TABLE OF CONTENTS

MAKING GEOGRAPHY

A GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM

THE VALUE OF A SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE

FIRSTSPACE, SECONDSPACE, THIRDSPACE

THIRDING-AS-OTHERING AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO HEGEL’S THESIS/ANTITHESIS/SYNTHESIS

CAN A TRIALECTIC ANALYSIS ADD ANYTHING TO BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP?

CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT: THE ETHICAL COMMANDMENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE  FAMILY-PLUS-LAND

S. BENDOR:  THE BEIT AB

NORMAN HABEL: HEBREW LAND IDEOLOGIES

ADDING THIRDSPACE TO THE DECALOGUE

HABEL AND THIRDSPACE

THE DECALOGUE AS A LAND TREATY

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL TRIALECTICS

THE RHETORICAL FUNCTIONS OF THE DECALOGUE

MAKING A NEW GEOGRAPHY

WELLBEING FOR ALL

THE DECALOGUE IN OUR OWN THIRDSPACES

HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER

RETURNING FIRSTSPACE TO THE DECALOGUE

OTHER POSSIBILITIES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES
 
 

In this paper, my purpose is to ask what a geographical perspective adds to biblical scholarship on the Decalogue. In his books, Postmodern Geographies (1989) and Thirdspace (1996), Edward Soja claims that critical social and historical scholarship has been operating with a bias that privileges time and ignores the importance of space, giving priority to history over geography.⁽¹⁾ He claims that this historical bias has caused scholars across the disciplines to miss the inseparable interrelationship between the historical, the social, and the spatial. In his words, "it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the 'making of geography' more than the 'making of history' that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world."⁽²⁾ Soja's assessment seems particularly relevant within the field of biblical scholarship. As practitioners of historical criticism, biblical scholars of the Ten Commandments have been profoundly concerned with the making of history, seeking the origin, original form, and redactional history of these words. There has been far less attention directed toward the ways that the Decalogue makes geography.

For non-geographers, the language of "making geography" might seem a bit odd. Soja's meaning would be clearer by making explicit that he is referring to "human geography" rather than "physical geography." Human geography is a broad division within the discipline of geography that deals with the spatial aspects of society in contrast to physical geography that deals with actual terrain. Although insertion of the word "human" compromises the neat poetic contrast "making history" and "making geography," Soja is not referring to remaking physical terrain. He is concerned with the ways that societies are made and remade as people change their social space. Biblical scholars have certainly paid great attention to physical geography. We have paid far less attention to the inherent spatiality of human societies and the ways that remaking human geographies remakes societies.
 

I must emphasize here that a geographical perspective does not displace, negate, or deny the validity of historical criticism of the Decalogue. Soja insists that an expanded critical imagination about the inherent spatiality of human life must include historical and social awareness. However, as a strategy to expand the spatial imagination, he argues for the methodological priority of geography over history, of space over time, as a counterbalance to years of overemphasis on historical questions.

If biblical scholars of the Decalogue have tended to emphasize the making of history while ignoring the making of geography, believers within various Judeo-Christian traditions have frequently turned the Ten Commandments into a timeless and spaceless social ethic. Perhaps more than any other portion of the Bible, the Ten Commandments have been both dehistoricized and despatialized. In current public debate, some people have claimed that the Ten Commandments constitute a universally valid social ethic. The recent vote of the House of Representatives, which authorizes the posting of the Ten Commandments on the walls of public schools as a response to school violence, demonstrates this opinion. Behind such claims lies the belief that the Ten Commandments are universally relevant and universally applicable, in all times, places, and societies.
 
 

My own concern for the importance of spatiality turns in two directions. First, I want to demonstrate the value of a geographical perspective regarding the Decalogue for historically oriented biblical scholarship. Second, I want to respond to claims within our own time and place about the use of these ancient words as an ethic for contemporary society. I want to make the case that Soja's notion of a trialectic of spatiality has much to offer to both scholars and non-scholars. For scholars, steeped in the ways of historical criticism, a trialectic of spatiality opens up insights about the Decalogue as a social ethic for another time and place. For both scholars and non-scholars, citizens of a multicultural society in a troubled era, a trialectic of spatiality provides crucial insights for the ways that the Ten Commandments can be used and misused in our own social, historical, and geographical contexts.
 
 

Soja's method for rebalancing spatiality, historicality, and sociality is what he calls "thirding-as-Othering" that results in a trialectic of First, or "perceived," space, Second, or "conceived," space, and Third, or "lived," space. Before going further, I need to express my own disclaimer here. Soja's writing style ranges from opaque to obtuse. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I suspect that the difficulty of his writing style is partly a deliberate strategy to expand the boundaries of his readers' critical spatial imaginations. At those moments when I am feeling less generous, I consider it an example of academic writing at its obfuscating worst. My point is that I don't pretend to understand everything that Soja is attempting to accomplish.

Having made that disclaimer, I want to focus on what Soja himself identifies as the essential first step in transforming the binary logic of either/or into the trialectic logic of both/and. Rather than make the case abstractly, as Soja does, I am going to begin with an example. Consider the place where you live. For the purpose of my example here, let's assume that you live in a house on a particular plot of land, on a particular street, in a particular city, in a particular state, in a particular country. This house is an actual material structure. It can be seen, touched, measured, painted, and repaired. It can be bought, sold, rented, and taxed. This material structure is Firstspace. The house is also your home, and carries with it whatever concepts you have about home. You can consider it as your safe haven in a cold world or a hostile place full of tensions. You can consider it for its economic value, as a tax write-off, your reward for careful savings, or an economic albatross around your neck. You can regard it as a family legacy, full of memories, a starter home, or a status symbol that you have made it in society. It can be the place where you grow your prize petunias, or an endless headache, demanding constant attention. All of these are ideas and beliefs about the house in which you live. These ideas and beliefs constitute Secondspace. Your house then is a combination of these two terms. The house where you live is both is both material and symbolic, both Firstspace and Secondspace. This combination of material and symbolic is Thirdspace.

