claim with regard to the Israel one ¿nds within the biblical text and the one in history.46 He argued that 42. Ben Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias,” 59: “[U]topian images not only convey hope, but communicate to, and socialize people into positions of estrangement and critique from reality.” 43. Ibid., 57. 44. Jon Berquist, “Identities and Empire: Historiographic Questions for the Deuteronomistic History in the Persian Period,” in Historiography and Identity (Re) formulation in Second Temple Historiographical Literature (ed. Louis Jonker; LHBOTS 534; London: Continuum, 2010), 11. 45. Berquist, “Identities and Empire,” 11. He deems the “scholarly move” to read the Deuteronomistic History as an exilic text also a fantasy, a deliberate misreading that places the history into a different context. It obscures empire in that the new context for the story is the exile imagined as a time without government whilst empire is de facto the government. 46. Philip R. Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel” (Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1992), 23. He adds that the construct has been given “a (sometimes vague) geographical and temporal setting in an historical world, presented as a society historically, religiously and ethnically continuous and living in Palestine 1

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biblical Israel found within the pages of the biblical text is a literary construct. It may be historical, but not necessarily so.47 It is in the light of the construction of the imaginary and the ¿ctionalizing process that I understand Steven Schweitzer’s remark about the literary nature of the text of Chronicles as utopia. The literary character of Chronicles in terms of the imaginary is not in doubt here. Schweitzer argues that the story and the cultic practices reÀect a desired reality and not a historical one.48 Chronicles constitutes an ideal or desired system which could have been implemented in the future. It does not legitimize any status quo but rather presents the reader with an alternative, thereby challenging the status quo.49 Moreover, the desired system is in line with Ezekiel’s restored temple. Whereas Ezekiel’s vision of the temple is an ideal vision in the future, Chronicles presents its utopian future as an idealized portrayal set in Israel’s historical past. Rather than a literary device designed to encourage legitimation of the present, this anchors the desired changes solidly in the hallowed past. Chronicles, if not supplying rationale for “why it is this way,” points to the alternative reality constructed in this version of Israel’s past as “how it should be.”50

If one encounters an idealized portrayal of Israel’s historical past, can one then read Chronicles as a nostalgic utopia? What happens with the presentation of the history in the book? Schweitzer’s utilization of utopia stands in contrast to this kind of legitimating of practices via a text. It is not a source for historical data, because that would exclude any utopian aspect de facto.51 What is clear from Davies’s approach is that the biblical texts provide examples of literary constructs that are ideologically driven in terms of a power relation set by a ruling class. In other words, it is not the history that is compared with the real events, but the way in which the story is constructed that tells one something of the world of text production.52 from at least the beginning of what we now term the Iron Age (c. 1250–600 B.C.E.; biblical scholars more commonly use the term ‘pre-exilic’ or ‘monarchic’ when speaking of this era).” 47. Ibid., 25. 48. Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles, 29. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 30. 51. Ibid., 29. 52. I ¿nd Schweitzer here somewhat elusive. He would be suggesting many possibilities for the world of text production but the suggestions are too manifold to act upon and to draw consequences.

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Louis Jonker sees Chronicles as a new literary text in which the Chronicler “adapts, reinterprets, and even merges different traditions.”53 The result was a literary construct that can be designed as “reforming history,”54 comprising a double attempt, one to reformulate and sanitize older traditions of the past and one to reformulate the identity of God’s people in the changed circumstances within the late Persian period—a change from independent monarchic rule with its own cult to imperial rule that recognizes different cults.55 It meant that the past had to be recon¿gured and narrated differently in order to be useful in the new dispensation.56 But in Jonker’s terms, it is not nostalgic. The special treatment of David and Solomon is suggested as a model of kingship expected under Persian rule. Jonker sees here a subtle polemic against Persian rulers: good rulers seek YHWH and bad rulers will receive punishment.57 To Jonker, there was a discontinuity between being ruled by a satrapy and by a monarch in an independent kingdom. The status of Yehud as a province necessitated “a new phase of reÀection among the Yehudites on their own identity.”58 Does this reÀection constitute the construction of an alternative reality with regard to the de¿ciency caused by the loss of political independence and the monarchy? 4.2. Alternative Reality and De¿ciencies Utopia as a literary text constructs an imaginary world that functions as an alternative to the contemporaneous social reality of the targeted audience who experience their social reality as lacking or de¿cient in some way. In Doctor Who Planet Utopia is invented as a (non)-location where the last survivors of the universe thought they could escape to in order not to be consumed by the end of time. It is thought to be a better place (not perfect) where the coffee would be less sour. By the time the rocket is launched towards the so-called planet, the viewer realizes that such a place is non-existent and the rocket is going to end up somewhere equally dystopian. The last humans cannot escape their own social reality. 53. Louis Jonker, 1 & 2 Chronicles (Understanding the Bible Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2013), 13. See also Louis Jonker, “Engaging with Different Contexts: A Survey of the Various Levels of Identity Negotiation in Chronicles,” in Jonker, ed., Texts, Contexts, and Readings, 63–94. 54. Jonker, 1 & 2 Chronicles, 14. 55. Ibid., 14. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 17. 58. Ibid., 15.

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Utopian images juxtapose and contrast what is perceived as an inferior reality with a portrayal of a utopian future that is supposed to be superior to past dystopias and even to the present of the community in whose midst the utopian image emerged: Utopia is precisely not what is but what should, and in the discourses of Yehud, mainly what will be. As the readers imagine and partake vicariously in these utopian worlds, they certainly felt and were supposed to feel estranged from their present situation. Moreover, the very portrayal of an imaginary ideal world carries a critique and ideological rejection of present conditions.59

Schweitzer bases his argument of utopia in Chronicles on an alternative reality that the book is thought to present to the reader. With regard to the genealogies, Schweitzer says: Perhaps Chronicles is arguing that the relationship between “Israel” and the nations is one of great complexity (which it is in historical reality), and that no clear policy can be instituted to cover the variety of concerns that will arise. However, some principles for this relationship according to Chronicles can be adduced: (1) intermarriage is not condemned; (2) war against foreigners is not condemned (however, victory is not guaranteed in every instance, so the people should not be hasty to engage in conÀict and should rather depend on God’s intervention to occur); and (3) religious ¿delity, seeking God with proper attitude, supporting the temple and its cult, and the proper internal relations of the community are of primary concern—much more important for the continued existence of the community than the establishment of borders and boundaries to distinguish between “us” and “them.”60

Time and again Schweitzer states what the alternative reality is, or what it should be. What is much more dif¿cult to ascertain, are the conditions and ideologies that are critiqued and problematized. The reader knows what the book of Chronicles stands for, but the world of text production, the social reality within which it emerged and which it critiques, stays as elusive as Chronicles’ scholarship remains ambiguous on this issue itself! One of the issues is whether Chronicles constitutes an internal debate and whether this internal debate is set off against a foreign world. Schweitzer regards Chronicles as insider literature, “concerned with issues important to the internal affairs of the Israelite/Yehudite community.”61 It does not constitute crisis literature in the way Ezra–Nehemiah 59. Ben Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias,” 59. 60. Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles, 74–75. 61. Ibid., 71.

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seems to. It is not concerned with establishing outside borders or with survival issues in the midst of a hostile environment.62 Similarly, Ben Zvi argues for Chronicles as a book dealing with inner conÀicts within Yehud. Ben Zvi de¿nes it in terms of the temple in Jerusalem: With “Israel” and its relationship with YHWH as self-evident, the only problem was that of competition between different cultic centers.63 The Jerusalemite cultic center developed from a “minor incipient temple in a marginal area within Yehud” into the main institution in Yehud.64 He remarks that the only anxiety present was about the success or failure of centralizing the temple. That anxiety disappeared in the late Persian period (in which he dates Chronicles) when Jerusalem became the capital of Yehud and the temple the central focal point.65 But does this lack of anxiety not deny the book of Chronicles its utopian character because there seems to be no real dystopia in contrast to which the book provides utopian images? 4.3. Dystopia as/and the Reality on Which an Alternative Is Served In Doctor Who, at the beginning of the story, dystopia is quite visible as the viewer sees a man running away from a group of humanoids with fangs that chase him in order to eat him. Everyone seems to be in a survival mode. Dystopia is further recognizable when the Doctor observes that he and his partner arrived at the end of the universe, implying there is no place or time further. Dystopia is thus to be found in the ¿nal moments of the universe, whatever length those moments might be. The intentional community gathering around the rocket wants to escape from this dystopia to a better world where the sky is made from diamonds. Dystopia is a place where the coffee is sour. But the socio-political circumstances of Yehud before and at the time of the emergence of the book of Chronicles do not seem to be that of sour coffee. Or at least, some scholars do not see it as such. Schweitzer fails to see a dystopian context when he rejects the notion of Chronicles

62. Ibid.: “Put another way, Chronicles is not so much concerned with threats from without as it is in addressing various issues of contention and dispute that have developed within the entity known as ‘Israel’.” 63. Ehud Ben Zvi, “On Social Memory and Identity Formation in Late Persian Yehud: A Historian’s Viewpoint with a Focus on Prophetic Literature, Chronicles and the Deuteronomistic Historical Collection,” in Jonker, ed., Texts, Contexts, and Readings, 118. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 119. 1

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as propaganda for a community in survival mode within hostile surroundings and in need of drawing external borders.66 Although the alternative reality he depicts in some of the stories about the kings indeed has dystopian features, for example his reading of the Chronicler’s construction of Jehoram’s history,67 these depictions do not translate into the construction of a dystopian reality in the world of text production that will justify the alternative reality. In Ben Zvi’s arguments it is clear that the eschatological expectations—or “temperature”—were low. He sees a lack of rigidity which he ascribes to a lack of a sense of being besieged that would have required strong defensive positions.68 In Ben Zvi’s discussion on utopian images in the prophetic books, he argues that the dominant worldview of the ruling elite is not questioned as the institutions that support them are rendered intact. The texts reinforce their central ideologies and their de¿ance is aimed outwards: “a world outside Yehud or potential inner challenges to the (dominant) ideological worldviews of the local elite.”69 The intent of such utopian images was to reinforce “a Yehudite…inner communal sense of belonging to a particular group with a singular relationship with YHWH.”70 But he does not rule out dystopia, so that the question is how far back one must seek for a dystopian context if the world of text production is of low eschatological temperature. Gary Knoppers draws attention to the centrality of the Babylonian exile and its concomitant dislocation and disruption in a large part of the biblical text. He argues that the same can be said of Chronicles as an “alternative history” even if it was constructed two centuries after the Deuteronomistic history:71 “Exile was a horri¿c fact of life in the late Iron age.”72 One thing to remember is that the effect of the exile created dystopia:

66. Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles, 71. 67. Ibid., 101. 68. Zvi, “On Social Memory and Identity Formation in Late Persian Yehud,” 143. 69. Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias,” 62. 70. Ibid. 71. Gary Knoppers, “Exile, Return, and Diaspora: Expatriates and Repatriates in Late Biblical Literature,” in Jonker, ed., Texts, Contexts, and Readings, 30–31. He acknowledges that the idea of the centrality of the Babylonian exile can be misleading, because there was more than one Babylonian deportation, an Egyptian one, as well as other population movements (32). 72. Ibid., 35.

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Worlds That Could Not Be Given the debilitating effects of famine and disease, the loss of life, the disintegration of traditional kinship groups, the shrinkage of Judahite territory, the voluntary migrations to other lands, and the forced deportations, it is not surprising that it took Judah centuries to recover from the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian invasions.73

Oded Lipschits similarly refers to the destruction and upheaval brought about by the invasion of Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 B.C.E.) that was so deep and far reaching that “no independent political entity developed in the conquered Assyrian areas in the following centuries, nor was there any military threat to Egyptian, Babylonian, or Persian imperial rule from them.”74 Ehud Ben Zvi looks into the issue of ontological security in the light of the catastrophe that befell Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., namely the fall of Jerusalem, the end of the monarchy and the deportation of a large group of the upper class. He argues that a group with a strong sense of security will not feel threatened by the calamity that befell them. Ben Zvi does not entirely agree with the argument that this was not the case in Judah in 586. He is of the opinion that later on in the later Persian period the anxiety about survival did not diminish if one takes into account “the ubiquity of promises of a utopian future for Israel and the equally ubiquitous ‘didactic’ explanations of the catastrophe in the discourse of the Persian-period Yehud.”75 Yet Ben Zvi thinks that the people never felt that their entire existence was at risk.76 There certainly would have been a place for anxiety about future disasters or divine judgment, but not in the sense that their identity as a text-centered community following YHWH’s laws would have been threatened.77 What Ben Zvi sees is a society that is internally focused and that mobilizes internal resources for didactic purposes.78 The picture Ben Zvi paints is far from dystopian. In fact, one gets a rather utopian idea about the community when he implies that its members had time to play with texts despite being poor and deprived of resources.79 73. Ibid., 42. It is especially the prophets (Jeremiah and Ezekiel) who underscore the disruptive effect of the exile (46). 74. Oded Lipschits, “Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and the Status of Jerusalem in the Middle of the Fifth Century BCE,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 20. 75. Ben Zvi, “On Social Memory,” 106. 76. Ibid. The province of Yehud was very poor and marginal to the Persian Empire, and thus unlikely to be drawn into a military campaign. 77. Ibid., 108. 78. Ibid., 109. 79. Ibid., 141. 1

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Louis Jonker’s construction of the world of text production of Chronicles similarly emphasizes peace and tranquillity due to the Pax Achaemenidica. The cultic context was determined by the Persian context in that the Pax Achaemenidica meant that the Persian religion was not forced upon the subjugated peoples. This allowed the inner cult of the territories to continue and to develop. According to Jonker this was the case with the Yahwistic temple cult in Jerusalem which developed into the central cult of Yehud.80 The suggestion is that if there was conÀict, its consequences were not dystopian in nature. If the focus was on the inner workings of the community, Jonker argues that the preponderance of peace and order within the Persian imperial kingdom would have made any disturbance between those living in Jerusalem and those within the Benjaminite tribal land undesirable: “[T]he proximity of this tribal border to Jerusalem and the fact that the borders shifted over time most certainly created awareness in Jerusalem of the contiguity of Benjamin and Judah.”81 Yairah Amit,82 with reference to the way Saul is treated in the books of Chronicles, suggests that this hidden polemic attested to in the book in fact reared its head during the transition from Babylonian to Persian rule. At the time of Chronicles, the polemic became more open and unambiguous, but in the book of Esther it went again underground and expressed itself covertly. Amit says the problem of leadership did not go away and the need to justify the Davidic dynasty’s leadership or ¿nding alternatives to the House of David, “continued to preoccupy biblical literature during the Persian period.”83 Amit states with reference to the advent of Cyrus that went with the demise of the house of David: at such a time of upheaval, and against a background of various changes of power and government and a decline in the prestige of the House of David, a polemic could well arise on the issue of leadership. It is possible that in these circumstances the population of Benjaminite origin hoped to assume the local leadership, a hope that reÀected their relative strength in the recovering province of Yehud, as well as their disappointment in the House of David.84

80. Jonker, “Engaging with Different Contexts,” 72. 81. Ibid., 71. 82. Yairah Amit, “The Saul Polemic in the Persian Period,” in Lipschitz and Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 647–61. 83. Ibid., 658. 84. Ibid., 657.

