Ethnography, Allochronism and the Problem of the Modern Discovery of the 'Biblical World'

EMANUEL PFOH

Helsinki

Congreso; European Association of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting / Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting - Helsinki 2018; 2018

SBL / EABS

This paper seeks to explore the temporal and cultural displacements that nineteenth-century Western travel accounts in the southern Levant produced through different streams of scientific exploration, in particular after insights into the ethnography of Levantine societies as reflecting directly the most ancient ´biblical world´. By analyzing samples from these textual sources from critical ethnographical and historical perspectives, we can dissect the construction and workings of a Western discourse dealing with the biblical past (i.e., building upon the continental research in biblical studies, but also upon the developments in biblical archaeology and cartography). A critical reflection on these modernist epistemologies sheds light on how much of them have survived in current historical and sociological reconstructions of the ´biblical world´.