Soja has reformulated the trialectic of spatiality from the French philosopher Henri LeFebvre, who differentiated between perceived, conceived, and lived space. Firstspace is the material that you perceive. Secondspace is the symbolic that you conceive about what you perceive. The place where you live is always a combination of what you perceive and what you conceive, a combination of Firstspace and Secondspace, resulting in Thirdspace, or lived space.
 
 

In this trialectic analysis of Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace, Soja is providing an alternative to the notions of thesis/antithesis/synthesis of Hegel and Marx. He argues that this sequence reveals a temporal privileging that ignores the importance of spatiality. The sequence takes place in linear fashion, over time, from original thesis, to the reaction to the thesis in the antithesis, and finally, to a new synthesis at the end of the process. Soja's thirding-as Othering sees the binary terms spatially, each existing simultaneously in time. The third then is not a new entity, which ends the original pair, but a simultaneous possibility in space, which then leads to an infinite number of new possibilities. Your house continues to be a material structure, whatever symbolic meanings you attach to it. Your house is always simultaneously Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace.
 
 

The question that I am addressing here is, How does this kind of trialectic analysis add anything to biblical scholarship regarding the Decalogue? Soja argues that we have been operating with a blind spot when it comes to spatiality. This spatial blind spot seems particularly evident in analysis of the Decalogue. I am going to begin by looking at the most obvious spatial category, the role of "land." The command to honor father and mother, which is the fourth or fifth commandment, depending on the theological tradition that is doing the numbering, includes the phrase, "so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD Your God is giving you" (Exodus 20:12b).⁽³⁾ I am going to leave aside all redactional questions about the original form of this commandment and the inclusion of this phrase. I am also going to leave aside all sorts of questions about the relationship between the versions of the Decalogue in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and the ways these two versions functions within their own literary contexts. Instead, I am going to consider the rhetorical function of these words using the concepts of First, Second, and Third Space.

My comments here are intended to be preliminary, by drawing on the arguments of other scholars to point in the direction of further study. I regard my own work on this material as a beginning point, motivated by an effort to ask a different set of questions. I have not done the kind of detailed exegetical work that would be necessary to make a solid case for my readings here. Nor do I claim to have made an exhaustive study of scholarship on the Decalogue. My own goal is to respond to Soja's challenge to expand my own spatial imagination and to think spatially in a discipline that has been shaped by historical criticism.

By making this strategic choice to read with a bias toward geography, a reader of both academic and popular discussions of the Ten Commandments will soon notice that few writers comment upon the reference to land in this commandment. Scholars concerned with the historical development of the Decalogue treat this phrase as a later addition, and focus on a presumed original form of the commandment. A reader with a spatial bias will also notice, and find revealing, that some writers focus upon the time significance of "long life" while ignoring the spatial reference, "in the land." For example, Walter Harrelson writes, "The longer form of the commandment shows that long life is the matter in question. If one wishes to enjoy long life, one needs to see to the life of one's parents when the time for doing so arrives."⁽⁴⁾ Two notable exceptions to this temporal bias toward the Decalogue are Christopher Wright and S. Bendor.
 
 

In an article published twenty years ago, Wright places the ethical commandments of the Decalogue in the social, economic, and political context of the household, a family-plus-land social unit that mediated the covenant relationship between God, Israel, and the land.⁽⁵⁾ The primary symbol of this family-based covenantal relationship was the land. Wright's thesis is that the commands to honor parents, and to prohibit adultery, stealing, and coveting were designed to protect this primary social unit of family-plus-land.

In his discussion, Wright follows the numbering of the Reformed Christian tradition to describe the eight and tenth commandments as external protection of the family's property. He makes the case that land and property were the tangible symbols of "a man's⁽⁶⁾ personal share in the inheritance of Israel."⁽⁷⁾ Since theft of property meant loss of this inheritance, the eighth commandment prohibition against stealing protects more than material goods. It safeguards God's blessing for the family and ensures the social status of the household as full participants in the community. The tenth commandment, which prohibits coveting the neighbor's house, also focuses on the land, since the neighbor's house is far more than a building. It is the household-plus-land that is the neighbor's share of the inheritance of God's blessing. Taking the neighbor's family land from him takes away the source of his family's wellbeing and standing within the community. Wright interprets the tenth commandment as a prohibition of the process of latifundialization by which the wealthy displaced the small landowners of Israel. His point is that the prohibitions of the eighth and tenth commandments function within a community which regards the family land as a visible symbol of God's blessing and the family's place within the community.⁽⁸⁾

Wright then characterizes the fifth and seventh commandments as internal protection of the family authority structure and sexual integrity. He places the fifth commandment, to honor father and mother, in the context of the beit ab⁽⁹⁾, or "father's house," which Wright identifies as "the primary framework of judicial authority within which the Israelite found himself, to which he remained subject for a considerable period of his life."⁽¹⁰⁾ The promise of long life in the land is conditional upon the respect and obedience of children to their parents, including "submission to the jurisdictional authority of the paterfamilias."⁽¹¹⁾ Wright then argues that disobedience to this family authority structure "was a crime against the stability of the nation,"⁽¹²⁾ since the "nation's" relationship with God was grounded on the wellbeing of the household. Wright then shifts the focus of the commandment from the obedience of children to their parents, to the responsibility of the "man" toward his ancestors and descendants to maintain the family land in the family.⁽¹³⁾ He cites at length, and then rejects, Brichto's argument that the commandment refers to honoring parents after their death, based on the importance of maintaining burial plots.⁽¹⁴⁾ The seventh commandment, which prohibits adultery, protects the sexual integrity of marriage. Wright also places this commandment within the context of the household-plus-land units, based on the principle that "a man must be sure that his children were his own."⁽¹⁵⁾ Violation of this commandment is also a "crime against the nation" because it attacks the stability of the basic unit of society, the family.⁽¹⁶⁾

By this discussion, Wright argues that the social, economic and theological realms were inextricably bound together, all three having the family as their focal point. Any forces that threatened the family-land-Israel connection would endanger the foundations of the national relationship between Israel and God.⁽¹⁷⁾
 
 

Bendor's The Social Structure of Ancient Israel is a book length treatment that focuses on the basic themes of Wright's article.⁽¹⁸⁾ He argues that the extended family was the basic unit of ancient Israel, from the settlement until the end of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. By doing so, he is challenging assumptions by some biblical scholars about kinship structures within ancient Israel. Most notably, he asserts that the mishpaha⁹ remained a structure based on kinship, contra Gottwald's claim that the mishpaha was a non-kinship based protective association.⁽¹⁹⁾ He also asserts that many of the conflicts that scholars have read as evidence of class-conflict between urban elites and dispossessed peasants in fact reveal conflicts within kinship structures, between the inheritors and non-inheritors of the family land. In this paper, I make no effort to rehearse or evaluate Bendor's arguments on these points. Instead, I use his description of the kinship structure for an analysis of the importance of "land" in the Decalogue.

