The first five books of the Hebrew Bible contain a significant number of texts describing ritual practices. Yet it is often unclear how these sources would have been understood or used by ancient audiences in the actual performance of cult. This volume explores the processes of ritual textualization (the creation of a written version of a ritual) in ancient Israel by probing the main conceptual and methodological issues that inform the study of this topic in the Pentateuch. This systematic and comparative study of text and ritual in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible maps the main areas of consensus and disagreement between scholars engaged in articulating new models for understanding the relationship between text and ritual and explores the importance of comparative evidence for the study of pentateuchal rituals. Topics include ritual textualization in ancient Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia; the importance of archaeology and materiality for the study of text and ritual in ancient Israel; the relationship between ritual textualization and standardization in the Pentateuch; the reception of pentateuchal ritual texts in Second Temple writings and rabbinic literature; and the relationship between text and ritual in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Dorothea Erbele-Kuster, Daniel K. Falk, Yitzhaq Feder, Christian Frevel, William K. Gilders, Dominique Jaillard, Giuseppina Lenzo, Lionel Marti, Patrick Michel, Rudiger Schmitt, Jeremy D. Smoak, and James W. Watts.
Christophe Nihan is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and the History of Ancient Israel at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus, coauthor of Opening the Books of Moses, and coeditor of several volumes, including most recently Writing Laws in Antiquity. Julia Rhyder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17-26 and coeditor of Re-evaluating the Concept of Authorship in Hebrew Bible Studies.
"The contributions to Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch contrast the relationship between text and ritual in ancient Israel with that of other ancient Mediterranean and Western Asian societies and thus gain new insights for the challenge of reconstructing the performance of ancient rituals from written sources." -Thomas Hieke, author of Die Genealogien der Genesis "This volume is an important and timely contribution to the scholarly study of ritual texts and procedures in the Pentateuch and the Hebrew Bible as a whole. Important scholars in the field labor to advance the application of ritual studies, biblical intertextuality, rhetorical analysis, ancient Near Eastern comparative material, and related postbiblical literature to understanding the texts and ritual procedures in the Pentateuch." -Richard Averbeck, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
