As generally in biblical literature, the Pentateuch portrays Israel coming from the outside, whether from Mesopotamia (Ur and/or Haran) or Egypt, to a land settled by Canaanite peoples. This course traces the diverse ways national identity conceptions were formulated in different sources of the Pentateuch, looking at the emphasis given to the foreign background of Israel in its cultural surrounding sphere.

The methodology is interdisciplinary: national identity conceptions will be investigated through several critical methods in Pentateuchal Studies, and with modern and post-modern studies of ethnic identification and ethnicity, as well as sociological and psychological approaches to group-identity studies. These approaches reveal the clear hierarchy and stereotipization lines that are stretched, and the paradigms of exclusivity and otherness that structure processes of legitimization and de-legitimization of one group over the other.

We will study several circles of national group-identities, including those between Israel and the Canaanite peoples and Aram in the Patriarchal stories: Abraham-Isaac and Jacob (chapters from Genesis and Deuteronomy 26:5-10); the commandments to separate from the seven peoples, from the “peoples of the land” in the Pentateuch law codes (Exodus 23, 34; Leviticus 18, 20; and Deuteronomy 7).