When Zion Becomes Sinai: Text-Building and Geomythology in the Book of the Twelve

30 years ago, Jon D. Levenson examined how Sinai becomes absorbed into Zion within the Hebrew Bible. In the Book of the Twelve, however, the dynamic is reversed: Zion is subsumed within the mythology of Sinai across its prophetic contents. In this paper I will examine how the hermeneutical and rhetorical structure of the book accomplishes this, along with implications for the self-perception of the book`s Levitical redactors in the late Persian period. The construction of the Book of the Twelve transforms earlier Israelite geomythology in response to the prevailing imperial concepts of space, political geography, and their impact upon cult and ritual in Persian Yehud.