“Your Gates”—Evoking a Landscape of Fortified Cities in Deuteronomy: Meanings, Implications, and Comparative Considerations with Other Constructions of the Israelite Past

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is about constructions of internal territorial space and its ideological implications. It discusses the lay of the land of the Israelite society that the literati “saw” when reading Deuteronomy. It focuses on the horizontal, non-hierarchical arrangement of an array of cities that so strongly characterizes the book. Then it addresses what the preference for this array suggests in terms of the polity that Deuteronomy conjures and how this preference relates to both central ideological tenets of the book and additional features of its imagined polity. Neither the imaginary landscape of the Israelite polity nor the polity itself evoked by Deuteronomy were consistent with those evoked by any of the “historiographical” works in Yehud. As a result, its literati had to assume either that such a landscape was never actually fulfilled in any period of the past or try to conform Deuteronomy’s landscape to other past-shaping, ideological texts (and related memories) that existed in their core repertoire, or both, in a complementary, balancing way.