Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-ḥērem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity: Reconsidering the Sabaean Text RES 3945 in Light of Biblical and Moabite Evidence

2007 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren A.S. Monroe
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
The South ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
Early State ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
Tripartite Relationship

AbstractIn the biblical conquest accounts,hērem signifies ritual destruction and consecration to the deity of entire enemy populations and towns. The root hrm also appears in two extrabiblical conquest accounts: the Mesha Inscription and the Sabaean text, RES 3945. This article revisits the interpretation of the Sabaean text in light of recent scholarship in South Arabian Studies, and argues that RES 3945 should be placed on equal footing with the Mesha Inscription for its relevance for understanding the biblical hērem. Taken together, these sources situate the war-hērem in the context of early state formation, and suggest that the tripartite relationship between people, land and god, expressed in terms of b&ebrever&icaront, or &#147covenant,&#148 in ancient Israel, may in fact have found expression more widely, in a tribal, inland Palestinian setting with cultural connections extending into the South Arabian Peninsula.

scholarly journals Trauma, Memory and Landscape in Queensland: Women Writing ‘a New Alphabet of Moss and Water’

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern States ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Limited Space ◽  
Trauma Memory

The cultural association of Queensland with a condition of imagination or unreality has a strong history. Queensland has always ‘retained much of its quality as an abstraction, an idea’, asserts Thea Astley in her famous essay on the state's identity (Astley 1976: 263). In one of the most quoted descriptions of Queensland's literary representation, Pat Buckridge draws attention to its ‘othering’, suggesting that Queensland possesses ‘a different sense of distance, different architecture, a different apprehension of time, a distinctive preoccupation with personal eccentricity, and . . . a strong sense of cultural antitheses’ (1976: 30). Rosie Scott comes closest to the concerns of this present article when she asserts that this so-called difference ‘is definitely partly to do with the landscape. In Brisbane, for instance, the rickety old wooden Queenslanders drenched in bougainvillea, the palms, the astounding number of birds even in Red Hill where I lived, the jacarandas, are all unique in Australia’ (quoted in Sheahan-Bright and Glover 2002: xv). For Vivienne Muller, Buckridge's ‘cultural antitheses’ are most clearly expressed in precisely this interpretation of Queensland as a place somewhere between imagined wilderness and paradise (2001: 72). Thus, as Gillian Whitlock suggests, such differences are primarily fictional constructs that feed ‘an image making process founded more on nationalist debates about city and bush, centre and periphery, the Southern states versus the Deep North than on any “real” sense of regionalism’ (quoted in Muller 2001: 80). Queensland, in this reading, is subject to the Orientalist discourse of an Australian national identity in which the so-called civilisation of the south-eastern urban capitals necessitates a dark ‘other’. I want to draw out this understanding of the landscape as it is imagined in Queensland women's writing. Gail Reekie (1994: 8) suggests that, ‘Women's sense of place, of region, is powerfully constructed by their marginality to History.’ These narratives do assert Queensland's ‘difference’, but as part of an articulation of psychological extremity experienced by those living on the edges of a simultaneously ideological and geographically limited space. The Queensland landscape, I argue, is thus used as both setting for and symbol of traumatic experience.

Slavery and the Slave Trade in Dār Fūr

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. O'Fahey
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Central African Republic ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The State ◽  
The South ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
State Organization ◽  
Slave Raid

The institutions of slavery, slave raiding and the slave trade were fundamental in the rise and expansion of the Keira Sultanate of Dār Fūr. The development of a long-distance trade in slaves may be due to immigrants from the Nile, who probably provided the impetus to state formation. This process may be remembered in the ‘Wise Stranger’ traditions current in the area. The slave raid or ghazwa, penetrating into the Baḥr al-Ghazāl and what is now the Central African Republic, marked the triumph of Sudanic state organization over the acephalous societies to the south.The slaves, who were carefully classified, were not only exported to Egypt and North Africa, but also served the sultans and the title-holding elite as soldiers, labourers and bureaucrats. In the latter role, the slaves began to encroach on the power of traditional ruling groups within the state; the conflict between the slave bureaucrats and the traditional ruling elite lasted until the end of the first Keira Sultanate in 1874.

scholarly journals Traditional Christian currents in the process of the newest national creation of Ukrainians

2007 ◽  
pp. 154-162
Author(s):  
R. Mykolayiv
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Scientific Assessment ◽  
Level Of Significance ◽  
National Formation

With the revival of Ukrainian statehood and the unfolding of the process of state formation, the problem of national identity of the citizens of Ukraine became especially urgent, because it is the main cementing element in the foundation of the new state-national formation. In view of this, it is important for Ukrainians to determine the level of significance of certain components of national identity. Therefore, in our article we will try to give a scientific assessment of the place and role of traditional Christian trends - Orthodoxy and Greek Catholicism - in the process of the newest Ukrainian national creation.

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