Language and Religion

Robert Yelle, Courtney Handman, Christopher Lehrich, Robert Yelle, Courtney Handman, Christopher Lehrich

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781614515906
• eBook ISBN: 9781501500749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume draws on an interdisciplinary team of authors to advance the study of the religious dimensions of communication and the linguistic aspects of religion. Contributions cover: poetry, iconicity, and iconoclasm in religious language; semiotic ideologies in traditional religions and in secularism; and the role of materiality and writing in religious communication. This volume will provoke new approaches to language and religion.

Part I: Ritual and language

Naphtali S. Meshel

To be taken with a grain of salt: Between a “grammar” and a GRAMMUR of a sacrificial ritual system

Naphtali S. Meshel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

1 Introduction

The goal of this paper is to offer a brief overview of two rules – selected from a set of several hundred such rules – operative in the “grammar” of a ritual system termed Σ (Sigma), which is described in full in Meshel (2014) and defined briefly below. I will argue that if “grammars” of ritual systems can be composed at all, this can be achieved only by taking a step away from the linguistic analogy and by identifying the nonlinguistic operative categories inherent in the ritual systems under investigation. Once several distinct operative categories are identified, the transformational rules between these operative categories are discovered, and the specific rules comprising each operative category within a given ritual system are formulated, the resultant theory may qualify as a “grammar,” perhaps more accurately termed a GRAMMUR: Generative, Rigorously Applied Mathematically Modelled Unconscious Rules. While this paper focuses on two rules from one operative category, it is intended to suggest the potential explanatory power of a full-fledged “grammar” of a ritual system.

In the past half century, the scholarly investigation of ritual has been pursued within a large variety of theoretical frameworks, including linguistics, information theory, systems theory, ethology, and cognition.4 Of these, linguistics has been the single most important framework for the study of ritual and several of the others employed in this undertaking are modelled upon, or at least inspired by, linguistics.

Within the theoretical framework of linguistics, there has been a tendency among some anthropologists and scholars in comparative religion to liken the structures of ritual systems to the grammars of natural languages. This has resulted in the widespread use of grammatical terminology to describe the structures of ritual systems, with the most radical theory even asserting the existence of an evolutionary relationship between ritual and language5; it has also resulted in a conviction that rituals, like languages, have grammars.6 The literature on this theoretical issue singles out sacrificial ritual as a special case, perhaps because some scholars believe that sacrifice holds a unique place among rituals, as if it were the ritual par excellence, to which all other rituals may ultimately be reduced.7

The idea that the structures of languages and sacrificial rituals are homologous has its roots in antiquity. As Staal (1989: 40–41) notes, the 2nd century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali first suggested this homology in the introduction to his Mahābhāṣya, a commentary on the classical Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini. To put it somewhat simplistically, Patañjali assumes – though he does not explicitly claim – that sacrificial ritual systems have grammars and aims to convince his readers that languages should have grammars as well. (Incidentally, structuralists often make the reverse claim, using language as a template for ritual rather than the other way around.) In Patañjali’s thinking, as Staal understands it – perhaps over-generously, as some recent scholars have argued – the formal homology between language and sacrificial ritual pertains to a specific tension inherent in both systems, a tension between unlimited theoretical possibilities and limited realizable options.8

While Staal’s work has inspired a large body of literature on “ritual grammar,” current discussion in the field of comparative religion about the theoretical underpinnings and possible implications of the grammar of ritual greatly outweighs descriptive accounts of the ritual systems themselves, although such accounts ought to serve as the foundation for the broader theoretical discussions. This situation has led Michaels to state that previous work on the grammar of ritual has generally been “more programmatic than proto-grammatical.”9 In fact, despite the relative abundance of detailed discussions of grammatical features within particular rituals, a systematic outlay of even a single ritual system’s grammar has been entirely lacking in the literature, until very recently.10 It is striking that there has even been some discussion of a “universal grammar” of sacrificial ritual – rules that may be applicable to all sacrificial systems in diverse human societies – even before one complete grammar of a specific sacrificial system exists.