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It does not look as if the immediate world of text production for Chronicles is suggestive of any dystopian elements. The dystopian element is found in the history of two hundred years earlier with the Babylonian invasion and the subsequent disruption of life within Judah. However, in the immediate world of text production there seems to appear polemics within the groups inhabiting the space of Yehud itself. Yet these polemics do not appear to have caused dystopian circumstances from which Chronicles emerged. Nonetheless, the issue of polemics indicates boundary maintenance which may point to issues with the composition of the intentional community of utopia. 5. Conclusion In order to answer the question about what a utopian reading can say about the world of text production of Chronicles, this essay employed a particular de¿nition of utopia as a literary construct in order to determine if a reading of Chronicles as utopia contributes to the world of text production or text reception. The key elements that make up the de¿nition were found to be an imaginary world, an alternative social reality, a de¿ciency or lack, a better place and an imagined community. Dystopia and a nostalgic utopia were found to be useful categories to explore some elements in Chronicles. The notion of utopia was explained with the help of a science ¿ction text, namely the series of Doctor Who, more speci¿cally the episode called “Utopia.” From that discussion it became clear that utopia and dystopia are different sides of the same coin. The one cannot exist without the other. What would have given Chronicles a utopian streak? If the story of Chronicles served as a nostalgic utopia there would need to be a context that would feed this nostalgia and utopia. Science ¿ction’s linking of utopia and dystopia may provide an answer here so that one needs to search for a dystopian context from which the text could have emerged. The disruption of the exile could provide that impetus, but then one would need to argue why that disruption became a primer for a text whose physical world of production is one of relative peace and low eschatological temperature.

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Bibliography Amit, Yairah. “The Saul Polemic in the Persian Period.” Pages 647–61 in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period. Edited by O. Lipschits and M. Oeming. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006. Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Baccolini, Raffaella, and Tom Moylan. “Dystopia and Histories.” Pages 1–12 in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Edited by T. Moylan and R. Baccolini. London: Routledge, 2003. Ben Zvi, Ehud. “On Social Memory and Identity Formation in Late Persian Yehud: A Historian’s Viewpoint with a Focus on Prophetic Literature, Chronicles and the Deuteronomistic Historical Collection.” Pages 95–148 in Texts, Contexts, and Readings in Postexilic Literature: Explorations into Historiography and Identity in Hebrew Bible and Related Texts. Edited by L. Jonker. FAT 2/53. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. ———. “Utopias, Multiple Utopias, and Why Utopias at All? The Social Roles of Utopian Visions in Prophetic Books within Their Historical Context.” Pages 55–85 in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Edited by E. Ben Zvi. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Berquist, Jon. “Identities and Empire: Historiographic Questions for the Deuteronomistic History in the Persian Period.” Pages 3–14 in Historiography and Identity: (Re)Formulation in Second Temple Historiographical Literature. LHBOTS 534. Edited by Louis Jonker. London: T&T Clark International, 2010. Boer, Roland. “Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles.” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4 (2010): 19–31. ———. “Utopian Politics in 2 Chronicles 10–13.” Pages 360–94 in The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture. Edited by M. P. Graham and S. L. McKenzie. JSOTSup 263. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999. Crome, Andrew. “‘There Never Was a Golden Age’: Doctor Who and the Apocalypse.” Pages 189–204 in Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith: Religion and Doctor Who. By A. Crome and J. McGrath; Eugene, Ore: Cascade, 2013. Crome, Andrew, and James McGrath. Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith: Religion and Doctor Who. Eugene, Ore: Cascade, 2013. Davies, Philip R. In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1992. Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Gardiner, Michael. “Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as Critique.” Utopian Studies 3, no. 2 (1992): 21–49. Jonker, Louis. 1 & 2 Chronicles. Understanding the Bible Commentary Series. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2013. ———. “Engaging With Different Contexts: A Survey of the Various Levels of Identity Negotiation in Chronicles.” Pages 63–94 in Texts, Contexts, and Readings in Postexilic Literature: Explorations into Historiography and Identity in Hebrew Bible and Related Texts. Edited by L. Jonker. FAT 2/53. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011.

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Knoppers, Gary. “Exile, Return, and Diaspora: Expatriates and Repatriates in Late Biblical Literature.” Pages 29–62 in Texts, Contexts and Readings in Postexilic Literature: Explorations into Historiography and Identity Negotiation in Hebrew Bible and Related Texts. FAT 2/53. Edited by L. Jonker. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Levitas, Ruth, and Lucy Sargisson. “Utopia in Dark Times. Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/ Dystopia.” Pages 13–28 in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Edited by T. Moylan and R. Baccolini. London: Routledge, 2003. Lipschits, Oded. “Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and the Status of Jerusalem in the Middle of the Fifth Century BCE.” Pages 19–52 in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period. Edited by O. Lipschits and M. Oeming. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006. McMillan, Graeme. “Why Doctor Who Is Pop Culture Sci-Fi At Its Best.” Time, 15 March 2013. No Pages. Cited 26 May 2014. Online: http://entertainment.time.com/ 2013/03/15/why-doctor-who-is-pop-culture-sci-¿-at-its-best/. Pratchett, Terry. “Terry Pratchett vs Who.” SFX, 3 May 2010. No Pages. Cited 25 May 2014. Online: http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/05/03/guest-blog-terry-pratchett-ondoctor-who/. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37. ———. “US Utopias in the 1980s and 1990s: Self-fashioning in a World of Multiple Identities.” Pages 221–32 in Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: A Comparative Perspective. Edited by P. Spinozzi. Bologne: COTEPRA; University of Bologne, 2001. ———. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. E-book. Cited 11 May 2014. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Schweitzer, Steven. Reading Utopia in Chronicles. London: T&T Clark International, 2007. Suvin, Darko. “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies.” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 69–83. ———. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Webb, Darren. “Christian Hope and the Politics of Utopia.” Utopian Studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 113–44. Wright, Alex. “An Ambiguous Utopia.” Political Theology 5, no. 2 (2004): 231–38. Wu, Dingbo. “Understanding Utopian Literature.” Extrapolation 34, no. 3 (1993): 236–44.

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WORLD-BUILDING AND TEMPLE-BUILDING: A GAME OF UTOPIAN PASTICHE IN 2 CHRONICLES 1–9 Frauke Uhlenbruch

1. Introduction In this essay, two texts are read: an ancient text and a modern text. Of course the texts’ wordings are very similar; one might say they are the same text: 2 Chr 1–9. The same text is read as an ancient text—which is a hypothetical task, as even an ancient text cannot be read completely objectively and divorced from contemporary insights about it—and as a contemporary text. A more natural reading might just be the reading of the ancient text as modern. In this essay, I shall try to voice contemporary cross-associations, investigating the test-text 2 Chr 1–9 as a potentially utopian reworking of similar material found in the book of Kings. At the same time the passage is compared with contemporary discussions about narrated worlds, as found in literary theoretical material on utopian literature, as well as science ¿ction and fantasy. Ehud Ben Zvi writes, “…what was authoritative for the literati and their Chronicler was the outcome or outcomes of an interaction between an authoritative source text they possessed and the world of knowledge they used to decode it.”1 Here, I approach the outcome of an interaction between source texts—1 Kings and 2 Chronicles—and the world of knowledge we possess to decode these intermingled source texts today. Second Chronicles portrays similar characters and similar story features as Kings, but the narrative ground rules surrounding some of the story’s features seem to have changed. Between 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles it seems that 2 Chronicles “utopianizes” 1 Kings, which can make the joint reading of both texts appear as a pastiche, raising many questions about creating, circulating, and re-writing in ancient communities. Since these questions are raised in contemporary scholarly discourse, it is also 1. Ehud Ben Zvi, “One Size Does Not Fit All: Observations on the Different Ways That Chronicles Dealt with the Authoritative Literature of Its Time,” in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles? (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Diana V. Edelman; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 20.

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interesting and worthwhile to look at how these questions are raised, and what dif¿culties and opportunities appear for a contemporary reader when she encounters these texts. A pastiche is an assembly or collage made up of known parts. It does not necessarily need to be a meaningless and contrived convergence of knowns, although Fredric Jameson describes pastiche rather pessimistically in the following way: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” 2 With a nod to emergence theory,3 and against Jameson’s pessimistic statements about pastiche, I would approach any sum of parts at least with the bene¿t of the doubt: a suf¿ciently complex new arrangement even of known parts has the capacity of emerging as something new with previously unknown features. Those who encounter the pastiche without being familiar with the original parts of which it is made up may add their interpretation and their uniqueness, which those who have known the originals might scorn or might embrace, and de¿nitely have to acknowledge. (I am thinking of Instagram: while it is admittedly a strange social phenomenon to take pictures of food with my phone and make the picture look like I ate the food in 1973, this high-tech nod to older aesthetics and technology adds something unique and meaningful to contemporary life and it is all but a ridicule or scorn of the past.) In this essay I establish a series of more or less tenuous connections between ancient texts and modern genres and theories, many of which might appear to be prohibitively anachronistic. Calling 2 Chronicles, or parts of it (steering clear of sweeping generalizations) utopian is an anachronism, because the term and the concept of utopia were ¿rst introduced by Thomas More in his work Utopia in 1516. When one refers to Chronicles as utopia, it is viewed as disconnected from direct linear inÀuences: Thomas More cannot have inÀuenced the Bible in conventional direct lines of reception. Reading the Bible as utopia one implicitly admits that there exists a utopian impulse that received its name from Thomas More but has existed before that. Reading the Bible as an ancient precursor to utopia seems to imply that there is a tendency in humans to imagine improved states of being and to ¿nd ways to explain 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 17. 3. Previously unknown properties can emerge if a suf¿ciently complex sum of parts is assembled. I have dealt with this in some detail in “Hacked Aqedah— Genesis 22 in Dialogue with Contemporary Political Science Fiction,” in “Not in the Spaces We Know”: An Exploration of Science Fiction and the Bible (a forthcoming special issue of Journal of Hebrew Scriptures). 1

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why the present consistently fails to ful¿l all wishes and desires. By introducing a name for the phenomenon, Thomas More and the genre that inherited the name “utopia” enable us to look back at older artefacts informed by More and his utopian successors. Utopia, however, is a slippery phenomenon: its de¿nition is still a matter of discussion in Utopian Studies, which is necessary because utopias and dystopias are still being produced. Recent times have seen a signi¿cant turn in mainstream popular culture to tropes and themes indebted to utopia—most often in the shape of the dystopia, and often in science ¿ction. Current events such as surveillance by the NSA, covert mood experiments by Facebook of which users were unaware, police violence in the U.S.A., will inÀuence what is seen as dystopian. In a very thought-provoking discussion on a podcast by cracked.com titled “Loss of Privacy: Why People Born After 1995 Can’t Understand the Book ‘1984,’”4 it was asked why a dystopia in which total surveillance reigns supreme (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) does not seem to be dystopian to a contemporary younger generation anymore, and why it becomes more and more dif¿cult to explain why this idea seems dystopian. Surveillance has become a fact of life. It is already present in contemporary society and often defended by either appealing to a sense of fear and then to a sense of security, or defended by appealing to service, convenience, or customization. What this indicates is really that a dystopian vision has an expiry date, which coincides with the mainstream implementation of a formerly dystopian seeming idea, which in reality, then does not seem as awful as in a ¿lm or book. De¿nitions Àuctuate and should be updated as events warrant. For the time being, I follow Darko Suvin when asked for a de¿nition of utopia. Utopias are “verbal constructions of a quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community…”5 One might add that a dystopia could be de¿ned as describing a society in whose members live in signi¿cantly worse circumstances than in the author’s community. What is meant by “more perfect” or “worse” changes, as I have tried to indicate by the example of the podcast above: whether a text is understood as a utopia or dystopia will depend strongly on the lived reality of the reader. 4. Jack O’Brien and David Wong, Why People Born After 1995 Can’t Understand the Book “1984,” The Cracked Podcast. N.p. [cited 2 February 2015]. Online: http://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-people-born-after–1995-cant-understandbook–1984/. 5. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 49.

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With this brief introduction to de¿nitions and dif¿culties in mind, we can approach utopia, dystopia (and related genres and de¿nitions), and the Bible as an intricate play of contemporary associations, contemporary scholarship, and an ancient document. Reading as utopia may help to take forward some interesting conjectures about past communities. The fact that we approve of utopia as a way of reading says a lot about present ways in which we read, reconstruct, and accept intertextualities, too. The novelty and the conclusion appear somewhere in between an interest in modern hermeneutics and an historian’s interest in a past community. Reading as utopia is not a purely historical endeavour because it has to be acknowledged that there is a certain disjunction as one enters a discussion using terms such as “ancient” and “modern.” Reading as utopia is a challenging endeavour, because we are faced with an intricate problem: “meaning” is not found in the utopian description alone; it is what was supposed to happen between a utopia and its intended readers, conveyed via the point of view of an author or authoring community. Seen from a non-faith perspective, contemporary readers are not the intended readers of the Bible. Reading as utopia is not an easy or reliable way to come to de¿nitive conclusions about an elusive past community, but it does open an ancient text up to interesting questions and discussions one may otherwise not have approached from this angle. In order to read the test passage 2 Chr 1–9 as a pastiche of intertextualities and meanings to a modern-day reader, a “family resemblance” approach6 is advocated here to observe consciously how past, present, and meaning Àuctuate (this approach is derived from the Weberian ideal type method). If item (a) and item (b) exhibit a certain family resemblance, the resemblance is investigated, even if it is impossible that there were direct historical, chronological inÀuences. For example, Raphael Hythloday—the protagonist of More’s Utopia—is compared to the Queen of Sheba, and General Utopus—builder-founder of More’s island— is compared to King Solomon. I discuss how slight changes in narrated worlds can inÀuence a text’s genre—utopia, dystopia, fantasy, fairy tale—and thereby its intended function. The way in which the test passage from 2 Chronicles engages with source texts is ¿nally compared to Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodern pastiche, but it is concluded that the passages from 2 Chronicles are different from a pastiche in Jameson’s sense. The reconciliatory conclusion will be to leave the

6. Discussed in more detail in Frauke Uhlenbruch, The Nowhere Bible: Utopia, Dystopia, Science Fiction (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), esp. Chapter 3.

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test passage be, as a hybrid text, made up of a fusion of ancient sources, ancient imaginations, modern attempts at undoing ancient sutures, and modern scholarly commentary. In what follows 2 Chr 1–9 is approached in a series of more or less interconnected case studies, mostly character-driven—King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba—and also concept-driven: pastiche, genre. 2. World-Reduction and World-Building In this section, the ¿gure of King Solomon is discussed as represented in the test passage 2 Chr 1–9 and in parallel passages in the book of Kings. Stuart Lasine writes about Solomon: …the narratives that describe him merely simulate the reality of a potent imperial king, who degenerates into a simulation of a despotic one. This makes Solomon our contemporary, considering that we are now said to live in a postmodern cyberspace in which “privacy and publicity dissolve into one another.”7

This observation is contemporary and political: in the modern world we are used to seeing shining ¿gures of political potency degenerate on public stages into “simulations” when the campaign image fades in the challenge of actual political of¿ce. Interestingly, if we were to follow up this association, Chronicles’ Solomon appears more as the shining campaign-image of a ruler and Kings’ Solomon more as a real-life ruler, not immune to temptations, misjudgments, and political dif¿culties. Chronicles as compared to passages describing similar events in 1 Kings seems to offer a highlight-reel, biased towards representing an idealized version. Descriptions of the temple and of Solomon’s wisdom and wealth in 1 Kings are grand, too, but Kings also retains a certain grittiness, a three-dimensionality: I would count the story about the harlots (1 Kgs 3:16–27) as evidence of this grittiness, and in addition to that the foreign wives and worship of foreign gods (11:1–8) and the association of Solomon as bringing about the division into two kingdoms (11:31–33). The Solomon of the hypothetical utopia of Chronicles is comparatively Àat—a predictably beautiful, photoshopped campaign poster, not likely to lapse verbally or behaviorally. His Àat representation is to some degree expected if the text is regarded as a utopian depiction because 7. Stuart Lasine, Knowing Kings: Knowledge, Power, and Narcissism in the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001), 14. In the citation, Lasine quotes William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 140.

