Several texts from the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature juxtapose stories about Israel’s exodus from Egypt with religious laws. Using Nehemiah 9 and 3 Maccabees 6 as case studies, I argue that such texts articulate Judean collective identity in a way that mimics Persian and Hellenistic imperial architecture; especially how royal stelae combine monumental iconography (story) with textual inscriptions (law). The Judean use of this pattern corroborates Omür Harmanşah’s concept of the “supra-regional” nature of Levantine architectural techniques, while also complicating the relationship between biblical/deuterocanonical texts and the imperial matrices that influenced them. Examining early Jewish religious texts in this way helps to address the largely unexamined legacy of antisemitism and orientalism pervasive in biblical scholarship, by which textual and cultural aspects of the Hebrew Bible tend to be hermetically sealed off from the contexts out of which they emerged.

The seminar is open for all. For a Zoom link please send an e-mail to rosanne.liebermann@cas.au.dk or teobh@cas.au.dk.