Antiquitopia

So as I finish up readying a draft of my monograph to send to publishers, I have thought a bit about a potential future project that would be more patently methodological in nature:  what, if anything, can different scholarly frameworks of ritual tell us about Hebrews?  How might Hebrews help us to rethink those frameworks?  So, I toyed with this idea a bit here , spoken of it with biblicists, with people who study ritual or "ritual" in other contexts, etc., and with their feedback I have come up with this as a preliminary abstract and table and contents: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Ritual Studies:  An Investigation Jared C. Calaway Visiting Assistant Professor Illinois Wesleyan University Abstract: This study responds to the increasing interest in “social-scientific criticism” in biblical studies and its relative absence in the most cultically-interested work in the New Testament:  the Epistle to the Hebrews.  There have been so...

Reviewing some works on Hebrews and the "social-scientific method," by which one usually means taking the insights of sociology and anthropology and applying them (or putting them in dialogue with) the biblical texts, I have been somewhat amused that, when discussing cultic aspects at least, the typical go-to's are still Victor Turner and Mary Douglas.  No one would deny their importance and influence.  And the latter is particularly understandable, since she did theorize using the Pentateuch, especially Leviticus and Numbers, to discuss ritual as a symbolic system.  Nonetheless, the social sciences move on and Bible scholars are often the last to know.  So, I had an idea perhaps for a future project in which one might be a little more overt about the the implications of the application of the social sciences and the Bible--that is, instead of making a particular thinker the background or general approach one has to the text, to see what happens when one makes the ap...

One last post on Halloween, although I fully realize it is now All Saints Day. In my reading this morning, I ran across a passage from Victor Turner, who discusses Halloween in a series of cross-cultural calendrical rituals (as opposed to rites of passage) that emphasize the temporary reversal of roles and the importance of masks in those rites: In Western society, the traces of rites of age- and sex-role reversal persist in such customs as Halloween, when the powers of the structurally inferior are manifested in the liminal dominance of pre-adolescent children. The monstrous masks they often wear in disguise represent mainly chthonic or earth-demonic powers--witches who blast fertility; corpses or skeletons from underground; indigenous peoples, such as Indians; troglodytes, such as dwarves or gnomes; hoboes or anti-authoritarian figures, such as pirates or traditional Western gun fighters. These tiny earth powers, if not propitiated by treats or dainties, will work fantastic and ca...

After my last post, I just could not help but quote the incantation against the Evil Eye, something feared throughout the ancient Mediterranean and ancient near east--Tolkien's Eye of Sauron seems to rely upon some of these characteristics, particularly the first line: The Eye goes, yea it runs; It has seen its brother, that he is good. Its brother, that he is lovely; It has begun to devour his flesh without a knife. To drink his blood without a cup; It is the eye of a BTY-man that has seen him [the brother], The eye of a BTY-woman that has seen him, The eye of a price-setter, The eye of an assembler, The eye of a gate-keeper. The eye of a gate-keeper, to the gate-keeper let it return! The eye of the assembler, to the assembler let it return! The eye of the price-setter, to the price-setter let it return! They eye of the BTY-man, to the BTY-man let it return! The eye of the BTY-woman, to the BTY-woman let it return! RS 22.225, Trans. Dennis Pardee This text is rather well put toget...

This recitation casts out the tormentors of a young man: The pain of your rod it has banished, The producers of the pain of your rod. It goes forth at the voice of the ta'iyu priest, Like smoke from a window, Like a serpent from a pillar, Like mountain-goats to a summit, Like lions to a lair. The rod has recovered, Yea the road has come near. Should you sin against your body, Should you commit evil against yoru body, You should eat moldy bread, Drink fig-juice in oppression, On the heights, in the well-watered valleys, In the shadows, even at the sanctuary. Then, as for the sorcerers, the tormentors, Horanu will drive them out, Even the companions of the 'lads of knowledge' he will drive out for you. With respect to heat, do not sag, May your tongue not stutter, May your canal not be decanalized. The god can clothe you, The god can make you naked. For the man, descend from the rod To the earth, O flow; For the son of man, from illness he is delivered. [The rest of the text ...

I just learned from Jim Davila at Paleojudaica that Catherine Bell, one of the world's leading scholars in ritual studies and Chinese religions, died at the young age of 55 on May 23, 2008 after a long illness. I remember bumping into her at a party at the annual meeting of AAR/SBL in San Antonio a few years ago. She taught at Santa Clara and retired last year due to her illness. She is best known in religious studies for her 1992 book, "Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice," which in 1994 won the American Academy of Religion book award in History of Religions. See a full obituary on the Santa Clara Religious Studies website here .