Belonging In Genesis Biblical Israel And The Construction Of Communal Identity

Genesis is central to both hegemonic and counterhegemonic conceptions of communal identity. Read one way, the book undergirds contemporary assumptions about the nature of communality and the categories through which it is constructed. Read another way, however, it undermines them. This project considers these two readings of Genesis, their asymmetrical approaches to the book, and the intersection between them. Using family storytelling as an approach to biblical interpretation allows this study to hold together the constitution of the reading community and the interpretation of the biblical text. In a Eurocentric reading of Genesis, the constitution of the reading community governs engagement of the biblical text. Conversely, in the YHWH-centric reading advocated here, the biblical text governs the constitution of the reading community. This study reopens the question of what it means to be an "us" rather than leaving participation in an "us" as an (often unacknowledged) a priori condition of all interpretation. In doing so it does not deny the existence or the significance of such preexisting commitments, but rather it refuses to regard those commitments as fixed and final. From an exegetical standpoint, this study challenges Eurocentrism by finding in Genesis a vision of communality that, in emphasizing the importance of living out the relatedness of all humans to one another and to God, holds the potential for more fruitful relationships between communities. From a methodological standpoint, it offers a reading of Genesis that incorporates features of the text that have been neglected by colonizing readings and avoids the difficulties and internal inconsistencies from which they suffer. Making use of Benedict Anderson's account of the relationship between the imagined community of the nation and religiously imagined communities, as well as Jonathan Sheehan's account of the Enlightenment Bible, this study argues that certain ways of reading the Bible arose to help the West articulate its sense of itself and its others. Drawing attention to the text's reception and the way in which Eurocentric approaches displace Jews and marginalize (the West's) others, this project considers alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the Bible and those who call it their own.

Genesis is central to both hegemonic and counterhegemonic conceptions of communal identity. Read one way, the book undergirds contemporary assumptions about the nature of communality and the categories through which it is constructed. Read another way, however, it undermines them. This project considers these two readings of Genesis, their asymmetrical approaches to the book, and the intersection between them. Using family storytelling as an approach to biblical interpretation allows this study to hold together the constitution of the reading community and the interpretation of the biblical text. In a Eurocentric reading of Genesis, the constitution of the reading community governs engagement of the biblical text. Conversely, in the YHWH-centric reading advocated here, the biblical text governs the constitution of the reading community. This study reopens the question of what it means to be an "us" rather than leaving participation in an "us" as an (often unacknowledged) a priori condition of all interpretation. In doing so it does not deny the existence or the significance of such preexisting commitments, but rather it refuses to regard those commitments as fixed and final. From an exegetical standpoint, this study challenges Eurocentrism by finding in Genesis a vision of communality that, in emphasizing the importance of living out the relatedness of all humans to one another and to God, holds the potential for more fruitful relationships between communities. From a methodological standpoint, it offers a reading of Genesis that incorporates features of the text that have been neglected by colonizing readings and avoids the difficulties and internal inconsistencies from which they suffer. Making use of Benedict Anderson's account of the relationship between the imagined community of the nation and religiously imagined communities, as well as Jonathan Sheehan's account of the Enlightenment Bible, this study argues that certain ways of reading the Bi.

Genesis calls its readers into a vision of human community unconstrained by the categories that dominate modern thinking about identity. Genesis situates humanity within a network of nurture that encompasses the entire cosmos--only then introducing Israel not as a people, but as a promise. Genesis prioritizes a human identity that originates in the divine word and depends on ongoing relationship with God. Those called into this new mode of belonging must forsake the social definition that had structured their former life, trading it for an alternative that will only gradually take shape. In contrast to the rigidity that typifies modern notions, Genesis depicts identity as fundamentally fluid. Encounter with God leads to a new social self, not a "spiritual" self that operates only within parameters established in the body at birth. In Belonging in Genesis, Amanda Mbuvi highlights the ways narrative and the act of storytelling function to define and create a community. Building on the emphasis on family in Genesis, she focuses on the way family storytelling is a means of holding together the interpretation of the text and the constitution of the reading community. Explicitly engaging the way in which readers regard the biblical text as a point of reference for their own (collective) identities leads to an understanding of Genesis as inviting its readers into a radically transformative vision of their place in the world.

