Pilgrimage Festival Research Articles

“And Oil out of the Flinty Rock” (Deut 32:13)

Abstract Olive press caves are widespread in the archaeology of Judea but have not received due attention. This paper provides an integrative analysis of the caves and explains their use in oil production. The phenomenon has clear geographic and chronological parameters as a feature of early Roman period Judean settlement. This article proposes that olive press caves represent ethnically-bounded practices identified with Jewish society and are linked to production of ritually pure oil for temple rites and pilgrimage festivals in Jerusalem. It is argued that their architectural layout helped to maximize the ability to supervise, monitor and control the purity of workers.

Mutual responsibility in Kabbalistic thought – ethics, theology and gender

This article explores the evolution of the concept of ‘mutual responsibility’ from the biblical and Talmudic eras to medieval Kabbalistic literature, and to analyse the notion of arvut and its implications through the prism of gender. I suggest that whereas in the Bible and in rabbinic literature the ‘negative’ aspect of mutual responsibility was emphasized, with a focus on one’s obligation to take responsibility for another’s sins or for his soul, in Kabbalistic literature metaphysical and ‘positive’ aspects of mutual responsibility were developed. I discuss the connection between arvut and the doctrine of gilgul , and other practices such as the Pilgrimage Festival, which illustrates the metaphysical idea of responsibility.

Religiosity, Nationalism, and Anti-Jewish Politics in Palestine and Poland: Islamic and Catholic Pilgrimages during the Interwar Era

AbstractThis study in comparative global history sheds light on a largely ignored forum for the politics of transition from monarchical empire to nation-state in the Middle East and Central Europe—religious festivals at sacred shrines. It compares the role of key pilgrimage festivals at politically important sacred shrines: (1) the Islamic Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses) pilgrimage to the Haram esh-Sharif and Nabi Musa Tomb near the Dead Sea in Mandatory Palestine and (2) various Catholic pilgrimages to Jasna Góra in Częstochowa in interwar Poland. The author demonstrates how these events served as sacred forums for secular politics, where various political factions contested their partisan ideas of the nation, which included the elite nationalism of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini and the Catholic-Endecja nationalism of Polish clerical leaders. Moreover, I examine the role of these pilgrimage festivals in some of the major conflicts afflicting their respective areas, such as Arab–Jewish violence and hostility in Palestine and wars for borders as well as anti-minority sentiment, especially anti-Semitism, in Poland.

Israelite Festivals: From Cyclical Time Celebrations to Linear Time Commemorations

The Pentateuch and later Jewish tradition associates the key pilgrimage festivals with stories about Israel’s past. Nevertheless, these festivals all began as agricultural or seasonal festivals. Using comparative evidence from the ancient Near East, and looking at the Covenant Collection, the earliest biblical law collection, through a redaction critical lens, we can uncover the early history of these festivals and even how they developed in stages. A similar process is evident with the Sabbath, which appears to have begun as a moon festival, as per certain biblical references and from comparative evidence, but which eventually developed into the seventh day of rest as part of the institution of the week, and then comes to be associated with the story of God resting after creation. These developments, from celebrating agricultural and lunar cycles to celebrating mnemohistorical events, can be seen as part of two parallel processes: the coalescing of Israelite cultural memory and the institution of the linear calendar as the dominant conception of time.

Peregrinação e santuário: reflexões teológicas na Bíblia hebraica

Um dos principais antecedentes históricos e religiosos para a prática contemporânea do turismo religioso é a peregrinação. De fato, a prática milenar da peregrinação se destaca particularmente na tradição judaica. O presente artigo objetiva explorar os contornos teológicos da peregrinação no contexto da Bíblia hebraica, mais especificamente nos livros de Gênesis, Êxodo e Salmos. Para tanto, o estudo se vale de uma metodologia bibliográfica que leva em conta, para a sua reflexão, os conceitos de tempo, espaço e liminaridade. Nesse sentido, o artigo inicia com a identificação de padrões de peregrinação nas narrativas patriarcais de Gênesis. Em seguida, o estudo explora o paradigma da peregrinação na narrativa de Êxodo. Finalmente, o artigo discute as festas de peregrinação e o uso litúrgico de Salmos. As conclusões do presente estudo destacam a qualidade espiritual da peregrinação na tradição judaica, cujo clímax é a experiência religiosa de Deus no templo. De forma mais abrangente, a tradição teológica da peregrinação na Bíblia hebraica serve de base para a experiência espiritual contemporânea, onde a vida como um todo é interpretada em termos de peregrinação.

