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As background to studying the biblical texts within their ancient contexts, this chapter surveys several extra-biblical texts of the ancient Near East. Traditions from Mesopotamian, Egypt, and Canaan are briefly discussed. The divine characters of Marduk, Tiamat, Enlil, and Ea are described in the Mesopotamian epics Enūma elish and Atrahasīs. Drawing from Ugaritic archival material, the Baal epic, though not a creation account proper, is also recounted. Both the Mesopotamian and Canaanite narratives feature the motif of divine combat with watery chaos (Chaoskampf). In contrast, the Egyptian accounts offer a more “evolutionary” perspective, particularly the cosmogony of Heliopolis, which features the deity Atum differentiating himself to form the physical world. In addition, the so-called Memphite theology features the deity Ptah bringing forth creation by word, similar to the God of Genesis 1.

This chapter poses the question of whether or not the “companion volume” that Eliade promised in Patterns in Comparative Religions can be identified with “the awkward, multi-volume, unfinished production of Eliade’s last years,” A History of Religious Ideas. It argues that Eliade thought it so, or came to think it so. The History functions—and will continue to function—in a way analogous to an encyclopedia, providing a valuable starting point for further inquiries, one that is provocative of both thought and questions. But despite Eliade’s identification of the History with the “companion volume,” it fails to reflect explicitly on the relations between the morphological approach, as exemplified in Patterns, and a historical approach, as illustrated by the History. In part, this is due to the lack of the concluding volume to the History, Eliade’s growing problems with his health, and, finally, his death; but it is also due to the inadequate conceptualization of the historical embodied in the work.

The narrative of the Exodus preserves various facets of collective memory. The memories of Egyptian slavery, of devastating plagues, and of the figure of Moses can be correlated in various ways with historical effects during the Egyptian Empire in Canaan. The figure of Moses serves as a unifying element in these stories, and may derive from a dimly perceived historical figure.

This chapter discusses terracottas and Old Testament study and looks at two paradigm shifts in recent scholarship in the origins of Israelite religion and in cognitive archaeology. It next turns to examine some conceptual hazards with regard to toys, magic and fertility. Finaly clay and cuneiform texts in terms of inscribed terracottas in ancient Mesopotamia are discussed and the value of broad and extended perspectives are given. Finally the chapter looks at contrasting terracotta repertories in the areas of Canaan, Israel and Judah.

This chapter provides contrasts in the terracotta imagery of Canaan, Israel and Judah. This is followed by an examination on the emergence of nude female images in early urban societies in Sumer, (c.3000–2100 bc). The chapter then investigates the ‘nude female’ in Babylonia (c.2100–1650 bc), the migration of the one-piece open-mould technology to Syria, terracotta imagery in Canaan and the Egyptian connection. Finally it looks at terracotta plaques in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age (c.1650–1150 bc) and the Canaanite terracotta legacy in the first millennium bc (Iron Age).

The Israelites' exodus from Egypt has been considered to be a historical event central to the formation of ancient Israel as a nation and its faith. The historicity of this event was affirmed by John Bright as recently as 1981 in the third edition of A History of Israel. Bright claims these periods never existed. One is forced to ask why the central event in Israel's history has so quickly lost its credibility in the eyes of many leading scholars. A number of factors have been responsible for this decline and the present crisis: the collapse of the Albright–Wright synthesis of the “conquest” of Canaan by Joshua and the Israelites; the demise of the Wellhausenian, regarding the composition of the Pentateuch and the traditional dating of those sources; and the redefining of historiography or history writing in the Bible. This chapter briefly sketches how these developments took place and how they set the stage for the present investigation.

