New Perspectives on Ritual in the Biblical World

2008

Boulder Research on ritual in all its dimensions has garnered a number of studies in the past decades, both within and across disciplines. It has been applied to area studies and examined as a distinct theoretical focus. Yet even considering this history, much remains to be said regarding ritual as applied to, and reflected in, specific texts across the biblical corpus. It is this need for broad methodological applications to examine specific texts, examinations that are thematized across meaningful groupings of study, that the volume under review seeks to address.

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2007

Although the main message of the film is that most of the times people worship gods that they have created instead of the one who created them, PK’s search for God and his participation in different religious practices shows how people in search for God are usually drawn to rituals as a way of comparing or understanding religions. Thereof, how much can rituals explain a religion?

The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Samuel Balentine, Oxford University Press, 2020

The chapter summarizes the roles and tasks of ritual experts and participants within the Hebrew Bible and its cultural environment. The first part reflects on the responsibilities of the kings, the priests, and the priestesses within the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Mari, Hittite Anatolia) and ancient Egypt. Then the chapter turns to the concepts of the Hebrew Bible. The second part demonstrates how the priests and Levites take care for the rituals, the sacrifices, purity, teaching, and administration. Cult prophets and the king have their limited and special functions. Third, at certain points lay people may partici pate in the cult: the offering person, women, children, and the non-Israelite (the foreign er). The fourth section provides a brief overview over the historical development within the first millennium BCE regarding the concepts and circumstances as they are repre sented in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

The vast majority of people in the pre-modern world, including the Jewish, Christian and Islamic cultures, belonged to semi-oral societies whose main access to texts was oral or via a few literate specialists. Focusing on the Bible in ancient Jewish and Christian ritual, this paper wants to address the question how Genette’s model might function for the illiterate majority of the population in such semi-oral societies. In an oral or semi-oral society, any text has to be performed in order to “be present.” For the average Jew or Christian who was not able to read or write the main access to the fundamental text of his religion was mediated by its interpretation in ritual performances. In Genette’s terms, oral text and its paratext are phonic (“phonique”) rather than graphic (“graphique”). The article briefly addresses textual relationships between bible texts and ritual performance for the following phenomena a) biblical texts as ritual incentive or even as screenplays of sorts b) liturgical reading of biblical texts c) the chronological linking of specific liturgical events (festivals, seasons, Shabbats or Sundays) with biblical reading(s). (This linking establishes a fixed ritual and mythological context for these texts that might not have been present in the text before. Of course, an already existing metatextual or epitextual tradition outside the graphic manuscript itself might well have influenced the selection of a text for a specific liturgical event. The individual and collective memory is shaped by the ritual recurrence of combinations of various texts linked to time and geography. Those texts frequently read will be much better known than those that are rarely or never cited.) d) Extensive biblical texts are quoted (not read) in Jewish and Christian worship: e.g., the words of institution for the Eucharist and the Pater Noster on the Christian side, the Shma‘ on the Jewish and the Priestly Blessing of Aaron and the Sanctus/Trishagion/Qedusha on both. e) My last example is the most remote in time and the most difficult to access from extant written sources: the relation between the performance of a Temple sacrifice and its biblical prescription(s) in the time of the Temple. In fact, the whole issue is more complicated and it is important not to be bibliocentrist or overly focused on the written text. Ancient Jewish rituals have always been transmitted textually (written or oral) and ritually. These modes of transmission are obviously somehow related. Yet, which text is metatextual to which, if you have two or three parallel text histories? Where is the main text? Almost certainly, priests studied the “biblical” prescriptions of sacrifices. At the same time, the information given in the biblical texts does not by a long way suffice to carry out the sacri¬fice. Certainly, the biblical prescriptions were never the origin of the first performance of a given rite but rather a (thin) description of it at one stage or another of its existence that later attained some kind of prescriptive status.

Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2018

This essay draws on Catherine Bell's concept of the ritualization of text in order to assess two cases of ritual innovation in light of the increasing textualization of Israelite religion in early Judaism. The first case is the use of ritual and scripturalized prayer by King Jehoshaphat and a Levite in waging war (2 Chronicles 20). The second case drawn from the Dead Sea Scrolls is the entry ritual in the Community Rule which elevates community priests as those who bless using an interpreted form of the priestly blessing of Numbers 6. A common perception of rituals is that they are necessarily fixed and unchanging. Through words and actions, rituals are thought to express divinely-ordained or cosmically-determined, timeless realities. The study of ritual has typically focused on synchronic aspects in emphasizing presumed meaning or structure rather than diachronic dimensions. Yet, rituals evolve over time and new rituals emerge to meet changing social circumstances. The Hebrew Bible, whose literature spans over a thousand years, and early Jewish literature more broadly, which engages earlier scripture, provide a window into such diachronic shifts. 1 My essay focuses on one subcategory of ritual-liturgical practices-and an innovation that can be traced over time: the way in which such practices engage scripture. I would like to suggest that Jewish liturgical practices increasingly reflect the textualization of Jewish life in the post-exilic period

R. Uro, J. J. Day, R. E. DeMaris & R. Roitto, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual (in press)

This chapter offers a guide to the reader for understanding the nature of ritual studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field, with particular emphasis on its relevance to the study of the history of early Christianity. Three characteristics are singled out: Ritual studies is distinguished by (1) a pluralistic approach to the definition of ‘ritual’; (2) an increased interest in theory; and (3) the application of interdisciplinary perspectives on ritual. The chapter also responds to the criticism that has been raised against using the concept of ritual and ritual theory in the study of past rituals and argues that ritual theory enriches historical and textual analysis of early Christian materials in a number of ways. Ritual theory contributes to drawing a more complete picture of early Christian history and offers a corrective to a biased understanding of early Christianity as a system of beliefs and practices. Finally, examples from the present Handbook are taken to demonstrate how the ritual perspective creates a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration and integrative approaches which both stimulate new questions and enrich old ones.