Taming Godavari River: Navigating through religious, developmental, and environmental narratives

Exploring the production and the social construction of Godavari riverscape in Nashik, this article presents a case of ongoing socio‐ecological transformations in the Indian cities. This case‐study aims to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on the political ecology of urban water bodies in India and expands the political ecology of waterscapes by engaging with the cultural politics of water. The Godavari, one of the seven sacred rivers in Hinduism, meanders through the fast urbanizing and a religious city of Nashik. Thousands of pilgrims converge every day along the Godavari in the Nashik and millions throng during the Hindu pilgrimage festival of Kumbh Mela—one of the biggest congregations in the world. Here, religious tourism coupled with modernist developmental agendas is rapidly (re)shaping the river into a prized religious and real estate commodity while ignoring the river ecology. This article nuances the perception, investigation, and management of rivers by examining three interrelated questions: How do the performance, circulation, and contestation of the multiple narratives surrounding the river transform its ecology and relationship with the city? In what ways do notions of control and exploitation of rivers normalize in the collective conscience of the societies? How do social relations (re)create and configure the emotional ties with the river in public imagination?This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness

Outward Bound with Ayyappan: Work, Masculinity, and Self-Respect in a South Indian Pilgrimage Festival

The annual pilgrimage festival dedicated to the god Ayyappan has become immensely popular in the past sixty years. As many as fifty million pilgrims participate each year. This paper draws on interviews of pilgrims conducted in South India in 2012–2013. My fieldwork suggests that the increasing popularity of the event relates to the contemporary South Indian work environment, an environment in which traditional gender roles are being reshaped by the challenges posed by migration for work opportunities. Interviews of English-speaking pilgrims show that their interpretations of the pilgrimage festival highlight the complexities of manhood in a time of rapidly changing work roles for men and women. Specifically, my fieldwork demonstrates that pilgrims perceive Ayyappan as a source of aid for those who struggle to succeed as financial providers and heads of the family unit. Pilgrims anxious about the loss of traditional models of masculinity amidst rapid change find solace in the blessings the god Ayyappan yields.

Explaining effervescence: Investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised.

The support of attendees for tourism development: evidence from religious festivals, Taiwan

This study examines the relationships among emotional experience, authenticity experience, festival identity, and support for tourism development among attendees at two well-known traditional religious festivals in Taiwan. Our theoretical models suggest that authenticity experience directly affects attendees’ festival identity and indirectly affects attendees’ support for the tourism development of the Dajia Mazu Pilgrimage festival and the Neimen Songjiang Battle Array festival. Moreover, attendees’ emotional experience positively, significantly, and directly affects their festival identity and indirectly affects their support for the tourism development of the Dajia Mazu Pilgrimage festival. The theoretical framework of this study provides insightful suggestions about festival implications that are valuable to researchers and practitioners in the field of festival tourism and extends our understanding of traditional religious festivals attendees’ support for tourism development. This study sheds light on previously proposed but unexamined behavioural models as applied to the attendees of traditional religious festivals and thus contributes significantly to the literature on festival tourism and attendees’ behaviour at festivals. We conclude that when people participate in traditional religious festivals such as the ones under consideration, they gain authentic experiences, which strengthens their sense of traditional religious festival identity and place attachment; as a result, they are more likely to support tourism development.

Exploring Visitor Experiences, Activities and Benefits at Three Religious Tourism Sites

AbstractThis research examines and compares the experiences of visitors (N = 534) to three different Christian religious heritage sites: Canterbury Cathedral, the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and the Glastonbury Abbey Christian pilgrimage festival. Employing the activity, setting, experience and benefit framework, the findings indicate that the three religious sites attract visitors who seek different kinds of experiences and report different kinds of benefits. Results indicate that restorative experiences and benefits often overshadow the spiritual or cognitive benefits that many believe to be the primary outcomes of religious tourism. These results challenge traditional ideas about what it means to be a visitor at historical religious sites. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reimagining Judaism

Reimagining Judaism

Why Did Hannah Ask for "Seed of Men"?