The old consensus regarding Israel's entry into Canaan, as the book of Joshua claims, has been largely abandoned because the archaeological record has not corroborated a literal interpretation and because, in the view of historical minimalists, the nature of the biblical sources is not historiographic but ideological and etiological. The purpose of this book is not to concentrate on the problem of when and under what conditions Israel entered Canaan, but rather to investigate seriously the sojourn narratives from the vantage point of Egypt. However, because of the link the Bible makes between these events, the Exodus and Joshua materials are inseparable. The book examines some of the key developments from the 1980s to the present, and evaluates them before looking at the biblical data on the Egyptian sojourn–exodus tradition. That the Israelites were pastoral Canaanites is a new development, which must be examined here.

In various versions of the Children's Bible, we observe that some narratives such as Noah's naked drunkenness and how he had cursed Ham's son Canaan have been left out, as have other scenes that exhibit tones of sex and racism. This is obviously because they are inappropriate for young readers. There are several ambiguities in interpreting this particular tale about Noah and Canaan, and this story presents seemingly unexpected actions for someone who was initially described as “righteous.” H. Hirsch Cohen, the author of The Drunkenness of Noah, believes that Noah was portrayed in such a manner as a demonstration of what he refers to as “philological sleuthing.” While alcohol during that time was believed to aid in sexual intercourse, Cohen points out that Noah used alcohol to fulfil God's command about being fruitful and multiplying. This chapter also incorporates Noah's narrative in the context of African-American enslavement.

This chapter presents the account of twelve scouts—one man from each Israelite ancestral tribe—who were commanded to survey the land of Canaan. The scouts returned to the Israelite camp enraptured by the beauty of land, saying “it does indeed flow with milk and honey,” however, they were also terrified by the giant settlers of the land—the Anakites. Even as God had promised the Israelites that they shall overcome the Anakites, the spies succumb to doubts and refused to fight. The contrast between the giants and the spies represents the duality between the Normative versus the Other. Specifically, the act of coming out and living as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender can be likened to a territorial battle for autonomy and self-definition against dominant culture—the gigantic power and privilege of mainstream thinking.

Prophetic thinkers disputed whether the nation could ever overcome its sin of oppression. These differences affected agendas for change and debates over emigration. The majority, reflecting redemptive strands in biblical prophecy, foresaw a bright if distant future within the United States and oriented their congregants to a generations-long struggle for equality.

Stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were a staple of theaters across the United States well into the twentieth century. In 1876, after jubilee troupes had become a national craze, George Howard and his wife Caroline added a jubilee troupe to their stage production, setting off a new trend. Soon jubilee singers were a prerequisite for every “Tom” production. This chapter examines the role of black singers in the show, using Howard’s revision of George Aiken’s script as well as reviews, and lists the spirituals used in the initial productions. A symbiosis between Tom shows and jubilee troupes developed, with jubilee troupes increasingly adding ethnographic portrayals of slave life to their concerts. Soon other plays that had a more tangential relation to plantation life (or none at all) began incorporating jubilee singers. Meantime, the Hyers sisters and Elizabeth Hopkins mounted musical plays that incorporated spirituals as well as cultivated music. Minstrel managers attempted a new level of “verisimilitude” in theatrical representations of slave life and music, constructing outdoor plantations and holding performances in slave cabins and cotton fields, as well as on nearby stages.

Chapter 3 engages with Giorgio Agamben’s argument that sovereignty is disclosed most directly through the ban, which places someone outside or beyond the law. His chief example is the ancient Latin figure of the homo sacer (literally, the “sacred man”), a condemned criminal who, having lost all rights, may be killed with impunity. Whereas earlier theorists regarded the homo sacer as an example of the ambivalence of the sacred— of the convergence of the pure and the polluted in a single category— Agamben argues that this figure should be interpreted not as a sacrifice, but as proof that the sovereign power to place someone under the ban is more primordial than the sacred. Juxtaposing another case of the ban, the biblical herem by which individual victims and entire cities were consecrated to destruction, this chapter contests Agamben’s interpretation of the ban, and his rejection of the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred, while developing his insights to interpret the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan as moments of sovereign appropriation, where the “outside” and “inside” of the polity— the law- breaking and law- making functions— become indistinguishable.

