Orienting the Mappa Mundi in Judaism's Earliest Traditions

Ancient Israelites, echoing a variety of options in the ancient Near East, endorsed an assortment of valorized reference points for the cosmos in the north, south, east, and west. The book of Genesis, for example, presents movement eastward as calamitous and movement westward as beneficial. For several centuries after the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., however, an emphatic orthodoxy began to emerge, and competing perspectives were gradually eliminated.