Ritual in Deuteronomy

The Performance of Doom

Melissa D. Ramos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351335164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion
• Index: History

Ritual in Deuteronomy explores the symbolic world of Deuteronomy's ritual covenant and curses through a lens of religious studies and anthropology, drawing on previously unexamined Mesopotamian material.

This book focuses on the ritual material in Deuteronomy including commands regarding sacrifice, prayer objects, and especially the dramatic ritual enactment of the covenant including curses. The book's most unique feature is an entirely new comparative study of Deut 27–30 with two ritual texts from Mesopotamia. No studies to date have undertaken a comparison of Deut 27–30 with ancient Near Eastern ritual texts outside of the treaty oath tradition. This fresh comparison illuminates how the ritual life of ancient Israel shaped the literary form of Deuteronomy and concludes that the performance of oaths was a social strategy, addressing contemporary anxieties and reinforcing systems of cultural power.

This book offers a fascinating comparative study which will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in biblical studies, classical Hebrew, theology, and ancient Near Eastern studies. The book's more technical aspects will also appeal to scholars of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, Biblical Law, Ancient Near Eastern History, Mesopotamian Studies, and Classics.

1Ritual studies and Deuteronomy

1.1 Introduction

The ritual material and sequences in Deuteronomy form some of its most crucial components. Deuteronomy is commonly viewed as a corpus or compendium of legal and ethical material with a narrative framework supplied by the Deuteronomistic Historian. The instructions read like a script for a performance: oral pronouncements enacted in a public assembly led by ritual experts, namely the priests and the Levites. The performance is to include ritual actions such as the offering of sacrifices, the inscribing of stelae bearing the words of the covenant, stage directions for the ritual experts, and ceremonial words which are to be read aloud by both ritual experts and participants.

This book builds on previous studies of the Deut 27–30 rituals by Delbert Hillers, Dennis McCarthy, and the recent work of Laura Quick, resituating these texts within the framework of ritual theory.¹ An approach of ritual studies has become more widely incorporated in biblical studies with fruitful results.² However, studies of ritual in the Hebrew Bible have largely focused on the Priestly literature, the Holiness Code, the cult, and sacrificial offerings, while the ritual material in Deuteronomy has received less attention.³

This volume also explores the social functions of ritual and ritual innovations in Deuteronomy. Many of the ritual practices in Deuteronomy are presented as entirely innovative within the world of the narrative. The rituals specified in Deuteronomy include components which are traditional within the Assyrian cultural model for the making of oaths, which are adapted and repurposed for a Levantine context. More recently, scholars such as Carly Crouch, Laura Quick, and Bill Morrow have argued that some of these traditional elements are West Semitic in origin, perhaps transmitted via Aramaic.⁴ However, ritual sequences, such as the covenant enactment in chapters 27–30 and the Shema prayer, are also presented in the narrative as entirely innovative. For example, within the world of Deuteronomy, the ritual script in chapters 27–29 is presented as an entirely new ceremony to the community. In addition, the centralization of worship in Deut 12 specifies a new restriction upon the location of sacrifices and changes the community's traditional set of practices surrounding the ritual sacrifices and the Passover. Furthermore, the ritual instructions in Deut 6 and 11 for the practice of reciting and teaching the Shema to succeeding generations and for the crafting of ritual objects are also presented as a novel within the world of the narrative. Deuteronomy envelops its new rituals in the familiar elements that form part of the standard repertoire for the making (and breaking) of oaths and covenants in the wider ancient Near East. Thus, the innovations are also characterized by standardized elements of traditional practices surrounding oaths, and by the legitimacy that is granted by ritual experts (the priests and Levites) who are part of the enacted performance.

Past scholarship has sometimes characterized the Deuteronomist as uninterested in cult practice.⁵ Many studies of the book fall within the broader realm of biblical law and emphasize comparisons of Deuteronomy with ancient Near Eastern treaties, especially Neo-Assyrian treaties. Thus, while the curses within Deut 27–28 have received much attention, studies of these chapters tend to focus on a comparison of individual curses without an examination of the ritual performance of the covenant itself and its significance within the book overall or its social context. Fewer studies have examined chapter 27 in any depth and, indeed, some scholars have sought to excise this chapter from the overall flow of the book by classifying it as a later addition.⁶ Most importantly, no studies to date have undertaken a comparison of Deut 27–28 with ancient Near Eastern ritual texts outside of the treaty oath tradition. This book explores ritual sequences within Deuteronomy from a ritual studies perspective and undertakes an initial exploration of commonalities shared by Deuteronomy and the Mesopotamian ritual texts Maqlû and Šurpu.

