Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch

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.

“Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch is a rich collection of data and interactions with scholarship, and the numerous insights in this volume make it an important resource for advanced students of pentateuchal ritual texts.”—Roy E. Gane, Andrews University Seminary Studies

“This rich collection is a welcome addition to scholarship and a must read for serious students of biblical ritual.”—Michael Hundley, Review of Biblical Literature

“The contributions to Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch contrast the relationship between text and ritual in ancient Israel with that of other ancient Mediterranean and Western Asian societies and thus gain new insights for the challenge of reconstructing the performance of ancient rituals from written sources.”—Thomas Hieke, author of Die Genealogien der Genesis

“This volume is an important and timely contribution to the scholarly study of ritual texts and procedures in the Pentateuch and the Hebrew Bible as a whole. Important scholars in the field labor to advance the application of ritual studies, biblical intertextuality, rhetorical analysis, ancient Near Eastern comparative material, and related postbiblical literature to understanding the texts and ritual procedures in the Pentateuch.”—Richard Averbeck, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Christophe Nihan is Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at the University of Münster. He is the author of From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus, coauthor of Opening the Books of Moses, and coeditor of several volumes, including most recently Writing Laws in Antiquity.

Julia Rhyder is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26 and coeditor of Re-evaluating the Concept of Authorship in Hebrew Bible Studies.

Preface

List of Abbreviations


Introduction

Christophe Nihan

Chapter 1. Rituals in the Spells of the Book of the Dead in Ancient Egypt

Giuseppina Lenzo

Chapter 2. Between Utterance and Dedication: Some Remarks on the Status of Textuality in Greek Ritual Practices

Dominique Jaillard

Chapter 3. Inscriptions and Ritual Practices in the Neo- Assyrian Period: The Construction of a Building as an Example

Lionel Marti

Chapter 4. Between Text and Ritual: The Function(s) of the Ritual Texts from Late Bronze Age Emar (Syria)

Patrick Michel

Chapter 5. The Textualization of Priestly Ritual in Light of Hittite Sources

Yitzhaq Feder

Chapter 6. Diversity and Centralization of the Temple Cult

in the Archeological Record from the Iron II C to the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Judah

Rüdiger Schmitt

Chapter 7. Texts Are Not Rituals, and Rituals Are Not Texts, with an Example from Leviticus 12

James W. Watts

Chapter 8. The Texture of Rituals in the Book of Numbers:

A Fresh Approach to Ritual Density, the Role of Tradition, and the Emergence of Diversity in Early Judaism

Christian Frevel

Chapter 9. Speaking with a Divine Voice: The Rhetoric of Epistolary Performance in Numbers 6:22–27

Jeremy D. Smoak

Chapter 10. The Ritual Texts of Leviticus and the Creation of Ritualized Bodies

Dorothea Erbele-Küster

Chapter 11. The Reception of Ritual Laws in the Early Second

Temple Period: Evidence from Ezra- Nehemiah and Chronicles

Julia Rhyder

Chapter 12. Text and Ritual in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Daniel K. Falk

Chapter 13. “And They Would Read Before Him the Order

for the Day”: The Textuality of Leviticus 16 in Mishnah Yoma,

Tosefta Kippurim, and Sifra Aḥare Mot

William K. Gilders

List of Contributors

Index of Ancient Sources

Subject Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction