Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual
Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual

Author: Yitzhaq Feder

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 9781589835542

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This pioneering study examines the use of blood to purge the effects of sin and impurity in Hittite and biblical ritual. The idea that blood atones for sins holds a prominent place in both Jewish and Christian traditions. The author traces this notion back to its earliest documentation in the fourteenth- and thirteenth-century B.C.E. texts from Hittite Anatolia, in which the smearing of blood is used as a means of expiation, purification, and consecration. This rite parallels, in both its procedure and goals, the biblical sin offering. The author argues that this practice stems from a common tradition manifested in both cultures. In addition, this book aims to decipher and elucidate the symbolism of the practice of blood smearing by seeking to identify the sociocultural context in which the expiatory significance of blood originated. Thus, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning and efficacy of ritual, the origins of Jewish and Christian notions of sin and atonement, and the origin of the biblical blood rite.

Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual
Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual

Author: Yitzhaq Feder

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 9781589835542

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This pioneering study examines the use of blood to purge the effects of sin and impurity in Hittite and biblical ritual. The idea that blood atones for sins holds a prominent place in both Jewish and Christian traditions. The author traces this notion back to its earliest documentation in the fourteenth- and thirteenth-century B.C.E. texts from Hittite Anatolia, in which the smearing of blood is used as a means of expiation, purification, and consecration. This rite parallels, in both its procedure and goals, the biblical sin offering. The author argues that this practice stems from a common tradition manifested in both cultures. In addition, this book aims to decipher and elucidate the symbolism of the practice of blood smearing by seeking to identify the sociocultural context in which the expiatory significance of blood originated. Thus, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning and efficacy of ritual, the origins of Jewish and Christian notions of sin and atonement, and the origin of the biblical blood rite.

Atonement and Purification
Atonement and Purification

Author: Isabel Cranz

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Published: 2017-05-05

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9783161549168

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Biblical scholars frequently attempt to contextualize the Priestly ritual corpus by comparing it to other ancient Near Eastern ritual traditions. This comparative approach tends to detect a hidden polemic at work in the Priestly Source (P) which was meant to highlight its distinctly monotheistic outlook. Isabel Cranz reframes current understandings of P by comparing Priestly rituals of atonement to their Assyro-Babylonian counterparts. In this way she shows how the Priestly ritual corpus is highly specialized and concerns itself primarily with sanctuary maintenance. Viewing P in this new light in turn helps to demonstrate that the authors of P were not interested in discrediting foreign rituals or pushing a monotheistic agenda. Instead P primarily aimed to confirm the Aaronide priests as the only legitimate priestly group fit for service at the altar. Subsequently if a polemical agenda is present in P it can be shown to be directed against rivals and critics of the Aaronide priesthood, not other rituals of the ancient Near East.

The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics
The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics

Author: Mari Joerstad

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-05-23

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1108757928

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The environmental crisis has prompted religious leaders and lay people to look to their traditions for resources to respond to environmental degradation. In this book, Mari Joerstad contributes to this effort by examining an ignored feature of the Hebrew Bible: its attribution of activity and affect to trees, fields, soil, and mountains. The Bible presents a social cosmos, in which humans are one kind of person among many. Using a combination of the tools of biblical studies and anthropological writings on animism, Joerstad traces the activity of non-animal nature through the canon. She shows how biblical writers go beyond sustainable development, asking us to be good neighbors to mountains and trees, and to be generous to our fields and vineyards. They envision human communities that are sources of joy to plants and animals. The Biblical writers' attention to inhabited spaces is particularly salient for contemporary environmental ethics in their insistence that our cities, suburbs, and villages contribute to flourishing landscapes.

A New Look at Atonement in Leviticus
A New Look at Atonement in Leviticus

Author: James A. Greenberg

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-05-11

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1646020510

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In this book, James A. Greenberg examines animal sacrifice in Priestly Torah texts found in Leviticus 1–16, Exodus, and Numbers. Through his analysis, Greenberg identifies a new valence of kipper as a process that produces a positive result between two objects and argues that the Israelite sanctuary exists to facilitate a connection between YHWH, sancta, and the Israelites through the medium of blood. Rather than beginning with a priori assumptions of what sacrificial terms and symbols mean, Greenberg allows his interpretation to develop through an accumulation of textual clues. To avoid the exegetical pitfalls of symbolic and structuralist approaches, he focuses on what the language of the ritual says about sacrifice and what it seeks to accomplish. His investigation considers why the flesh and blood of an animal are used by the priest as he mediates on behalf of the offerer through the medium of YHWH’s sanctuary, what the difference is between intentional and unintentional sin, how the meaning of kipper changes from one sacrifice to the next, whether the sanctuary can be both holy and unclean, and how priests conceive of YHWH’s interaction with sancta, the offerer, and the animal. A New Look at Atonement in Leviticus recalibrates our understanding of kipper and furthers our knowledge of the priestly cult in ancient Israel. It will especially interest scholars of Biblical Hebrew and the Old Testament in particular.

The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible
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: 574

ISBN-13: 0190222123

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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.

Bloodshed by King Manasseh, Assyrians and Priestly Scribes
Bloodshed by King Manasseh, Assyrians and Priestly Scribes

Author: Krzysztof Kinowski

Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 3647500437

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King Manasseh of Judah is one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible. 2 Kings presents him as the wickedest of monarchs. In 2Kgs 24:3–4, he is accused of having provoked God to destroy Judah on account of the innocent blood he had shed in Jerusalem (cf. 2Kgs 21:16). In his study Krzysztof Kinowski investigates this accusation, viewing it against the biblical and ancient Near East backgrounds, and casts a new light upon Manasseh's role in the fall of Jerusalem. The mention of bloodshed in this affair appears to be the outcome of a process of scapegoating of Manasseh, ongoing in 2 Kings and reflecting both the legal and the cultic paradigms governing the biblical historiography. The link between Manasseh's bloodshed and the destruction of Judah on account of the cultic land's blood-defilement points towards a group of priestly scribes involved in the production of the 2Kgs 21 and 24 narratives. This assumption lies behind the scholarly discussion about the Priestly-like strata and priestly touches in the Books of Kings.

The "grammar" of Sacrifice
The

Author: Naphtali S. Meshel

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0198705565

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Focusing on Σ--the idealized sacrificial system represented in the Priestly laws in the Pentateuch--this study demonstrates that a ritual system is describable in terms of a set of concise, unconsciously internalized, generative rules, analogous to the grammar of a natural language.

Sacred Ritual
Sacred Ritual

Author: Bryan C. Babcok

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2014-05-05

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 157506877X

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Israelite festival calendar texts (Exod 23; 34; Lev 23; Num 28–29; Deut 16; and Ezek 45) share many features; however, there are also differences. Some of the most-often-cited differences are the following: festival dates, festival locations, date of the New Year, festival timing, and festival names. Scholars have explored these distinctions, and many have concluded that different sources (authors/redactors) wrote the various calendars at different times in Israelite history. Scholars use these dissimilarities to argue that Lev 23 was written in the exilic or postexilic era. Babcock offers a new translation and analysis of a second-millennium B.C. multimonth ritual calendar text from Emar (Emar 446) to challenge the late dating of Lev 23. Babcock argues that Lev 23 preserves an early (2nd-millennium) West Semitic ritual tradition. Building on the recent work of Klingbeil and Sparks, this book presents a new comparative methodology for exploring potential textual relationships. Babcock investigates the attributes of sacred ritual through the lens of sacred time, sacred space and movement, sacred objects, ritual participants, and ritual sound. The author begins with a study of ancient Near Eastern festival texts from the 3rd millennium through the 1st millennium. This analysis focuses on festival cycles, common festival attributes, and the role of time and space in ritual. Babcock then moves on to an intertextual study of biblical festival texts before completing a thorough investigation of both Lev 23 and Emar 446. The result is a compelling argument that Lev 23 preserves an early West Semitic festival tradition and does not date to the exilic era—refuting the scholarly consensus. This illuminating reading stands as a model for future research in the field of ritual and comparative textual studies.

Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch
Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch

Author: Christophe Nihan

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-08-01

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1646021576

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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.