Ezekiel 5:5

Hebrew Bible

4 Again, take more of them and throw them into the fire, and burn them up. From there a fire will spread to all the house of Israel. 5 “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: This is Jerusalem; I placed her in the center of the nations with countries all around her. 6 Then she defied my regulations and my statutes, becoming more wicked than the nations and the countries around her. Indeed, they have rejected my regulations, and they do not follow my statutes.

Jubilees 8:12

Pseudepigrapha

11 When he summoned his children, they came to him — they and their children. He divided the earth into the lots which his three sons would occupy. They reached out their hands and took the book from the bosom of their father Noah. 12 In the book there emerged as Shem's lot the center of the earth which he would occupy as an inheritance for him and for his children throughout the history of eternity: from the middle of the mountain range of Rafa, from the source of the water from the Tina River. His share goes toward the west through the middle of this river. One then goes until one reaches the water of the deeps from which this river emerges. This river emerges and pours its waters into the Me'at Sea. This river goes as far as the Great Sea. Everything to the north belongs to Japheth, while everything to the south belongs to Shem. 13 It goes until it reaches Karas. This is in the bosom of the branch which faces southward.

 Notes and References

"... According to Jubilees 4:26, there are four places that belong to the divine. Likewise, according to Jubilees 8:12, the land belonging to God’s chosen people reflected, in some manner, the divine possession as well. Jubilees 8:12 reads as follows: “And the lot of Shem emerged from the book (to be) in the midst of the earth, which he would possess for his inheritance and for his sons to eternal generations.” The divine ownership of place, and particularly the places Eden, Sinai, and Zion/Jerusalem, meant that in some manner they reciprocated each other ... Such holy characteristics meant that each occupied the center of a chosen realm (such as Sinai at the center of the desert and Jerusalem the center of the world), but such forces drawing them together conceptually also required them to face one another, to be related and placed in circular fashion as if looking toward another central area ..."

Boyd, Samuel L. "Place as Real and Imagined in Exile: Jerusalem at the Center of Ezekiel" in Greenspoon, Leonard J., editor. Next Year in Jerusalem: Exile and Return in Jewish History (pp. 1-27) Purdue University Press, 2019

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