Manasseh: Reflections on Tribe, Territory and Text

• Main Author: Lerner, Ellen Renee
• Other Authors: Douglas A. Knight
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: VANDERBILT 2014
• Subjects: Religion
• Online Access: http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07162014-103702/

This study focuses on biblical Manasseh as a tribal entity, a territorial region, and a literary construct to explore facets of ancient Israels history and the ways in which it (re)constructed this history in the biblical narratives. Many biblical texts describe Manasseh as the only tribe having territory both west and east of the Jordan River in the central hills region of the west and in northern Gilead in the east. This is a striking characterization because the biblical writers generally cast the Jordan River as a boundary between the eastern and western tribes, and while these two Manassite regions do not necessarily represent a contiguous area of land, they are nonetheless viewed as a single tribal unit. Since the Hebrew Bible presents conflicting views of the legitimacy of the east Jordan region and those Israelites that inhabit it, Manasseh operates, at least conceptually, in both the eastern and western worlds. Given that the Bible was in the view of most scholars ultimately written and compiled in a southern Judahite context several hundred years after Israels tribal period, however, this study considers the degree to which the Bibles depiction of the northern tribe of Manasseh represents an ideological picture of the nations past. By examining Manasseh through the lenses of literary analysis, anthropology, archaeology, and historiography, I argue that 1) the biblical portrait of Manasseh has been shaped by two distinct layers of tradition: one tradition knows Manasseh solely, or at least predominately, as a western entity while a second tradition conceives of Manasseh as a rather obliquely defined eastern entity; 2) although the idea of Manasseh as a tribe that spans both sides of the Jordan is a plausible model of tribal organization, ultimately the concept of east Manasseh only makes sense within the framework of the twelve-tribe system which scholars widely recognize as a later ideological construct; and 3) insofar as Manasseh is cast as an east-west entity, the tribe ultimately stands as a complex, ambiguous object that simultaneously subverts and reinforces the biblical distinctions between the areas east and west of the Jordan River.