Biblically Derived Toponyms in Israel as a Midrash

• In Event: Bible & Biblical Interpretation

Abstract

The Zionist project in its early days was, by and large, a spatial one – the establishment of a spatial-cultural infrastructure associating physical landscape features with a corpus of textual sources. In my new project, I wish to map out the relationship of landscape and scripture in Biblically derived toponyms in Israel. The toponymic revision of The Land of Israel/Palestine, curated by the Israeli Government's Naming Committee and its predecessors, has been a topic of academic discussion through the scopes of nation-building and post-colonialism. Building upon the pioneering work of Bible Scholar Lea Mazor, I aim to further this discourse by examining the cognitive mapping aspect of Zionist toponymy, that is, how connections between scriptures and landscapes are formed.
Several hundreds of toponyms on the modern map of Israel are Biblically derived. In the suggested paper, I wish to view the act of naming as a hermeneutical practice and account for its interpretation of both scriptures and landscape. ʾûdim, for example, the name granted to a moshav founded on the coastal plain in 1948 by holocaust survivors, acts as a midrash on a verse from Amos' prophecy (4:11): "You have become like a brand [ûd] plucked from burning." This toponym infuses scriptures with 20th-century resonances and cements this meaning in the minds of commuters passing by the Moshav daily. Similarly, two adjacent Moshavim separated by a main road were named in 1950 Tāʿōz and Tārôm as a spatial play on Psalms 89:14: "Your hand is strong [Tāʿōz] your right hand exalted [Tārôm]." The fact that Tārôm is located on the right-hand side and Tāʿōz on the left (when coming from Tel-Aviv) makes this reading a Midrash operating on both space and verse. What other new meanings were 'mined' in scriptures using them as sources for toponyms? How do other new toponyms relate to the landscape in which they are embedded? By attempting to map out the various answers to these questions, I wish to produce an account of one aspect of the Zionist movement's relationship with both landscape and scriptures.

Author

• Omer Shadmi, Haifa University