Bendor asserts that Israelite society in biblical times was organized according to kinship groups, from tribe (shebet)⁹ to clan (mishpaha) to family (beit ab).⁽²⁰⁾ In detailed analyses of these terms, Bendor describes a society organized into kinship units on family land, and the kinds of conflicts and ethical considerations inherent within such a society.

The beit ab is a kinship unit which includes father and wives, their sons and the son's wives, unmarried daughters and the sons' offspring.⁽²¹⁾ This means that the basic kinship unit comprised three or four generations living in the same space. He cites the references in the Ten Commandments, "for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love (hesed⁹) to the thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments" (Ex 20:5-6); Dt. 5:9-10). Then Bendor makes the point that the "reference is primarily to groups in which three or four generations live together, not necessarily a sequence of generations."⁽²²⁾ In other words, Bendor is seeing human geography rather than history in these words. The concern is for the consequences for a multigenerational family living together in the same space, not the effects upon a family and its descendants over time.

Bendor also asserts that the smallest kinship unit was not the beit ab, but nuclear units within the beit ab when a son set up his own house within the beit ab. "This house constitutes a unit in its own right, connected to and dependent upon the beit ab and its functioning, and its status therein (vis-à-vis the father and the brothers) determines its status outside."⁽²³⁾

Bendor describes the development of the beit ab over time. The first generation consisted of the father and his wives and sons and daughters. During the second stage, the sons took wives and created their own households within the beit ab, under the leadership of the father, while the daughters left their own beit ab to become wives in other households. In the third stage, the father was no longer the head of the household, and the leadership of the beit ab passed to his eldest son.

He also discusses the realities of multigenerational family units living on family property under the authority of the head of the household, who was either the father or the eldest son when the father was deceased or too old to lead. He also discusses the kinds of conflict inherent in a social structure where there could be more sons than land to inherit. The non-inheriting sons remained part of the beit ab led by their father, or elder brother when he inherited leadership, but would never become heads of their own beit ab units. These brothers continued under the name of the father or inheriting elder brother and would never inherit the family land.

Bendor's analysis of Israel's kinship structure, and his description of the potential for conflict and injustice within such family-plus-land units makes sense of the ethical considerations of the Decalogue. Wright asserted that four of the commandments functioned as protection, both internally and externally, of the family-plus-land units. Yet, he makes two questionable assumptions. The first is that the command to honor parents is addressed to children about obedience to their parents. The second is that the command about coveting the neighbor's house is directed against the practice of creating latifunds out of dispossessed peasant lands. In both cases, Wright is not focusing clearly enough on the addressee of the Decalogue. First, as most commentators note, the command to honor father and mother is not addressed to children, but to adults about care for their elderly parents. Second, although the process of latifundialization occurred in Israel, the prohibition against coveting in the Decalogue makes ample sense as a prohibition addressed to the landholding head of the beit ab. Wright has mixed the audience, so that different commandments are addressed to different audiences. He has not considered the Decalogue rhetorically, as an address to a specific audience, intended to accomplish a specific purpose.
 
 

In contrast, Habel's excellent study, The Land Is Mine, is a splendid example of biblical scholarship that is sensitive to both spatial and rhetorical questions.⁽²⁴⁾ As such, Habel's book is my primary conversation partner for the rest of the paper. His topic is land and land rights in the Hebrew scriptures. He identifies his own rhetorical motivations in writing the book. An Australian, he lives in a country which is facing hard questions about the land rights of Australia's Aboriginal inhabitants and its colonizing settlers. In his own social context, Habel has become aware of the use and misuse of biblical texts about land by people who use Biblical references to buttress their own positions without paying attention to the specific social and ideological context of the references.

Habel also sounds much like the postmodern geographers in his insistence on the significance of land within the Hebrew scriptures, and his assessment that biblical scholarship has tended to overlook the ideological importance of land. He notes that "land, after all, is such a comprehensive symbol in the Old Testament that it could be ranked next to God in importance."⁽²⁵⁾

Habel identifies six distinct land ideologies within the Hebrew scriptures. He describes an ideology as a "complex of images and ideas that may employ theological doctrines, traditions, or symbols to promote the social economic, and political interests of a group within a society."⁽²⁶⁾ By using the language of ideology, Habel is arguing that the words of biblical texts are addressed to specific audiences about contested matters, to persuade the audience of the rightness of its ideology. He is not concerned to identify the social and historical reality behind the texts, but to identify the ideology behind the rhetoric.

Two of Habel's land ideologies seem particularly relevant to the Decalogue. He does not explicitly refer to the Ten Commandments in his study. He does identify the ideology of Deuteronomy, which he names a "theocratic ideology," with the land as "conditional grant."⁽²⁷⁾ In this ideology, YHWH is identified as the owner and ruler over the land. ⁽²⁸⁾ The process of liberating Israel from Egypt is the basis for recognizing that YHWH is the supreme God of the universe.⁽²⁹⁾ The land of Canaan is gift or grant, designed to remind the Israelites that they are indebted to YHWH for the use of the land.⁽³⁰⁾ In Deuteronomy, the land is the primary and crucial gift.⁽³¹⁾ Long life in the land is conditional upon Israel keeping the stipulations of YHWH, the landowner.⁽³²⁾ Most notably, Israel must not make idols or worship other gods.⁽³³⁾ Habel asserts that the land is secondary to allegiance to YHWH. "Any land could have been chosen."⁽³⁴⁾ What is primary is allegiance to YHWH, not this specific land. The Israelites have no natural right to the land, only the promise of long life in the land if they adhere to the conditions of the treaty.⁽³⁵⁾