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) What was Hannah praying for? More specifically, how are we to explain the phrase ... in 1 Sam 1:11? In plain terms, we of course understand that Hannah was praying to have child. Our text has set this up as the basic point on which the plot of the story turns. As soon as the main characters-Elkanah and his two wives, Hannah and Peninnah-are identified, we are informed (v. 2), Peninnah had children, but Hannah did not. The setting of the story is the family's visit to Shiloh for worship and sacrifice. There is no reason to assume that the trip was made on the occasion of yearly pilgrimage festival. The phrase ..., annual (v. 21), simply refers to the sacrifice made annually by Elkanah and his family, which provided the setting of the events of vv. 3-19. Indeed, the course of the story would seem to argue against public festival. There is no one on the scene but Elkanah's family and the high priest, Eli, and the latter seems to have plenty of time on his hands. All we are told about him is that he is sitting on his priestly throne at the entrance to the shrine watching Hannah mutter to herself. This is not what we would expect the chief priest to be doing on the busiest weekend of the year. If the festival was indeed public occasion, our chapter's narrow focus is all the more evident. For our story is about one thing and one thing only: Hannah wants child. But the phrase with which she makes her request falls into little-discussed category of biblical texts: those in which the process of exegesis runs in reverse. We ordinarily must understand writer's words in order to interpret his meaning, but we sometimes find ourselves with sense of what the writer must mean, though it has not been clearly expressed. In such cases our task is to explain how the writer's unusual choice of words was indeed meant to convey the meaning that we somehow intuit. My instincts say that this category is larger than we would like to admit, and that by the nature of the beast there must be examples where what we all know it means is actually wrong. I intend to suggest here that Hannah's request is one such case. The difficulty arises because-if I may step for moment into my role as professor of Biblical Hebrew-the phrase ..., and can only mean, human offspring.1 Indeed, the medieval interpreter David Kimhi does offer as one of his comments on this phrase the suggestion that Hannah was praying for who would not resemble monkey or eunuch. But the story has provided no reason that Hannah should fear an outcome of this kind. Others of the medievals join Kimhi in further suggestion that what Hannah wanted was who would be real man-righteous (as ... are called in 1 Kgs 2:32), prominent (1 Sam 17:12), and wise (Deut 1:13). The common understanding of the phrase among modern interpreters-from Henry Preserved Smith in the ICC century ago to Jan P. Fokkelman in 1993-is that Hannah wants son.2 Bible translations too, from a man child of the KJV to seed of Robert Alter3 make the same assumption. Certainly neither this nor the hope that her would be worthy man is an absurd request, but according to the logic of the story neither of these is the request that Hannah is making. This is not to say, of course, that Hannah did not want who would grow up to be righteous, prominent, and wise. She might even, if pressed, have expressed preference for male child. Elkanah's rhetorical question, Am I not better to you than ten sons? (v. 8), could be interpreted as support for this (though it need not be).4 But this says nothing about what Hannah herself wants, and the narrator (in vv. 2 and 4) has carefully avoided framing the child's sex as the focus of the story. What Hannah wants is child, plain and simple. The careful interweaving of two chains of consecutive verbs-one describing what happened every year when Elkanah and his brood went to Shiloh, and one describing what happened on one particular occasion5-demonstrates that the action of our story begins where it does because Hannah has reached the end of her rope. …

Why Is Miriam Also among the Prophets? (And Is Zipporah among the Priests?)

(ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted.)... I. The Bible's Women Prophets Without doubt, the feminist revolution that has swept through the academic world at large has had an enormous impact Hebrew Bible studies, with questions regarding the roles and status of women in ancient having assumed a dominant place within the biblical field during the past twenty-five years.1 Yet equally without doubt is the fact that, for biblical scholars who have sought to uncover indications of positive roles and an elevated status for women within ancient Israelite society, the results of the past twenty-five years of research have been somewhat mixed.2 Certainly, this is true for scholars whose primary interest is the place of women within ancient Israelite religion. On the one hand, such scholars have been able to bring to the fore evidence of women's religious observances that were basically equivalent to those of men and have even been able to isolate certain cult functions that seem to have been exclusively or at least principally the responsibility of Israelite women. Women, for example, seem to have held the exclusive responsibility for singing victory songs after an Israelite triumph in holy war and appear to have assumed a principal position as ritual musicians upon occasions of lament.3 On the other hand, our examinations have revealed manifold ways in which Israelite religion excluded or marginalized women. For example, while a woman, like a man, could dedicate herself as a Nazirite to God (Num 6:2), her vow could be nullified by her father (if she was yet unmarried) or by her husband (if she had wed [Num 30:2-15]). Likewise, although a woman, like a man, could participate in the great pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Succoth (as does Hannah, for example, in 1 Sam 1),4 it was only men, according to Exod 23:17; 34:23; and Dent 16:16, who were required to make these pilgrimages central to the Israelite festal calendar. Another manifestation of this same on the one hand/on the other hand phenomenon is the role women could play as prophets within Israelite religion. Five women bear the title ..., the feminine form of... prophet, in the Hebrew Bible: (1) Miriam, the sister of Moses, in Exod 15:20; (2) Deborah, said also to be judging Israel (...), in Judg 4:4; (3) the unnamed wife of the Isaiah in Isa 8:3; (4) Hulda, the who verified the validity of the recently discovered Book of the Law for King Josiah, in 2 Kgs 22:14 (paralleled in 2 Chr 34:22); and (5) Noadiah, who seems to have opposed the restoration projects of Nehemiah in some way, in Neh 6:14. In many respects, this register provides important evidence for modern scholars who seek attestations of positive roles and positions of elevated status for women within Israelite religion. Indeed, a positive role and an elevated status seem especially indicated given how dominant a place prophetic narratives and the prophetic books hold in the biblical tradition as it has come down to us. Still, we should express reservations. First, we must resist characterizing Isaiah's wife as a in the vein of Miriam, Deborah, Hulda, and Noadiah. Unlike these women, Isaiah's wife did not engage in a typical prophetic ministry, making proclamations about matters of public interest and participating directly in public affairs. Rather, the sole action attributed to Isaiah's wife is a domestically based enterprise in which almost all ancient Israelite women engaged: conceiving by her husband and bearing their child. It is also important to note that, alone of the Bible's five women prophets, Isaiah's wife is not given a name. This is significant, for the giving of names in the Bible-especially the giving of names to women-is often an important marker of those women's autonomy and authority.5 The nameless status of Isaiah's wife, conversely, suggests relative powerlessness. In fact, I would argue that Isaiah's wife is assigned the title prophet only as an honorific by virtue of her marriage to the male Isaiah, in much the same way, say, that Esther is assigned the title queen by virtue of her marriage to Ahasuerus, despite the fact that Esther is not of royal birth. …

The Political Impact of the Festival - Biblical Statements

Liturgy possesses a socio-critical potential which greatly surpasses political activism. It bypasses the systems of a "complex society", such as socialisation, communication and economics, through its factual logic which stands independent of faith. This political fo-rce is already developed by the feast on Sinai, to which Israel is lead out of Egypt (Ex 5:1-3). There, Israel receives the Torah, in order that its life as the people or community of Yahweh may be successful in the Promised Land. The community is to renew itself on occasion of the three pilgrimage festivals. For this purpose, Deuteronomy developed two basic types of popular liturgy within the scope of its theology of the people of God. The first is constituted by the passion commemoration of the passover (Dt 16:1-8). It aims at the social liberation of everyone in Israel, in commemorating their being lead out of Egyptian slavery. The second type is presented in the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles (16:9-12, 13-15). They initiate a fraternal society devoid of poverty, and already realise this in a realistic-symbolic way, through the communal meal of rejoicing in which all are to participate before Yahweh. According to this model, the eucharistic celebrative joy of the first Jerusalem congregation (Acts 2:44-46) reveals its community-changing force in the fact that "no poor were to be found any more" among the believers (Dt 15:4 in Acts 4:32-34).

ジャーヒリーヤ時代の暦法

In the Jahiliya Period, a pilgrimage festival with an annual market was held at a convenient season of the year. Observing the difference between the lunar and the solar year, they intercalated a month every several years. It has been said that this system was taken from the Jews. The Banu Kinana were charged with Nasi' (intercalation) and adjusted the calendar.Abraha, who invaded Makka in the Year of the Elephant, aimed to divert the Arab pilgrimage to the church he himself had constructed in Yemen. But there were strong protests against his plan, particularly by the Kinanite who controlled the order of the Arab pilgrimage cycle in the Arabian peninsula.According to their calendar, in a normal year, the first two months after Dhu 'l-Hijja were Safar I and Safar II, and in a leap year, the intercalary month, al-Muharram, came first, followed by Safar I and Safar II. Safar I in a normal year and al-Muharram both belonged to the sacred months, so that the safety of the pilgrims moving to another sanctuary was guaranteed. Therefore, in a leap year and a normal year, there were four sacred months.Though this was exceptional, they postponed the sanctity of a month when the markets were invaded, or war broke out between Arab tribes, and so the festival could not be held as normal. Mainly the Kinanite took part in the war of Fijar which occurred near the 'Ukaz market for several years. Therefore, it was likely that the sacred month was postponed exceptionally.