Exclusive inclusivity

About this book

"The sixth and the fifth centuries BCE were a time of constant re-identifications within Judean communities, a time when the Babylonian Exilic Ideology had captured central position in the Judean (Jewish) history and literature at the expanse of silencing down the voices of any other Judean community. Using social psychology categories of ethnicity and group-identity, Exclusive Inclusivity explores these internal polemics through the phenomenon of exclusivity, its characteristics and traits. By reconstructing boundaries of otherness, exclusivity constructs polarized positions through designations and counter-designations, arguments and counter-arguments, as also strategies and counter-strategies that each of the opponent communities advances to re-identify its own status as the in-group, and disregard, even delegitimize, all those considered out-group."--Bloomsbury Publishing The sixth and fifth centuries BCE were a time of constant re-identifications within Judean communities, both in exile and in the land; it was a time when Babylonian exilic ideologies captured a central position in Judean (Jewish) history and literature at the expense of silencing the voices of any other Judean communities. Proceeding from the later biblical evidence to the earlier, from the Persian period sources (Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Deutero-Isaiah) to the Neo-Babylonian prophecy of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, Exclusive Inclusivity explores the ideological transformations within these writings using the sociological rubric of exclusivity. Social psychology categories of ethnicity and group identity provide the analytical framework to clarify that Ezekiel, the prophet of the Jehoiachin Exiles, was the earliest constructor of these exclusive ideologies. Thus, already from the Neo-Babylonian period, definitions of otherness were being set to shape the self-understanding of each of the post-586 communities, in Judah (Yehud) and in the Babylonian Diaspora, as the exclusive People of God. As each community reidentified itself as the in-group, arguments of otherness were adduced to diregard and delegitimize the sister community. The polemics against "foreigners" in the Persian period literature are the ideological successors to the earlier ideological conflict