Zeba A. Crook, ed. The Ancient Mediterranean Social World: A Sourcebook

Abstract

Zeba Crook brings together essays from members of the SBL Context Group for Biblical Research in this reference work addressing established and fresh topics with a socioscientific framework. The key contributions here are twofold: the collection of 400 primary texts with brief contextual commentary about the text and the hundreds of additional texts listed at the end of each essay, giving the reader ample room to explore the topic in their own time. This work succeeds as an excellent guide to helpful primary sources on given topics and as an excellent reference work for advanced students.The book arranges twenty essays into five parts. Part one contains essays on economy, kinship, and patronage. “Social Interactions” in part two contains essays on honor, shame, collectivism, gossip, space, and gender. Part three covers domestic rituals, public rituals, purity, healing, and alternate states of consciousness. Loyalty, friendship, gifts, limited good, and envy are addressed in part four. The topics of deviance, mockery, secrecy, and the evil eye round out the books’ essays in part five. A bibliography and short biography of the contributors conclude the book.Each essay begins with a two to three-page introduction to the topic. Twenty primary texts are divided into subcategories, introduced with a short contextual commentary about its significance, and translated into English. The texts range from around 1000 BCE to around AD 200 and include various key Greco-Roman historical narratives, letters, inscriptions, OT/NT passages, and Rabbinic commentary. Each essay also contains a list of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin vocabulary words relating to the topic, a select bibliography of six key works in the subject, and a massive list of “additional texts” divided into the same subcategories used in the essay for further exploration by the reader.“Space” by Eric Stewart with contributions by Mischa Hooker and Emil Kramer is a good example of the type of analysis offered in this book. The essay begins with an introduction to spatiality as a means of control by which certain spaces are “appropriated for only those designated tasks, often by seeking to restrict access to them” (p. 124). Discussion of space then moves into binary pairs in which one member is “favored” of the other pairing. The main example given is geography as understood in Greco-Roman thought, which, of course, benefited the Greco-Roman elite authors: “latitudinal zones, or klimata, favors those who living in proximity to the Mediterranean Sea” (p. 125) against those who lived in areas deemed too hot or cold for civilization; cities corrupted by “moral degeneration” against the “idyllic, rustic past” (p. 125) of the countryside; public spaces as inherently male against private spaces as female (a delineation challenged by Susan E. Hylen in an article published after this book). The final example of designated space is “restricted” space that might include “temples, sacred groves, certain cities (or city spaces) . . . [and] the heavenly realm of the gods” (p. 126). The twenty texts on space begin with Homer, Herodotus, and Vergil under the subcategory “The Edges, Range, and Extent of the Oikoumenē,” continue with Pliny the Elder and Claudius Ptolemy (second century AD) under “Centrality and Klimata,” followed by “City and Village,” “City and Countryside,” “Private and Public/Gendered Spaces,” and “Restricted Spaces” with examples from Strabo, 1 Maccabees, Cicero, Thucydides, Mark 6, Xenophon, Columella, Ps 24, Josephus, and Pausanias, respectively. An up-to-date bibliography precedes the “Additional Texts” section, which contains 106 passages (by my count) listed in the above subcategories.As a sourcebook, this work occupies a unique space. It is both introductory and advanced; it gives the introductory but excellent information as one might expect of a good introductory work while its commentary on primary texts and hundreds of gathered references go into more depth than a specialized encyclopedia. The downside of this approach is that some readers, particularly those new to these topics, may feel overwhelmed by the lists of primary texts, and some students may be left wanting a longer orientation to these topics before the commentary on primary texts. Still, each essay very helpfully introduces the topic at hand, and the commentary on 400 primary texts guides the reader to the topic as a way into the advanced study of that topic.This sourcebook is warmly recommended to advanced students seeking to explore social aspects of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially those ready to commit the time to exploring the massive lists of primary texts and vocabulary so helpfully given. For students just beginning their journey into contextual analysis of biblical texts, this work will supplement but not replace an introduction to the social-scientific study of the Bible, instead guiding them for years to come as a key reference work to dive deeper into the social contexts of the ancient world.