Cities. They are our past and our future. They are spaces of human effort, dreams and achievements. Yet also the very spaces of neglect, disillusion and failure. This work focuses on cities. It considers the way in which the Hebrew Bible describes, imagines and uses them, within as well as regardless of a particular time, space and style. In order to do so, the work adopts existing methods from the study of space as a linguistic (stylistic) as well as a social given. This theoretical merger aims to address the question: what is a city according to the Hebrew Bible? This question is not as much involved with a discussion on size and numbers. Nor is it a matter of distinguishing between good and bad cities, or between cities faithful to God or unfaithful. It is not asking for a reconstruction of the (spatial) experience of an original audience. Neither is it a quest for the symbolic role of biblical urban space. Yet, the main premise of the study is conceptual and textual. How is the city conceptualized in the Hebrew Bible, as a category, and how is this category given form in the text with specific language and given a role within a particular paragraph, story, book and ultimately, the biblical corpus? It is a study of urban imagination, addressing both the rules that govern this imagination and the creative bending and mending for purposes beyond simple grammar. As Elaine James summarizes it in her study on the landscapes of the Song of Songs, it is about “the creative potential of the poet draw[ing] from the resources at hand and [being] at the same time radically free to play with convention to make new meaning to allow the ambiguity and ambivalence to bubble up and surprise the audience” (2017a, 115).
The study starts from the idea that the Hebrew Bible displays a coherent city concept, despite its long composition history, its florilegium of genres and likewise styles, and different contextual settings of its various parts. As any concept, it is subject to change internally. However, ultimately, these changes do not affect the overall notion of ‘city’ in the biblical text. It is in that way that I understand Robert Carroll’s statement,
Whereas Carroll speaks of all cities being somehow Jerusalem, his insight equally applies to the concept of ‘city’ without a specific place in mind. All references to urban space in the biblical text are manifestations of a limited set of imaginations of the city. This set forms the “one city,” textually formed with a variety of words and linguistic constructions and contextually framed within a certain story and setting. Language and story are the plethora of “representations, manifestations and instantiations” mentioned by Carroll. To stick with urban architecture, the urban concept functions in the text as a particular building style, say Romanesque style. All buildings in this style share a set of features, however, none of the buildings looks exactly the same, nor is it placed in the exact same surroundings. What is more, its basic features do not change within a considerable span of time but form the stable core of the style. Where the comparison may fail, is when it comes to the degree of consciousness. Romanesque style was a prescriptive guide for builders, not a set of ideas people drew on both consciously and unconsciously. City concepts in the biblical text are not by definition the diligent following of an explicit set of rules, but may also display fundamental, empirically based understandings of urban space. This difference is well illustrated in the history of scholarship on the depiction of cities in the biblical text. The majority of research focuses on the personification of the city as a woman, discussing both its ancient Near Eastern background and its creative manipulation of this metaphor in the Hebrew Bible.1 Such would qualify as a deliberate and conscious use of a prescribed concept of ‘city.’ However, at least as prominent as the city-woman is the idea of the city as a container, a conceptualization that has been described briefly and only recently in an article by Alison Gray (2018, 20–24). This concept of city may have been overlooked in scholarship precisely because it is far less played upon (as in deliberately played upon), but a natural go-to when speaking of cities.2In the Bible there is only one city, but it has multitudinous representations, manifestations and instantiations. Of course in topographical terms there are hundreds and thousands of cities in the Bible […], but in the symbolic geography of the Book we may see each and every city as one aspect of the city of humankind. Whether that be the city of dreadful night or the city of peace and harmony or the city of chaos or the strong city or whatever, each city may be at any one time either faithful or whorelike, peaceful or warlike (or perhaps all these different incarnations at the same time). (2001, 56–57)
A second starting point of the study is the idea that language is a powerful tool to construe space and that its resultant city spaces, called textual cities in this work, are worth a study on their own.3 Whereas reading a text never happens in a vacuum and every text carries the traces of its context, historical and background information should not keep us from following the text’s imagination.4 “If a narrative is taken seriously, the world which it creates is not simply something to get behind or unmask, but is itself the site of ‘lived’ experience” (Anderson 2018, 66). What is more, this world does not need to match the real world or experience as we know it.
Various studies on biblical cities have identified contradictions in the Hebrew Bible’s depiction of cities, whereas these may be exactly that—contradictions. These can serve a role in the world of the text as spaces of anxiety and uncertainty, or as spaces of possibility and multiple voices.5 “Analysis of literary space is not simply a matter of our affirming that space is textual and then reading, but of realizing that text is spatial and then exploring” (Meredith 2013, 16). What is more, this literary imagination is assisted by language that is itself spatial by definition. Hence, when we consider a quote as the above, our minds not only consider the changed relationship between space and text in the sentence but also the potential mapping of reading as an exploration, thus as something spatial. While one way of understanding Meredith’s statement is as a call for a breach of the current paradigm of reading, another way emphasizes the rewiring of the paradigm. Language is inherently spatial, and thus so are its very products, texts. The quote then makes explicit what readers should implicitly understand as reading according to Christopher Meredith. It shows that the power of language does not end with textual space and textual cities but is equally present in the analysis of these spaces.Literary history […] provides ample evidence that spatial imagination is not limited by the physics of Newton and the geometry of Euclid. Long before Einstein, Riemann, or Hawking, literature had represented spaces that are every bit as ‘impossible’ as those described by contemporary physics. (Gomel 2014, 2)
Biblical Cities Before (Briefly)
Ample studies exist on the historical aspects of biblical cities. These works consider the city primarily as a geographical place with a particular outlook, populace and functionality.6 Such studies have a long tradition that finds a theological counterpart in the study of the city of God, Jerusalem/Zion. The latter type of research focuses on the religious significance of Jerusalem and considers the physical aspect of the urban far less.7 Jerusalem is an idea and a symbol for a unifying theological concept in the biblical corpus. A comparable symbolic reading is picked up by later literary approaches of the biblical text, where the city becomes a space of a variety of emotions. Simultaneously, these studies consider the descriptions of material space as the scenery against which the biblical stories develop. Space and time are often treated together, with the latter outweighing the former in terms of scholarly attention. “The biblical narrative is wholly devoted to creating a sense of time which flows continually and rapidly, and this is inevitably achieved at the expense of the shaping of space,” according to Simon Bar Efrat (1989, 196).8 The true potential of what Michael Bakhtin has defined as the chronotope (1981), the space-time field, is far less explored in studies on biblical cities, as Hugh Pyper argues (2018, 36).9
All in all, textual cities h...