Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the so-called “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4 begins an in-depth exploration of Assmann’s advances on Freud, by distilling key terms from Assmann and his cognate “axial age” scholarship: different kinds of “religions,” their “translatability” with other religions, and different kinds of violence.

Chapter 6 outlines a political theology of monotheism using Assmann’s concepts of the Mosaic distinction, supplemented by other scholars like Mark S. Smith, Robert Gnuse, Rainer Albertz, et al. We dwell closely here on Israel’s political conditions of sovereignty, subjugation, and exile that all help illuminate – as we saw in Gans’ critique – what historical peculiarities constitute the Hebrew discovery of monotheism. I explore how monotheism could be composed of polytheistic building blocks – first in state-based religion and political symbols, like monolatry and despotic vassal treaties – but transform among an exiled people into a division of God from political representation.