Contesting Labeled Identities

Ki-Eun Jang analyzes the processes through which identity labels were claimed, disclaimed, and reappropriated in the ancient Near Eastern literary milieu. Central to her inquiry is the grammatical category conventionally termed "gentilics", whose modern genealogy stands in conflict with the ancient logics of identification that operated on different conceptual premises. The author argues that dominant ethnic and racial models - widely employed in biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies - impose assumptions that obscure their historical origins, theoretical limits, and methodological consequences. Engaging sociological and postcolonial critiques, particularly of the Barthian paradigm of ethnic groups and boundaries, she traces the history of racial and ethnic thinking in the humanities and demonstrates its impact on the interpretation of ancient evidence. From a linguistic perspective, the author introduces the notion of relational adjectives to clarify the morphological, semantic, and ontological structures encoded in gentilics. This perspective illuminates logics of categorization that cannot be collapsed into modern ethnic typologies. Her analysis of labels such as "Philistine", "Hebrew", "Canaanite", "Aramean", and "Judean" in the Hebrew Bible and cognate literature reveals shifting mechanisms of belonging that shaped the social world of ancient scribes. Ki-Eun Jang thus shows how ancient evidence not only enriches historical reconstruction but also challenges dominant models of modern identity.