![]()
Part I
Intersectional biblical neighbors
![]()
Introduction: The social neighbor and the spatial neighbor
There are at least two kinds of neighbors in the Hebrew Bible. There is the neighbor known from the Decalogue (Exod 20:1â17; Deut 5:1â22), whose house, wife, slaves, ox, and donkey you shall refrain from coveting, and there is the neighbor as in the person, who lives next door or close by. In Biblical Hebrew, the term rÄaĘž (רע) is used both of the kind of neighbor we find in the Decalogue and of the person next door, but the person next door can also be called a ĹĄÄkÄn (׊××), a person who âdwellsâ close by. In English, both of these words are translated simply as neighbor. In German and in Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian and Danish, the neighbor in the Decalogue is called a Nächste/neste/nĂŚste, a fellow person, whereas the person next door is a Nachbar/nabo/nabo, literally a ânear-dwellerâ, which is the same word etymologically as neighbor. These two meanings of the word neighbor in English may overlap, the person next door may also be your fellow and your fellow may also happen to be living next door, but they are not always and not necessarily the same. For the purpose of this study, I shall refer to the neighbor in the sense of fellow person as a âsocialâ neighbor, and to the neighbor in the sense of a person living next door as a âspatialâ neighbor.
I use the term social neighbor here, because the stereotypical close other known from the Hebrew Bible is exactly a social mirror image of the second person singular masculine âyouâ addressed in the text. The social neighbor is an âotherâ that is exactly like oneself, a person of the same gender, rough age and social position, and who shares oneâs world view and interests. Individual descriptions of social neighbors often reflect a certain degree of blindness to oneâs own privilege and to life experiences that depart from oneâs own.1 Social neighborship is demarcated by oneâs social circle, by the group of individuals that one resembles. The social neighbor is the socially proximate other. Spatial neigborship on the other hand is demarcated by space and by geography. The spatial neighbor is the physically proximate other, and at least in principle this category of neighbor is defined only by spatial proximity and not by factors such as gender, ethnicity, and social class. In practice, of course, the place where people live is very much influenced exactly by their social class, and sometimes by their ethnicity and gender as well. In many neighborhoods, the categories of social and spatial neighbors overlap.
In this study, I am particularly interested in the spatial neighbor and in how this kind of neighbor is described as ambiguous in the Hebrew Bible. My starting point is to take a closer look at the two terms rÄaĘž and ĹĄÄkÄn in the Hebrew Bible and in particular to see how they are used to describe the spatial neighbor. I shall move then to an analysis of the story of the Exodus from Egypt, where the Israelites, aided by Yahweh, rob their Egyptian neighbors blind on the eve of departure (Exod 3:21â22; 11:2â3). First, however, I shall dwell on the ambiguity of the spatial neighbor in contemporary Western urban communities and share my own experience of serial neighborships.2
The neighborship memoirs of an academic nomad
Biographies are not a standard element in scholarly writing, but nevertheless, I have chosen to include a description of some selected neighborship experiences of my own in this part of my study. This was triggered by something I discovered when I started doing research on neighbors. When I mentioned what I was working on, people would respond with interest. People are usually kind and patient when you talk about work, and almost everyone responded with a story. A story about that time they experienced a neighboring conflict, or about that one neighbor who did them a good turn. My good friend Annette, who has recently had balconies put up in her building, reflected upon how the addition of an outdoor neighboring space posed new challenges to patterns of neighborly behavior, and she gave me several examples of balcony-related neighborship successes and fiascoes. All these stories made me realize that our individual understanding of spatial neighborship is very much influenced by our individual experiences of spatial neighborship, and that these, in turn will most likely influence the ways in which we theorize neighborship.3 Therefore, I attempt to put my cards on the table with this account of neighborship experiences, because it reveals my own assumptions about good neighboring, and I invite my readers to reflect upon their own experiences and preferences as they read.
For many university researchers, occasional longer stays abroad are a common part of their work life. My first experience as an academic nomad was in Providence, New England, in the US. I had rented one of the university housing departmentâs flats. It was part of a large and beautiful wooden New England house with a columned front porch and a very stately hall with an elegant staircase to the first floor, a plush Persian carpet, and a gold and crystal chandelier. I spent long days in the library and came home rather late in the evening. I knew that I was not the only inhabitant in the large house. There were perhaps six apartments in total. I could hear my neighbors through the walls and through the ceilings, when they turned on the tap in the kitchen or watched television, but I never saw anyone. As the months progressed, I became slightly obsessed with the invisible strangers living next door. I started lingering a little bit longer in the common areas when I was on my way in or out just to see if I would run into another person, but I never did. My neighbors sometimes left laundry in the laundry room in the basement, and they picked up their mail in the pigeonholes in the hall, so the noises I heard them make in the big house were not just figments of my imagination. After six months, I traveled back home, without having encountered any of the other residents.
