A comprehensive analysis of the ritual dimensions of biblical mourning rites, this book also seeks to illuminate mourning's social dimensions through engagement with anthropological discussion of mourning, from Hertz and van Gennep to contemporaries such as Metcalf and Huntington and Bloch and Parry. The author identifies four types of biblical mourning, and argues that mourning the dead is paradigmatic. He investigates why mourning can occur among petitioners in a sanctuary setting even given mourning's death associations; why certain texts proscribe some mourning rites (laceration and shaving) but not others; and why the mixing of the rites of mourning and rejoicing, normally incompatible, occurs in the same ritual in several biblical texts.

Good and evil, clean and unclean, rich and poor, self and other. The nature and function of such binary oppositions have long intrigued scholars in such fields as philosophy, linguistics, classics, and anthropology. From the opening chapters of Genesis, in which God separates day from night, and Adam and Eve partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dyadic pairs proliferate throughout the Hebrew Bible. In this groundbreaking work melding critical exegesis and contemporary theory, Saul M. Olyan considers the prevalence of polarities in biblical discourse and expounds their significance for the social and religious institutions of ancient Israel. Extant biblical narrative and legal texts reveal a set of socially constructed and culturally privileged binary oppositions, Olyan argues, which instigate and perpetuate hierarchical social relations in ritual settings such as the sanctuary.

Focusing on four binary pairs--holy/common, Israelite/alien, clean/unclean, and whole/blemished--Olyan shows how these privileged oppositions were used to restrict access to cultic spaces, such as the temple or the Passover table. These ritual sites, therefore, became the primary contexts for creating and recreating unequal social relations. Olyan also uncovers a pattern of challenge to the established hierarchies by nonprivileged groups. Converging with contemporary issues of power, marginalization, and privileging, Olyan's painstaking yet lucid study abounds with implications for anthropology, classics, critical theory, and feminist studies.

Mental and physical disability, ubiquitous in texts of the Hebrew Bible, receive their first thoroughgoing treatment in this monograph. Olyan seeks to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible's particular ideas of what is disabling and their potential social ramifications. Biblical representations of disability and biblical classification schemas - both explicit and implicit - are compared to those of the Hebrew Bible's larger ancient West Asian cultural context, and to those of the later Jewish biblical interpreters who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study will help the reader gain a deeper and more subtle understanding of the ways in which biblical writers constructed hierarchically significant difference and privileged certain groups (e.g., persons with "whole" bodies) over others (e.g., persons with physical "defects"). It also explores how ancient interpreters of the Hebrew Bible such as the Qumran sectarians reproduced and reconfigured earlier biblical notions of disability and earlier classification models for their own contexts and ends.

Does the Hebrew Bible ascribe an implicit form of legal personhood or legal rights to animals? If so, which animals—domesticated or wild, or both—receive which rights, and for what purpose? Scholars have been slow to consider these questions, and animal-oriented research as a whole, in the field of biblical studies. For the first time, author Saul M. Olyan addresses these questions in detail and explores how the evidence of the Hebrew Bible might contribute to contemporary debates about animal rights in the academy, in the courts, in the public square, and in religious communities. In this book, Olyan demonstrates that seven different biblical texts extend both legal personhood and rights to animals. The rights conferred upon them are mainly specific and situational, and the legal personhood associated them is in most cases best characterized as limited. Nonetheless, he argues that the animal rights described by these texts are genuine because they are not contingent on the needs or demands of others, they do not disappear or give way because of conflict with the interests of another legal person, and they may not be violated with impunity. Finally, Olyan considers how the biblical texts examined in his analyses might be used to extend or strengthen the arguments of those advocating for animals in judicial, academic, political, or religious settings.

Although seldom studied by biblical scholars as a discrete phenomenon, ritual violence is mentioned frequently in biblical texts, and includes ritual actions such as disfigurement of corpses, destruction or scattering of bones removed from a tomb, stoning and other forms of public execution, cursing, forced depilation, the legally-sanctioned imposition of physical defects on living persons, coerced potion-drinking, sacrificial burning of animals and humans, forced stripping and exposure of the genitalia, and mass eradication of populations. This book, the first to focus on ritual violence in the Hebrew Bible, investigates these and other violent rites, the ritual settings in which they occur, their various literary contexts, and the identity and aims of their agents in order to speak in an informed way about the contours and social aspects of ritual violence as it is represented in the Hebrew Bible.

