The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Samuel E. Balentine

Abstract

The last thirty years have seen an increasing number of studies on ritual in the Hebrew Bible inspired by the path-breaking work of scholars like Rendtorff, Douglas, Milgrom, and Levine as well as the development of ritual theory within anthropology. The field is well placed for a handbook that builds on past scholarship in order to develop pathways for new research, and a particular strength of this volume is its attentiveness to the reception of biblical texts in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As is typical for the Oxford Handbooks, this is a substantial volume with 34 essays covering a wide range of topics. The first section has essays on the wider cultural context: Mesopotamia (Abusch), Egypt (Teeter), Hatti (Beckman), Syria-Palestine (Curtis), Greece (Kowalzig). Greece might easily have been overlooked and its inclusion is welcome. The second section examines interpretative approaches: history of religion (Grabbe), ritual theory (Gruenwald), and social and cultural anthropology (Gilders). Readers expecting an analysis of recent ritual theory will find what they seek in the incisive essay by Gilders. Gruenwald’s essay presents his distinctive views on ritual and (rather oddly for a handbook on the Hebrew Bible) a case study on baptism. The third section is the largest and considers the different components of ritual: the gods (Hartenstein), sacred space (Hundley), ritual experts and participants (Hieke), sacred time (Davis), ritual objects (Bonfiglio), practices (Gane), and the ritualizing of iconic texts in Judaism (Watts), Christianity (Parmenter), and Islam (Svensson). The fourth section has reflections on the cultural and theological perspectives: sin and expiation (Janzen), clean/unclean and holy/profane (Lawrence), sickness and healing (Rooke), death and afterlife (Schmidt), and divine presence and absence (Berlejung). The fifth section examines the history of interpretation: Qumran (Schuller), early Christianity (Bradshaw), early Judaism (Newman), and rabbinic Judaism (Reif). Since Newman’s essay deals extensively with Qumran, there is a degree of overlap with the object of Schuller’s examination. The sixth section studies the sociocultural effects of rituals in the Hebrew Bible in the realms of politics (Morrow), ethics (Davies), Israelite society (Cook), and economics (Schaper). The seventh and final section examines the theological heritage of biblical rituals in biblical theology (Klingbeil), secular Judaism (Marx), Christian rituals (Werline), and Islamic rituals (Gauvain). In the essays, notes have been kept to a minimum, but each essay has a bibliography. Balentine provides a two-page introduction to the entire volume and there is a subject index, including selected authors, but no index of scriptural or ancient texts.