RBL 03/2011 Stavrakopoulou, Francesca, and John Barton, eds. Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah New York: T&T Clark, 2010. Pp. xvi + 207, Paperback, $34.95, ISBN 9780567032164. Katharine Dell University of Cambridge Cambridge, United Kingdom Words that sum up the approach of this volume include variety, local, rural, pluriformity, context-specific, and diversity, the term used in the title of the book. It is also a book primarily about religion and its practice rather than about theology and ideas. It provides an overview of the way the history of Israelite religion is now being regarded, with a large helping of ideology, with some back-projection of ideas, with a dislike of overarching categories (including Israelite itself, which is why Israel and Judah are used in the title), and with an emphasis on piecemeal and variegated evidence, including that from archaeology. Eleven distinguished contributors give a broad picture of the state of the field and pose a challenge to a number of accepted norms of the scholarship. After an introduction from the editors, the book divides into three parts looking at conceptual diversities, socioreligious diversities, and geographical diversities, followed by an evaluative postscript by John Barton. The introduction makes the case for the approach to be taken, for the separation of Israel and Judah as both geographical and ideological entities, for the emphasis on pluriformity and context. The possibility of different deities and deity combinations is to be raised in this book, not just polytheism but poly-yahwism and the diversity of cultic observation that goes with that. The possibility that the presentation of the religious past is divergent
from the reality is a given of this volume, and the view that religion is a sociocultural activity likewise. The use of archaeology and of comparative evidence from the ancient Near East is also a stated method. The desire here is to embrace the complexity, diversity, and sheer muddled nature of the evidence about religious activities rather than to seek to categorize. Old dichotomies such as official versus popular religion and Israelite versus Canaanite are challenged and seen to be oversimplified, if not incorrect. The complexity of change of time is also added into the equation, which is also true of the Hebrew Bible s portrait itself, leading to a spectrum of infinite variety (7). The first essay is by Niditch on experiential religion: the ways in which the divine was experienced. She looks at descriptions of visits to God s realm in the Hebrew Bible, at reports of symbolic visions, and at descriptions of Sheol, including references to appearance of the dead on earth. She makes the point that the experiences themselves are very individual and yet have a conventional and traditional nature in that there are established forms of expressions for such experiences. Individual experiences are thus clothed in the imagery, the meaning-world and the linguistic expectations of the visionary tradition (13). She sees the official/unofficial religious divide as another dichotomy that needs revising. In reference to the divine council image, the Hebrew Bible demonstrates progression and diversity in the concept, reflecting various sociohistorical contexts. As for symbolic visions, these tend to go from simple to more complex and again witness to many varied perceptions of the divine world from people from many different contexts. As for the realm of the dead, this is where official religion tries to sever the ties between the living and the dead, yet pockets of gray area remain, a prime example being 1 Sam 28. This essay gives a new lens to familiar material in its alignment of three categories under the heading of experiential religion. The next essay is by Niehr, who seeks to clarify the relationship between Israelite and Canaanite religion, showing that the message of opposition between the two is a largely ideological one on the part of the writers of the Hebrew Bible rather than the true picture. He shows how Israel came to existence within Canaan and how Israelite religion was not imported from outside; rather, it was a West-Semitic subset of Canaanite religion. He also shows how close imagery of Yahweh came to familiar Canaanite god-imagery; for example, Yahweh was seen as a weather god and called Baal/Bull at times. He was the rider of the clouds and the god of war. He is described as a jealous god not tolerating other gods, and this is perhaps the seed of later monotheism. Evidence from Kuntillet Ajrud suggests a goddess, too, with its mention of Yahweh and his Asherah. Clearly, polytheism was only gradually shed, and there were different manifestations of Yahweh from different places. Niehr, in this truly fascinating essay, also points out how the connection between Mount Zaphon, home of the weather-god, evolved into connections with Zion. Although Ezek 16:3, By origin and by birth you are of the land of the
Canaanites, is a negative statement in the context of Ezekiel, Niehr points out that this statement was in fact true! Stavrakopoulou picks up the official/popular religion dichotomy and adds another one: centralized/deviant. Again the issue of the historical reliability of the biblical texts is in question, given also that it is the official line of the biblical writers that we read and have so often seen as normative. She distinguishes between high culture, the product of the dominant groups often leading to written texts, and low culture, the religion of the marginalized and oppressed for which evidence is more sparse again the context-led nature of the process is revealed. She points out that the home is often the locus of nonelite religious practice but that we cannot draw neat lines between types of practice in relation to particular levels of society because they often transcend such divides. So with the cult of the dead, all levels of society practiced mortuary ritual, and while some practices were distant from establishment religion and not acceptable to mainstream Yahwism, others were not. Stavrakopoulou also points out how our own Western rationalist perspectives have tended to dominate our evaluation of official and popular religion, terms that plainly no longer adequately describe the diversity of ancient Israelite religion. There is also a dimension of idealization of the past coming from the Persian or Hellenistic periods, so that when we read the ideological perspectives of biblical writers, we are looking not only at possible current ideology but back-projected ideology also. This essay is interesting in that it shows how mainstream some of the more radical questioning of the Bible as a historical witness is becoming. Wyatt s essay opens part 2 and is truly fascinating. He takes the view that the literature itself is far more reliable than the question of the nature of sources as history. He also sees later ideologists as having constructed the David we read about in the texts. He writes, historiographers either invented David or at least heroized and epicized a local bandit in presenting him as archetypal king (63). However, later assessment of an earlier tradition is not worthless: values and ideology are still there. Here Wyatt looks at Ugaritic parallels to kingship in Israel and uses the argument for organic relationship between such cultures. The Ugaritic evidence gives a window into the ritual life of a king that is lacking in biblical material. He sees the cult of Yahweh as a Davidic innovation, imposed on the northern kingdom, which held to an old El-bull cult revived by Jeroboam. This Yahweh cult was originally connected to Hebron and Jerusalem. Wyatt writes, David went to Hebron, and naturally adopted the local deity, presumably a form of El, with the local cult title Yau as his patron. This would have been a means of expressing his solidarity with his new subjects. Upon assuming the kingship over Israel, as well, he then took Jerusalem (2 Sam 5:1 10) which became a royal fief under the specific tutelage of the deity, now Hebraized as Yahu (later form Yahweh). The rest is history (larded with legend) (68). He looks at ritual enthronement and coronation rites from Ugaritic