A significant aspect of Habel's discussion of land ideology is the Hebrew word, nahalah.⁹ Habel asserts that the common translation of nahalah as "inheritance" is misleading, since most occurrences of the term do not involve legal transfer of land or property from parent to child.⁽³⁶⁾ Rather, the primary meaning of nahalah "is not something simply handed down from generation to generation, but the entitlement or rightful property of a party that is legitimated by a recognized social custom, legal process, or divine character."⁽³⁷⁾ The basic definition of nahalah has to do with division of property and most frequently refers to a portion of land.⁽³⁸⁾ Rather than translate nahalah as "inheritance," Habel uses the terminology of "portion," "share," "entitlement," "allotment," and "rightful property."⁽³⁹⁾

In his ideological analysis of Deuteronomy, Habel claims that the Levites, and especially the Levitical priests, are the ones who most benefited by this ideology. Although the Levites do not receive a portion of land, they receive a "higher portion" by having authority over the law of the covenant, which is the law of the land treaty.⁽⁴⁰⁾ The peasant landholders have entitlement to individual properties by virtue of a divine allocation in the distant past, which is designated a nahalah, a separate entitlement within the land as YHWH's grant to Israel.⁽⁴¹⁾ Others in the ideal Deuteronomic society have neither land nor status. Those without land are dependent upon the goodwill of the landed.⁽⁴²⁾ The landholders are expected to take care of the needs of the landless who have no land rights, such as the widows, orphans, aliens, the poor, and landless laborers.

In his discussion of Joshua, Habel identifies "an ancestral household ideology."⁽⁴³⁾ The "ancestral household" is the beit ab, which Habel defines as "the smallest socioeconomic unit in Israel, involving several generations of family under a single head, a cluster of dwellings forming a single household, and a range of economic activities."⁽⁴⁴⁾ The mishpaha is the "ancestral family."⁽⁴⁵⁾ The ideology of Joshua refers to the land as a cluster of family lots or allotments, with each family lot identified as its divine entitlement (nahalah).⁽⁴⁶⁾ Each entitlement, given by divine lot according to the command of Moses, becomes the inheritance of the ancestral family and household in subsequent generations. Thus the ideology of the book of Joshua provides a charter for ancestral households to claim these inherited lands as territory given by divine decree, regardless of what may have happened to the ownership of the land over time."⁽⁴⁷⁾ Habel sees the audience of Joshua as the individual households who are called to follow Joshua's example. The heads of the households are the holders of authority in this ideological system. They are the nucleus of the community and its responsible leaders.⁽⁴⁸⁾ He characterizes the book of Joshua as a campaign document designed to encourage landless ancestral households and families, whether in exile or in Israel, to claim the royal lands once allocated to them but not now in their possession."⁽⁴⁹⁾

The common doctrine of all six ideologies is that YHWH has promised to give Canaan to Israel, so that Israel is entitled to the land.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Habel also assumes that specific power groups use this doctrine of entitlement to the land to promote their claims for control or ownership of all or parts of the land. This means that "most of these land ideologies are being promoted by particular landholders or would-be landholders."⁽⁵¹⁾ He also assumes that the texts are "the product of those with vested interests in gaining or maintaining control of land."⁽⁵²⁾

Although Habel makes a case to justify these assumptions, I am going to treat his assumptions as axioms, and consider the Decalogue as an ideology based on a belief in entitlement to the land. Taken as isolated units, the versions of the Decalogue in Exodus and Deuteronomy have obvious elements of both of these land ideologies. It is clear that the land is given as gift. It is also apparent that the words are addressed to an agrarian audience of male leaders of beit ab units.
 
 

After this summary of the arguments of three biblical scholars who have paid attention to land, I return to my own primary question. Can Soja's notion of a trialectic of spatiality add anything to the discussion that Wright, Bendor, and Habel have not already seen without using this terminology? Soja, following Lefebvre, asserts that the privileging of time leads toward reductionism, the result of setting up categories with two terms. Soja defines reductionism as "the compacting of meaning into a closed either/or opposition between two terms, concepts, or elements."⁽⁵³⁾ Again quoting Soja, "Whenever faced with such binarized categories (subject-object, mental-material, natural-social, bourgeoisie-proletariat, local-global, center-periphery, agency-structure), Lefebvre persistently sought to crack them open by introducing an-Other term, a third possibility or "moment" that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple combination or an "in between" position along some all-inclusive continuum. This critical thirding-as-Othering is the first and most important step in transforming the categorical and closed logic of either/or to the dialectically open logic of both/and also…"⁽⁵⁴⁾

Operating under a paradigm that has privileged time, study of the Decalogue has been an exercise in reductionism. Historical criticism has attempted to reduce the Decalogue to its original words, to separate the words from the surrounding narratives, to separate commands from prologue, and to separate the original word from later additions. By treating the promise of land as secondary and non-essential to the original words, scholars have separated space from the Decalogue in an effort to seek its history. In the process, the Decalogue has been ungrounded, set loose from its social and spatial moorings. In contrast, Soja's thirding-as-Othering paradigm expands rather than contracts, looking for the ever-expanding ranges of possibilities that come from considering the relationship between Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace.
 
 

Yet even this spatially sensitive book, which focuses on an obvious spatial category, "the land," demonstrates the kind of reductionism that concerned Lefebvre and Soja. Habel begins with a dialectic, a binary pairing of two terms, the physical reality called land, and the land as a symbol with a range of meanings.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In this contrast of physical land and land as symbol, Habel follows in the footsteps of Walter Brueggemann's excellent original volume on the land in the Overtures to Biblical Theology Series.⁽⁵⁶⁾ In Soja's terminology, the physical land is Firstspace. The land as symbol with a range of meanings is Secondspace. Habel has made clear throughout the book that he is looking at the texts themselves, without attempting to identify the actual historical and social locations behind the texts. "Our goal here is not to attempt a reconstruction of the historical and social reality behind the texts. Rather, our interest lies in the specific set of beliefs the texts espouse and the corresponding social force of these beliefs as they are reflecting within the rhetoric and wording of the texts."⁽⁵⁷⁾ By making this distinction, Habel uses another binary pairing, history and society, without mentioning geography. Perhaps the point is moot since he uses the pair only to note that he is not going to consider historical and social locations. As a spatially sensitive reader, I find it revealing that a book focusing on the category of land refers to social and historical locations but does not mention geographical locations. It is an indication of Soja's point, that we have been trained to think in terms of history and society, but to neglect geography.