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utopias are not full representations of an idealized society. Ben Zvi writes that “the depictions of utopian circumstances tend to appear in short, poignant passages, they do not and cannot deal with all aspects of the new ideal world, these texts suggest a prioritization of perceived lacks and high desires…”8 A utopia is an arti¿cial construction of descriptions of the most important advantages and signi¿cant differences of a ¿ctional society, structured and described according to the priorities of its authors. As Sara Japhet observes, the Solomon of Chronicles is “indeed Àawless, and several positive qualities are appended to his ¿gure, such as his personal election, his special relationship with God, and the achievement in his time of ‘rest’ and ‘peace’.”9 His wisdom, Japhet adds to this differentiation of Kings-Solomon and Chronicles-Solomon, is systematically understated in Chronicles.10 The Chronicler appears to be more interested in focusing on Solomon as the temple builder than on his legendary wisdom (though wisdom is of course also present). Between both accounts he is both emphatically wise and emphatically a builder, but Chronicles’ Solomon appears as somewhat more of a doer rather than a thinker. It is possible to ask a highly relevant question to inquire into the thoughts of the authoring community who crafted Chronicles’ Solomon, and also to inquire into the text-as-a-utopia: Is Solomon a doer-¿gure who is supposed to inspire action in the intended readership? Or is he a proxy-doer crafted to reassure that action is not currently needed? He might inspire action or communicate that action should only be taken by someone as shining and glorious as Solomon, providing a story to experience building vicariously because it is not done (or not possible to do it) in experienced reality. Northrop Frye writes: “The utopian writer looks at his own society ¿rst and tries to see what, for his purposes, its signi¿cant elements are.”11 8. Ehud Ben Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias, and Why Utopias at All? The Social Roles of Utopian Visions in Prophetic Books Within Their Historical Context,” in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi; Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 60. 9. Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles: A Commentary (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 48. 10. Ibid. In Kings Solomon’s main task is to be a judge (ibid., 531); a characteristic is his discernment in administering judgment. The story about the harlots is presented as a case study. “In Chronicles, the more speci¿c connotation of ‘judgment’ is entirely omitted” (ibid.). 11. Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought (ed. Frank E. Manuel; London: Souvenir, 1965), 26. 1

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If the society the utopian writer of Chronicles looks at were to be the world of perceived historical facts of Kings, then the element thought to be slightly more signi¿cant about Solomon is building the temple, with his wisdom taking second place.12 The Chronicler might be inspired to choose to focus on this speci¿c aspect or a pre-existing account because of circumstances in his empirical reality. No easy conclusion can be drawn though: if Chronicles were indeed a utopia that functions as we expect a utopia to function—by juxtaposition of a ¿ctional better world to a less ideal real world—then the Chronicler might depict an ideal king who “does” more than he “thinks.” If these texts contain elements of world-juxtaposition to be understood by its intended readers, maybe “thinking,” wisdom, learning, was already deemed present among the literati, but hands-on action was not, so that the wise, gritty Solomon was rewritten according to popular discursive needs. Some utopias were written as calls to action, some were written as thought games, but if an author is not available to comment on whether a utopia was meant as satire, call to action, or thought game, it is easy to misjudge this aspect about a utopian text.13 Lacking such statements by the creator of a utopia, it will be dif¿cult for a reader far removed in time to judge the utopia’s intention. Some utopias, especially contemporary ones, are scathing critiques of circumstances already present in contemporary society and may contain an urgent warning to keep an eye on and raise awareness of these issues.14 The meaning and mechanisms we are trying to trace with the help of the concept of utopia are located somewhere between Kings, the focused 12. Roddy L. Braun, “Solomonic Apologetic in Chronicles,” JBL 92 (1973): 503. Roddy L. Braun, “Solomon, the Chosen Temple Builder: The Signi¿cance of 1 Chronicles 22, 28, and 29 for the Theology of Chronicles,” JBL 95 (1976): 581. 13. Uhlenbruch, Nowhere Bible, 49. Cited there, are statements by two writers of utopias about whether their utopia was intended as a call to action or not. B. F. Skinner reports that his Walden Two was meant as quite a serious proposal but was mostly misunderstood as satire, in B. F. Skinner, “Utopia as an Experimental Culture,” in America as Utopia (ed. Kenneth M. Roemer; New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1981), 29. Edward Bellamy, on the other hand, reports that his Looking Backward, which contributed to a social reform movement, was not actually intended to inspire hands-on action towards social change, but was rather meant as a thought experiment in Edward Bellamy, “How and Why I Wrote Looking Backward,” in Roemer, ed., America as Utopia, 22. 14. One example of an especially dire contemporary dystopia, which lacks the powerful aspects of rebellion and change for the better of most mainstream contemporary Young Adult Dystopias, was written by Louise O’Neill after working in the fashion industry: Only Ever Yours (London: Quercus, 2014).

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utopianized version of Kings in Chronicles, and the empirical reality surrounding the utopianizer, that is, the Chronicler. Moving slightly away from speculations about possible utopian propensities, in what follows I discuss world-building and functions of literary characters in utopia. Having read both Utopia by Thomas More and 2 Chr 1–9 it is possible to say that Chronicles-Solomon has more than a few characteristics in common with Utopus, founder and builder of Thomas More’s island. Utopus creates an island: He “brought the rude and uncivilized inhabitants into such a good government, and to that measure of politeness, that they now far excel all the rest of mankind.” Utopus is part of the origin myth of utopia. The thriving society that is endorsed by protagonist Hythloday is something that only took its fully developed shape much later. Solomon creates a temple for Yahweh’s chosen people who already “far excel all the rest of mankind.” The building in both cases brings about a kingdom with a utopian-like governmental system, in Chronicles something like a theocracy under Yahweh (if only for the duration of a few verses), in Utopia something like a proto-socialist utopia. What is the function of the character of Utopus and can we make any statements derived from it about the function of the utopianized Solomon in Chronicles? The characters function as follows: Utopus is a ¿ctional character, who, in the narrated world of Utopia, is already receded into (Utopia’s ¿ctional) history books. He is the world-builder of Utopia, not the current reigning governor, and not a currently reigning governor in the world of More’s initial readers. In the world of the Chronicler the situation must have been analogous. Solomon was a legendary character, already receded into history recorded in texts read by a community. Both Utopus and Solomon are absent, invisible15 world-builders of worlds that are symbolically juxtaposed with the real world. As mentioned above, the meaning of Utopia is not the ¿ctional world described in a given utopian setting, but rather what happens between the ¿ctional setting and those who read the story about it. Thus, with regard to Chronicles-Solomon, it might be possible to say: the utopia is not just

15. Stuart Lasine shows how invisible or ungraspable Solomon is in his Knowing Kings, Chapter 6, especially from p. 135. Other characters speak much, Solomon does not. No back story about him is offered. He appears mainly as the templebuilder; David’s hand, so to say, who cannot build the temple himself. “All that’s left for Solomon is to ‘arise and do.’” Lasine, Knowing Kings, 136.

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the temple, it is what happens between the temple and those who read the Chroniclers’ story about Solomon and the temple. Solomon is a world-builder, he builds a temple with appropriate cults, diplomatic relationships (Huram of Tyre; the Queen of Sheba), governance, hierarchy, decorum; he establishes a home, a shrine, a center. But in a utopian reading the description of such achievements is not the main point; in utopia meaning is created because the narrated world is not experienced by the audience. Chronicles focuses on Solomon the temple builder, yet it and he are utopian: a game of being and not-being, governing and being governed, temple-building and temple-destruction, being in the future and being in the past. If the story about Solomon the temple builder is read in an empirical reality of non-dominance, of no shining Solomon unequivocally supported by uni¿ed all-Israel, then this story is not about building a perfect structure, but rather about not-building. The utopia is nowhere seen in reality; in this lacking reality, it exists only in a text, highlighting the reduced possibilities of empirical reality. Utopia is, in Jameson’s words “a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality,…in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simpli¿cation which we will henceforth term world-reduction.”16 In a utopian or science ¿ction reading, the Solomon of Chronicles together with his reader who does not see his shining ¿gure and a shining temple in contemporary reality, Solomon is not a world-builder so much as a world-reducer, focusing reality on what the Chroniclers thought it lacked: cohesion, dominance, a center, and a direct relationship with a utopian deity. 2. Queen of Sheba Utopian King Solomon receives a utopian traveler when he is visited by the Queen of Sheba, the gender-bending Raphael Hythloday to his General Utopus. Raphael Hythloday—Raphael ‘Knowing about Nonsense’ as his name translates—narrates in great detail and following an encyclopaedic structure a paradigmatic-seeming society. All societal aspects deemed important are described in neatly titled sections, such as “Of their towns” 16. Fredric Jameson, “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 3 (1975). Cited 1 February 2015. Online: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/7/jameson7art.htm.

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or “Of their traf¿c.” This creates an effect that is uniquely utopian and has been criticized many times, especially by anti-utopians or in dystopias: the narrated world appears Àat, boring, and static, mainly because divergences from the narrated situation are not reported.17 The impression evoked, if one were to judge a utopia too quickly, would be that the utopia’s author is endorsing a completely uniform society, in which everyone follows robotically what everyone else does and has been doing in exactly the same way ever since the ¿ctional republic was founded. Assuming that it were legitimate to read a small passage from 2 Chronicles as a utopia, what Japhet writes about 2 Chr 9:3–4 rings true: “What the queen saw in Jerusalem, and the impression it made, are described in great detail.”18 Given the relatively concise style of much biblical narrative, the impressions of the traveling queen are indeed described in comparatively great detail: When the Queen of Sheba saw how wise Solomon was and the palace he had built, the fare of his table, the seating of his courtiers, the service and attire of his attendants, his butlers and their attire, and the procession with which he went up to the House of the Lord, it took her breath away. (2 Chr 9:3–4, NJPS)

Note, though, that this is not the socialist everyman’s utopia we come to expect from the genre of utopia. Solomon’s wisdom is alluded to, and in a utopian socialist reading the butlers, attendants, and procession are paradigmatic utopian stand-ins for the general population. An attempted utopian reading of these verses can yield different outcomes: the attendants and butlers are an intrusion of the everyday person into a courtly romance. They are also backdrop to a courtly romance if one did not ask for their perspective to be included. Who does the story ask us (or an ancient reader?) to identify with? The glamour—the king, the queen—or the below-stairs? The answer to this question can be genre-making, as I will demonstrate below in more detail. But the issue also links in with the unanswerable question from above. What is the purpose of this passage-as-utopia? In a call-to-action the message of this passage to its intended readers could be: “in an ideal kingdom, even servants are well-dressed, included, present, well-behaved (this means you, average person!).” But it might also be just a poetic detail, shaping a courtly story of high romance told to an audience that has to ¿nd a narrative strategy to portray itself as chosen while experiencing a disappointing reality. 17. For divergence as the norm, it pays off to turn to the genre of dystopia— these narratives are most often concerned with those who ¿nd themselves questioning the system, or for some reason “outside” of it. 18. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 635. 1

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With regard to gender a contemporary utopian reading of the encounter between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon might and/or might not work. Claudia Camp says that the Queen of Sheba is Woman Wisdom, come to test Solomon. His wisdom equals hers. This could be a utopian and a non-utopian cipher. Only in some utopias the utopian traveler travels to Utopia on purpose. Often, the traveler stumbles upon the strange space and gets to know it progressively. However, most utopias (unlike some science ¿ction) are optimistic that communication between the traveler and the newly encountered society and its members is quite easily possible. One might say: the traveler’s wisdom matches the utopian host’s wisdom. Utopian travelers are estranged sometimes, but they are insightful and overcome their xenophobia (if they even experience any) and are met in a friendly way. In a utopia the visiting protagonists have to be if not loveable, at least not negative characters: they are the representative of the average-Joe (or average-Jane, see below) reader; their function in the narrative is to ask those questions the reader would ask the proposer of the utopian society. Since the traveler is the reader-representative of the reader who is ultimately the addressee of the utopian proposal for societal change, utopia portrays the home society as being worth the effort: capable and intelligent enough to change for the better. Interesting and puzzling with regard to gender is that utopian protagonists are often male. The three protagonists of the feminist utopia Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are male, and also the protagonist of The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin, though the protagonists of the feminist utopia Mizora (1880/81) by Mary E. Bradley Lane and Xenogenesis (also known by the title Lilith’s Brood; 1987–89) by Octavia Butler are female. There will be more examples on both sides, but the general tendency seems to be a male utopian traveler protagonist. In utopia, I would venture to propose—if the utopian traveler is read as a representative of the home society, the traveler is often male because the society from which he travels to utopia is/was white and male. The presence of a black female traveler in 2 Chronicles can probably be read as either empowering if we so choose, or dismissing. The positive reading would be that the utopian traveler is seen as a fairly positive representative of their society, who will be in charge of bringing back knowledge to initiate a change for better; a leader character, an adventurer, an open-minded, curious person, who is respected both in her home society as well as in the society she visits. The reader will identify with her and marvel vicariously through her at the splendour of the ideal king. Another reading, as it were: if you see yourself, that is, your home society as a woman, already equipped with knowledge, riches and splendours of her own (“…came to Jerusalem to

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test Solomon with hard questions, accompanied by a very large retinue, including camels bearing spices, a great quantity of gold, and precious stones,” 2 Chr 9:1), who is bedazzled by the much greater riches of the king that she can only aspire to be—would this not require a utopian reading that would tell the intended reader that they are best represented by a “frail” woman who believes her riches to equal those of the ideal male, but is foolishly mistaken? One question this passage raises is whether a statement by the queen indicates her conversion (the NT answers this positively in Luke 11:31 and Matt 12:42). “Sheba praises Solomon’s God but it is not clear that she renounces her own religious traditions or converts to Solomon’s.”19 Does she convert, then? Does she surrender what is unique about herself to the ideal? Is she the home society representative if this utopia is meant to inspire action? Is she meant to inspire vicarious action or is she just part of a beautiful reinforcing conversion story about how powerful the religion of the intended readership is? If the queen is a home society representative, then she converts and abandons her old beliefs: in utopias the traveler often nearly worships the new system. The travelers are enthusiastic converts to it, once they learn everything about it, and vow to bring back their insights to their home society and initiate changes for the better there. If the queen is just a plot feature to underline an ideal king—not necessarily a utopian king—it might be suf¿cient for the story if she praises Solomon’s god to add an element of outside veneration to the validation of Solomon’s regime. The Queen of Sheba in this snippet could be read as a utopian traveler, but again, conclusions do not come easily. In this utopian pastiche of Solomon’s fairy-tale-like riches and wisdom, the Queen of Sheba can be read as the readership-representative within the story. She is somebody who is as removed from the utopian state as the reader, and equally dazzled and inspired by incredible wisdom and wealth. Her conversion to Solomon’s faith might make the story more utopian; just praising, not converting, lessens its utopian-ness somewhat. 3. Solomon the Science-Fiction/Fantasy King One intriguing question to pose to the ancient text concerns the authority of the “history” of Kings. Ben Zvi says that the Chronicler tested the boundaries of what was considered a ¿xed fact of the past. The

19. Alice Ogden Bellis, “The Queen of Sheba: A Gender-Sensitive Reading,” JRT 51, no. 2 (1995): 17. 1

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Chronicler re-coded even ¿xed facts by adding, omitting, and transforming.20 While perceived historical facts are not changeable, the narrative that surrounds them is, but against changed surroundings the facts may actually appear changed. In modern literary criticism genres are differentiated by the construction of the narratives surrounding such facts. The same basic storyline can easily turn into science ¿ction, utopia, horror, fantasy, or fairy tale depending on how the storyline is integrated into the narrated world. Eric Rabkin’s21 nuanced investigation about the fantastic in literature takes into account the context established by an author in a text and the expectations with which a reader approaches the text. Fairy tales, for example, should not be considered fantasy literature, according to Rabkin, because between the narrated world and the reader’s expectations when reading a fairy tale, a talking wolf is entirely not unexpected.22 However, if a talking wolf would appear in a narrated world that generally operates according to more realistic principles, it would appear to be fantastic. Another example of basic story tenets staying the same in changed narrative surroundings comes from Suvin. He is actually speaking about fantasy being an impure genre, how it plays with narrated worlds versus empirical worlds, but his example illustrates changed narrated surroundings well: “Gogol’s Nose is so interesting because it is walking down the Nevski Prospect, with a certain rank in the civil service, etc.; if the Nose were in a completely fantastic world—say H. P. Lovecraft’s—it would be just another ghoulish thrill.”23 The fact that a wolf can talk does not really surprise Little Red Riding Hood (nor is the protagonist of “The Nose” surprised that his nose has left—only annoyed and inconvenienced, it seems). Were Little Red Riding Hood a character in a Lovecraftian horror universe, the talking wolf-monster might just make her lose her little red riding hood in the same indescribable horror that routinely prevents Lovecraft’s protagonists from going into too much gory detail. The story feature I would like to engage to try the theory that facts can stay but narrative changes so facts are changed, is Solomon’s theophany at Gibeon. In 1 Kgs 3:5 and 3:15 Solomon’s theophany at Gibeon is described (twice) as a dream. The same event in 2 Chr 1 is not described as a dream: “That night, God appeared to Solomon” (2 Chr 1:7). Sara 20. Ben Zvi, “One Size Does Not Fit All,” 21. 21. Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). 22. Ibid. 23. Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34, no. 3 (1972): 376.

