Israel’s mythological borders: an interview with Rachel Havrelock

by David Zlutnick (Mondoweiss)

Rachel Havrelock is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and its historical interpretation. She is an associate professor of Jewish Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of three books as well as the writer/director of the play, From Tel Aviv to Ramallah. Her latest work, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (2011, University of Chicago Press), examines five national myths in the Hebrew Bible and examines which have had political currency and which have been repressed.

While in San Francisco to promote River Jordan, I interviewed Havrelock about the Israel of biblical mythology and its impact on the present day conflict in Israel/Palestine. She argues that while certain interpretations favor expansion and conquest, others may provide an inspiration for coexistence, while colonial ideas of partition and rigid borders need to be thrown out to favor a new post-national model. What follows is an edited transcript of the full interview. To view an eleven minute edited selection of the video click here.

DZ: What led you to take on the subject of your book, River Jordan?

RH: I initially approached the topic with an interest to how biblical paradigms impacted modernity, or in other words: what is the connection between Biblical Israel and Modern Israel? So I really began almost with the issue of the map. How is it that in both Israeli and Palestinian national traditions that the Jordan is a central border that seems to define the collective, impact national identity in a very dramatic way, and how did this biblical symbol become realized in modernity?... Ultimately what I write about is that those things—the line from one to the other, especially the line from the bible to modernity is not so straight, and rather contested and circuitous. more

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