An example will help illustrate what would constitute a “grammar” of a ritual system and what such a grammar could contribute to our understanding of ritual systems. In the 12th century, the Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides formulated several general rules about the sacrificial laws in biblical and rabbinic traditions. One cluster of these abstractions, consisting of Maimonides’ own generalizations as well as generalizations culled from earlier rabbinic literature, appears towards the end of his introduction to tractate Zebaḥim, in his Commentary on the Mishna (Kafaḥ 1963: 19):

And if you consider all of the abovementioned sacrifices, you will find that there is not a single female among all of the public offerings. […] Similarly you will find that every layperson’s purification offering is a female animal. […] Similarly it will become evident to you that there is not among all of the public offerings an ovine [i.e., sheep] purification offering, nor a caprine [i.e., goat] wholeburnt offering…

Note that several of the generalizations in Maimonides’ introduction are found nowhere in the ancient sources he had at his disposal; they are Maimonides’ own abstractions, designed to accord with several examples of sacrifices within the biblical text (as interpreted by the early rabbinic authorities) and with a number of sacrificial combinations newly introduced in rabbinic traditions but not found in the biblical text. Yet of the many dozens of sacrificial combinations found in literature from the turn of the era, including Qumranic literature, Josephus, Philo, and a large body of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic literature11 – combinations that differ substantially from the instructions of the Pentateuchal law – not a single one substantially violates these rules formulated by a 12th-century Spanish-North African rabbi. Most of these texts were unavailable to Maimonides, so we can only suppose that he has hit upon certain rigorous, underlying rules, the same rules which the authors of the late Second Temple period had internalized as a result of their exposure to the biblical text, and which guided them when generating their own new sacrificial combinations.

Consider a common linguistic analog: young children hear grammatical utterances from their parents. The children are exposed to numerous – but finitely many – grammatical utterances. The fact that these children regularly acquire fluency in a language on the basis of that finite number of utterances, and in particular that they can then produce grammatical but as-yet-unheard utterances, demonstrates that they have internalized grammatical rules from a limited input. A linguist can compose a grammar for that language on the basis of those utterances of one speaker, a grammar that would then prove valid for the utterances of other speakers as well even though the linguist had not heard them.

So too, Jewish authors writing in antiquity derived their understanding of sacrifice from (roughly) the same Pentateuchal text, and some of them presumably also witnessed a shared set of Temple practices. These authors describe rituals that do not appear in the sources they would have encountered but that nevertheless accord with rules they had internalized from their exposure to a finite set of rituals. Writing in the 12th century, Maimonides (like the aforementioned linguist) postulated generalizations in order to characterize the Pentateuchal and rabbinic literature, but his rules also prove valid for other rituals to which he could not have been exposed. In short, Maimonides was describing a “grammar” of rituals that earlier practitioners and authors had internalized.

Whereas Maimonides only discusses a few internalized grammatical rules, a full “grammar” of ritual should map out a system of these rules in a comprehensive fashion. Such a grammar would delineate the generalized principles that govern the formation of ritual sequences. For an analysis to constitute a “grammar” – as defined here – it would not be sufficient for it to offer a full and systematic listing of an inventory of building blocks for the “praxemic” description of a robust ritual system12; and to identify general rules that determine which combinations of building blocks are licit and which are not – though such a description is in and of itself no small task by any standard. It would also have to be: (1) generative, in the sense that a small set of rules inferred from a large set of data can be shown to govern the formation of new sequences; (2) rigorously applied, in the sense that exceptions to the rules might be allowed (as in a grammar of a language) – but fewer exceptions would produce a simpler and more successful grammar; (3) amenable to mathematical modelling – this is not a requirement of the grammar, but rather an indication of its explanatory power: a successful grammar ought to be describable concisely and parsimoniously in abstract terms, and should be representable in simple graphic or formulaic terms; (4) unconsciously internalized – as in a language, it should be demonstrated that some of the rules are not explicit in the ritual manuals (and competent practitioners need not be consciously aware of them); lastly, (5) rules must to be grouped into discrete operative categories in such a way that the theory of the ritual system is sensitive to differential levels of abstraction, clearly describing specific transformational rules between these levels. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Ritual and language
• Part II: Ideologies of religious language
• Part III: Media and materiality after the linguistic turn
• Contributors
• Index