Having made the pairing of physical land and land as symbol, and then restricting his discussion to texts about land, Habel has turned his attention to one term, land as symbol. He focuses on land as symbol without much reference to real land. In Soja's terms, he began with a pairing of land as Firstspace and land as Secondspace, but limited his focus to land as Secondspace. There is really no Firstspace in Habel's book. And since Habel restricts himself to Secondspace, there is no place for Thirdspace. As much as I appreciate and value Habel's book, there is a certain bloodless quality to it. He gathers and sorts biblical ideas about land, but these ideas seemed disconnected from actual land, and disconnected from real people who lived on the land. These are landless land ideologies, all Secondspace with no Firstspace. Without Firstspace, Habel's Secondspace textual analysis cannot take the step to Thirdspace, where actual people lived according to these ideologies.

Habel's book demonstrates the difficulty that we have as biblical scholars who study ancient texts. When we have only texts, we can easily forget that these texts were written by real people who lived in Firstspace, and that these ideas mattered. The references to land were not merely ideas, they were references to actual spaces and profoundly significant to the real people who attached these ideological meanings to actual land. To this reader, Habel's brief references to the poor Tamil family in India and the Aranda of central Australia convey more passion and more of a sense of lived reality than any of the Hebrew land ideologies that follow.⁽⁵⁸⁾
 
 

My question now is, can we read ancient texts according to a trialectic of spatiality without attempting to locate them historically, socially, and geographically? Can we still do the same kind of ideological analysis of texts that Habel has done, by beginning with three terms rather than two? And if so, what difference does it make in our analysis? Following Soja, I begin with the notion of a trialectic of Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace, rather than Habel's dialectic of physical land and land as symbol. At this point, I wish to make two comments. The first is that Habel's use of land as symbol clearly involves what Soja calls Thirdspace considerations. When he writes, "We create the land we experience; we construct the meanings of land for ourselves," he is combining Secondspace and Thirdspace.⁽⁵⁹⁾ The second comment is that here, as much as any place in my effort to expand my spatial imagination by venturing into the unfamiliar terrain of postmodern geography, I am unsure of the ground on which I am attempting to stand. I am convinced that there is something valuable for biblical scholars to gain by thinking in terms of Thirdspace when we analyze biblical texts and when we attempt to translate the results of our studies into our own contexts. Whether or not I am able to clarify the difference here is another matter. In any case, I plunge ahead, perhaps venturing where only fools dare to tread, using Habel's work as the ground of my own analysis.

I begin with a deliberate bias toward space by adopting as axiomatic Habel's assumption that this is a text about entitlement to land.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Even though redaction criticism can show that the phrase, "so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you" is the product of later redaction, I begin with the assumption that these words summarize the foundation of the ethic.
 
 

Writers on the Ten Commandments frequently refer to "the two tables of the law." Certainly, popular assumption divides the Ten Commandments between two tablets, with the commandments on the first tablet referring to responsibilities toward God and the commandments on the second tablet referring to the responsibilities to others. However, just as different theological traditions number the commandments differently, there is no consistent distribution of the two sets of commandments between the two tablets. A further problem with this popular notion is that dividing the commandments into two groups implies that each tablet has a fundamentally different focus and function.

One of the most widely discussed aspects of the Decalogue has been its status as covenant and its relationship to various treaty, loyalty oath, and covenant forms. Even though the image of two groups of commandments divided between two rounded tablets has become a part of common culture, perpetuated in movies, cartoons, and stained glass windows, many scholars put the two tablets in the context of covenant. There are two tablets because each party to the covenant gets a copy. If this is correct, then the continued use of the language of "two tables of the law" only serves to perpetuate the notion that the Decalogue has two distinct parts, without looking for the ways that the Decalogue is a unified whole.

Habel characterizes Deuteronomy as a land treaty.⁽⁶¹⁾ The issue is not merely submission to a dominant overlord, but a covenant about access to land. In this paper, I make no effort to summarize and sort through the scholarship on the Decalogue in relation to these various genres, or to differentiate between the versions of the Decalogue in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Again I take Habel's work as axiomatic and assume that the Decalogue functions as a land treaty. Read spatiality, the underlying construction of the Decalogue is that it identifies YHWH as the one who is giving the land as a conditional gift. In an effort to look for the unifying construction rather than assume two distinct parts, I return to Habel's assessment that the two most important terms in the Hebrew scriptures are "God" and "land." I suggest that the thread that ties the Decalogue together, however anyone chooses to divide this material into ten commandments, is the relationship between God, land, and people.

Although I am making a concerted effort not to adopt the numbering system of any theological tradition, I note in passing that the connection between God, land, and people becomes more evident by following Jewish tradition and reading Exodus 20:2 as part of the first commandment, rather than prologue. "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" places the entire covenant into spatial terms, and places the ethical obligations in the context of the deliverance from one place into another, by the one who claims ownership of the land.

There are two Hebrew words that are variously translated into English as "land." Both are used in Exodus 20. In 20:2, the word is erets⁹ "out of the land of Egypt." In 20:12, the word is adamah⁹, "that your days may be long in the land." Although both Hebrew words have a range of meanings, in the context of Exodus 20, erets has specific Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace connotations. The land of Egypt was actual physical location and political entity, both Firstspace and Secondspace. It was also Thirdspace, the place where the people experienced their life in Egypt as "the house of slavery." In 20:12, adamah refers first of all to Firstspace. Adamah is the ground, the place for growing crops, planting vineyards, grazing animals, and building houses. Unlike the reference to "the land of Egypt," there is no explicit political designation, naming the adamah as "Israel." It is not even "the land" as "the Earth," nor is there any kind of theological abstraction, naming this as the Promised Land or the Holy Land. Instead, it is adamah, the soil that sustains life in an agrarian culture.

