RITES IN AND OUT OF PLACE: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE RITUAL PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN HAGGAI–ZECHARIAH 1–8 (Ph.D. Dissertation Abstract) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
This study discusses how a material religions approach might be applied to the study of Israelite religions. After providing a discussion of recent theory on space and the body in the study of religion, we give several suggestions for how these ideas can apply to Israelite tomb and temple spaces. Our approach brings the study of Israelite religious texts and material culture (back) into the broader study of material religion. To this end, we prioritize the role that the body plays in shaping perceptions of these spaces and in determining the use of things in ritual practice.
Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer. Rejecting a binary that would treat such language as either mental/subjective (and thus metaphorically) or soley physical/objective , Neis argues that we must unpack the fraught meaning of such corporeal spatial terminology to understand “rabbinic concepts of body-mind, ritual technology, and sacred geography." Neis highlights the guidelines for the body in prayer mode found in the rulings of Mishnah and Tosefta Berakhot, which provide a geography and choreography of bodily and affective orientation that calls into question the notion of a fixed, mandate to turn toward the site of the Jerusalem Temple. Although later directions found in the Babylonian Talmud on the praying toward the holy of holies have come to be viewed as normative, Neis warns against reading these into the earlier sources on prayer, finding multiple focal points in her anatomy of the tannaitic evidence. Analyzing kavvanat halev in Mishnah Rosh Hoshana 3 and its parallel in the Tosefta, Neis shows how the sages turned hearing into ritual listening and ordinary gazing into observing, directions grounded in the body, space, and affect. Neis closes with a section on the broader implications of this analysis for scholarly discussions of mind/body dualisms and metaphorical and embodied language.
New Perspectives on Ritual in the Biblical World
Laura Quick and Melissa Ramos (eds.), New Perspectives on Ritual in the Biblical World (LHBOTS 702; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022). Pp. xiii + 274. $115., 2024
In this three-section volume, Laura Quick and Melissa Ramos present essays that deal with different rituals in the Old Testament by utilizing gender and food studies, history and comparative religion approaches, material religion methods, and anthropological studies of the social meanings of textualization of rituals.
RBL 10/2023- New Perspectives on Ritual in the Biblical World
Boulder Research on ritual in all its dimensions has garnered a number of studies in the past decades, both within and across disciplines. It has been applied to area studies and examined as a distinct theoretical focus. Yet even considering this history, much remains to be said regarding ritual as applied to, and reflected in, specific texts across the biblical corpus. It is this need for broad methodological applications to examine specific texts, examinations that are thematized across meaningful groupings of study, that the volume under review seeks to address.
“The Interpenetration of Ritual Spaces in Late Antique Religions: An Overview” (2008)
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 10
Rituals in the home, rituals in the square, rituals in the temple, the church, or the synagogue -how do they influence each other? It used to be that the world of domestic piety was cast in terms of fertility, children, and hearth, the purview of women, or else (in Weberian terms) the heterodox thinking of maverick craftsmen and intellectuals. Civic piety then comprised public sacrifice, liturgical mysteries, high-minded theology, and the space of men. While there may be some truth to these broad contours, work on the character of piety across these domains has dissolved simplistic contrasts between public and private. Our now requisite attention to pilgrimage, festival, and procession has complicated the picture of public piety, while new studies on how domestic space was represented in Christian and rabbinic literature show the complex interpenetration of institutional ideology and domestic sphere. The home is not isolated from public religion but, as in rabbinic Judaism and Manichaism, the place where religion is thought out, texts are exchanged, ideology is formulated, and individual piety modelled.