River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line

“River Jordan is a necessary vision of the Jewish past and future. Timely and beautifully written, Rachel Havrelock’s book will appeal to a wide circle of readers.”

— Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan

“Havrelock offers a rich set of perspectives—literary, historical, ethnographic, and otherwise—for thinking about the waters of the Jordan as barrier and source of life. She patiently articulates the politics implicit in differing claims of the Jordan and the Euphrates as idealized boundaries of ancient Israel. She offers a concluding vision of the Jordan as a place of meeting rather than a place of separation. Her frank rather than despairing acknowledgment of the continuing power of ancient models, as of the potential power of other models lost in the din of competing claims, should trouble our frozen notions of ideologies past and identities in the present. And that’s exactly the kind of trouble we need from scholars now.”

— Jonathan Boyarin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Havrelock shows impressive mastery of a vast amount of material, and her theoretical sophistication allows her to formulate sharp questions at every turn. Brave and insightful in its analysis, River Jordan is a rare pleasure: an intriguing and intellectually adventurous book bolstered by Havrelock’s sparkling writing.”

— Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

“River Jordan is a thought-provoking contribution to a growing body of criticism on the Bible as cultural text. The Jordan River is an incredibly rich site for the exploration of the changing significance of biblical traditions in diverse moments of reception.”

— Ilana Pardes, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“Rachel Havrelock’s River Jordan is broad in scope, subtle in interpretive detail and written in lucid prose, with an assured mastery of the relevant scholarship—all the more remarkable because it is her first book. What she has done in effect is to invent a new kind of historical analysis . . . with culture comprising ideology and politics as well as national identity. . . . The salutary aspiration of Havrelock’s study is that after her long scrutiny of borders as barriers, lines of divisiveness and killing-fields, she reaches to imagine, in the very consciousness of the border as a mythological construct, an alternative way for peoples to live alongside each other and to interact with one another. This is a scrupulous work of scholarship that is also informed, quietly but effectively, by a moral vision.” ― London Review of Books

Rachel Havrelock is associate professor in the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is coauthor of Women on the Biblical Road: Ruth, Naomi, and the Female Journey.