For consideration of the land as Secondspace, I again refer to the work by Wright, Bendor, and particularly to Habel's ideological analyses. The Secondspace designation is that this is the land that the "Lord your God is giving you. This is land as gift of YHWH God. It is also significant to note the kinds of Secondspace designations that are not included here. There is no king in the Decalogue, and so there is no royal land. There is no temple or tabernacle, and so mention of holy space. Neither are there priests or Levites. There is no named political entity, and so no mention of Israel. Rather, this is a land treaty between YHWH and the landholders concerning Firstspace, based on a Secondspace designation of land as YHWH's conditional gift.

What is the connection between adamah and Thirdspace? Thirdspace combines the physical land with an ideology about the land to create lived social space. Whatever the social, historical, and geographical context behind the ideology, those who produced this text about land rights were involved in more than creating an ideology. They were attempting to provide an ideological basis for life lived on real land.
 
 

Perhaps the distinction I am seeking here is that Habel has differentiated between the texts themselves and the social and historical [and geographical] locations that produced the texts. In the process, he is creating an apples and oranges kind of situation. He has set up a category that includes the actual land of the ones who wrote the texts and the ideologies revealed by the texts, and then decided to focus on the ideology of the texts without locating the ones who produced the ideology. Actually, there are two distinct trialectics operating here. The first is an external trialectic of the writers of the texts, whose ideologies about the land (Secondspace) on which they lived (Firstspace) resulted in their own lived experiences on the land (Thirdspace). The second is an internal trialectic within the text that comprises the concern for physical land (Firstspace), ideologies about the land (Secondspace), and visions of what life lived on real land according to this ideology would be like (Thirdspace). By using the language of Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace, scholars can focus on either or both of these trialectics. A trialectics of spatiality offers scholars a sharp tool for locating texts in the land and locating the land in the texts.
 
 

As an ethic addressed to landholders, the Decalogue accomplishes two major rhetorical tasks. It first reminds the landholder that his land is not his, but is a conditional gift from God. It also places responsibility on the landholder for the welfare of those who are not landholders. The work by Wright, Bendor, and Habel has made clear that the "you" is the male head of the beit ab. The others are named in relationship to the addressee as "your son," "your daughter," "your male or female slave," "your livestock," or "the alien resident who lives in your towns" (Exodus 20:8). All of these others live under the authority of the head of the household, and none are landholders. In addition, responsibility is placed on the head of the beit ab to respect the rights of the neighbor, whose people and property are also identified in relationship to the male head of a beit ab, as "your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor" (20:16-17). The primary role of the ethic was to keep the family land in the family and the family on the land, and to protect the wellbeing of all members of the family, and to extend the same kind of concern for the neighbor's right to keep his land in the family and his family on the land.

A trialectic analysis of the command to honor father and mother also grounds these words in Firstspace. Although many scholars note that the command is addressed to adults about the care of elderly parents, few root this ethic in the social structure of the beit ab and even fewer attempt to ground it in Firstspace. Most commentators appeal to presumed universal notions about gratitude toward parents who deserve to be honored because they have given life to their children. As Wright saw clearly, this is an ethic for a social structure that was family and land based. The ethic is concerned to keep the land in the family by protecting the family's portion, its nahalah. Yet how does the command function here? How does care of elderly parents relate to keeping the land in the family? Brichto attempts to answer this question.⁽⁶²⁾ He argues that the real focus is the burial lots on the family land. In his analysis, honor of parents means protecting the family burial plots, based on a whole system of care for the ancestors. The responsibility extends both forward and backward in time, within the same plot of land. Although Brichto's analysis can faulted for creating a dichotomy between living parents and dead parents, and then making the argument that the commandment is about honoring the dead, his argument is one of the few that attempts to read the commandment spatially, and relate the honor of parents to long life on the land.

Bendor's book is particularly insightful for considering the quality of life for members of an extended family, particularly for the members of the household who would never inherit land. The family is not the nuclear family of modern society, but the multigenerational beit ab living on the ancestral land, in a kinship structure in which access to land was determined by gender and birth order. The mathematical reality of large families and finite plots of land is that a plot cannot be divided infinitely. Limiting the lion's share of the inheritance to the oldest son guaranteed that the land of the family stayed large enough. The inheriting son was then responsible for the wellbeing of the rest of the family, including the non-inheriting sons, and the elderly. Bendor raises questions about the quality of life of second or third or fourth son, the widow, the orphan, and the daughters who have lost status in the father's house. He makes the point that one's perspective on such a system had everything to do with where one stood in the kinship structure. Rhetoric is language of persuasion about contested matters. The only reason to make such an argument is that not all male heads of households were protecting the wellbeing of the non-inheritors within the family, or taking care of their elderly parents.
 
 

Once again, I return to Soja's original claim that historical bias has caused scholars across the disciplines to miss the inseparable interrelationship between the historical, the social, and the spatial, and repeat his assessment that "it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the 'making of geography' more than the 'making of history' that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world." As a text, the Decalogue makes a new geography for people whose old geography led to life in bondage. Although most scholars refer to the words, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" as "historical prologue," in reality they contain all three elements of a trialectic of history, society, and geography. The Decalogue offers an-Other possibility for a new society in the land, with a new geography based on a claim that the land is God's conditional gift, which leads to the possibility of a creating a new history. The text is also a tactic, a rhetorical strategy to create a new trialectic of history, society, and geography in lived social space. Whoever they were, and whenever and wherever they were located, the people who produced this text apparently intended that these words would make a new society according to the principles of this new human geography.
 

Although the point was made earlier, I return to the rather astounding notion that the primary concern of this ethic is the wellbeing of all of its members. If Wright, Bendor, and Habel are right in their analyses, this is an ethic for a particular type of human geography. In an agrarian society, with people living as families on finite plots of land, this ethic places the responsibility on the landholder to keep the land in the family, the family on the land, and take care of the ones who would never inherit land. If Habel is right that this was an ethic produced by landholders to justify their claim to the land, it is worth noting that the landholders have focused the ethic in terms of their responsibility to others, rather than the responsibility of others toward them. Bendor is surely right in pointing out that such demands would not have been necessary if all landholders were in fact ensuring the wellbeing of the ones dependent upon them. It does place the ethic in a different light than the one most often used to focus upon these words, which treats them as universal rules that everyone must obey.
 
