Anthropology And Hebrew Bible Studies Modes Of Interchange And Interpretation

Early anthropologists saw a simple society in the Hebrew Bible. Recent approaches call upon ethnographic sensibilities, structuralism, and attention to literacy to understand biblical ritual, notions of purity, and the social structures within which these are embedded.

This handbook presents an overview of the main approaches from social and cultural anthropology to the Hebrew Bible. Since the late 19th century, biblical scholarship has addressed issues and themes related to biblical stories from a perspective which could now be considered socio-anthropological. It is however only since the 1960s that biblical scholars have started to produce readings and incorporate analytical models drawn directly from social anthropology to widen the interpretive scope of the social and historical data contained in the biblical sources. The handbook is arranged into two main thematic parts. Part 1 assesses the place of the Bible in social anthropology, examines the contribution of ethnoarchaeology to the recovery of the social world of Iron Age Palestine and offers insights from the anthropology of the Mediterranean for the interpretation of the biblical stories. Part 2 provides a series of case studies on anthropological themes arising in the Hebrew Bible. These include kinship and social organisation, death, cultural and collective memory, and ritualism. Contributors also examine how the biblical stories reveal dynamics of power and authority, gender, and honour and shame, and how socio-anthropological approaches can reveal these narratives and deepen our knowledge of the human societies and cultural context of the texts. Bringing together the expertise of scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Archaeology, this ethnographic introduction prompts new questions into our understanding of anthropology and the Bible.

Meat Matters offers a portrait of the lives of Ethiopian Jews as it is reflected and refracted thought the symbolism of meat. Drawing upon thirty years of fieldwork, this beautifully written and innovatively constructed ethnography tells the story of the Beta Israel, who began immigrating from Ethiopia to Israel in the 1970s. Once in Israel, their world changed in formerly unimaginable ways, such as conversion under Rabbinic restrictions, moving into multistory buildings, different attitudes toward gender and reproduction, and perhaps above all, the newly acquired distinctiveness of the color of their bodies. In the face of such changes, the Beta Israel held on to a key idiom in their lives: meat. The community continues to be organized into kirchas, groups of friends and family who purchase and raise cows, then butcher and divide the animal's body into small and equal chunks, which are distributed among the kircha through a lottery ritual. Flowing back and forth between Ethiopia to Israel, Meat Matters follows the many strands of significance surrounding cows and meat, ultimately forming a vibrant web of meaning at the heart of the Beta Israel community today.

This volume presents the findings of an international research symposium, held at St Andrews University, Scotland, in July 2003. Contributors include both biblical scholars and anthropologists. The essays presented variously explore and review interdisciplinary links, innovations and developments between anthropology and biblical studies in reference to interpretation of both the OT and NT and pseudepigraphal works. Explored are methodological issues, the use of anthropological concepts in biblical studies (identity; purity boundaries; virtuoso religion; spiritual experience; sacred space) and more ‘field orientated’ work of bible translators in different cultures.

This collection of essays contextualizes the history and current state of the social science method in the study of the Hebrew Bible. Part 1 traces the rise of social science criticism by reprinting classic essays on the topic; Part 2 provides "case studies," examples of application of the methods to biblical studies.

In Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Period Judaism, Jeremy Penner seeks to uncover the historical and social processes that underlie the origins and development of Jewish daily prayer practices, particularly the establishment of set times for daily prayer. Since daily prayer lacks explicit biblical warrant, this book seeks to explain how this custom was legitimized as divinely inspired. The importance of daily prayer was understood and experienced within a range of literary and social contexts, and thus different exegetical and etiological strategies develop at this time to legitimize its practice. In some cases daily prayer was coordinated with, and made analogous to, daily cultic sacrifice, in other cases, daily prayer was legitimized by identifying the origins of the practice in sacred scripture. Lastly, in some contexts daily prayer was coordinated with the cycles of celestial bodies in the heavens.

This volume considers the New Testament in the light of anthropological study, in particular the current trend towards theological anthropology. The book begins with three essays that survey the context in which the New Testament was written, covering the Old Testament, early Jewish writings and the literature of the Greco –Roman world. Chapters then explore the anthropological ideas found in the texts of the New Testament and in the thought of it writers, notably that of Paul. The volume concludes with pieces from Brian S. Roser and Ephraim Radner who bring the whole exploration together by reflecting on the theological implications of the New Testament's anthropological ideas. Taken together, the chapters in this volume address the question that humans have been asking since at least the earliest days of recorded history: what does it mean to be human? The presence of this question in modern theology, and its current prevalence in popular culture, makes this volume both a timely and relevant interdisciplinary addition to the scholarly conversation around the New Testament.

Most of the articles were presented and discussed at the seminar Early Christianity between Judaism and Hellenism at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies in Piliscsaba and Budapest, Hungary, in August 2006. The anthropological quest is still one of the classical approaches in historical-critical as well as in other methodological approaches to the New Testament. The complexity of anthropological ideas in the New Testament is seldom presented neither explicitly nor in clearly defined terms, but rather in stories about human beings or their (inter-)actions and/or parenetic teaching that is based on some, often unstated, presuppositions of what humans are like. The different essays in Anthropology in the New Testament and its Ancient Context are taking care of this complex situation and address a selection of important problems from the variety of ideas on anthropology in Early Christianity as well as in its Jewish and its Hellenistic context. The book does not aim to show a coherent New Testament anthropology as it is to write a coherent New Testament theology, but rather tries to present new insights into the complexity of ancient anthropological discourses. With that aim the collection includes presentations on the human body and its purity a key feature in many ancient cultures and their anthropological systems, questions of purity and impurity, on the key anthropological terms sarks and soma in Paul, how a Greco-Roman reader would understand Paul's anthropological reasoning. Paul's anthropology is also set in relation to Philo's view of humanity. Platonic, tripartite anthropology is also part of an article analyzing the common elements in the teaching concerning the human soul among Sethian, Valentinian and Platonic writers. Conversion, another kind of adaptation of a Hellenistic philosophical concept to early Christianity, different early Christian ideas of the resurrected body, and so-called sepulchral anthropology are further subjects addressed in the book which finally deals with selected anthropological imagery in the Gospel of John and with anthropological perspectives in Hebrews. The book contains contributions by Ida Froehlich, Tom Holmen, Lorenzo Scornaienchi, Martin Meiser, George van Kooten, Paivi Vahakangas, Miguel Herrero de Jauregui, Outi Lehtipuu, Imre Peres, Margareta Gruber and Walter Ubelacker. The essays offer some new angles, new methodological approaches and important insights relevant to anthropological views in the New Testament.