Beyond Ethnicity: Outline of a Renewed Approach to the Levantine Divine Landscape

The religious history of the ancient Levant has been described as a juxtaposition of ethnic pantheons, each one dominated by the major deity of a “nation” or “tribe.” Focussing on the Iron Age, this paper will plead for a shift in emphasis from religious differences based on presumed ethnic identities and postulated cultural borders to the overall similarity across the Levantine religious landscape. The paper introduces and discusses five heuristic notions that can be helpful to outline the Levantine religious landscape in further research: “gods as networks,” “cultural infrastructure,” “transposability”, “Levant,” “glocalization and adaption.” Using these notions, divinities can be conceived as “material entanglements” made up of shared, variously configured features, and therefore understandable and translatable for each social group according to its own specific needs.