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Japhet writes: “How signi¿cant this point is for the Chronicler’s religious outlook is dif¿cult to say, as no further dreams appear in his sources; the Chronicler himself makes no reference to dreams anywhere in his book.”24 The change from the doubled insistence of 1 Kings that Solomon’s theophany occurs in a dream to 2 Chronicles, where there is no such hedging, is a change in the game rules of the narrated world of the past. This change can make 2 Chronicles more fantastic, more utopian, and less realistic. The fact that God communicates with Solomon is not changed, but the narrative world is, by the omission of the mentioning of the dream. If we presuppose a readership used to the narrated, gritty, threedimensional world of 1 Kings, in which Solomon dreams about talking to God—something that can surely happen to everyone—to 2 Chronicles, where we can speculate that God appears to Solomon in something that is not necessarily a dream, this might strike the trained reader of historical fact in Kings as possibly more fantastic; and if not as more fantastic, then de¿nitely as more open to interpretation and reÀection. By adjusting the surrounding narrative ¿xed facts can suddenly be presented within a loftier genre—maybe utopia, maybe fantasy, maybe something like symbolism, or allegory—the formerly closed past is signi¿cantly more available for re-appropriation and re-interpretation. Maybe in a call-to-action utopian sense, the story is suddenly less of a sober account of a communal past, but with the right interpretation and re-appropriation becomes a metaphor for a shining future. If the story in general is opened up towards being seen as more open to interpretation, call to action, metaphor by allegory, this can easily happen through small signals, like leaving out the rational explanation that Solomon had a fanciful dream. If small signals change the game rules of the narrated world ever so slightly, even those passages which do not differ signi¿cantly are now part of a narrated world with different rules. The lavish description of Solomon’s temple, which stresses gold and precious stones over verses and verses appearing in a more fantastic or utopian world reminds one of exaggerated riches of fairy tale worlds—those old yet somehow timeless archetypical genres that are so strikingly wide open to contemporary reinterpretation (cf. e.g., the recent inÀux in fairy tale remakes—Into the Woods, Once Upon a Time, Snow White and the Huntsman, Male¿cent etc. etc.—with a recognizable framework but a lot darker to match the trendy dystopian look). Maybe something similar happened here.

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24. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 530.

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4. Pastiche and the Bible Assessing what has been observed so far: there seems to be a generally utopian overhaul of Kings, in which one can recognize some traits of utopia, and some hints that there may have been a genre-changing operation going on, enabling a re-appropriation of what may have been perceived as historical fact. I am not the only one who struggles with seeing the blurry reÀections of Solomon or the Queen of Sheba in these texts. Stuart Lasine writes that maybe the stories about the hidden, elusive Solomon are “encouraging a variety of subjective responses to the texts.”25 Second Chronicles might be a revamped version of utopia—one that had to be amended in one or more ways: x To ¿t a new reality: Little Red Riding Hood ¿lms no longer feature a cute little girl and an actor dressed up in a wolf costume; the fairy tale is made into a horror story to match contemporary fashion, sensibilities, and markets; maybe Chronicles’ Solomon was not deemed ¿t for a particular reality anymore, so made open to interpretation again. x To make the utopia a call to action: if the past account were seen as ¿xed, the reader would not deem change to the past possible; if the story is made more eternal, symbolic-seeming, more fantastic, there is more space for interpretation and more space for being called to action in contemporary reality by it. x To make the utopia a discouragement of action: by overemphasizing some larger-than-life features, this also removes the shining royal from realistic attainability. Updating the past in such a way might also convey a message of all the rest just being inspirational symbols, not a call to action, just a thought-game encouraging patience while circumstances outside were less than ideal. I agree with Lasine, who writes: Solomon appears one way in Kings and another in Chronicles, not to mention the variety of different ways he appears to different commentators. Are these varying images of Solomon also a function of the observer’s “momentary mood” (or ideology, or hermeneutical habits)? Scholars would not like to say so. Yet if the texts describe the king in such a way that the “real” Solomon (both the literary Solomon and the historical personage) remains invisible, it is unlikely that any academic attempt to bracket out subjective factors will produce an “objective” portrait of the king.26 25. Lasine, Knowing Kings, 139 (emphasis original). 26. Ibid.

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Made up of all these parts—Kings, Chronicles, scholarly commentaries—Solomon is a pastiched king in the contemporary imagination. John Van Seters writes: “It takes no more than a moment’s reÀection to realize that imitation plays a major role in the creation of literary works and objects of art everywhere and in all ages.”27 He says that this is certainly true also for the Bible. But, “the problem in the Hebrew Bible lies in the anonymity of its authors (as compared with Greek authors), which makes direction of dependence more dif¿cult to decide, but that does not mean that literary dependence did not exist.”28 Let the mind of a contemporary reader be the place where the intertextuality exists synchronically, independently of a “direction of dependence.” “Consciously or unconsciously,” Lasine writes, “readers make choices concerning the genre of the text they are reading. In so doing, they expand the intertextual matrix of their reading by linking the text with biblical and extrabiblical literature that is perceived as belonging to the same genre.”29 This results in a constantly Àuctuating text, because the genre a reader chooses for the text can change quickly: a text can be swapped from history to fairy tale to fantasy easily and as subtly as by removing a reference to a dream. It is possible that this does not reÀect messiness or relativism, but that it is actually one of the few reliable statements we can possibly make about the Bible and biblical interpretation in the contemporary plus ancient worlds. It is always changing and will not stay the same for even a moment. The family resemblance approach is a heuristic device of sorts. The family resemblances though are not static, especially not in my test passage. I found it hard to make up my mind about whether the conclusion is, yes 2 Chr 1–9 looks a lot like utopia—or no, there are too many discontinuities, too many factors that can swing either way. I think the key is that it actually is all-at-once, not just for the contemporary reader or scholar, but possibly even for the ancient community, because—to complicate matters: “This social memory is neither the Chronistic nor the Deuteronomistic narrative but what was in the mind of the members of the community that read both of them.”30

27. John Van Seters, “Creative Imitation in the Hebrew Bible,” 6, presidential address to the Candian Society of Biblial Studies, 2000 [cited 2 February 2015]. Online: ccsr.ca/csbs/2000prez.pdf. 28. Ibid., 7. 29. Lasine, Knowing Kings, 143. 30. Ben Zvi, “Utopias, Multiple Utopias, and Why Utopias at All?,” 23. 1

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Hence, I want to close by proposing to read the text hermeneutically as a cyborg, as a “whole” made up of parts. The story happens between two accounts and their many readers. Ben Zvi speaks about the ancient community in late Persian or early Hellenistic times of course. This can be expanded to include modern readers, too, scholars and believers alike. What can be seen in the test passage is what appears to be pastiche, something that uses a seemingly random assortment of well-known styles.31 Jameson, we remember, wrote that “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.”32 This is not what happens literally between Kings and Chronicles. Ehud Ben Zvi, for example, observes that Chronicles tends to update the language of Kings and uses Late Biblical Hebrew, not Standard Biblical Hebrew. But still: “Segments of various biblical portions are employed in an anthological mosaic.”33 Whereas a mosaic seems to imply crafting stunning art from small pieces, pastiche carries a connotation of irony, of satire, of being very aware that old material is recycled, and quite possibly of an intention to deface, desacralize the old by attacking it, and smashing it up and back together violently. While Kings plus Chronicles may have made up a mosaic, today the combination of Kings plus Chronicles plus modern styles becomes pastiche in a post-secular environment in which academic disciplines like Biblical Studies are struggling for survival. In the mind of a contemporary reader, the Bible is very much and quite literally “speech in a dead language,” whether one speaks about Hebrew or translations like the KJV, which to some readers might be familiar only because comic book villains are known to speak in KJV citations.34 The Bible generates arbitrary and disjointed associations that could not be direct linear inÀuences: “…pastiche plays with our fantasies, teases us and changes shape before we can pin any meaning on it. Ambiguity and ambivalence prevail.”35

31. “Or is it only modern historical scepticism, a modern unwillingness to suspend disbelief when reading imperial propaganda, and modern uneasiness with social strati¿cation and national service programs that make the Solomon of 1 Kgs 4–10 seem unbelievable or condemnable and his depiction ironic?” Lasine, Knowing Kings, 144. 32. Jameson, Postmodernism, 17. 33. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 537. 34. See Dan Clanton, “Graphic Novel,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 10 (ed. D. C. Allison; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 821–24. 35. Myra Macdonald, Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media (London: Arnold, 1995), 114.

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Sara Japhet writes, that “one of the book’s [Chronicles] most conspicuous features, [is] its heterogeneity, which attracts the reader’s attention on ¿rst reading.” Style, language, modes of writing, genres, differences between historical records and lists, are “found by some scholars to be irreconcilable in one author and to suggest different author-personalities from the outset.”36 This, too, sounds very much like pastiche, even ancient pastiche. Rather than being as pessimistic as Jameson about pastiche being a random assortment of known styles which loses all its meaning, I would want to counter with Donna Haraway37 and propose to embrace this text as an incorporated cyborg: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of ¿ction.” 38 I believe this is true not only for Chronicles, but for most of the Bible in today’s world. It is a hybrid of a book once organically grown, now engineered and poked at by the machine of academia. It exists in social reality, and it exists in the realm of ¿ction. “Cyborg reproduction is uncoupled from organic reproduction.”39 I can bring a modern theory—utopian theory—to the text and produce a cyborg text, not at all organically grown, but fabricated from the juxtaposition of a modern idea with an ancient text. And, as with Haraway, “This chapter [this essay] is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”40 The cyborg, Haraway writes, “is wary of holism, but needy for connection.”41 By ¿rst disconnecting the biblical text from a linear chronology, then re-connecting it with contemporary theory and unexpected intertextualities we are creating an astonishing and very lively cyborg text—an ancient text supplemented with modern associations, questions, and techniques. Bibliography Bellamy, Edward. “How and Why I Wrote Looking Backward.” Pages 22–27 in America as Utopia. Edited by K. M. Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1981. Bellis, Alice Ogden. “The Queen of Sheba: A Gender-Sensitive Reading.” JRT 51, no. 2 (1995): 17–28.

36. Japhet, I & II Chronicles, 5. 37. Donna Jeanne Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), 149. 38. Ibid., 150. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. (my emphases). 41. Ibid. 1

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Ben Zvi, Ehud. “One Size Does Not Fit All: Observations on the Different Ways That Chronicles Dealt with the Authoritative Literature of Its Time.” Pages 13–35 in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles? Edited by E. Ben Zvi and D. V. Edelman. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011. ———. “Utopias, Multiple Utopias, and Why Utopias at All? The Social Roles of Utopian Visions in Prophetic Books Within Their Historical Context.” Pages 55–85 in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Edited by E. Ben Zvi. Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Braun, Roddy L. “Solomonic Apologetic in Chronicles.” JBL 92 (1973): 503–16. ———. “Solomon, the Chosen Temple Builder: The Signi¿cance of 1 Chronicles 22, 28, and 29 for the Theology of Chronicles.” JBL 95 (1976): 581–90. Clanton, Dan. “Graphic Novel.” Pages 821–24 in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 10. Edited by D. C. Allison, C. Helmer, T. Römer, C.-L. Seow, B. D. Wal¿sh, and E. Ziolkowski. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Frye, Northrop. “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” Pages 25–49 in Utopias and Utopian Thought. Edited by F. E. Manuel. London: Souvenir, 1965. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Pages 149–81 in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. ———. “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative.” Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 3 (1975). Online: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/ backissues/7/jameson7art.htm. Japhet, Sara. I & II Chronicles: A Commentary. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1993. Lasine, Stuart. Knowing Kings: Knowledge, Power, and Narcissism in the Hebrew Bible. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001. Macdonald, Myra. Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. London: Arnold, 1995. O’Brien, J., and D. Wong. Why People Born After 1995 Can’t Understand the Book “1984.” The Cracked Podcast. Online: http://www.cracked.com/podcast/whypeople-born-after–1995-cant-understand-book–1984/. O’Neill, Louise. Only Ever Yours. London: Quercus, 2014. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Skinner, B. F. “Utopia as an Experimental Culture.” Pages 28–42 in America as Utopia. Edited by K. M. Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin & Co, 1981. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. ———. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34, no. 3 (1972): 372–82. Uhlenbruch, Frauke. The Nowhere Bible: Utopia, Dystopia, Science Fiction. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Van Seters, John. “Creative Imitation in the Hebrew Bible.” Presidential address to the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, 2000. Cited 2 February 2015. Online: ccsr.ca/csbs/2000prez.pdf.

Part II

AFTER EXILE, UNDER EMPIRE: UTOPIAN IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS IN EZRA–NEHEMIAH AND CHRONICLES

1

EXILE, EMPIRE, AND PROPHECY: REFRAMING UTOPIAN CONCERNS IN CHRONICLES* Steven J. Schweitzer

In my previously published work1 and in several presentations, I have used the methodology of utopian literary theory to assist in reading the book of Chronicles and the book of Ezra–Nehemiah. In this essay, I will be approaching how Chronicles conveys its utopia with attention to three speci¿c concerns—the exile, the empire, and the role and function of prophecy—using this same interpretive lens. I will ¿rst summarize brieÀy key aspects of this perspective as I understand it, and then move into a discussion of these concerns in Chronicles. Utopian literary theory is an approach developed over the last four decades by scholars whose primary areas of research are utopian and dystopian literature and science ¿ction. The terms utopian and dystopian are related to the broader concept of utopianism, which seems the more appropriate point of departure for clarifying the scope of these two * This essay originated as two presentations, one in the Chronicles–Ezra– Nehemiah Section at the SBL Annual Meeting in Baltimore, November 24, 2013, and the other in a special session on Utopia and Chronicles at the European Association of Biblical Studies Meeting, held at the University of Wien in Vienna, Austria, July 8, 2014. 1. Steven J. Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles (LHBOTS 442; London: T&T Clark International, 2007); idem, “The Genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9: Purposes, Forms, and the Utopian Identity of Israel,” in Chronicling the Chronicler: The Book of Chronicles and Early Second Temple Historiography (ed. P. Evans and T. Williams; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 9–27; idem, “Judging a Book by Its Citations: Sources and Authority in Chronicles,” in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles? (ed. E. Ben Zvi and D. Edelman; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 37–65; idem, “Exploring the Utopian Space of Chronicles: Some Spatial Anomalies,” in Constructions of Space I: Theory, Geography, and Narrative (ed. J. L. Berquist and C. V. Camp; LHBOTS 481; London: T&T Clark International, 2007), 141–56; idem, “Utopia and Utopian Literary Theory: Some Preliminary Observations,” and “Visions of the Future as Critique of the Present: Utopian and Dystopian Images of the Future in Second Zechariah,” in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Texts (ed. E. Ben Zvi; Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 92; Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 2006), 13–26 and 249–67.