 

The distinction between Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace not only helps biblical scholars break out of our binary categories in our study of biblical texts. It also helps us respond to the kind of Thirdspace realities that motivated Habel to write his book. Although as scholars, we can separate ideology from actual land, to talk about Secondspace without dealing with Firstspace, human beings live in all three spaces simultaneously. The struggles over land in Australia involve all three spaces. Firstspace is the actual land in dispute. Secondspace are the conflicting ideologies about land and land rights. And Thirdspace--in reality--Thirdspaces, are the places where Australians actually live. What Habel sees so clearly is that people are using and misusing biblical texts in an effort to remake Australia's human geography.

As biblical scholars, we have tended to leave our own Thirdspaces to others. In the two hundred years since Gabler's division of labor into systematic and biblical theology, biblical scholars have tried out a whole range of biblical theologies. We have had no consensus about how to translate the results of our historical studies of "what it meant" into theological statements of "what it means." The conflicting notions about how biblical scholars can or should do theology have led many of us to leave the field to the theologians. We'll do historical exegesis and let them worry about doctrine and ethics in our own times and places. In the process, we have allowed people who are not biblical scholars to claim the authority of the Bible on contested social questions with the simple words, "The Bible says..."

Habel laments the misuse of biblical texts to provide simplistic answers to contemporary social questions. Yet his apples and oranges paradigm makes it very difficult to relate his ideological analyses to the contemporary world. It is exactly on this point that Soja's trialectic of spatiality has so much to offer to biblical scholars such who want to address those who claim, "The Bible says…" on contemporary social issues.
 
 

Since I have identified Habel's rhetorical motivation for his study, it seems only fair to locate my own compelling motivations. My own focus for matters of justice is not land rights for Australian Aborigines, but the human rights of children who are abused by their parents. My interest in the Ten Commandments in general and the commandment to honor parents in particular is motivated by a deep concern that the words, "Honor your father and your mother," have been interpreted throughout the generations as the divine command that children must obey their parents, no matter what. As a representative of common public opinion, I quote Dolly in the Family Circus cartoon--my candidate for the most theologically irresponsible cartoon strip of our time--"It's right here in the Ten Commandments: You kids better do 'xactly what thy Mommy and thy Daddy tell you to do."⁽⁶³⁾ The words have been interpreted as the demand for unconditional obedience of children to their parents without putting these biblical words into their own social, historical, and geographical contexts, and without paying sufficient attention to the lived realities of children in abusive families, and without counting the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual costs to children who learn that God cares only that they obey their abusers.

This lack of attention to original context began early. In the New Testament, this interpretation is explicit. Ephesians 6:1-3 reads. "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 'Honor your father and mother'--this is the first commandment with a promise: 'so that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth." I suggest that this New Testament interpretation is a long, long way from the original rhetorical intention of the Decalogue. As one who is aware of the realities of abusive families, I ask, How did an ethic addressed to the adult inheritors of the land turn into a command that children must obey their parents? How did the command to honor elderly parents become synonymous with obedience to authority? How did this ethic addressed to the ones with power become a command for the powerless? I suggest that it did so because it lost the land.

As citizens of the West, we have lived under the influence of an ethic that long ago lost the original connection between the command to honor parents and right to the land. These words have been interpreted for us by those who made fundamental shifts in the direction of the ethic. Rabbinic Judaism became an ethic of filial piety. Gerald Blidstein's 1975 book, Honor Thy Father and Mother, is a study of rabbinic teaching on this commandment.⁽⁶⁴⁾ He begins with the statement that "Jewish law is characteristically framed in terms of responsibility rather than right."⁽⁶⁵⁾ That is the point of Blidstein's book. Rabbinic interpretation moved the command from the responsibility of the head of the household to the responsibility of children to their parents. What strikes me as particularly significant is that rabbinic exegesis was the product of the Diaspora, a system of ethics for people who had lost the land. It also strikes me as significant that Ephesians is the product of a Christian missionary movement which had moved out of the land of its origin into the Greco-Roman world. The House Tables of Ephesians puts a Christian stamp of approval upon Greek and Roman notions of status and obedience to authority, in the relationships between male and female, adult and child, and owner and slave. In the process, Christian family ethics became an ethic of obedience to authority. Notice that the phrase, "that you may live long on the earth," has a markedly different connotation than "long life in the land that the LORD your God is giving you." In both Christian and Rabbinic interpretation of this commandment, the ethic has moved out of the land, and turned an original ethic addressed to the ones of higher social status into an ethic addressed to the ones of lower status. By this transformation, the responsibility of the powerful to ensure the wellbeing of those under their care becomes a demand that the ones with lower status submit to the authority of the powerful. As heirs of these interpretations, we too have lost connection with the land as an essential component of the original ethic. For most of us, who hold non-Zionist ideologies about the land of Israel, biblical promises of "the land" hold little attraction and bear little relevance to the ways we live our lives.

I return to my own passionate conviction that the command to honor father and mother has functioned as a powerful weapon of injustice for many, many children, who have heard that their duty is to obey the people who harm them. In the last year, I have read as many books and articles on the Ten Commandments as I have been able to locate. On this particular commandment, many writers assert universal notions about how all parents deserve honor for the simple reason that they are parents. This is true even for many of the same scholars who point out that the words were not originally addressed to children. Many writers also use the opportunity to express their own heartwarming sentiments about how wonderful their own parents were to them. I could count on the fingers of one hand the writers who have even raised the problem of parents who abuse the children who are commanded to honor them.
 
