Judaism defined itself as not Egyptian?
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2015 4:56 am
An interesting thesis transmitted in Tim Whitmarsh's Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Classicism. Discussing the Exagoge, a Hellenizing-Judaic work in Greek about the Exodus, written during the Ptolemaic period (some 269 iambic trimeter lines survive), Whitmarsh says this (p. 217): "As Jan Assmann in particular has argued, Judaism’s distinctive sense of identity rested on its status as a “counterreligion” defined in opposition to Egypt, which “came to represent the rejected, the religiously false, the ‘pagan.’”(n. 18) The representation of Pharaonic Egypt within Alexandrian Judaism was of course heavily filtered through this biblical tradition of antinomy but so too must have been the perception of the Ptolemaic present."
n. 18 gives citations from publications of Assmann and then adds that F.V. Greifenhagen (Egypt on the Pentateuch’s Ideological Map: Constructing Biblical Israel’s Identity. Sheffield, 2002) "argues that the Pentateuch displays a tension between the normative, overlain Mesopotamian ethnogenesis and an older tradition locating the origins of the Jewish people in Egypt."
I had not thought about this before. We are so used to growing up assuming that the Canaanites (itself an artifact of the biblical text?) constituted Judaism's principal "other" ...
Anyone have a reaction, or know the work of Assmann and/or Greifenhagen? Is all this stuff "white people's scholarship"?
n. 18 gives citations from publications of Assmann and then adds that F.V. Greifenhagen (Egypt on the Pentateuch’s Ideological Map: Constructing Biblical Israel’s Identity. Sheffield, 2002) "argues that the Pentateuch displays a tension between the normative, overlain Mesopotamian ethnogenesis and an older tradition locating the origins of the Jewish people in Egypt."
I had not thought about this before. We are so used to growing up assuming that the Canaanites (itself an artifact of the biblical text?) constituted Judaism's principal "other" ...
Anyone have a reaction, or know the work of Assmann and/or Greifenhagen? Is all this stuff "white people's scholarship"?