Spatial Frontiers

Abstract

Spatial Frontiers Ian D. Wilson Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred. Edited by Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen J. Wenell. LHBOTS 540. Pp. xxii + 242. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Cloth, $115.00. The King and the Land: A Geography of Royal Power in the Biblical World. By Stephen C. Russell. Pp. xiii + 286. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Cloth, $99.00. The Hebrew Bible begins with a description of space. Lacking form, empty, void, was the earth, with darkness and wind and chaotic waters—a description that captures some of the essence of space as a concept. Space is empty but it contains things. It lacks filling but carries the possibility of being filled. It is void but one has to move through it to get somewhere. In Genesis, God makes space. Or more precisely, he reconfigures space in order to make the space of the cosmos, with all the things it contains, as we know it. But space is not stable of course. It is ever shifting and being reconfigured. God constructs space in the opening verses of Genesis, and then his created order itself continually reconstructs space throughout the Bible's texts. Space is never constant, its boundaries never fixed. Its boundaries, moreover, are not always agreed upon. The limits of space (and its conceptual cousin, time) depend on human perception and position. Although scholars of the Bible have always been concerned with space to some extent (indeed, given a text like Genesis 1, how could we not be concerned with it?), in recent years it has become an especially productive conceptual category within biblical scholarship. The American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature jointly hosted the Constructions of Ancient Space Seminar at their annual meetings from 2000 to 2005. Then the European Association of Biblical Studies began its own [End Page 359] seminar devoted to space, entitled Bible and Sacred Space, a research program that went on for more than a decade. These scholarly efforts have produced no less than five volumes of essays to date,1 and many of the seminar participants have also written monographs related to their research.2 There has been, too, an increase in scholarly attention to certain types of spaces, the city for example—mainly Jerusalem—with its various conceptualizations and quarters.3 One can map this recent trend in biblical studies onto a larger spatial trend in the humanities.4 And because space, as a concept to think with, is so broad and touches on every aspect of human life in one way or another, it can serve as a central talking point that successfully brings together academic study of the Bible with other fields of research. The two volumes under review aim to do just that. The edited volume Constructions of Space III and the monograph The King and the Land explore conceptualizations of space in the Bible, interacting with scholarship from the fields of geography, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and others. Each book is to be commended for its attention to questions that have not often been asked of the Bible's texts. How is space "made sacred" in biblical texts, and how does the making of sacred space relate to other social constructions in the literature (Økland, de Vos, and Wenell, p. xvi)? In the texts, how is political power—especially royal power, with all its ties to divinity and sacredness—formed in space, and how does space inform power (Russell, pp. 1–3)? Moreover, how does one take into [End Page 360] account the textuality of this making and unmaking of sacred and political space? Indeed, "spatial-critical approaches have provided a vocabulary through which the ancient texts are allowed to speak in new ways and also to address modern people in new ways" (Økland, de Vos, and Wenell, p. xvii). As a driver of research, the concept of space can take biblical scholarship into new territories. In asking new questions, of course, the challenge that researchers face is to provide answers that continue pushing the limits of our knowledge, instead of retreating back into the same old comfortable ideas. For the most part, the editors and authors of...