 

What would it mean to return Firstspace to the Decalogue? It would not mean returning to a literal interpretation that identifies that land as Israel and the ethic as applicable only to the beit ab of ancient Israel. It would mean that any use of the Decalogue must ground it in actual space. Two contemporary British geographers, Michael Keith and Steve Pile, edited a fascinated collection of essays, Place and the Politics of Identity.⁽⁶⁶⁾ In a discussion about the relationship between social location and power, they make the statement, "Universal notions must be situated."⁽⁶⁷⁾ They quote another geographer, David Harvey, "there can be no universal conception of justice to which we can appeal as a normative concept to evaluate some event."⁽⁶⁸⁾ In other words, what you see depends on where you stand. As Bendor points out, one's attitude toward the social structure had everything to do with status. The eldest son of the beit ab experienced an ethic based on land rights for the eldest son differently than the fourth son of the family. The head of a family experiences an ethic of obedience to authority differently than the one who is supposed to do the obeying. A writer from a healthy and nurturing family experiences the command to honor father and mother differently than the child who has endured a hell on earth at home. Anyone who wants to make the case that the Decalogue does in fact constitute a sufficient foundation for contemporary ethics must first bring it down to earth, and ground it in Firstspace where actual people live, in actual families, which do not look like the families of ancient Israel. If not, these words can be powerful means of injustice toward the innocent.

Whatever the origin of the command, the social structure of ancient Israel is not the one of today. Most of us do not live in multigenerational kinship structures on ancestral family property. We buy and sell houses, live alone or as nuclear families in separate places, and most of us do not make our living on the land. If we do not recognize that the Decalogue originated as a land treaty, addressed to the male heads of households to remind them that the land was a gift from God that carried with it the responsibility to take care of the wellbeing of the non-inheritors of land, then we allow the Ten Commandments to remain what they have become, an abstract system of rules imposing a patriarchal/fratriarchal land and family based social structure in a society which doesn't look like that anymore.
 
 

Soja's paradigm of a trialectics of spatiality gives us a model for regrounding the ethic in the Firstspaces where we actually live, according to the Secondspace ideologies by which we create our own Thirdspaces. It gives scholars a way to speak within our own contexts to those who claim, "The Bible says…" on complex social issues without paying sufficient attention to the vastly different circumstances between the First, Second, and Thirdspaces of biblical texts and First, Second, and Thirdspaces of the contemporary world. By making the distinction between Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace in biblical texts, we can be clear about the distinctions between Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace in our own contexts. As we consider these words as a rhetorical strategy that offered an-Other possibility to people within their own social, historical, and geographical locations, we can ask how these words might offer an-Other possibility for people in our own contexts. As soon as we think in terms of Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace, we will soon realize that we cannot limit ourselves to an-Other possibility, but need to expand the limitations of this ancient ethic into the infinite range of possibilities that constitute our own Thirdspaces. Then an ethic, which can be used as a weapon against the weakest members of our society, can be remade into a new human geography that places a higher value on the wellbeing of everyone than obedience to the powerful.
 
 

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------. "The Uniqueness of the Decalogue and Its Place in Jewish Tradition." In The Ten Commandments in History and Tradition, edited by Ben-Zion Segal and Gershon Levi, 1-44. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1990.

Westbrook, Raymond. Property and the Family in Biblical Law. JSOT Supplement Series, 113. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991.

Wilch, John R. "The Land and State of Israel in Prophecy and Fulfillment." Concordia Journal 8 (Summer 1982): 12-178.

Winn, Albert Curry. A Christian Primer: The Prayer, the Creed, the Commandments. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990.

The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives. Edited by R. E. Clements. Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Wright, Christopher J. H. God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990.

------. "The Israelite Household and the Decalogue: The Social Background and Significance of Some Commandments." Tyndale Bulletin 30 (1979): 101-24.

------. "What Happened Every Seven Years in Israel: Old Testament Sabbatical Institutions for Land, Debts and Slaves." Evangelical Quarterly 56 (October 1984): 193-201.
 
 

NOTES

1.  Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

2. Soja, 1996, 1.

3. All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version

4. Walter J. Harrelson, The Ten Commandments and Human Rights (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1997), 80.

5. Christopher J. H. Wright, "The Israelite Household and the Decalogue: The Social Background and Significance of Some Commandments," Tyndale Bulletin 30 (1979): 101-24.

6. The underlying theme of my paper relates to Whitehead's famous assessment that every generation operates with its own unquestioned assumptions. In 1979, Wright was ahead of a historically-biased field in his awareness of the importance of land. At the same time, his consistent use of male language stands out like the proverbial sore thumb to a reader trained within a generation that had its consciousness raised to gender exclusive language. Such a realization reminds a writer to make her case with humility, since the next blindspot to be revealed might very well be her own.

7. 108.

8. 105-12.

9. Here and elsewhere, my transliteration of Hebrew words is imprecise, lacking necessary diacritical marks, resulting from my current lack of appropriate computer software to handle Hebrew and Hebrew transliteration. As a former Hebrew teacher, I care about such details and I do know better.

10. 113.

11. 113.

12. Wright consistently uses the problematic language of "nation" to refer to the larger community.

13. 114.

14. 116-20.

15. 121.

16. 123.

17. 104.

18.  S. Bendor, The Social Structure of Ancient Israel: The Institution of the Family (Beit 'Ab) from the Settlement to the End of the Monarchy, Jerusalem Biblical Studies, 7 (Jerusalem: Simor Ltd., 1996).

19.  85.

20. 45.

21. 48.

22.  50.

23. 122.

24.  Norman C. Habel, The Land is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).

25. 6.

26. 10.

27. 36-53.

28.  37.

29. 38.

30. 39.

31. 40.

32. 44.

33. 45.

34. 46.

35. 50.

36. 33.

37.  35.

38.  34.

39.  35.

40.  49-50.

41.  51.

42.  52.

43.  54.

44.  56.

45.  56.

46.  56-57.

47.  57.

48.  70.

49.  74.

50.  143.

51.  142.

52.  143.

53.  Soja, 1996,60.

54.  Soja, 1996, 60.

55.  Habel, 2.

56.  Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 2.

57.  Habel, 5.

58.  Habel, 2.

59.  Habel, 1.

60.  Habel, 142-43.

61.  Habel, 43-47.

62.  Herbert Chanan Brichto, "Kin, Cult, Land and Afterlife--a Biblical Complex," Hebrew Union College Annual 44 (1973): 1-54.

63.  Bill Keane, Distributed by Cowles Synd, Inc, 1993.

64.  Gerald Blidstein, Honor Thy Father and Mother: Filial Responsibility in Jewish Law and Ethics (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1975).

65. xi.

66.  Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1992).

67.  Keith and Pile, 38.

68.  Keith and Pile, 38.

END