Martien Halvorson-Taylor, review of Remembering Abraham. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Israelites in History and Tradition (review)
Shofar, 2001
This monograph is a confused exercise in futility. I am amazed that it was published in the "Library of Israel" series. The editor of that series, Douglas A. Knight, writes on the back flyleaf: Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines-such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and literary criticism-to illumine the everyday realities and social subtleties these ancient cultures experienced.
2019
The Hebrew Bible presents Israel as a community of twelve tribes descending from one common ancestor. While Israel’s kinship identity does not represent a fact to be ascertained by biology or genetics, as an elementary social construction it nevertheless functions as the basic code for Israel’s collective identity. The article therefore discusses the nature and the origins of the Israelite tribal system. Like other primordial codes of collective identity, it applies features which are regarded within the relevant community as natural or essential and beyond the possibility of individual choice. Being an Israelite is a matter of descent, of being born into one of the Israelite tribes. The code is expressed by means of genealogies which structure the social world of the community and inform and orientate social interactions. If one asks for the historical origins of the tribal system it becomes easily apparent that it is hard to name any period within the history of Israel in which it would easily match social reality or the shape of any given political entity. This holds true for the post-exilic as well as the pre-exilic monarchic periods. Sources for earlier periods are elusive but the indications available allow for some cautious conclusions on the existence and shape of north-Israelite and Judahite kinship structures which in time developed into the system of the twelve tribes of Israel.
Religion, Identity and the Origins of Ancient Israel
According to tlie Bible, early Israel origillated as a g o u p of migrant slaves wlio escaped from Egypt, spent an extended time in the wilderness as pastoral nomads, and then fought their way into the highlands of Palestine. Because these events are not wholly confirmed by the archaeological and historical evidence, modern scholars are attempting to reconstruct Israel's early history on the basis of the archaeological evidence, ancient textual evidence, and a critical reading of the Bible. Scholars agree that the Israelites, or their ancestors, first appeared in the highlands of Palestine around 1200 BCE. The key question is where these early highland settlers came from. At present, the most popular theory among scholars is that the settlers migrated into the highlands fiom the Canaanite lowlands, so that the earliest Israelites were essentially Canaanites. But that theory is now being questioned vigorously by scholars who accentuate the role of nomadic pastoralists in the highland settlements. In important ways, our understanding of Israelite religion and identity hinges on these important debates.
We are Family: Deuteronomy 14 and the Boundaries of an Israelite Identity
The Bible and Critical Theory Vol. 9 No.1-2, 2013
Through an engagement with the dietary prohibitions of Deuteronomy 14, this article seeks to provide a corrective to the dominance of constructivist perspectives within recent reconstructions of Israelite ethnic identity. Drawing upon research in the field of cognitive psychology and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, it argues that the Priestly vision of ascribed membership in the entity Israel is framed by an essentialist mode of ethnic cognition which was widely diffused within Israelite society. The identification and isolation of this particular brand of classificatory logic accounts not only for the persuasive potential of the dietary prohibitions themselves, but in the process challenges the theoretical status quo on ethnicity amongst biblical scholars.