Re-imagining identity through national narratives: The representational ethics of Israelites and Other(s) in Jubilees and Josephus’s Judean Antiquities

Abstract

This article brings the literary treasures of ancient Judea into conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of Narrative Ethics and Socio-Narratology while considering Jubilees and Josephus’s Judean Antiquities as participating in the etic genre of national history. This article interrogates the work that each of these narratives do to shape the collective identity of Hellenistic and Roman era Judeans and to shape Judean perceptions of their cultural Others. By analyzing Jubilees 30 and Antiquities 1.337–341 dialogically, this paper claims that Josephus’s re-narrativization of Judean history serves as a corrective to the Israelite representation in Jubilees. It is argued that representations in Jubilees promoted an impermeable boundary between Judeans and Others, with violence as a legitimized and valorized ethic of cross-cultural engagement, whereas Antiquities re-imagined a new future of more permeable boundaries and diplomatic negotiation for first-century C.E. Judeans by re-imagining their past through narrative. Dangerous representations of cultural Others, however, remained a part of the story.