Ritual Words and Narrative Worlds in the Book of Leviticus PDF Download

Author: Bryan D. Bibb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0567513033
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book argues that literary features and ritual dynamics within the book of Leviticus enlighten each other. The first two chapters establish that one may read Leviticus as a coherent literary work and define the genre of Leviticus as "narrativized ritual," a complex blending of descriptive narrative and prescriptive ritual. In conversation with Catherine Bell, they present several aspects of the text that are ritualized and show how this ritualization implies a negotiation of power relations among participants. The third and fourth chapters examine the first half of Leviticus, both the legal sections in Lev. 1-7 and 11-15 and the narratives in Lev. 8-10 and 16. These sections alternate between establishing the ritual system and exposing gaps and ambiguities in that system.Chapter 5 turns to the second half of Leviticus, traditionally called the Holiness Code. The ritual language found in this section is less formal and precise, mirroring the way in which the concept of holiness is expanded and extended to the whole people. As this material concludes the book, it relativizes and democratizes the strict ritual system contained in the first half.

Author: Bryan D. Bibb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0567027139
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book argues that literary features and ritual dynamics within the book of Leviticus enlighten each other. The first two chapters establish that one may read Leviticus as a coherent literary work and define the genre of Leviticus as "narrativized ritual," a complex blending of descriptive narrative and prescriptive ritual. In conversation with Catherine Bell, they present several aspects of the text that are ritualized and show how this ritualization implies a negotiation of power relations among participants. The third and fourth chapters examine the first half of Leviticus, both the legal sections in Lev. 1-7 and 11-15 and the narratives in Lev. 8-10 and 16. These sections alternate between establishing the ritual system and exposing gaps and ambiguities in that system.Chapter 5 turns to the second half of Leviticus, traditionally called the Holiness Code. The ritual language found in this section is less formal and precise, mirroring the way in which the concept of holiness is expanded and extended to the whole people. As this material concludes the book, it relativizes and democratizes the strict ritual system contained in the first half.

Author: Laura Quick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567693384
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This volume presents a range of methodologically innovative treatments on ritual action in the Hebrew Bible. They treat a diverse range of ritual phenomena, including space, blessings and oath-taking, from the world of ancient Israel and Judah. The introduction engages with the dominant scholarly models drawn from ritual theory, and the volume explores their applicability to ancient textual material such as the Hebrew Bible. The chapters reflect high-level specialized engagement with specific ritual phenomena through the lens of appropriate theoretical and methodological approaches.

Author: Ming Him Ko
Publisher: Langham Publishing
ISBN: 1783684526
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
The Asia Bible Commentary Series empowers Christian believers in Asia to read the Bible from within their respective contexts. Holistic in its approach to the text, each exposition of the biblical books combines exegesis and application. The ultimate goal is to strengthen the Body of Christ in Asia by providing pastoral and contextual exposition of every book of the Bible. The book of Leviticus has a two-fold mission. Leviticus 1–16 symbolizes the order of the world through sacrifices, purity law, and sacred boundaries, so that God’s people can acknowledge his presence and lordship in their different aspects of life. The second part of the book, from Leviticus 17–27, extends the belief of holiness through moral laws of sex and social justice, so that God’s people can be holy, as he is holy. This commentary helps believers to integrate God’s holiness into their daily lifestyle with particular attention to Asian contexts.

Author: Christophe Nihan
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1646021576
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible contain a significant number of texts describing ritual practices. Yet it is often unclear how these sources would have been understood or used by ancient audiences in the actual performance of cult. This volume explores the processes of ritual textualization (the creation of a written version of a ritual) in ancient Israel by probing the main conceptual and methodological issues that inform the study of this topic in the Pentateuch. This systematic and comparative study of text and ritual in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible maps the main areas of consensus and disagreement among scholars engaged in articulating new models for understanding the relationship between text and ritual and explores the importance of comparative evidence for the study of pentateuchal rituals. Topics include ritual textualization in ancient Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia; the importance of archaeology and materiality for the study of text and ritual in ancient Israel; the relationship between ritual textualization and standardization in the Pentateuch; the reception of pentateuchal ritual texts in Second Temple writings and rabbinic literature; and the relationship between text and ritual in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Dorothea Erbele-Küster, Daniel K. Falk, Yitzhaq Feder, Christian Frevel, William K. Gilders, Dominique Jaillard, Giuseppina Lenzo, Lionel Marti, Patrick Michel, Rüdiger Schmitt, Jeremy D. Smoak, and James W. Watts.