In GÜttingen in Germany, one of my next-door neighbors was a friendly male professor from Korea who always worked from home and was happy to receive packages on my behalf when I was away in my office. Normally I received only book packages, but once he knocked on my door holding a parcel from an online clothes shop, which I had completely forgotten that I had ordered, and I could feel my scholarly façade crumbling a bit.
In Helsinki in Finland, my building was owned by the university, but there were a few apartments that were protected by law, and in those apartments, lived people who were not academic nomads like me and the other visiting researchers. One of these permanent residents was an elderly Finnish woman. I sometimes met her in the lift, and she seemed to know that my knowledge of Finnish did not go beyond âyesâ, âhelloâ and âthank youâ, but nevertheless, she always talked and talked when she met me. I could tell from her tone of voice and from her body language that she was telling me about things that were not okay. I guess I will never know exactly, but I think it was sometimes about the bicycle that was often very haphazardly parked in front of the buildingâs entrance and sometimes about the young Italian man upstairs who had an unfortunate habit of burning cheese in his oven so that the smoke would set off the fire alarm. I thought these were very reasonable complaints, but we had no way to communicate properly, so I just said âmoiâ and âmoi moiâ, which means âhelloâ and âgoodbyeâ, and smiled in a way that I hoped would impress upon her that I was certainly not a cheese-burning kind of neighbor.
This rather long anecdote illustrates, I hope, some of the ambiguity of the spatial neighbor in modern urban society.4 Very often, neighbors are not family and they are not exactly friends, but they are the strangers next door with whom we prefer to be on reasonably good terms. Personally, I pride myself on being a âgood neighbor.â I never leave a mess in shared spaces, I always say hello and smile politely, and if people seem to want to chat I try to oblige, but I am conscious that I should not chat for too long and that I should not ask too many questions. This is my understanding of good neighboring, but studies show that this is by no means an original perception of neighborship. A good neighbor is frequently perceived as a person who manages to keep a good balance between privacy and availability.5
The friendly professor in Germany was more or less the perfect neighbor for someone like me. He was helpful and valued privacy. The talkative Finnish lady made me feel that I had to prove that I was indeed a good neighbor and that I would never make a mess or set off the fire alarm, but I had no way of telling her this, and that nagged me much more than it probably should have. My invisible neighbors in New England made me feel that I had been surpassed with regard to valuing privacy. This was the only time in my life that I have haunted the corridors of a building in the hope of running into a neighbor, and at the time it made me feel like a âbad neighborâ, because it made me appear nosy and needy. In the large New England house, I ended up compromising my own ideal of being a good neighbor.
The ambiguity of the spatial neighbor: The stranger next door
The ambiguity of the spatial neighbor is largely connected with the perception of home as a place of safety and autonomy.6 One may choose oneâs neighborhood, but individual neighbors are generally beyond oneâs own control. The proximity between spatial neighbors creates an opportunity for building social relationships over time, but the same proximity also poses a risk of having your privacy invaded and of having your peace disturbed. In some cases, even personal safety and property are perceived to be at risk.7 Spatial neighborship does not guarantee shared interests or values, and even oneâs social neighbor, whose interests and values are likely similar to oneâs own, may turn out to have a different concept of good neighboring than oneself. In this way, spatial neighbors who repeatedly overstep boundaries may âunmakeâ their neighborsâ sense of home, because they are perceived as a challenge to the autonomy of the home, basically, as an obstacle to feeling âat homeâ in oneâs own home.8
It is interesting to consider neighboring alongside another home-centered social interaction, namely hospitality. In general terms, hospitality is to welcome a stranger into oneâs home. As such it carries a risk, of invasion, of theft, of assault, but it also carries the opportunity of turning a stranger into a friend.9 Hospitality is an expression of social reciprocity. Quite frequently, it is direct reciprocity between the host and the guest, who establish and maintain a social relationship by exchanging the gift of mutual hospitality over time. Hospitality also occurs, however, in circumstances where any kind of direct reciprocity is highly unlikely, and in those cases, hospitality may rather express an expectation of indirect reciprocity, or even a notion of an altruistic ideal, which carries a reward in itself and is thus not entirely detached from other kinds of social reciprocity.10 With regard to social reciprocity, hospitality and neighboring are quite similar. Good neighboring is explained by social actors with reference to both direct re...
