Jesus and Land

I am reading Karen J. Wenell's published dissertation Jesus and Land. There is much more I could say about this book but I find one comment curious and I would like to counterpose a quotation from Robert Wilken's book The Land Called Holy. 

Wenell

Even so [speaking about the twelve tribes evokes twelve territories], we should be careful not to limit the spatial implications of the twelve tribes/twelve territories to some particular physical location. When looking at biblical texts relating to the tribes, entering the discussion is not predicated by an ability to place locations on a map, or to identify a particular territory (p. 106, emphasis added). 

Wilken

For the ancient Israelites land always referred to an actual land. Eretz Israel was not a symbol of a higher reality. It was a distinct geographical entity, a territory with assumed if not always precise boundaries . . . For ancient Hebrews, idyllic descriptions of the land are always subservient to a territorial realism. The land is a geographical region that can be marked on a map, a place with memories as well as hopes, with a past as well as a future . . . The blessings associated with the land are this-worldly . . . No matter who utopian the language, the promised land was always real, not an ideal, country. Hence there could be no genuine fulfillment of the promise that was not historical, which is to say, political (pp. 8-9). 

 

There is just no doubt in my mind that Wilken is right. I found in reading Wenell's book that her use of anthological models of sacred space somewhat distracting and difficult to penetrate. Her approach, at least for me,  created a fog that was difficult to cut through to see what she was really saying. I am still uncertain for example what she thinks about the kingdom of God and the Land outside of crypt descriptions such as this: "the kingdom functions as an orienting mythical space with practical implications for followers in their daily life and conduct” (p. 17). Furthermore, she states "It is not necessary to decide whether the mathematical statement 'kingdom equal's land' is true or false; but it is important [sic] establish that the message of the kingdom evokes the promises to Abraham and defines a new sacred space with its own symbolic associations and practical implications" (p. 139).

Robert Wilken on "Jerusalem" in Galatians 4

I am reading a fantastic book that I only wish I had discovered years ago. It makes you wonder what books you have yet to read that would have made a difference in ones your research and thinking. The book is The Land Called Holy. I have found it to be a very important compliment to my own work on the importance of the land promise and the kingdom of God in the New Testament and early Christianity. I am not very far into it, but I came across Wilken's interpretation of the Jerusalems in Paul's allegory in Galatians 4. A passage and topic I have published on (ZNW 96, no 3-4, 188-210). 

I was encouraged to read that Wilken goes in a similar direction as I did in highlighting the eschatological significance of Paul's references to Jerusalem. I made the argument that Paul is reading Isa 54:11 and makes the "Present Jerusalem" an eschatological category for the present age while the "Jerusalem from above" he uses to one represent the new age that had dawned in the work of Jesus the Messiah. While not developing it in the way I did, his reading would complement my own. 

Wilken states:

If Paul is speaking eschatologically,--and the citation from Isaiah makes this likely,--the distinction he draws between the two cities may not be between a "heavenly city" (a term he does not use) and an "earthly city" (which he also does not use), but between Jerusalem as it is at present (in Greek, Jerusalem as it is now) and a future Jerusalem. The difference between the two cities is temporal, not metaphysical, between what exists at the present and is imperfect and flawed and what will one day take its place, a glorious new city not made by hands but graven on the palms of God (n. 42, pp. 281-82).