The Constructions of Ancient Space Seminar ran as a joint project of the AAR and SBL from 2000-2005, the only cross-society venture of its time.?For the first time in the development of biblical studies, participants in the seminar attempted to foreground and critically analyze space with the same theoretical nuance that biblical scholars have traditionally devoted to history.?
This volume, first, collects five papers focused on biblical cities, and especially Jerusalem.?The female personification of Zion allows for, among other things, a specifically feminist slant on spatiality theory.?Whereas these essays begin with cities as material realities, the second part of the volume offers two essays that begin with the imagined spaces of apocalyptic literature, though these two are shown to have deep connection to actual lived space. The final essay moves outside the biblical canon to examine real and imagined space in Pure?Land Buddhism.
Introduction: Claudia V.?Camp
Part I: Space and the Biblical City
Michael Patrick O'Connor, The Biblical Notion of the City
Christl Maier, Daughter Zion as a Gendered Space in the Book of Isaiah
Christl Maier, Body Space as Public Space: Jerusalem's Wounded Body in Lamentations
Jon L. Berquist, Constructing the City of David: Critical Spatiality and Jerusalem as Capital
Susan Graham, Justinian and the Politics of Space
Part II: Biblical and Other Spaces
Kathryn Muller Lopez, Standing Before the Throne of God: Critical Spatiality in the Judgment of the Wicked Apocalyptic Literature
Tina Pippin, Ideology of Apocalyptic Spaces
William E. Deal, Simulating Pure Land Space: The Hyperreality of? Japanese Buddhist Paradise