Religion on the move: Mobility, migration and internal religious: Diversity in Biblical and Early Israel and Judah

Abstract

Migration is a social process. Religion is fundamentally a social enterprise. Like other aspects of their cultural identities, humans carry their religious identities with them as they traverse geographies. This paper explores the effects of inter-regional movement, as both mobility and migration, on the religious practices and beliefs of ancient Mediterranean peoples, specifically of those who come to be called Israelites. Several studies that account for internal religious differences in Israel and Judah explain Yahweh’s multiple geographic associations as “poly-Yahwism,” assuming that veneration of different geographic associations is in actuality worship directed toward different Yahwehs. Migration studies, specifically those engaging migrant instrumentalization of religion, have not been central conversation partners in these explorations of divine personage. Thus, I argue that the complexities of cultural exchange in the Levantine regions of the Mediterranean in the 1st Millennium BCE and the development of internal religious diversity in ancient Israel can be better understood by integrating modern mobility and migration data. Furthermore, accounting for the dialogical relationship between mobility, migration and religiosity allows scholars to better account for the cultural responses observed in spaces of resettlement and colonization where religion functions both as a source of control and as a resource employed to undermine colonizing power structures. To this end, this paper specifically addresses the occurrence of variant modes of Yahwistic religiosity through two case studies: The first is a migration-informed reading of the Judges 17-18. The second is a mobilities-informed analysis of four inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Horvat Teman). Together, these explorations provide answers to questions of Yahweh’s multiplicity and his mobile nature.