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adjectives. Utopianism is the representative label for three manifestations: (1) as the literary genre of utopia; (2) as an ideology through which the world is viewed; and (3) as a sociological movement that writes utopias.2 Thus, just as biblical scholars now restrict the designation of “apocalypse” to a literary genre, but are willing to discuss the “apocalyptic” content of a text composed in the milieu of “apocalypticism” by a community or individual, so a similar distinction must be made when the terms “utopia,” “utopian,” and “utopianism” are employed.3 This precision allows for the reading of “utopian” content in a work that would not typically be classi¿ed as a “utopia” proper by generic considerations. The same nuances obviously apply to the three inverse terms “dystopia,” “dystopian,” and “dystopianism.” It is also worth emphasizing that utopia and dystopia are relative and subjective terms: one person’s or community’s utopia is another’s dystopia, and vice versa. One must always ask: A utopia for whom? A dystopia for whom? “Utopia” is itself, of course, the name of the ¿ctional remote island created by Thomas More in his famous work of the same name. The word, like many names in his text, is Greek in origin and was, most likely, used because of its meaning.4 However, the literal meaning of 2. See the highly inÀuential works by Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism,” Minnesota Review 7, no. 3 (1967): 222–30; idem, “Utopia: The Problem of De¿nition,” Extrapolation 16 (1975): 137–48; idem, “Eutopias and Dystopias in Science Fiction: 1950–75,” in America as Utopia (ed. K. M. Roemer; New York: Burt Franklin, 1981), 347–66; idem, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37; idem, “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Costs of Eutopia,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (ed. R. Baccolini and T. Moylan; New York: Routledge, 2003), 225–31; idem, “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations,” in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (ed. R. Schaer, G. Claeys, and L. T. Sargent; New York: New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2000), 8–17. This understanding made an immediate change in utopian studies as evidenced by the de¿nition’s complete acceptance by Kenneth M. Roemer, “De¿ning America as Utopia,” in Roemer, ed., America as Utopia, 1–15. 3. As mentioned, biblical scholars will recognize that these same classi¿cations have been employed by Paul D. Hanson to address the nature of “apocalyptic”: literary genre, worldview, and social movement lying behind the production of such literature (“Apocalypticism,” IDBSup: 28–34); cf. John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20. While having other dif¿culties, Hanson’s distinctions have aided in the further exploration and, at times, complete reversal of previous thinking and associations of the term. A similar phenomenon can be found in the critical literature on utopianism. 4. See, e.g., the comments by Eugene D. Hill, “The Place of the Future: Louis Marin and his Utopiques,” Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 167–79, esp. 173–74. 1

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“Utopia” is not obvious. It is both the “good place” (eutopia) and “no place” (ou topia). This ambiguity has provided the basis for subsequent studies of utopias.5 The imagined place is both idealized and does not exist in reality. Thus, “utopian” has come to mean “fanciful,” “fantastic,” “impossible,” and “unrealizable.” However, it can also mean “visionary,” “ideal,” “better-than-the-present,” and “an alternative reality.” The tension between these understandings of the adjective is essential to interpreting utopian literature and should not be readily dismissed in favor of one or the other connotations. In terms of its temporal location, it is clear that utopia is not necessarily a future place.6 That utopia does not have to be a future place, but can exist in the present (just as More’s island of Utopia does) eliminates an automatic equivalency between eschatology and utopia.7 It 5. See the scholarly literature cited and further discussion of this point in my doctoral dissertation, “Reading Utopia in Chronicles” (University of Notre Dame, 2005). 6. Often passed over without much thought is the fact that More’s famous island of Utopia existed contemporaneously with medieval England and that the lands of Euhemerus and Iambulus (in Diodorus Siculus 5.41.1–46.7; 2.55.1–60.3) were also contemporary societies with ancient Greece. Temporal distance is more typically invoked in Urzeit and Endzeit myths, such as the Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem or in Plato’s myth of the then 9,000-year-old Atlantis civilization (in Crit. 108e–115d and Tim. 23d–25d). Temporal displacement can be past or future depending on the individual utopian or dystopian work; and while spatial displacement towards the Other is very common (i.e., journeys to remote regions), it can also be articulated as the Other coming near (i.e., visitors from remote regions). 7. The following Greek texts have been discussed in light of their utopian content or as depictions of classical utopias: Hesiod’s Golden Age (in Theogony and Op. 109–180, 822–824); Homer’s societies of Phaeakia (in Od. Bks. 6–8), and the Ethiopians (in Il 1.423; 23.205; Od. 1.22; cf. the Lotus-eaters in Od. 9.83–104); Herodotus’s description of the Ethiopians (in Hist. 3.22–23); Plato’s Republic, Laws (esp. 3.702a-b), and his description of Atlantis (in Crit. 108e–115d and Tim. 23d– 25d); Xenophon’s Cyropaeida and Anabasis; the land of Meropis in Theopompus (in Strabo, Geogr. 7.3.6); the travel narratives of Euhemerus (in Diod. Sic. 5.41.1–46.7) and Iambulus (in Diod. Sic. 2.55.1–60.3); Hecataeus of Abdera’s On the Hyperboreans (in Diod. Sic. 2.47.1–6); Heliodorus’s Aethiopica; and Lucian’s Verae Historiae. Note that the societies depicted in these works are located in all three possible temporal relationships with the present: past, contemporary, and future. However, while such an association is not always the case, many of the constructions of society in utopian and dystopian terms that appear in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are in fact eschatological or future-oriented. Several texts or descriptions from the biblical corpus and works related to it have also been labeled “utopian”: the Garden of Eden (Gen 2); the eschatological visions of the prophets (esp. in Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Second Isaiah, Third Isaiah,

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is not the temporal placement of the utopia, but rather the depiction of the society which it aims to portray that is central. In fact, the organization and qualities of the society depicted are the one commonality between all works considered to be utopian in nature.8 Whatever else utopian literature may be, the term utopian describes a good society that is better than that of the author’s present, just as the term dystopian refers to a society that is worse than the present.9 As a recognized methodology in literary criticism, utopian theory is related to a number of contemporary literary theories, especially deconstructionism, sharing many of the same presuppositions regarding the means by which a text generates meaning. Of particular importance are the ideas of “neutralization” and “defamiliarization” or ostranenie.10 Second Zechariah); the Priestly Source of the Pentateuch; the “Jerusalem-theology” of the HB; the temple society of Ezek 40–48; the Christian community of Acts 2–4; the Letter of Aristeas; the Temple Scroll, the War Scroll, and New Jerusalem texts from Qumran; the description of the Essenes in Philo (Prob. 75–91; Hypoth. 11.1– 11.18 in Eusebius, Praep. ev. 8.6,1–7; 8:11,1–8) and in Josephus (Ant. 13.171–173; 18.18–22; B.J. 2.119–161); the description of the New Jerusalem in Rev 21:1–22:5; and Augustine’s De civitate Dei. Note the placement of these utopias in all three temporal frames as in the Hellenistic material, but with many more examples of eschatological, and particularly apocalyptic, scenarios. 8. Darko Suvin notes that utopias come in a variety of models and proposals, but all of them are organized; there are no disorganized utopias (Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], 50). 9. This conclusion is also partially demonstrated by the fact that a dystopia, the “bad” society and inverse of utopia, has the portrayal of an inherently “worse” society than the present situation as its common theme. The dystopia typically is depicted as the result of the logical extrapolation of present abuses or problems either in terms of their intensity or pervasiveness in the literary reality of the dystopian text. However, a dystopia may also be formed by the removal of key elements in the present society that either promote well-being or hope for the future. Thus, stripped of the good, society succumbs to its worst aspects, practices, and beliefs in the realization of a dystopia. See the comments by M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994), 18–20; Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview, 2000); and the essays in the volume Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (ed. R. Baccolini and T. Moylan; New York: Routledge, 2003). 10. These related ideas, long associated with Russian Formalism, are the backbone of deconstructionism. The gaps, seams, and inconsistencies of the text provide the place where a meaning can be constructed. On the relationship between utopian theory and deconstructionism, see, e.g., Roland T. Boer, Novel Histories: The Fiction of Biblical Criticism (Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1997), 104–68, esp. 109; 1

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In this view, utopian literature invites readers “to reconsider their notions of the normal and the familiar…[so that] one can safely assume that contemporary readers are particularly aware of the tensions and ambiguities observable in utopian visions. This emphasis on the provisional nature of all utopian systems encourages readers to employ their own utopian imagination.”11 In this light, the organizational structure of the utopia becomes a means of social critique, whether deriving ultimately from the reader or from the text, which constructs an alternative world that calls the present order into question at every turn. Indeed, in More’s Utopia—the central, but not only, text in de¿nitions of the literary genre of utopia—the island of Utopia exists as a better alternative reality ¿lled with critiques of More’s present social situation.12 The same is true for the various examples of Hellenistic utopian Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (ed. G. H. Taylor; New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 16–17; and Erin Runions, “Playing It Again: Utopia, Contradiction, Hybrid Space and the Bright Future in Micah,” in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation (ed. F. C. Black, R. T. Boer, and E. Runions; SemeiaSt 36; Atlanta: SBL, 1999), 285–300. The “singular relevance” of deconstructionism to utopian theory is noted by Hill (“Place of the Future,” 167). He also advocates, based on the landmark work by Louis Marin (Utopics: Spatial Play [trans. R. A. Vollrath; Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984]), the central place which neutralization and self-deconstruction holds in the ideology of the utopian text. Departing from Marin’s system, Hill returns to “authorial intention” as playing an important role in situating the ideology of the utopian text in its “ideological context.” This blending of more traditional “historicalcritical” analysis and contemporary literary theory, particularly reader-response, is common to most recent works in utopian theory, including that of Boer; cf. the claim that utopias and works of science ¿ction tend to be written in the context of “sudden whirlpools of history” which produce radical change that inÀuences the perspective of the authors according to Darko Suvin, “The Alternate Islands: A Chapter in the History of SF, with a Bibliography on the SF of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance,” Science Fiction Studies 10 (1983): 239–48, here 242. See also the inÀuential works by Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971– 1986. Vol. 2, The Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 75–101; repr. from diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977): 2–21; and Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. 11. Frank Dietz, “Utopian Re-visions of German History: Carl Amery’s An den Feuern der Leyermark and Stefan Heym’s Schwarzenberg,” Extrapolation 31 (1990): 24–35, here 33. 12. The relationship between alternative reality and historical present is well articulated by Northrop Frye: “The utopian writer looks at the ritual habits of his own society and tries to see what society would be like if these ritual habits were made more consistent and more inclusive” (“Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in

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literature, which include such examples as Hesiod’s “Golden Age” in Works and Days, the Republic of Plato, the depiction of Distant Lands in Homer, Herodotus, Theopompus, Hecataeus of Abdera, and Heliodorus, the Panchaeans in Euhemerus and the Island of the Sun in Iambulus, and the portrayal of Cyrus in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The importance of social critique in utopian literature is emphasized in recent critical theory as a means of reading such works not as blueprints for ideal societies, but rather as revolutionary texts designed to challenge the status quo and question the way things presently are being done. Thus, utopias depict the world “as it should be” not “why it is the way it is.” In other words, utopias are not works of legitimation (which provide a grounding for the present reality), but works of innovation (which suggest a reality that could be, if its parameters were accepted). Largely under the inÀuence of Marxism, utopias have traditionally been viewed negatively as literary works of oppression that restrict the “revolutionary” spirit as the powerful elite impose a system on the masses. Given the highly detailed organizational structures, especially hierarchical social pyramids, common to utopias, such a reaction is not surprising. However, the interrelationship between the utopian text and the reality against which it de¿nes its values has provided a means of assessing the “utopian ideology” of the text. This phrase, “utopian ideology,” is an oxymoron in Marxism, which distinguishes between the two concepts as opposites. Since, in the traditional Marxist system, ideology leads to revolution, while utopia is viewed as a vehicle for maintaining the status quo, Marxism has traditionally rejected utopia and favored ideology. However, from a literary critical perspective drawn from contemporary scholars working on utopian literature rather than utopian communities or communities founded on utopian principles, the typical Marxist de¿nitions of utopia and ideology are inadequate to account for the true nature of utopia: it is an ideology, and one which can be revolutionary in that it provides a strong social critique. Utopia is not opposed to ideology, but is an ideological position itself that can be identi¿ed in a text, a counterideology designed to question the present historical situation.13

Utopias and Utopian Thought [ed. F. E. Manuel; Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton MifÀin, 1966], 25–49; repr. in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970], 109–34, here 124). 13. This dichotomy is part of the heritage of Marx and Engels; cf. Lyman Tower Sargent, “Authority and Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought,” Polity 14 (1982): 565–84. 1

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This reassessment of utopian literature produces a signi¿cant byproduct: the utopian construct does not necessarily reÀect the historical situation of the author, that is, the author does not legitimize his present, but criticizes it by depicting the literary reality in terms not to be found in the author’s society. The utopian text does not reÀect historical reality, but future possibility. For example, attempting to ¿nd the structures of society from More’s Utopia in his contemporary England would produce a distorted view of England during this time period.14 However, to take More’s portrayal as the opposite or another view of constructing society, the problems of his contemporary English society (at least in More’s own view) would become accessible to the reader. In summary, the methodology of utopian literary theory contends that utopian literature functions as a rejection of the present status quo instead of a rigid blueprint for the present and unchanged future. It af¿rms that the portrayal of society in a work of utopian literature is a critique of the present situation by offering in its place a better alternative reality that is based on different principles than the current reality.15 Utopian images construct an alternative reality to the present, and reveal something about the ideological conÀict out of which a better or worse future is being articulated. Many scholars have observed that Chronicles is not an eschatological text, but one with deep concerns for the future of the community. I contend that this future-orientation of the book provides the reader with an alternative reality, one couched in the literary past, but calling out possibilities for new structures, systems, and perspectives on how the community should respond to the challenges of its day. In this way, the utopianism of Chronicles has a great deal in common with Ezekiel’s restored temple, the New Heavens and New Earth, the New Jerusalem, and the future anticipated by the Qumran community. However, while these other texts present their utopian ideology as future idealized visions, Chronicles presents its utopian future as an idealized portrayal set in Israel’s historical past, meant to provide alternative understandings of the present and address what the Chronicler perceives as pressing concerns for his audience. 14. This point is repeatedly made, with examples, by Sarah R. Jones, “Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ and Medieval London,” in Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630 (ed. R. Horrox and S. R. Jones; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117–35. 15. In a similar way, dystopian literature critiques the present by either rejecting certain practices of the contemporary society or highlighting a ¿xation on its baser elements, or both.

