In the Hellenistic Jewish novel Aseneth, the eponymous heroine is transformed from an earthly woman (Aseneth) into a heavenly polis (City of Refuge). This transformation goes beyond simple renaming, for descriptions of Aseneth’s body and the functions ascribed to her and her seven maidservants refer to all the spaces and places (sacred and profane, urban and agricultural) and institutions (citizens and government) that comprise a polis. And though the overlap between the categories of Woman and City is widely attested across ancient cultures, the metaphor typically operates as City is Woman. In Aseneth, however, the metaphor is inverted: Woman is City. This metaphor’s inversion renders place mobile––unlike a personified polis, the urbanised woman (and all she represents) can move.

In this paper, I make the twofold argument that this inverted metaphor is best understand in a broader context of literary and material cultures from Jewish and Greek traditions, and that this embodied metaphor was a means of wrestling with the potentially paradoxical roles of (sedentary) urbanity and mobility, homeland and diaspora in the reimagining of late Hellenistic Jewish identities. In support of this thesis, I first show that the City of Refuge does indeed contain the places and institutions of a polis, and then connect these elements to mythic landscapes and sacred architecture in various literary and material sources. This range of literary and archaeological intertexts; which includes, e.g., Gen 1-2, Jer 1:18, Isa 14:32, Song 4:4; 7:5; 8:10 and the caryatides from the Acropolis and the Sveshtari Tomb, offers interesting insight into the presumed urbanity of Hellenistic Jewish identities.