Biography of Ancient Israel by Pardes Ilana

Author:Pardes, Ilana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2000-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Land of the Fathers

Moses attempts to create what is so central to the formation of national belonging: a sense of home.4 He relies on two concepts: “the land of milk and honey” and “the land of the fathers.” Home, for Moses, is a chronotope where the mother—who is revealed solely via figurative language—provides space and the fathers provide the temporal dimension. As Julia Kristeva suggests, this division is a common one: “When evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming or history.”5 The division between parental time and maternal space, however, is rather fuzzy. National time is revealed in national space and vice versa. Similarly, the paternal and maternal aspects are inextricably connected.

I will begin with the fathers. The children of Israel spend four hundred years (or four hundred thirty, according to another tradition) in Egypt oblivious to their past. It is left for Moses to evoke—or fashion—those long-forgotten memories about the three founding patriarchs, the divine Promise, and the ancient patrimony far away. Just before the Exodus, Moses addresses the children of Israel in God’s name, saying:

I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage. . . . And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage. (Exod. 6:6–8)

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