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Utopia After Exile The two exiles imposed on the people of Israel (the Assyrian deportation of 722/721 B.C.E. and the Babylonian exile of 587/586 B.C.E.) are depicted as catastrophic events in both the genealogies and narrative of Chronicles. “Unfaithfulness” (+3/) has produced these dystopias for the people. However, this is not the end of history, nor is it the end of Israel. Indeed, although the northern kingdom was still perceived to be in a state of exile at the time of the Chronicler (1 Chr 5:26), Chronicles suggests the possibility of a future return for these tribes (2 Chr 30:6–9). In the same regard, the Babylonian exile was not the end for the southern kingdom of Judah, but Chronicles presents it as only a temporary period of rest which “wiped the slate clean” to provide a new opportunity to rebuild a society that is not hindered by the failures of the past. Thus, in Chronicles, the land is empty during the exile (2 Chr 36:21), which disrupts the spatial-temporal lines of continuity with the past. The period of exile witnesses the cessation of the monarchy, the temple cult, the people’s dwelling in the land, and, at least by implication, the prophetic word. Cyrus’s decree at the conclusion of the book indicates that the temple will be rebuilt, the people will return to the land, and the prophetic voice and its ful¿llment are active once again. However, the only monarch mentioned is the Persian Cyrus, who speaks with a message from God and acts in obedience to it.16 The dystopian political organization of the past, under the Davidic kings, remains in the past. The future utopia in Chronicles will not necessarily be realized through the reestablishment of the Davidic dynasty. While the Chronicler holds out the possibility of a restored Davidic monarch, as evidenced by the Solomonic genealogy in 1 Chr 3:17–21 and the recounting of the Davidic covenant in 1 Chr 17, 28–29, there is nothing in Chronicles that requires the re-establishment of a Davidic ruler. Thus, the exile serves as a moment of discontinuity between the political system of the past and the 16. John W. Wright correctly notes that this assertion of direct divine communication by Cyrus is a “Solomonic claim” by the foreign ruler, but proceeds to state that “No assessment is made of the validity of this claim, however” (“Beyond Transcendence and Immanence: The Characterization of the Presence and Activity of God in the Book of Chronicles,” in The Chronicler as Theologian: Essays in Honor of Ralph W. Klein [ed. M. P. Graham, S. L. McKenzie, and G. N. Knoppers; JSOTSup 371; London: T. & T. Clark, 2003], 240–67, here 258). Yet, coupled with the Chronicler’s previous attribution of direct divine communication to Pharaoh Neco, the Chronicler’s assessment seems to af¿rm the claim by Cyrus and indeed heightens the prestige of Cyrus by recourse to a Solomonic parallel. 1

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present day, with temple and Torah as the two primary means by which to transcend this rupture and serve as sources of continuity with the hallowed past. Again, the exile serves as the spatial-temporal line of demarcation in Chronicles.17 The future cannot be the same as the past, nor is it a simple continuation of it. Much of the past is irrevocably lost (e.g., the temple vessels, the ark, and the borders of the Israelite nation) without any possibility of restoring these original conditions or items. Instead, adaptation in the face of historical change is the avenue to be pursued in the construction of a better alternative reality to the past and present. As I have argued in other publications, the Chronicler’s rejection of a single ideal time or condition in the past—that is, there is no one moment that is set up as the goal toward which the community seeks to recover and reshape itself—this rejection of a singular event or time in favor of multiple potential better constructs, opens up numerous possibilities for the future. This is particularly evident in the details of various cultic reforms. None is identical. Variation and adaptation are the keys to success, while under the guise of continuity to a utopian construct. So also with the political dimension: none of the judicial systems in Chronicles is identical nor is the spatial extent of Israel’s land consistent nor does the Davidic monarchy seem to have a particular function in the restoration society. The past should not be replicated, but its positive and negative lessons should be learned for living in the present and future. There is no blueprint for a future political utopia in Chronicles. Rather, Chronicles presents a better alternative reality that has a political dimension, but which focuses on the cult rather than political organization.18 In order to move his audience past the “trauma of exile,” the Chronicler mitigates the lasting repercussions and signi¿cance of that particular event. The exile is not eliminated from the retelling of Israel’s history, but it is recast. While in the Deuteronomistic History, the exile hangs as a shadow over all of the narrative and is itself the culmination to which that story has been leading, this focus is downplayed and rede¿ned in 17. This is a common device in Hellenistic utopian literature and in More’s Utopia for establishing a key point in the historical development of a utopian community. See the remarks about the exile’s relegation to an “interruption” in Chronicles by Knoppers (I Chronicles 1–9, 514; idem, I Chronicles 10–29, 889). 18. This makes Chronicles very different from Hellenistic utopian literature, which almost never discusses a utopia with cultic concerns as a key component of its political program. The exception to this is the political utopia with priests as the ¿nal authority in Euhemerus (in Diod. Sic. 5.42.5; 5.45.3b–5; 5.46.2–3).

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Chronicles. The exile is a fact, but not the ongoing reality for the Chronicler. The exile happened, but the community does not need to live as if it still suffers under its weight. The Chronicler is clear that the exile for the southern kingdom is over. Cyrus, through divine direction and intervention, brought it to an end. Through repentance, the northern tribes may be restored, but the southern tribes have already been brought back to the land. The books of Samuel and Kings are a “negative” history, of what not to do and how things fell apart, resulting in exile. As the people live in exile, this account both explains how the current trauma occurred and how to avoid it in the future. However, there is not much in Samuel and Kings to build on when that community has returned to the land and begins to recreate a society that is constructed to succeed (as opposed to not failing). Thus, the community has a new opportunity to create a new future, no longer shackled by the past and the “negative history” that the Deuteronomistic History had espoused, as it draws on the utopian principles from this new positive version of Israel’s history, the book of Chronicles. As a parallel to this marginalization of the exile, another minimization occurs in Chronicles concerning the exodus event. This signi¿cant moment both for Israel’s history and its theology is acknowledged in Chronicles, but without much focus or commentary. The exodus is not explicitly mentioned in genealogies in 1 Chr 1–9 and not in 1 Chr 2 (where one might expect it chronologically), as there are no narrative asides or other chronological markers that are linked to the event. While key individuals (such as Moses, Aaron, and Phineas) or objects (such as the tabernacle and its apparatus) are mentioned, they are invoked without reference to the exodus itself. Indeed, it is absent from the genealogical material and only appears very few times throughout the narratives which follow in the book of Chronicles. I want to outline quickly nine instances concerning the exodus in Chronicles. The ¿rst is the narrative comment that the Levites carried the ark as Moses had commanded (1 Chr 15:15). This, of course, occurred during the exodus, but it is not explicitly mentioned. Similarly, in 1 Chr 21:29, the text reports that Moses made the tabernacle in the wilderness, again without further development. Both of these texts are unique to Chronicles, but do not explicitly mention the exodus itself. However, in 2 Chr 20:10–11, part of the Chronicler’s Sondergut, Jehoshaphat’s prayer for deliverance from the current military threat recounts God’s previous command to leave these very nations alone when the people came from the land of Egypt. Now, these peoples are attacking, and Jehoshaphat recognizes that they are 1

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“powerless,” proclaiming “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” The prophetic word from the Levite Jahaziel, which immediately follows Jehoshaphat’s prayer for assistance, uses language from the crossing of the Sea in proclaiming that the “battle is not yours to ¿ght, but God’s” and that the people are to “stand still and see the victory of the LORD” (2 Chr 20:13–17). The people are victorious because of God’s intervention and their belief in the LORD and his prophets (so 2 Chr 20:20), and not due to military power against a signi¿cantly larger enemy army. The next four instances of the exodus in Chronicles have parallels in Samuel–Kings. First, David’s prayer to God (1 Chr 17:21) mentions Israel’s redemption out of Egypt, with the parallel in 2 Sam 7:23; second, the narrative statement that Moses put the tablets in the ark at Horeb, after God brought the people out of Egypt (2 Chr 5:10), with its parallel in 1 Kgs 8:9; third, Solomon’s prayer of dedication (2 Chr 6:5) mentions that God had brought the people out of Egypt with its parallel in 1 Kgs 8:16; and fourth, Solomon’s prayer following the dedication (2 Chr 7:22) again mentions God’s deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, with its parallel in 1 Kgs 9:9. In these texts, the Chronicler retains brief references to the exodus and all focus on God’s role in being the one who performed the act, similar to the event at the time of Jehoshaphat above. There are also two instances in which source material mentions the exodus and resulting wilderness wanderings, but Chronicles lacks that information. The ¿rst is in the composite song in 1 Chr 16, drawn from Pss 105, 96, 106, which constitutes the ¿rst formal worship in the book. While copying portions of each psalm and piecing them together to create something new, the Chronicler also deletes the references to the wanderings during the period of the exodus from those earlier works in choosing which parts have been recast into this new composition, now one without reference to the exodus. Second, the Chronicler does not mention the importance of the date of the building of temple in terms of the date of the exodus, as is done famously in 1 Kgs 6:1. This theologically signi¿cant moment in 1 Kings is linked directly to another theologically signi¿cant moment in Israel’s past, one which Chronicles fails to highlight. Thus, in the ¿rst worship described in the book and at the dedication of the temple, the exodus is absent. Thus, in the Chronicler’s utopia, the exodus has been minimized and its importance controlled. I believe this parallels the restricted nature of the exile in the book. That the exodus motif and the exile are linked in other books, such as the intimate and creative association in Second Isaiah, it may be that the Chronicler saw them as connected ideas, and so

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sought to restrict both the exodus and the exile in his work, to move the people beyond this exilic theology towards a better alternative reality that they should embrace. Utopia Under Empire By controlling the exile (and its corollary, the exodus), a dystopia is being overcome and the Chronicler can suggest a way forward. However, in this utopia, in contrast to the overthrow of the Egyptians as a result of the exodus, the foreign empire remains in control after the exile. The subjugation of Israel under a foreign power without an independent political system raises serious questions concerning the Chronicler’s advocacy of such prospects for the future, in his work composed sometime during the transitional fourth century B.C.E.19 Whether the foreign power from the fourth century B.C.E. in question is Persia or Greece is relevant to the discussion, but the answer does not alter the main points that I wish to make.20 Is political independence a necessity for utopia, or can utopia exist under an empire? If the Chronicler, as seems to be the case and argued by several recent scholars, fails to advocate the overthrow of or revolt against the imperial regime, then the implementation of a better alternative reality by the removal of the foreign power can only come through God’s action. The Chronicler may allow for such to happen, but this is not the primary message which he wishes to convey. The readers of Chronicles gain no insight into the process by which such events would occur. Instead, the Chronicler does provide evidence that the current power is to be accepted and dealt with for the bene¿t of the community, as they are the instruments of God at this time. God’s control of history is a central concern in Chronicles. If this present empire (whether Persian or Greek) should be overthrown by another, then that must be the will of God or a result of 19. The precise date of Chronicles is a matter of dispute, while there is broad agreement on the general window of the late fourth or early third century B.C.E. Apart from the complexity of the textual variants in the postexilic segment of the Solomonic genealogy in 1 Chr 3:17–24, there is nothing that requires dating the book past the transitional period from the Persian to Hellenistic eras (Gary Knoppers, 1 Chronicles 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AB 12; New York: Doubleday, 2004], 116; Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles, 3–5). 20. The issue of whether the late Persian period or early Hellenistic era is more probable will not be addressed here; cf. Section 1.1.2 on the date of Chronicles in Reading Utopia in Chronicles. The subject here is restricted to the issue of Israel’s subjugation to a foreign power as an ideological problem for a utopian construction of reality. 1

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God’s involvement in human affairs. However, the community is not to seek the overthrow of the foreign power, as their current situation is the will of God for them at this time. God provided the means to attain a utopia, a lasting utopia, by the actions of Cyrus and the Persian Empire.21 I will not recount here the arguments by many scholars in favor of viewing the restoration of the Davidic dynasty as unnecessary according to Chronicles, but rather af¿rm that the role and function of the monarch has shifted away from the Davidides to the Persian rulers and to the worship of God at the temple which they authorized. One is tempted to agree with Jonathan Dyck that if the Chronicler had been among those in the procession to greet Alexander the Great as recorded in Josephus (Ant. 11.326–339), the Chronicler would have been at the front leading the way for the arrival of this next instrument of God.22 The community’s obligation is to respond accordingly and take advantage of the situation in which they ¿nd themselves. Two passages are signi¿cant in this respect: Shishak’s invasion at the time of Rehoboam (2 Chr 12:7–12) and a section of Solomon’s prayer at the temple dedication (2 Chr 6:36–40). In the ¿rst, God allows Jerusalem to become temporarily subject to Egypt to instruct the Israelites in “the difference between serving [God] and serving the kingdoms of other lands” (2 Chr 12:8). This verse could be read as a reÀection by the Chronicler on the state of subjection to Persia (or Greece) in his own day. Such a reading would echo the perception of slavery to Persia expressed as a complaint in Neh 9:36–37. However, the Chronicler is quick to conclude the section on Shishak’s invasion with the comment that “conditions were good in Judah” (2 Chr 12:12). The conditions in this state of affairs were thus better and more desirable than those under most of the subsequent Davidic monarchs whose rules are viewed negatively, even though they were not subjected to foreign powers. Conditions can still be good—L&—even under empire, at least according to the Chronicler. 21. This assumes a Persian date for Chronicles, but is still valid for a Hellenistic date. The process begun under the Persians could continue under these new leaders. The point of departure for a new future in Chronicles is the exile and the promised restoration, not the subsequent shift in world powers. Compare the remark that “the effective political power of the day is not a matter of concern to the Chronicler” by Richard J. Coggins, “Theology and Hermeneutics in the Books of Chronicles,” in In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements (ed. E. Ball; JSOTSup 300; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999), 263–78, here 266. 22. Jonathan E. Dyck, The Theocratic Ideology of the Chronicler (BIS 33; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 3.

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In the second, Solomon concludes his prayer with a brief petition for God to forgive the people once they have repented in their state of punishment: an exile from the land (2 Chr 6:36–40). What Solomon does not say about the state of exile in this prayer is signi¿cant. If the Davidic–Solomonic era is an “ideal” state to which Israel should hope to return by replication, as many scholars have believed, then this would be an appropriate location for comments regarding the future restoration of the people from exile, of the temple complex, and of the Davidic dynasty. However, all that the text relates is that God should forgive them without specifying how that forgiveness would take practical form. Chronicles also lacks the line in 1 Kgs 8:50b–51 that God should cause their “captors” (-!' ˜ œ— f) to grant the people compassion. Perhaps the Chronicler wishes to avoid the possible labeling of the Persians (or Greeks) as “captors” who are holding the community as prisoners. Perhaps this is one additional way in which the Chronicler presents the foreign kings as the legitimate political authority in his utopian construction of reality. In the Chronicler’s opinion, the Persians (or Greeks) should not be compared to the Egyptians who held Israel in the “furnace of iron” (+ ˜$:’ C™ !™ :KV), as they are negatively described in that same text from 1 Kgs 8:50b–51. This, again, ¿ts nicely with the marginalization of the exodus in the book. Instead, similar to the main message in Second Isaiah, which also reworks the exodus tradition but in more explicit ways, the foreign empire is the divine agent through whom God is working to establish a better alternative reality for the community if they too will join in this process. If this position of tolerance by the Chronicler of foreign powers in his political utopia is accepted, then Chronicles has no direct political parallel in the utopian literature from antiquity. That the Hellenistic utopias should be independent city-states is not surprising given the Greek’s loathing of kings and propensity toward local autonomy.23 The vast majority of texts in the HB, NT, and Second Temple period reÀect the belief that either a Davidic descendant or God himself will rule over the chosen community. Perhaps the lone exception is the local Christian communities of the NT and of the book of Acts in particular.24 These utopian Christian communities accept—or are instructed to accept— 23. See the comments by Erich S. Gruen, “Introduction,” in Images and Ideologies: Self-de¿nition in the Hellenistic World (ed. A. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and A. Stewart; Hellenistic Culture and Society 12; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3–6, esp. 4–5. 24. See the detailed discussions of these various primary texts in my dissertation, “Reading Utopia in Chronicles,” pp. 159–81.

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many, though not all, of the social parameters imposed on them, working within the overall limits of the socio-politico-economic system of the Roman Empire. These communities do not attempt social upheaval or political revolt. Such would have likely been disastrous for the Àedgling Christian communities. The Chronicler has a parallel interest: identifying what must change and what cannot change given the present historical situation, so the community may Àourish. The Chronicler fails to see the wisdom of political revolt, so that course of action is discouraged. However, the future of the community can be built on the temple cult, since this institution has the backing of the political power of his day, and provides the source of stability and identity for the community. This view of utopia under empire is also consistent with the Chronicler’s understanding that God is really the true ruler, regardless of who sits on the physical throne. That the LORD is the true king and that the kingdom belongs to him is explicit in the unique phrase “the kingdom of the LORD” (!#!' =)˜ +˜ /’ /), ™ which appears once in the entire Hebrew Bible, in 2 Chr 13:8. The passage recounts a conÀict between Jeroboam of the northern kingdom and Abijah. The Davidide Abjiah states, “And now you [the northern tribes] think that you can withstand the kingdom of the LORD in the hand of the sons of David, because you are a great multitude and have with you the golden calves that Jeroboam made as gods for you.”25 The Chronicler emphasizes that the kingdom is God’s, while it is entrusted to David and his sons. This is consistent with the statement earlier in the narrative at the death of Saul (1 Chr 10:14), when the narrator provides the unique explanation, “Therefore the LORD put him [Saul] to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse.” It was God’s kingdom entrusted to Saul and given, by God, to David. It is God’s action, and not human action; it is God’s kingdom and not a human empire. A similar point is made by the Chronicler at the time of the transition to Solomon in 1 Chr 29:23 in comparison to the parallel in 1 Kgs 2:2. The 1 Kgs 2 passage reads, “So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David; and his kingdom was ¿rmly established” while 1 Chr 29:23 reads, “Then Solomon sat on the throne of the LORD, succeeding his father David as king.” Again, the difference between these texts highlights that the throne truly belongs to God.

25. The phrase “kingdom of the LORD” also appears in the LXX of 1 Chr 28:5, but not in the MT: In the transition to Solomon, David states, “And of all my sons, for the LORD has given me many, he has chosen my son Solomon to sit upon the throne of the kingdom of the LORD over Israel.”

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Further, as is well known, at the end of his book (2 Chr 35:20–22), the Chronicler claims that Pharaoh Neco spoke words from the mouth of God and that Cyrus was “stirred up” by God to ful¿llment of the prophetic word. There is no Davidic king; there are foreign kings being used by God to ful¿ll God’s purposes. Davidic kings could not produce utopia, but only dystopia. However, the Chronicler’s present is different. A foreign king, over a foreign empire, has been established by God. Yet the true king, regardless of who is on the physical throne—whether Davidide or Persian—is ultimately God, according to the Chronicler. Thus, the Chronicler contends, as long as the people follow God, whether through the temple or through the Torah by “seeking the LORD”—then their future will be secure, and the reality that awaits them is utopian, for they are now after the exile and under empire, both seen as a result of God’s gracious acts to Israel. One dystopia has been overcome and another potential dystopia has been signi¿cantly rede¿ned. From this perspective, at least according to Chronicles, utopia is reality. Utopia Through Prophecy Scholars have recognized that the treatment of prophecy (as well as the numerous speeches) reported throughout the narrative of Chronicles performs the function of communicating the book’s ideology and dominate themes.26 These two devices are among the multiple “authorityconferring strategies” employed by the Chronicler.27 While this assess26. See, e.g., Simon J. De Vries, “The Forms of Prophetic Address in Chronicles,” HAR 10 (1986): 15–36; Rex Mason, Preaching the Tradition: Homily and Hermeneutics After the Exile: Based on the “Addresses” in Chronicles, the “Speeches” in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the Post-Exilic Prophetic Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 13–144, 257–62; Otto Plöger, “Reden und Gebete im deuteronomistischen und chronistischen Geschichtswerk,” in Aus der Spätzeit des Alten Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 50–66, esp. 54–66; repr. from Festschrift für Günther Dehn zum 75. Geburtstag (ed. W. Schneemelcher; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1957), 35–49; Mark A. Throntveit, When Kings Speak: Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles (SBLDS 93; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987); and Claus Westermann, “Excursus: Prophetic Speeches in the Books of Chronicles,” in Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech (trans. H. C. White; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), 163–68. On speeches revealing the author’s purpose and themes in Hellenistic historiographic works, see Charles W. Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 142–68. 27. The phrase and concept is taken from Hindy Najman, “Interpretation as Primordial Writing: Jubilees and Its Authority Conferring Strategies,” JSJ 30 (1999): 379–410, here 381. 1

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ment of the Chronicler’s use of prophecy and speeches has tended to emphasize how the status quo is reinforced and authorized by such rhetoric, utopian literary theory would suggest such proclamations indeed express the desire for something different and better than the present circumstances. Thus, rather than maintenance of the status quo, prophets and prophecy convey other aspects of the Chronicler’s utopia, couched in the authoritative prophetic voice. Further, the ability of the Chronicler to convince his audience that the utopia presented in the text is indeed a better alternative reality rests heavily on the authoritative status of Chronicles itself, and that it may in fact present itself as having prophetic status.28 The unique roles of prophecy and prophets in Chronicles indicate a transition in the understanding of these phenomena during the Second Temple period. William Schniedewind lists several observations about the prophets in Chronicles: (1) When Kings is unclear about why certain events happened, prophets may be invoked to provide the answer in Chronicles; (2) They most typically function as interpreters of past and present events, rather than predictors of the future; and (3) Perhaps most importantly, prophets have become historians, the writers of the historical sources mentioned in Chronicles.29 This third prophetic function is ¿rst attested in the book of Chronicles. Does the Chronicler create this association or does he build on a common idea of his time and capitalize on it? While it is dif¿cult to determine, the role of the prophet as historian functions within the utopian society depicted in the book, claiming a role for prophets essential to this construction of reality—they are the ones who interpret it and give it meaning—and one previously not explicit in the tradition. The Chronicler presents something new: prophets write history. Scribalism and prophecy are related activities. Thus, scribal activity may be considered prophetic in nature. By association, this link established between scribalism, prophets, and historical writing functions as a means of asserting the authority of the Chronicler’s own composition—an account of the past most likely written by a scribe who 28. Compare the similar remarks by Louis Jonker, “The Chronicler and the Prophets: Who Were His Authoritative Sources?,” in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles? (ed. E. Ben Zvi and D. Edelman; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 145–64, here 160–61. 29. William M. Schniedewind, “The Chronicler as an Interpreter of Scripture,” in The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture (ed. M. P. Graham and S. L. McKenzie; JSOTSup 263; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999), 158–80; idem, The Word of God in Transition: From Prophet to Exegete in the Second Temple Period (JSOTSup 197; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1995).

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would claim the same prophetic inspiration for his own work as he assigned to the “prophetic” scribes of the past.30 As part of the Chronicler’s utopian construct, prophecy functions to connect the past with the present by the interpretation of events. Prophecy and prophets function in a very speci¿c way in Chronicles: they are one of the means for promoting innovation in the tradition while at the same time af¿rming continuity with it. These dual, and seemingly contradictory, functions convey the essence of the Chronicler’s vision for a utopian future without expressing it in the form of predictive prophecy. Instead, the past and present are recorded and interpreted by prophets for the bene¿t of the community centered around Jerusalem—whether in the preexilic period as in the narrative or in the postexilic period during the time of the Chronicler. In his own authoritative composition, the Chronicler has retrojected his utopian vision into the past in order to actualize it in his present and into the future. This utopian vision does not replicate the past nor continue the status quo of the present. By his use of the prophets, the Chronicler critiques the present and offers his understanding of a better alternative reality anchored in the words and inherent authority of these 30. While Chronicles certainly exhibits characteristics of a text produced by scribes, not many scholars would argue that it is a prophetic text, at least on the basis of form. However, the lack or scarcity of prophetic oracles does not determine the “prophetic” nature of any given text. Chronicles itself claims that historical writings as well as oracular material were composed by prophets in the past. Chronicles is not an apocalyptic text, but it does exhibit scribal features, especially those associated with the wisdom tradition. See, e.g., Joseph Blenkinsopp, “The Sage, the Scribe, and Scribalism in the Chronicler’s Work,” in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East (ed. J. G. Gammie and L. G. Perdue; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 307–15; idem, “Wisdom in the Chronicler’s Work,” in In Search of Wisdom: Essays in Memory of John G. Gammie (ed. L. G. Perdue, B. B. Scott, and W. J. Wiseman; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 19–30; Christine Schams, “1 and 2 Chronicles,” in Jewish Scribes in the SecondTemple Period (JSOTSup 291; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1998), 60–71; and Antje Labahn, “Antitheocratic Tendencies in Chronicles,” in Yahwism After the Exile: Perspective on Israelite Religion in the Persian Era (ed. R. Albertz and B. Becking; STAR 5; Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003), 115–35, esp. 123–35. See, e.g., 1 Chr 29:29–30; 2 Chr 9:29; 12:15; 13:22; 20:34; 21:12–15; 24:27?; 26:22; 32:32; 33:18?; 33:19?; 35:25. The division between history and prophecy on the basis of form is to be rejected. Compare the labels the “Former Prophets” assigned to the historical narrative of the Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings and the “Latter Prophets” used to refer collectively to the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve. The so-called “historical psalms” are another example of the blurring of formal genre distinctions, in this case, between history and poetry (or liturgy). 1

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personages and concepts. It is signi¿cant that the Chronicler does not offer an apology for their authoritative status. The Chronicler has not created new sources of authority, but draws on those already prominent in the tradition. This is true despite the “creation” or presentation of named prophets known only in Chronicles. That is, the Chronicler may “invent” particular individuals, but their authority is based on their identity and function as prophets within the narrative of Chronicles. The Chronicler chose categories from his own day that were already invested with authority and supplied the content of their messages to allow for these sources to support his own presentation of Israel’s past. In the creation of the content of these sources, the Chronicler anticipates a trend in later Jewish literature to appeal to sources of authority for supporting particular practices.31 With these strategies for conferring authority, the Chronicler attempts to solidify the status of his own composition. Louis Jonker notes that several prophetic ¿gures known from Samuel– Kings have been used with little adjustment in Chronicles, such as Nathan, Ahijah, Shemaiah, Micaiah ben Imlah, and Huldah.32 However, it should be observed that even these common presentations have particular emphases in Chronicles: the centrality of the Jerusalem temple, authentic worship of God, and trust in God rather than military strength and alliances. Jonker has also argued correctly that prophetic ¿gures unique to Chronicles appear in the context of battle accounts or cultic reforms.33 Of these unique portrayals, the function of the Levitical singers and musicians as prophets has drawn much scholarly attention, particularly as a supposed reÀection of contemporary practice in the Second Temple period. However, I want to suggest that perhaps we should not see this as a statement of historical reality. That is, instead of taking this to mean that Levitical singers and musicians were commonly understood to be prophets and that there was some need to anchor the present practice in the hallowed past (to give it authoritative status), we might rather view this as an innovation on the part of the Chronicler desiring a new and alternative perception of the activity of these singers and musicians. In a new historical context without a royal court, where can the prophetic voice be found? In the temple, among the Levitical singers and musicians. A royal court is not necessary for the prophets to bring the word— 31. Compare, as only one example among many, the appeal to the Heavenly Tablets and other sources of authority in Jubilees. See, e.g., Najman, “Interpretation as Primordial Writing”; and the similar remarks made concerning Chronicles by Knoppers, I Chronicles 1–9, 133. 32. Jonker, “The Chronicler and the Prophets,” 147–48. 33. Ibid., 148.

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singers and musicians are, or should be, the carriers of the prophetic word. Prophecy is now linked with the temple, and not as a marginal activity. Prophecy is part of the normal operation of the temple liturgy. This link of prophecy and the temple in Chronicles is a dramatic shift from the tradition. Does this reÀect historical circumstances or a desired reality? The further repeated connections between Levites and prophets throughout the book of Chronicles suggests a desire to associate more closely prophecy and the Levites. As with other activities associated with the Levites, this is not to the strict exclusion of non-Levitical prophets, but rather points to greater trust and recognition of Levites as prophets and to fewer authentic prophets recognized apart from the Levitical orders. Again, from my view, this type of rhetorical strategy not only serves to control the prophetic voice, but it also ¿ts with the Chronicler’s utopian vision of greater importance, involvement, and authority for the Levites as they are explicitly identi¿ed with roles and functions previously marginal or unknown for them in the tradition. The Chronicler’s utopia is a Levitical one, and the use of authoritative prophets and prophecy in this way serves to enhance their position within it. Additional prophets appear in the context of cultic reforms, such as Azariah ben Oded at the time of Asa in 2 Chr 15:1–19, Zechariah ben Jehoiada at the time of Joash in 2 Chr 24:17–22, and the unnamed prophet at the time of Amaziah in 2 Chr 25:15–16. Their messages emphasize the worship of God at Jerusalem with appropriate Levitical personnel and the removal of other deities and practices associated with them. The prophetic word serves the purpose of unity around the centrality of the temple and the deity worshipped there and the marginalization of alternatives to that center in this utopian construction of society. While several prophets appear in the narrative to encourage the people in the context of battle, the Levite Jahaziel at the time of Jehoshaphat in 2 Chr 20:13–19 stands out with his impassioned proclamation drawing heavily on language from the deliverance at the Sea in exodus. The next morning, Jehoshaphat encourages the people with words echoing language from the book of Isaiah that they should “believe in the LORD your God and you will be established.” To this, the Chronicler’s Jehoshaphat adds the imperative to “believe his prophets.” The parallel command to believe God and believe the prophets certainly enhances the prestige of these prophets, and note that it is now plural rather than the singular Jahaziel as the referent. Of course, the Israelites do so, and experience miraculous deliverance from an overwhelming coalition coming against them. While this could be simply labeled as propaganda, it is of a particular type: it is utopian. It is easy to see how the prophetic word from 1

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Jahaziel and the exhortation from Jehoshaphat are messages for the Chronicler’s contemporary audience sometime in the late Persian or early Hellenistic period. Their words call the Chronicler’s audience to live in another reality, a utopian reality, guided by the prophetic word to trust God and believe the Levitical prophets, singing praise as the means of combat and relying on God rather than relying on their military strength in the face of external armed threats. The ¿nal reference to prophets as a group in Chronicles occurs at the culmination of the story, 2 Chr 36:15–16, which describes the circumstances of Jerusalem’s destruction and the exile of the people. In contrast to Jehoshaphat and the people of his time, the “leading priests and the people” at Jerusalem’s demise did not believe the prophetic words sent by God, and instead mocked the messengers and scoffed at the prophets. Ultimately, this passage understands that the devastation wrought by Babylon comes on Israel as a direct result of the failure to obey the prophetic word. At the book’s ¿nal conclusion, the prophetic word of restoration offered by the prophet Jeremiah is understood to be ful¿lled by the words and actions of King Cyrus of Persia. The open invitation to return offers an opportunity again to choose between believing God and the prophetic word as those who returned from exile did or to ignore it and risk exile again as those at the time of Zedekiah had done. Thus, prophecy and prophets in Chronicles serve to provide innovative changes such as the character of historical writing being prophetic writing and the role of Levites in singing and music. Prophets serve to call the people to what the Chronicler views as appropriate belief and practice. Prophets also give the impression of continuity between these ancient narratives and the present, as they interpret the past for the present audience to create a different future based on that same past— which itself is a utopian construction. Prophets and prophecy are one of the many vehicles and means of authority that the Chronicler utilizes in the creation of a utopia for his audience, if they would believe God and the prophets, including his own writing—his own prophetic composition. Bibliography Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “The Sage, the Scribe, and Scribalism in the Chronicler’s Work.” Pages 307–15 in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East. Edited by John G. Gammie and Leo G. Perdue. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990. ———. “Wisdom in the Chronicler’s Work.” Pages 19–30 in In Search of Wisdom: Essays in Memory of John G. Gammie. Edited by Leo G. Perdue, Bernard Brandon Scott, and William Johnston Wiseman. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993.

