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The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible

Author: David Janzen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-08-09

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3110904810

This work uses anthropological theory and field studies to investigate the social function and meaning of sacrifice. All rituals, including sacrifice, communicate social beliefs and morality, but these cannot be determined outside of a study of the social context. Thus, there is no single explanation for sacrifice - such as those advanced by René Girard or Walter Burkert or late-19th and early-20th century scholars. The book then examines four different writings in the Hebrew Bible - the Priestly Writing, the Deuteronomistic History, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles - to demonstrate how different social origins result in different social meanings of sacrifice.

Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition

Author: Karin Finsterbusch

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-08-14

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 904740940X

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The present volume asks to which extent ancient practices and traditions of human sacrifice are reflected in medieval and modern Judeo-Christian times and also includes contributions concerned with the Ancient Near East and Ancient Greece.

The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Samuel E. Balentine

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-16

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 0190944935

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Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.

War in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Susan Niditch

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995-06-29

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0190282711

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Texts about war pervade the Hebrew Bible, raising challenging questions in religious and political ethics. The war passages that readers find most disquieting are those in which God demands the total annihilation of the enemy without regard to gender, age, or military status. The ideology of the "ban," however, is only one among a range of attitudes towards war preserved in the ancient Israelite literary tradition. Applying insights from anthropology, comparative literature, and feminist studies, Niditch considers a wide spectrum of war ideologies in the Hebrew Bible, seeking in each case to discover why and how these views might have made sense to biblical writers, who themselves can be seen to wrestle with the ethics of violence. The study of war thus also illuminates the social and cultural history of Israel, as war texts are found to map the world views of biblical writers from various periods and settings. Reviewing ways in which modern scholars have interpreted this controversial material, Niditch sheds further light on the normative assumptions that shape our understanding of ancient Israel. More widely, this work explores how human beings attempt to justify killing and violence while concentrating on the tones, textures, meanings, and messages of a particular corpus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Animals as Social Construction in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Davide D'Amico

Publisher:

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783534300143

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Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible

Author: Baruch J. Schwartz

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2008-06-01

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0567028321

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This book is a collection of essays on purificaton and atonement in the Hebrew Bible that provides new insights into the discussion of these ideas by looking at the values of sociological and anthropological approaches to the topics. The collection also examines multivalence and polyvalence in ritual and asks to what extent it is possible to speak of the function or meaning of ritual, even within the highly systematic priestly texts.

Who Is to Blame for Judges 19?

Author: Grace Kwan Sik Tsoi

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-06-29

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1666730637

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The horrific text of Judges 19 is puzzling, especially to Chinese Christians who read the Chinese Union Version. This dominant translation of the Bible seems to place the blame for the tragedy on the concubine, which in turns legitimizes violence against women. Using tools of narrative, intertextual, and ideological criticism, Tsoi reveals an anti-Levite rhetoric in the text that has been neglected by translators. An examination of the translation context suggests that an anti-concubinage agenda in the social context of Republican China might have contributed to the bias in the translation, resulting in more than a century of misinterpretation among Chinese Christians.

The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative

Author: Danna Nolan Fewell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 657

ISBN-13: 0199967725

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Comprised of contributions from scholars across the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative is a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible's narratives and topics related to the Bible's narrative constructions. The Handbook covers the Bible's narrative literature, from Genesis to Revelation, providing concise overviews of literary-critical scholarship as well as innovative readings of individual narratives informed by a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. The volume as a whole combines literary sensitivities with the traditional historical and sociological questions of biblical criticism and puts biblical studies into intentional conversation with other disciplines in the humanities. It reframes biblical literature in a way that highlights its aesthetic characteristics, its ethical and religious appeal, its organic qualities as communal literature, its witness to various forms of social and political negotiation, and its uncanny power to affect readers and hearers across disparate time-frames and global communities.

"On Her Account"

Author: Anne-Mareike Wetter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0567664317

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Anne-Mareike Wetter investigates how the books of Ruth, Esther and Judith contribute to the discussion about Israel's ethnic and religious identity in the formative period following the Babylonian Exile. Although each of these narratives deals with variations of the theme of survival in a hostile world, the question underlying them is a different one: “Who are we, and who is our 'other'?” The narratives are presented as sequels to Israel's history as put forward in other (now biblical) texts, and presuppose God's continuing involvement with his people. However, they subtly modify the way in which Israel can or should relate to her God by suggesting alternatives for official Temple worship or bypassing the latter altogether. While older prophetic texts make use of metaphoric language portraying Israel as YHWH's unfaithful wife, grieving widow, or ravaged virgin, Ruth, Esther and Judith can be construed as embodiments of Israel of a different kind. Wetter argues for a revisioning of Israel in and through the bodies of the three female characters, as a community which is simultaneously vulnerable and inviolable, marginalized and empowered. Their tricksterism, in all its comicality, underlines the precarious situation in which the women and the community they represent are caught. Yet it also has the power to both defeat threats from outside and amend Israel's self-perception on the inside. Israel no longer has to perceive of itself as a battered wife but as one who can deploy her qualities – seductive and otherwise – for the survival of the community.

Dinner at Dan

Author: Jonathan S. Greer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-09-12

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 9004260625

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In Dinner at Dan, Jonathan S. Greer provides biblical and archaeological evidence for sacred feasting at the Levantine site of Tel Dan from the late 10th century - mid-8th century BCE. Biblical texts are argued to reflect a Yahwistic and traditional religious context for these feasts and a fresh analysis of previously unpublished animal bone, ceramic, and material remains from the temple complex at Tel Dan sheds light on sacrificial prescriptions, cultic realia, and movements within this sacred space. Greer concludes that feasts at Dan were utilized by the kings of Northern Israel initially to unify tribal factions and later to reinforce distinct social structures as a society strove to incorporate its tribal past within a monarchic framework.