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| author |
Jennifer Maidrand
| | title |
Excavating Promised Land: The Geopolitics of Scripturalization in Palestine-Israel
| | abstract |
The notion of "Promised Land" is a pervasive paradigm in scholarly and popular rhetoric
that conveys a singular narrative about the biblical promise of the land of Canaan to
Israel, interpreting it as an immemorial promise that renders the Jewish people as God's
chosen and the modern nation-state of Israel as the fulfillment of those ancient promises.
The Palestinian people, adversely, are interpreted as Other or erased entirely in this
narrative. Promised Land, however, is not a biblical term but a constructed notion that
has been mobilized for imperial, Western scholarly, and settler colonial projects in
Palestine-Israel from the nineteenth century until today. This dissertation seeks to disrupt
the normalization of the Promised Land paradigm in biblical scholarship and its material-political
implications in Palestine-Israel by way of theorizing the relationship between
Western constructions of Promised Land, biblical archaeology, and the biblical
colonization of the contemporary landscape of Palestine. In analyzing the intersecting
histories of Evangelical Puritan Christian Zionism, British imperial exploration of the
Holy Land, the emergence of biblical archaeology, and the biblicization of Palestine's
landscapes, this project demonstrates the ways in which Western colonialism has fixed
the Promised Land paradigm to the physical land of Palestine-Israel. Excavating
Promised Land offers the term "scriptural green(line)ing" as a way of naming the
phenomenon of the scripturalization of Promised Land as an ongoing political tool in
colonizing and annexing Palestinian land, and it features a case study on the City of
David/ Jerusalem Walls National Park to demonstrate the ways in which scriptural
green(line)ing efforts are aggressively altering the landscape of East Jerusalem. The
central aim of this dissertation is threefold: to dismantle the settler colonial legacies in
biblical scholarship and archaeology that have shaped the singularized notion of
Promised Land; to expose the structures of power which transform interpretations of
scripture into concrete biblical realities in Palestine-Israel; and to center examples of
Palestinian epistemic and embodied resistance to this oppressive ideology, which offer
pathways for re-grounding these scriptures in their nuanced and multiplicitous existence
in service of reading for collective liberation and flourishing.
| | school |
The Theological School, Drew University
| | degree |
Ph.D. (2024)
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| advisor |
Kenneth N Ngwa
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| committee |
Munther Isaac
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre
Althea Spencer-Miller
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| full text | JMaidrand.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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