English description: This volume consists of fifteen of the authors essays, including two that have never been published before. The essays date to the last decade and a half, and all reflect in some manner the authors ongoing interest in literary operations of classification and their social implications, particularly the production of distinctions which create social inequality in the world of the text, and have the potential to generate hierarchical social relationships in contexts where biblical texts might have had an impact on real people. In these essays, the author explores themes such as gender, sexuality, purity and pollution, sanctification, death and afterlife, foreignness, and disability with particular attention to the roles distinctions such as honored/shamed, feminine/masculine, mourning/rejoicing, unclean/clean, alien/native play in creating and perpetuating social differences in texts. Rites of status change such as circumcision, shaving, purification, burial or disinterment, sanctification and profanation of holiness are a focus of interest in a number of these essays, reflecting the authors on going interest in the textual representation of ritual. Most of the essays examine texts in their historical setting, but several also engage the early history of the interpretation of biblical texts, including the phenomenon of inner biblical exegesis. The essays are divided into five sections: Rites and Social Status; Gender and Sexuality; Disability; Holiness, Purity, the Alien; Death, Burial, Afterlife and their Metaphorical Uses. The author introduces each of the sections, contextualizing each essay in his larger scholarly project, reflecting on its development and reception and, in some cases, responding to his critics. German description: Der vorliegende Band beinhaltet 15, z.T. noch unveroffentlichte Aufsatze von Saul M. Olyan. Der Autor beschaftigt sich mit Klassifikationen in biblischen Texten und ihren sozialen Auswirkungen. Besonders widmet er sich den Klassifizierungen die Ungleichheiten in der Umwelt des Textes hervorrufen.Solche Unterschiede sind zum Beispiel mannlich/weiblich, tot/lebendig, fremd/einheimisch oder rein/unrein. Die Artikel beschaftigen sich dabei mit biblischen Texten, die von der Konigszeit uber das Exil bis hin zur romischen Epche datiert werden.Dabei legt Olyan ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die Menschen, die bei diesen Unterscheidungen die minderwertige Rolle spielen oder gar ganz von der Gemeinschaft ausgeschlossen sind. Einen weiteren Schwerpunkt stellen Ubergangsriten dar, die einen Wechsel des Status markieren, z.B. Beschneidung, Rasur, Bestattung.

Mental and physical disability, ubiquitous in texts of the Hebrew Bible, here receive a thorough treatment. Olyan seeks to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible's particular ideas of what is disabling and their potential social ramifications. Biblical representations of disability and biblical classification schemas - both explicit and implicit - are compared to those of the Hebrew Bible's larger ancient West Asian cultural context, and to those of the later Jewish biblical interpreters who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study will help the reader gain a deeper and more subtle understanding of the ways in which biblical writers constructed hierarchically significant difference and privileged certain groups (e.g. persons with 'whole' bodies) over others (e.g. persons with physical 'defects'). It also explores how ancient interpreters of the Hebrew Bible such as the Qumran sectarians reproduced and reconfigured earlier biblical notions of disability and earlier classification models for their own contexts and ends.

During the last decade or so there has been a renewed interest in the study of cult and priesthood. The various individuals who have contributed essays to this volume are of both junior and senior rank and from both Christian and Jewish backgrounds. Certain essays represent the fruitful interchange that is now developing among historians of religion, anthropologists and biblical scholars. Others focus on parallels between aspects of Israelite religion and their counterparts in Canaanite and early Greek contexts. There are also contributions on the literary shape of the priestly law-code.

The first comprehensive study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible Friendship, though a topic of considerable humanistic and cross disciplinary interest in contemporary scholarship, has been largely ignored by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, possibly because of its complexity and elusiveness. Filling a significant gap in our knowledge and understanding of biblical texts, Saul M. Olyan provides this original, accessible analysis of a key form of social relationship. In this thorough and compelling assessment, Olyan analyzes a wide range of texts, including prose narratives, prophetic materials, psalms, pre-Hellenistic wisdom collections, and the Hellenistic-era wisdom book Ben Sira. This in-depth, contextually sensitive, and theoretically engaged study explores how the expectations of friends and family members overlap and differ, examining, among other things, characteristics that make the friend a distinct social actor; failed friendship; and friendships in narratives such as those of Ruth and Naomi, and Jonathan and David. Olyan presents a comprehensive look at what constitutes friendship in the Hebrew Bible.

Although the relationship of the Hebrew Bible and violence has been of interest to scholars in recent years, ritual violence in its various manifestations has been underexplored, as have the theoretical dimensions of ritual violence. This volume is intended to bring into relief the full range of violent rites represented in the Hebrew Bible, many rarely, if ever, considered. It seeks to explore what acts of ritual violence might accomplish socio-politically in their particular settings and the ways in which engagement with theory from a variety of disciplines can contribute to our understanding of ritual violence as a phenomenon. The volume consists of an introduction and eight essays. Topics include cognitive perspectives on iconoclasm, the instrumental dimensions of ritual violence against corpses, the ritual killing of cities ("urbicide"), royal rites of military loyalty, the ends accomplished by political violence in David's story, comparison of the Rwanda genocide and material dimensions of the biblical herem, the exchange of women among men and its violent dimensions, and the ritual assault on cities. Authors include Debra Scoggins Ballentine, T. M. Lemos, Mark Leuchter, Nathaniel B. Levtow, Susan Niditch, Saul M. Olyan, Rudiger Schmitt, and Jacob L. Wright.

This volume is intended to promote academic and public understanding of the different positions that exist on the issues of sexual orientation and civil rights protections for gays and lesbians within the major American religious traditions. Writers from the Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and African-American churches explore the history and tradition of their communities on same-sex orientation, discuss the moral stance they advocate, and consider the legal and public policy implications of that stance.