Tracing The Ritual Body: Catherine Bell and Rituals of the Ancient Biblical World
Edited by Ada Taggar Cohen, Richard E. DeMaris, Jonathan Schwiebert
(LHBOTS [=Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 741] T&T Clark, Bloomsbury, 2024)
Description
This volume utilizes Catherine Bell’s ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating ritual and practice. Only recently, however, has Bell’s theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This cross-disciplinary examination assesses the utility of Bell’s theorizing for studying the textual evidence for rituals of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and other early Christian literature.
The contributors to this volume illustrate a path away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behaviour. In this volume, as each scholar works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts are consciously employed to guide or challenge the investigation, pushing beyond previous conclusions about ancient rituals. The contributors’ attention to theory, and especially the social context, practical function, and symbolic interpretation, set this collection apart from studies that consider the rituals in more traditional textual ways.
Contributors
Ada Taggar Cohen (Doshisha University); Roy E. Gane (Andrews University); Dan Belnap (Brigham Young University); Hannah K. Harrington (Patten University); Richard E. DeMaris (Valparaiso University); Jonathan Schwiebert (Lenoir-Rhyne University); Jade Weimer (University of Manitoba); Ritva H. Williams (St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church, Cedar Rapids); Russell C. D. Arnold (Regis University)
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK, USA)
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