The first five books of the Hebrew Bible contain a significant number of texts describing ritual practices. Yet it is often unclear how these sources would have been understood or used by ancient audiences in the actual performance of cult. This volume explores the processes of ritual textualization (the creation of a written version of a ritual) in ancient Israel by probing the main conceptual and methodological issues that inform the study of this topic in the Pentateuch.
This systematic and comparative study of text and ritual in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible maps the main areas of consensus and disagreement among scholars engaged in articulating new models for understanding the relationship between text and ritual and explores the importance of comparative evidence for the study of pentateuchal rituals. Topics include ritual textualization in ancient Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia; the importance of archaeology and materiality for the study of text and ritual in ancient Israel; the relationship between ritual textualization and standardization in the Pentateuch; the reception of pentateuchal ritual texts in Second Temple writings and rabbinic literature; and the relationship between text and ritual in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Dorothea Erbele-Küster, Daniel K. Falk, Yitzhaq Feder, Christian Frevel, William K. Gilders, Dominique Jaillard, Giuseppina Lenzo, Lionel Marti, Patrick Michel, Rüdiger Schmitt, Jeremy D. Smoak, and James W. Watts.
Author(s): Christophe Nihan, Julia Rhyder
Publisher: Eisenbrauns
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 347
City: University Park
COVER Front
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Rituals in the Spells of the Book of the Dead in Ancient Egypt
Chapter2: Between Utterance and Dedication: Some Remarks on the Status of Textuality in Greek Ritual Practices
Chapter 3: Inscriptions and Ritual Practices in the Neo-Assyrian Period: The Construction of a Building as an Example
Chapter 4: Between Text and Ritual: The Function (s) of the Ritual Texts from Late Bronze Age Emar (Syria)
Chapter 5: The Textualization of Priestly Ritual in Light of Hittite Sources
Chapter 6: Diversity and Centralization of the Temple Cult in the Archeological Record from the Iron II C to the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Judah
Chapter 7: Texts Are Not Rituals, and Rituals Are Not Texts , with an Example from Leviticus 12
Chapter 8: The Texture of Rituals in the Book of Numbers: A Fresh Approach to Ritual Density, the Role of Tradition, and the Emergence of Diversity in Early Judaism
Chapter 9: Speaking with a Divine Voice: The Rhetoric of Epistolary Performance in Numbers 6:22–27
Chapter 10: The Ritual Texts of Leviticus and the Creation of Ritualized Bodies
Chapter 11: The Reception of Ritual Laws in the Early Second Temple Period: Evidence from Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles
Chapter 12: Text and Ritual in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Chapter 13: “And They Would Read Before Him the Order for the Day”: The Textuality of Leviticus 16in Mishnah Yoma, Tosefta Kippurim, and Sifra Aḥare Mot
Index