Author: Nathan MacDonald
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110368714
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Are the rituals in the Hebrew Bible of great antiquity, practiced unchanged from earliest times, or are they the products of later innovators? The canonical text is clear: ritual innovation is repudiated as when Jeroboam I of Israel inaugurate a novel cult at Bethel and Dan. Most rituals are traced back to Moses. From Julius Wellhausen to Jacob Milgrom, this issue has divided critical scholarship. With the rich documentation from the late Second Temple period, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is apparent that rituals were changed. Were such rituals practiced, or were they forms of textual imagination? How do rituals change and how are such changes authorized? Do textual innovation and ritual innovation relate? What light might ritual changes between the Hebrew Bible and late Second Temple texts shed on the history of ritual in the Hebrew Bible? The essays in this volume engage the various issues that arise when rituals are considered as practices that may be invented and subject to change. A number of essays examine how biblical texts show evidence of changing ritual practices, some use textual change to discuss related changes in ritual practice, while others discuss evidence for ritual change from material culture.

Author: James W. Watts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139464673
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus uses rhetorical analysis to expose the motives behind the writing of the central book of the Torah/Pentateuch and its persuasive function in ancient Judaism. The answer to the question, 'who was trying to persuade whom of what by writing these texts?' proves to be quite consistent throughout Leviticus 1-16: Aaronide high priests and their supporters used this book to legitimize their monopoly over the ritual offerings of Jews and Samaritans. With this priestly rhetoric at its center, the Torah supported the rise to power of two priestly dynasties in Second Temple Judaism. Their ascendancy in turn elevated the prestige and rhetorical power to the book, making it the first real scripture in Near Eastern and Western religious traditions.

Author: Danna Fewell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199967733
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
Comprised of contributions from scholars across the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative is a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible's narratives and topics related to the Bible's narrative constructions. The Handbook covers the Bible's narrative literature, from Genesis to Revelation, providing concise overviews of literary-critical scholarship as well as innovative readings of individual narratives informed by a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. The volume as a whole combines literary sensitivities with the traditional historical and sociological questions of biblical criticism and puts biblical studies into intentional conversation with other disciplines in the humanities. It reframes biblical literature in a way that highlights its aesthetic characteristics, its ethical and religious appeal, its organic qualities as communal literature, its witness to various forms of social and political negotiation, and its uncanny power to affect readers and hearers across disparate time-frames and global communities.

Author: Sarah L. Hart
Publisher: ATF Press
ISBN: 1925872874
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The principal interest of the text on the tabernacle tent, Exodus 24:15 - Numbers 10:28, is Israelite worship-cultic place, the cultic people, and laws for the regulation of cultic life. The method followed is description of the biblical text and collation of the evidence as would a classicist go about classifying an ancient Greek Vase. The findings reveal a virtual world of Israelite cult. The transportable tabernacle tent with its courtyard and altar resembles a temple in its complexity. Through words the reader is invited into the atmosphere of the tabernacle tent where all the senses are evoked. The beautifully embellished fore-room of the tent illuminated by the light of the lamp-stand is seen, the waft of incense smelt, the atmosphere of fear or attraction that emanates from the epicentre of holiness felt. The tabernacle tent is constructed of words, not of stones. It is indestructible and does not succumb to the vagaries of time, as pristine today as it was over 2,500 years ago when it was first created.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004356525
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Departing from the Reformed tradition and its potential to contribute to the discussion about the connection between liturgy and ethics, this volume offers in-depth studies in how to understand God’s acting in worship, the centrality of justice, and the formative meaning of the liturgy.