It is best to state at the outset that the aim of this project is not to attempt to recapture the ritual performances in Deuteronomy as historical events. The aim is rather to explore the significance of these ritual performances and sequences as visual and performative symbols that were embedded in narrative and law because they were understood to hold transformative power for participants and perhaps also for readers. This volume posits that the covenant enactment ceremony in Deut 27–30 plausibly reflects historical ritual performances in ancient Israel, but does not assume that the ritual described was a script for any specific historical event. It seems likely that this text represents an idealized reproduction of ritual events that took place perhaps annually or at key moments of social change and disruption in the life of the community. In other words, this project views Deut 27–30 as an idealized reproduction of the type of performance that was enacted at various times and in multiple historical contexts over centuries. These chapters are perhaps also an interwoven composite of elements from various ritual performances knitted together into a single narrative and presented as a single set of ritual instructions. Thus, the text of this ritual does not represent ritual realia from a single historical event, but captures perhaps some of the elements, sequences, symbols, and even some of the language and phrasing of ritual enactments from various moments in the life of ancient Israel.

The narrative of the performance in chapters 27–30 likely reflects elements of historical ritual performances. However, this narrated ritual performance comes to us in the form of national and religious literature that was both edited and revised over centuries. Rituals and their symbols are dynamic rather than static in their enactment and meaning. The scripted ritual performance in Deut 27–30 likely reflects “movement” and “play” with the various ritual components, sequences, and the constellations of meaning behind each of these elements.⁷

There are three pieces of evidence that demonstrate that covenant renewal rituals were most plausibly enacted in ancient Israel and that the text of Deut 27–30 does reflect elements of historical ritual performance(s). This assumption is based on three observations: (1) Josh 8, 2 Kgs 22–23, and Neh 8 narrate similar covenant renewal events that feature ritual performances and specifically oral reading ceremonies; (2) a similar liturgical enactment of a community ritual that shares striking parallels with Deut 27 is found in the Qumran text Serek Hayaḥad (1QS ii); (3) the text of the ritual performance of the covenant oath in Deut 27–30 also shares widely recognized parallels with ancient Near Eastern oath texts written over a broad span of time that likely reflect historical performances, such as Hittite treaties, the Sefire treaty, widely used Mesopotamian treaty-oaths like the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon (STE).

One of the distinctive contributions of this project is an analysis of the parallels between Deut 27–30 and Mesopotamian ritual texts that were likely written with the express purpose of enabling ritual experts to remember and properly enact ritual performances. All of these factors, taken together, suggest that the covenant enactment was a type of ritual performance that was both deeply embedded in the social and religious imagination of ancient Israel and had enduring significance, as exemplified by vestiges of this ritual preserved in the text from Qumran. The connections with Mesopotamian ritual texts and the ritual enactment portions of treaty texts suggest a common social and cultural reality behind the ritual script of Deut 27–30, even if Deuteronomy does not represent or capture the ipsissima verba of a single historical performance event.⁸

1.2 Ritual studies and Deuteronomy

Ancient Near Eastern oath and treaty texts, especially Deuteronomy, have frequently been studied as scribal documents rather than vestigial remnants of embodied performances. The focus of scholarship in Deuteronomy Studies has been primarily on the dating of various layers of the text, the relationship between the legal segments of Deuteronomy and the Covenant Code, and linguistic and structural parallels with ancient Near Eastern treaty texts. While the texts are all that remain of oaths and treaties, texts such as the STE, the Sefire treaty, and Deuteronomy are written as a set of speeches that include performative elements such as sacrifices, demonstrative actions such as the burning of objects, and visual display elements such as the crafting of tablets or stelae.

These performative aspects have yet to be fully explored, but the elements of scripted oral pronouncement, performative actions by religious experts, and oath enactments in a formal setting such as gathered assembly suggest that oaths and treaties are ritual performances. For these reasons, the approach of ritual studies is adopted here in order to explore the ritual ratification of the covenant in Deuteronomy (Deut 27–30), as well to explore two well-known ritual passages from Deuteronomy, the Shema (Deut 6) and the Law of Centralization (Deut 12).

Ronald Grimes, a leading figure in the emergence of ritual studies as an academic discipline, observes that the study of ritual is less of a methodology and more of a craft or a field.⁹ Grimes writes that “some who study ritual consider their labor a science; others regard it as an art. However, I've come to consider ritual studies as a craft. Craft is art's practical-minded, hands-on, manual-laborer cousin.… To treat ritual studies as a manual art, an activity of the hands, arises from a conviction that theorizing, like ritualizing, is inescapably embodied.”¹⁰ This project examines ritual in Deuteronomy with a focus on practical aspects of ritual in Deuteronomy: the social function and the form of the ritual s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Ritual studies and Deuteronomy
• 2 The ritual performance of oaths
• 3 Deuteronomy 27–30 and incantation rituals
• 4 Ritual and the literary unity of Deuteronomy 27–28
• 5 Ritual innovation in Deuteronomy
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index