T&T Clark Handbook of Anthropology and the Hebrew Bible

Emanuel Pfoh

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780567704733
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567704764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This handbook presents an overview of the main approaches from social and cultural anthropology to the Hebrew Bible. Since the late 19th century, biblical scholarship has addressed issues and themes related to biblical stories from a perspective which could now be considered socio-anthropological. It is however only since the 1960s that biblical scholars have started to produce readings and incorporate analytical models drawn directly from social anthropology to widen the interpretive scope of the social and historical data contained in the biblical sources. The handbook is arranged into two main thematic parts. Part 1 assesses the place of the Bible in social anthropology, examines the contribution of ethnoarchaeology to the recovery of the social world of Iron Age Palestine and offers insights from the anthropology of the Mediterranean for the interpretation of the biblical stories.

Part 2 provides a series of case studies on anthropological themes arising in the Hebrew Bible. These include kinship and social organisation, death, cultural and collective memory, and ritualism. Contributors also examine how the biblical stories reveal dynamics of power and authority, gender, and honour and shame, and how socio-anthropological approaches can reveal these narratives and deepen our knowledge of the human societies and cultural context of the texts. Bringing together the expertise of scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Archaeology, this ethnographic introduction prompts new questions into our understanding of anthropology and the Bible.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Social and cultural anthropology and the Hebrew Bible in perspective
• Part One Historiographies, theories and methods
• 2 Anthropologists and the Bible
• 3 The Holy Land and the Bible in the nineteenth century
• 4 Phantoms, factoids and frontiers: Social anthropology and the archaeology of Palestine
• 5 Ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological insights to interpret first-millennium bce material culture
• 6 The anthropology of the Mediterranean, the history of the southern Levant and biblical studies
• Part Two Themes, approaches and interpretations
• 7 Kinship and social organization in ancient Palestine
• 8 The many forms and foundations of power and authority in the Hebrew Bible
• 9 Economic anthropology and the Hebrew Bible
• 10 Gender and society in ancient Israel
• 11 Anthropologies of the Hebrew Bible
• 12 Honour, shame and other social values in the Hebrew Bible
• 13 For Moses ‘Had Indeed Married a Cushite Wife’: Metaphors, power and ethnicity in numbers 12
• 14 Asymmetrical reciprocal exchange in the Book of Jonah
• 15 Neither divide nor continuum: Orality and literacy in the Hebrew Bible
• 16 Telling tales: Biblical myth and narrative
• 17 A social anthropology of biblical memory
• 18 Acts that work, texts that work: Ritual in the Hebrew Bible
• 19 Shaman, preacher or spirit medium? The Israelite prophet in the light of anthropological models
• 20 The anthropology of food in ancient Israel
• 21 The anthropology of death in ancient Israel
• 22 Spatiality and territoriality: Power over land and power over people
• 23 The anthropology of iconography in ancient Palestine
• Index of Sources
• Index of Authors
• Copyright