|
Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Aspects of religions (non-Christian) > Theology
|
Buy Now
Israel's Beneficent Dead - Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,805
Discovery Miles 38 050
|
|
|
Israel's Beneficent Dead - Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition (Hardcover)
Series: Forschungen zum Alten Testament, 11
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
|
Did the ancient Israelites perform rituals expressive of the belief
in the supernatural beneficent power of the dead? Contrary to long
held notions of primitive society and the euhemeristic origin of
the divine, various factors indicate that the ancestor cult, that
is, ancestor veneration or worship, was not observed in the Iron
Age Levant. The Israelites did not adopt an ancient Canaanite
ancestor cult that became the object of biblical scorn. Yet, a
variety of mortuary rituals and cults were performed in Levantine
society; mourning and funerary rites and longer-term rituals such
as the care for the dead and commemoration. Rituals and monuments
in or at burial sites, and especially the recitation of the
deceased's name, recounted the dead's lived lives for familial
survivors. They served broader social functions as well; e.g., to
legitimate primogeniture and to reinforce a community's social
collectivity. Another ritual complex from the domain of divination,
namely necromancy, might have expressed the Israelite dead's
beneficent powers. Yet, was this power to reveal knowledge that of
the dead or was it a power conveyed through the dead, but that
remained attributable to another supranatural being of non-human
origin? Contemporary Assyrian necromancers utilized the ghost as a
conduit through which divine knowledge was revealed to ascertain
the future and so Judah's king Manasseh, a loyal Assyrian vassal,
emulated these new Assyrian imperial forms of prognostication. As a
de-legitimating rhetorical strategy, necromancy was then integrated
into biblical traditions about the more distant past and attributed
fictive Canaanite origins (Deut 18). In its final literary setting,
necromancy was depicted as the Achille's heel of the nation's first
royal dynasty, that of the Saulides (1 Sam 28), and more tellingly,
its second, that of the Davidides (2 Kgs. 21:6; 23:24).
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