In this study, Jonathan Huddleston examines Genesis as a rhetorical whole, addressing Persian-era Judean expectations. While some have contrasted Genesis' account of origins with prophetic accounts of the future, literary and historical evidence suggests that Genesis narrates Israel's origins precisely in order to ground Judea's hopes for an eschatological restoration. Promises to the ancestors semiotically apply to those who preserved, composed, and received the text of Genesis. Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying and spreading blessing among the families of the earth. Genesis' vision of Israel's destiny coheres with the postexilic prophetic eschatology, identifying Israel as a precious seed to carry forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized creation fruitfulness.

The stories of Hagar, Dinah, and Tamar stand out as strangers in the ancestral narrative. They deviate from the main plot and draw attention to the interests and fates of characters who are not a part of the ancestral family. Readers have traditionally domesticated these strange stories. They have made them “familiar”—all about the ancestral family. Thus Hagar’s story becomes a drama of deselection, Shechem and the Hivites become emblematic for ancestral conflict with the people of the land, and Tamar becomes a lens by which to read providence in the story of Joseph. This study resurrects the question of these stories’ strangeness. Rather than allow the ancestral narrative to determine their significance, it attends to each interlude’s particularity and detects ironic gestures made toward the ancestral narrative. These stories contain within them the potential to defamiliarize key themes of ancestral identity: the ancestral-divine relationship, ancestral relations to the land and its inhabitants, and ancestral self-identity. Perhaps the ancestral family are not the only privileged partners of God, the only heirs to the land, or the only bloodline fit to bear the next generation.

Karalina Matskevich examines the structures that map out the construction of gendered and national identities in Genesis 2–3 and 12–36. Matskevich shows how the dominant 'Subject' – the androcentric ha'adam and the ethnocentric Israel – is perceived in relation to and over against the 'Other', represented respectively as female and foreign. Using the tools of narratology, semiotics and psychoanalysis, Matskevich highlights the contradiction inherent in the project of dominance, through which the Subject seeks to suppress the transforming power of difference it relies on for its signification. Thus, in Genesis 2-3 ha'adam can only emerge as a complex Subject in possession of knowledge with the help of woman, the transforming Other to whom the narrator (and Yahweh) attributes both the agency and the blame. Similarly, the narratives of Genesis 12–36 show a conflicted attitude to places of alterity: Egypt, the fertile and seductive space that threatens annihilation, and Haran, the 'mother's land', a complex metaphor for the feminine. The construction of identity in these narratives largely relies on the symbolic fecundity of the Other.

Isaiah has a richer theology of creation than any book of the Bible. Isaiah uses the Hebrew word for "create" more than any book of the Bible. Isaiah ends with a vision of the creation of a new heavens and a new earth. Isaiah uses the name Jacob more than any book of the Bible except for Genesis itself. The name Jacob is used in Isaiah almost as many times as it is used in all of the books of the prophets combined. Isaiah even says that God created Jacob. Isaiah also mentions the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Sarah, Noah and the flood, with echoes of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Isaac, Rachel, and Joseph and his brothers. Many scholarly studies have ignored the importance of Genesis in Isaiah. This book argues Genesis is Isaiah's instrument to re-form the identity of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish communities.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 decreed that all men were created equal and were endowed by their Creator with “certain unalienable Rights.” Yet, U.S.-born free and enslaved Black people were not recognized as citizens with “equal protections under the law” until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even then, White supremacists impeded the equal rights of Black people as citizens due to their beliefs in the inferiority of Black people and that America was a nation for White people. White supremacists turned to biblical passages to lend divine justification for their views. A Womanist Reading of Hebrew Bible Narratives as the Politics of Belonging from an Outsider Within analyzes select biblical narratives, including Noah’s curse in Genesis 9; Sarah and Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21; Mother in Israel in Judges 5; and Jezebel, Phoenician Princess and Queen of Israel in 1 and 2 Kings. This analysis demonstrates how these narratives were first used by ancient biblical writers to include some and exclude others as members of the nation of Israel and then appropriated by White supremacists in the antebellum era and the early twentieth century to do the same in America. The book analyzes the simultaneously intersecting and interconnecting dynamics among race, gender, class, and sexuality and biblical narratives to construct boundaries between “us versus them,” particularly the politicization of motherhood to deny certain groups’ inclusion.

This book illuminates sojourn language in Genesis using an innovative application of sociological theory about ethnic myths. Close exegetical investigation reveals that sojourn, despite its connotations of alienation, is a significant contributor to a strong communal identity for biblical Israel.