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Boer, Roland T. Novel Histories: The Fiction of Biblical Criticism. Playing the Texts 2. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1997. Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Coggins, Richard J. “Theology and Hermeneutics in the Books of Chronicles.” Pages 263–78 in In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements. Edited by Edward Ball. JSOTSup 300. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999. Collins, John J. “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre.” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20. De Vries, Simon J. “The Forms of Prophetic Address in Chronicles.” HAR 10 (1986): 15–36. Dietz, Frank. “Utopian Re-visions of German History: Carl Amery’s An den Feuern der Leyermark and Stefan Heym’s Schwarzenberg.” Extrapolation 31 (1990): 24–35. Dyck, Jonathan E. The Theocratic Ideology of the Chronicler. BibInt 33. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Fornara, Charles W. The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. Frye, Northrop. “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” Pages 25–49 in Utopias and Utopian Thought. Edited by Frank E. Manuel. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton MifÀin Co., 1966. Repr. pages 109–34 in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Gruen, Erich S. “Introduction.” Pages 3–6 in Images and Ideologies: Self-de¿nition in the Hellenistic World. Edited by Anthony Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and Andrew Stewart. Hellenistic Culture and Society 12. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Hanson, Paul D. “Apocalypticism.” Pages 28–34 in Supplement Volume of Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by K. Crim et al. Nashville: Abingdon, 1976. Hill, Eugene D. “The Place of the Future: Louis Marin and His Utopiques.” Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 167–79. Jameson, Fredric. “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse.” Pages 75–101 in the Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History. 2 vols. Theory and History of Literature 49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Repr. from diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977): 2–21. Jones, Sarah Rees. “Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ and Medieval London.” Pages 117–35 in Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630. Edited by Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Jonker, Louis. “The Chronicler and the Prophets: Who Were His Authoritative Sources?” Pages 145–64 in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles? Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi and Diana Edelman. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011. Knoppers, Gary N. I Chronicles 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 12. New York: Doubleday, 2004. ———. I Chronicles 10–29: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 12A. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Labahn, Antje. “Antitheocratic Tendencies in Chronicles.” Pages 115–35 in Yahwism After the Exile: Perspective on Israelite Religion in the Persian Era. Edited by Rainer Albertz and Bob Becking. STAR 5. Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003. 1

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Marin, Louis. Utopics: Spatial Play. Translated by R. A. Vollrath. Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. Mason, Rex. Preaching the Tradition: Homily and Hermeneutics after the Exile. Based on the “Addresses” in Chronicles, the “Speeches” in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the Post-Exilic Prophetic Books. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Najman, Hindy. “Interpretation as Primordial Writing: Jubilees and Its Authority Conferring Strategies.” JSJ 30 (1999): 379–410. Plöger, Otto. “Reden und Gebete im deuteronomistischen und chronistischen Geschichtswerk.” Pages 50–66 in Aus der Spätzeit des Alten Testaments. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971. Repr. from pages 35–49 of Festschrift für Günther Dehn zum 75. Geburtstag. Edited by W. Schneemelcher. Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1957. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by G. H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Roemer, Kenneth M. “De¿ning America as Utopia.” Pages 1–15 in America as Utopia. Edited by K. M. Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin, 1981. Runions, Erin. “Playing It Again: Utopia, Contradiction, Hybrid Space and the Bright Future in Micah.” Pages 285–300 in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation. Edited by F. C. Black, R. T. Boer, and E. Runions. Semeia Studies 36. Atlanta: SBL, 1999. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Authority and Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought.” Polity 14 (1982): 565–84. ———. “Eutopias and Dystopias in Science Fiction: 1950–75.” Pages 347–66 in America as Utopia. Edited by K. M. Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin, 1981. ———. “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Costs of Eutopia.” Pages 225–31 in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Edited by R. Baccolini and T. Moylan. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37. ———. “The Three Faces of Utopianism.” Minnesota Review 7, no. 3 (1967): 222–30. ———. “Utopia: The Problem of De¿nition.” Extrapolation 16 (1975): 137–48. ———. “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations.” Pages 8–17 in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. Edited by R. Schaer, G. Claeys, and L. T. Sargent. New York: New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2000. Schams, Christine. “1 and 2 Chronicles.” Pages 60–71 in Jewish Scribes in the SecondTemple Period. JSOTSup 291. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1998. Schniedewind, William M. “The Chronicler as an Interpreter of Scripture.” Pages 158–80 in The Chronicler as Author: Studies in Text and Texture. Edited by M. Patrick Graham and Steven L. McKenzie. JSOTSup 263. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999. ———. The Word of God in Transition: From Prophet to Exegete in the Second Temple Period. JSOTSup 197. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1995.

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Schweitzer, Steven. “Exploring the Utopian Space of Chronicles: Some Spatial Anomalies.” Pages 141–56 in Constructions of Space in the Past, Present, and Future. Edited by Jon L. Berquist and Claudia V. Camp. LHBOTS 481. London: T&T Clark, International, 2007. ———. “The Genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9: Purposes, Forms, and the Utopian Identity of Israel.” Pages 9–27 in Chronicling the Chronicler: The Book of Chronicles and Early Second Temple Historiography. Edited by Paul Evans and Tyler Williams. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2013. ———. “Judging a Book by Its Citations: Sources and Authority in Chronicles.” Pages 37–65 in What Was Authoritative for Chronicles? Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi and Diana Edelman. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011. ———. Reading Utopia in Chronicles. LHBOTS 442. London: T&T Clark International, 2007. ———. “Utopia and Utopian Literary Theory: Some Preliminary Observations.” Pages 13–26 in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi. Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 92. Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 2006. ———. “Visions of the Future as Critique of the Present: Utopian and Dystopian Images of the Future in Second Zechariah.” Pages 249–67 in Utopia and Dystopia in Prophetic Literature. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi. Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 92. Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 2006. Suvin, Darko. “The Alternate Islands: A Chapter in the History of SF, with a Bibliography on the SF of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.” Science Fiction Studies 10 (1983): 239–48. ———. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Throntveit, Mark A. When Kings Speak: Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles. SBLDS 93. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987. Westermann, Claus. “Excursus: Prophetic Speeches in the Books of Chronicles.” Pages 163–68 in Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech. Translated by Hugh Clayton White. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967. Wright, John W. “Beyond Transcendence and Immanence: The Characterization of the Presence and Activity of God in the Book of Chronicles.” Pages 240–67 in The Chronicler as Theologian: Essays in Honor of Ralph W. Klein. Edited by M. Patrick, Steven L. McKenzie, and Gary N. Knoppers. JSOTSup 371. London: T&T Clark, 2003.

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RE-NEGOTIATING A PUTATIVE UTOPIA AND THE STORIES OF THE REJECTION OF FOREIGN WIVES IN EZRA–NEHEMIAH* Ehud Ben Zvi

1. On the Role of a Social Memory Approach in the Study of the Expulsion of the “Foreign” Wives and Children in Ezra–Nehemiah The stories about the rejection of “foreigners,” including “foreign” wives and the children they bore to “Israelites” in Ezra–Nehemiah, have been studied from multiple historical perspectives. Some of this research has focused on the history of the text/s, mainly redactional history, and on the potential implications that the various layers advanced within different models for the development of the text may have for reconstructions of historical shifts in the world of thought of the communities to which the said proposed layers and, above all, their distinct and distinctive proposed authors/redactors may attest.1 Others have focused more directly on the possible reasons for the historical expulsion of the “foreign” wives and those of “impure birth” (Ezra 9:1–10:44; cf. Neh 9:2; 13:3, 23–29). Such actions relate, for obvious reasons, to matters of “identity formation” and boundaries. These matters are usually, and with very good reason, tackled with social, anthropological, political, and economic—essentially transcultural— approaches, and thus it is not surprising that a variety of explanations for the rejection of these mothers and children has been advanced on the basis of these approaches and comparative historical studies. Thus, some * The research leading to this essay and related works has been supported by a grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1. E.g., Yonina Dor, “The Composition of the Episode of the Foreign Women in Ezra IX–X,” VT 53 (2003): 26–47; and her comprehensive, Have the “Foreign Women” Really Been Expelled? Separation and Exclusion in the Restoration Period (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2006) (in Hebrew). The strong presence of these approaches is easy to understand, given (a) that there is more than one story of forced dissolution of “mixed” marriages and expulsions, (b) that it is extremely unlikely that the present Ezra–Nehemiah was written at once, by one author and out of whole cloth, and (c) the traditional importance of redactional-critical methods in historical studies of (eventually) “biblical” texts.

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scholars approached these issues in light of Pericles’s citizenship law and arrived at a number of different explanations,2 while others thought this comparison at least partially ill-¿tting.3 Some researchers addressed the matter in terms of, inter alia, “heightened ethnic consciousness as a result of return migration,”4 Victor Turner’s social drama model,5 or “witch-hunting.”6 Some scholars have accounted for, at least in part, the expulsion of the women in terms of a proposed struggle to avert losses of land holdings,7 while others focused on ideologies of purity and their social implementation.8 It has also been proposed that the immigrant golah community should be understood as “a minority with an ideological [utopian] vision driven by a desire for cultural exclusion and 2. E.g., Lisbeth S. Fried, “The Concept of ‘Impure Birth’ in 5th Century Athens and Judea,” in In the Wake of Tikva Frymer-Kensky: Tikva Frymer-Kensky Memorial Volume (ed. S. Holloway, J. Scurlock, and R. Beal; Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias, 2009), 121–42; Wolfgang Oswald, “Foreign Marriages and Citizenship in Persian Period Judah,” JHS 12, no. 6 (2012). Online: http://www.jhsonline.org (= Wolfgang Oswald, “Foreign Marriages and Citizenship in Persian Period Judah,” in Perspectives in Hebrew Scriptures IX: Comprising the Contents of Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, vol. 12 (ed. E. Ben Zvi and C. Nihan; Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias, 2014), 107–24. 3. E.g., Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 1, Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah (LSTS 47; London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 307. 4. See, e.g., Katherine E. Southwood, Ethnicity and the Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9–10: An Anthropological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)—citation from p. 210; and cf. Rainer Albertz, “Purity Strategies and Political Interests in the Policy of Nehemiah,” in Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever (ed. Seymour Gitin, J. Edward Wright, and J. P. Dessel; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 199–206. 5. Donald P. Moffat, Ezra’s Social Drama: Identity Formation, Marriage and Social ConÀict in Ezra 9 and 10 (LHBOTS 579; London: T&T Clark International, 2013). 6. David Janzen, Witch-hunts, Purity and Social Boundaries: The Expulsion of the Foreign Women in Ezra 9–10 (JSOTSup 350; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2002). 7. E.g., Tamara C. Eskenazi, “Out from the Shadows: Biblical Women in the Postexilic Era,” JSOT 54 (1992): 25–43 (see esp. p. 35); Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra–Nehemiah: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), 176–77. 8. E.g., Saul M. Olyan, “Purity Ideology in Ezra–Nehemiah as a Tool to Reconstitute the Community,” JJS 35 (2004): 1–16 (republished in idem, Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Signi¿cance of Ritual and Social Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible [Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 4; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011], 159–72); Hannah K. Harrington, “The Use of Leviticus in Ezra– Nehemiah,” JHS 13, no. 3 (2013). Online: http://www.jhsonline.org. 1

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dominance.”9 Not only the reasons for the dissolutions of the “mixed” marriages, but also the reasons for their existence and seeming popularity in Yehud, in the ¿rst place, have been discussed from a variety of social and anthropological perspectives, from hypergamy theory to assumptions about a population gender imbalance in Yehud, with more males than females.10 The preceding survey of current common approaches to the matter of the expulsion of the “foreign” wives and their children that are particularly informed by social or anthropological models is obviously far from being comprehensive. This said, for the present purposes at least, it suf¿ces to show in broad strokes a reasonably representative image of widespread scholarly tendencies in the ¿eld on these matters; an image that is representative enough to raise a number of observations and concerns about the basic assumptions underlying the shared landscape on which the range of common socio-anthropological approaches that are adopted to address matters such as the rejection of the “foreign” wives and their children are grounded.11 To begin with, studying the reasons for the historical expulsion of the “foreign” wives and the children they had with male members of the community in Yehud during the putative time of Ezra, in contradistinction to studying why a “memory” of such an event emerged and was successfully transmitted, implies an assumption that the expulsion did historically happen. Second, the often related endeavor of reconstructing the world of thought of a minority golah community in the Persian period that stood distinct and against the majority of the population in Yehud implies an assumption that there was such a golah community and that its counterpart, a non-golah community, existed as well, and that they competed for power, in one way or another for a signi¿cant time. 9. E.g., Jeremiah W. Cataldo, “Whispered Utopia: Dreams, Agendas, and Theocratic Aspirations in Yehud,” SJOT 24 (2010): 53–70 (67). 10. See Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, “The Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13: A Study of the Sociology of the Post-Exilic Judaean Community,” in Second Temple Studies 2: Temple Community in the Persian Period (ed. Tamara C. Eskenazi and Kent H. Richards; JSOTSup 175; Shef¿eld: JSOT, 1994), 243–65 and bibliography cited there. 11. It is worth stressing that the range of proposed approaches is wider than the examples brought up in the text, but to a large extent the basic underlying grounds on which they rest are not necessarily so. See, for instance, the case of comparative studies between the rejection of “foreign women” in Ezra–Nehemiah in Yehud and socio-ideological processes in contemporary Israel: see Tamara C. Eskenazi and Eleanore P. Judd, “Marriage to a Stranger in Ezra 9–10,” in Eskenazi and Richards, eds., Second Temple Studies 2, 266–85.

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Third, although transcultural studies indicate that a return migration may well lead to a heightened ethnic (or religious) consciousness (as for that matter, diaspora conditions often do among some groups), the point would be moot for historical studies of Persian Yehud, if there was no substantial return migration in order to shape a long-term countercommunity that stood in contradistinction and opposed to the already existing community for a signi¿cant time. Fourth, the explanation of the expulsion in terms of witch-hunting processes assumes (as do several explanations as well) a compelling sense of existential anxiety and the related existence of strong external boundaries within the community. At the same time, one may consider that, ¿rst, the archaeological evidence does not suggest a massive return.12 Second, the rise of the temple in Jerusalem to a central position in Yehud would have been unlikely if the small group responsible for running it would have excluded the vast majority of the population in Yehud, which consisted of those who remained in the land. In fact, proposals about a long term dual social structure in Yehud are unlikely.13 Third, the core corpus of authoritative texts that existed in the Persian period does not reÀect a community with a strong level of existential anxiety, unlike the one implied in Ezra–Nehemiah.14 Fourth, the notion of universal matrilinearity 12. See, e.g., Oded Lipschits, “Demographic Changes in Judah Between the Seventh and the Fifth Centuries BCE,” in Judah and the Judeans in the NeoBabylonian Period (ed. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 323–76 and note in particular the following statement, “the ‘return to Zion’ did not leave its imprint on the archaeological data, nor is there any demographic testimony of it” (365). Elsewhere Lipschits writes “there is no supporting evidence in the archaeological and historical record for demographic changes to the extent of this list [the ‘list of returnees’ in Ezra 2 and Neh 9], either at the end of the sixth or the beginning of the ¿fth centuries, or even during the course of the ¿fth century.” Oded Lipschits, “Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and the Status of Jerusalem in the Middle of the Fifth Century B.C.E.,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 19–52 (33 n. 46). 13. See Ehud Ben Zvi, “Total Exile, Empty Land and the General Intellectual Discourse in Yehud,” in The Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel and Its Historical Contexts (ed. Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin; BZAW 404; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 155–68, and bibliography cited there. 14. And unlike the one implied in texts such as Jubilees, 1–2 Maccabees or much of the so-called “sectarian” Qumran texts. I have argued on different occasions for the lack of existential anxiety among the literati of the Persian period. See, e.g., Ehud Ben Zvi, “Othering, Sel¿ng, ‘Boundarying’ and ‘Cross-Boundarying’ as Interwoven with Socially Shared Memories: Some Observations,” in Imagining the Other 1

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(to be distinguished from matrilocal matrilinearity) or alternatively, of universal dual patri-matrilinearity that is crucial to the story of the rejection of the women and their children appears nowhere else until rabbinic literature.15 Fifth, neither the notion of