This chapter examines the period during which the Latter-day Saints built “the City of Joseph” in Nauvoo, Illinois. During this time, in a limited manner the Mormons attempted to create a Zion that included people of African descent. Both contemporaneous and retrospective archival records from this period portray Joseph Smith Jr. as a prophet who welcomed blacks as (all but) full members of the Mormon covenantal community. Yet Joseph and other Smith family members were far from colorblind. In fact, the Smiths’ willingness to accept black Mormons like Jane Manning James was predicated on the black Mormons’ ability to overcome the legacy of spiritual inferiority of the cursed lineages into which they were born. If they remained faithful to the gospel, then their cursed bloodlines would be purified. This inward change meant that these black Saints could become equal to their white brethren and (eventually) white themselves.

This chapter discusses Octavia E. Butler's writing career during the period 1976–1980, focusing on her published works Kindred (1979), “Near of Kin” (1979), and Wild Seed as well as the unpublished Canaan (c. 1975–1976). The chapter first provides an overview of Butler's formal education and commercial success as an author before analyzing her works in greater detail, along with the themes of survival and reproductive futurity that pervade them. Butler said she saw “Near of Kin” as originating in her study of the Bible during her Baptist childhood, and in particular on the way she “read avidly” on biblical “stories of conflict, betrayal, torture, murder, exile, and incest.” With regards to Kindred, she did not think of it as science fiction, and instead referred to it as a “grim fantasy.” Wild Seed provides the “origin story” for the events in the Patternist series, while Canaan is the alternate version of Kindred, set in Patternist universe.

This chapter turns to the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans retold the biblical story of the “curse of Ham” as a fantasy to promote the notion of racial purity, which contradicted the social reality of interracial reproductive sex that prevailed throughout slavery. It contends that nineteenth-century Americans clung to the so-called curse of Ham or curse of Canaan as a religious fantasy that attempted to negate interracial sex as foundational to the origins of race and instead propagated a fantasy about racial purity. This fantasy was the field in which identities were forged, subjugations articulated, and desire structured. And by making the familial form universal and perpetuated by the (sovereign and nonsovereign) sexual transmission of race, it held out a singular humanity cut by racial inequality.

This chapter takes the story of the curse of Canaan as a starting point and states that it serves as a point of departure for presenting the varied views of prominent Karaite commentators on Genesis 9:18–28, including Yaʿqub al-Qirqisani, Yefet ben ʿEli, Yusuf ibn Nuh, and Yeshuʿah ben Yehudah. The comparative analysis is arranged according to seven leading thematic-exegetical questions, while in each category the exegetical responses are presented in chronological order, commencing with al-Qirqisani (first half of the tenth century) and ending with Yehudah (mid-eleventh century).

This chapter analyzes the Sefat Emet, a late nineteenth-century work that shaped the theology of Gur Hasidism. It identifies the two territorial belongings—the land of Canaan and the land of Israel—as representing two spiritual phases in the process of the redemption of reality. Inspired by the Zoharic Kabbalah and the thought of Maharal of Prague, the Canaan-Israel juxtaposition comes to represent the theosophical dichotomies of natural/supernatural, impure/sanctified, unified/diverse, and so on. The conquest of the land of Canaan was not an actual aggressive act, but rather an act by which the natural, impure, and fragmented conditions of reality were redeemed to become a supernatural, sanctified, and united order. This spiritualized interpretation not only escapes ethical and theological difficulties, but also redefines the relationship between Canaan and Israel as one of reciprocal cooperation within the divine plan and the cosmic order.

This chapter addresses the following questions: In the Hellenistic and Roman period, did Jews consider that there were still “Canaanites” living in the land, or elsewhere? Were the categories “Canaan” and “Canaanites” relevant in any way to Jews at that time? In a more general way, which words did Jewish authors use to name the land and its non-Jewish inhabitants? And does the terminology teach us something about the way(s) Jews conceived of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the land? The answers proposed are based on the analysis of Jewish literary works from the Hellenistic and Roman period.