evidence and draws out some biblical hints, such as Exod 34, where Moses goes up Mount Sinai, which he sees as modeled on royal ascent and enthronement rites where the mountain was the dwelling of the god. Moses is described as having horns on his face, which parallels Mesopotamian divine images of gods. This essay makes some bold claims with which not all would agree, but it is a very stimulating and informative read nonetheless. Edelman s essay is presented in a more fact-collecting manner. She is concerned with archaeological evidence from a variety of cultic places. She presents four contexts: intramural local shrines or temples in cities or towns; shrines in city gates; cultic complexes in forts; and shrines associated with trade. She is also concerned with the way in which the evidence has been presented in the Hebrew Bible, which is at odds with the evidence on the ground. The concept of centralization, as promoted by the Deuteronomistic writers, has been a particular source of misleading impression on the cultic front. She looks at Elephantine, where there was no animal sacrifice, and raises the possibility that a later context such as that has been the prime influence on the way earlier material (e.g., the patriarchal narratives) has been presented. She writes, Thus the actions and attitudes of the patriarchs in Genesis can be seen either to be an example of discontinuity where implicit practices of animal sacrifice and multiple altars used in the past no longer hold in the time of the reader, or an example of attitudes and practices in force at the time of the reader that have been set into the past to give an impression of continuity in spite of actual discontinuity (84). This essay provides a helpful and detailed description of the archaeological evidence. Davies looks at another dichotomy, that between urban and rural religion. He looks at the process of urbanization, which took place at different rates in Israel and Judah and increased under the monarchy. Some cities grew up while others were inherited (Deut 6:10). We clearly know more about the urban because it is in urban settings that biblical texts were written and archaeological remains tend to be greater. Can we then reconstruct rural religion? Davies, too, airs the issues of the reliability of the biblical account and writes, How far the biblical portrait of Judah s religion is historically reliable constitutes perhaps the single most important and hotly debated issue in current biblical scholarship (108). Davies points out that even in cities there was a huge variety of worship. He shows how the divine realm, too, is largely painted in urban terms. Furthermore, the splendor of the city is seen as a reflection of both royal power and divine glory. Davies goes on to explore rural concerns such as agriculture and fertility, which were not, in fact, just rural, even though they tend to be portrayed by the Deuteronomists as such. The asherah symbol was found, for example, in the Jerusalem temple itself! He sees much of the urban picture as projected back from a postmonarchical period, although one does wonder whether there would be such interest in the royal past in an age when national
sovereignty was a distant memory. Davies shows how festivals were urbanized, prophecy also, especially in its written textual, even archival, form. Even the view of the countryside itself is urbanized, so that trying to uncover the rural context becomes increasingly difficult. Some very interesting conclusions emerge from this rather distinctive lens on the material. Meyers s article is on household religion, looking at what people did in their own homes in terms of religious activity. This, too, has been marginalized in the Hebrew Bible because of the focus on national existence and corporate or royal cults. Meyers shows from archaeological evidence and from looking at traditional cultures as well that the range of home activity was extensive. She stresses the importance of collective identity at the grassroots level, where ties of kinship and patrilineality were strong. She uses three categories of seasonal activity, life-cycle activity, and sporadic events to structure her essay. Seasonal activity includes festivals. She interestingly points out the origin of Passover in the home. She shows how national religion had local and household counterparts. Life-cycle activity emphasizes reproductive religious practices in particular at a time when childbirth was an extremely hazardous activity. Votive female figurines testify to household prayers for fertility, conception, and safe delivery of a child. Meyers also looks at rites around death in this context. Occasional activities include rites around illness or infertility. This essay shows the fundamental nature of household as a unit of society, a unit marginalized by the presentation given by the Hebrew Bible itself but needing to be brought into greater focus. Connected to this, Albertz, in the next essay, writes about personal piety. He looks at theophoric personal names that often reflect the experiences of the mother during pregnancy or birth. He studies evidence of personal piety from individual laments and thanksgiving psalms and also looks at the proverbial material, which tends to focus on rationality rather than piety, yet still contains an important religious element of basic trust in Yahweh in everyday matters. He considers archaeological evidence of incense offerings, meal offerings, and libations accompanying prayers. He sees personal piety as having changed over time: from the seventh century B.C.E. the differences between personal and official religion seem to have lessened. He regards personal piety as more creation-based and hence able to withstand historical catastrophes such as the exile, and indeed as becoming more dominant after the exile, as books such as Job testify. This more theological essay is a helpful reminder that beliefs and ideas are a fundamental basis for the practice of religion. The final part of this book treats geographical diversity. Again, archaeological evidence comes to the forefront. Hutton s essay is concerned to uncover the very local nature of expressions of religion that he calls micro-religions. He looks, for example, at local
manifestations of Yahweh: Yahweh of Samaria in the north, Yahweh of Teman from the Edomite area. These seem to be rival manifestations of the same deity, yet they are often found in close proximity and not necessarily just in cultic spaces. He looks at another dichotomy, the idea that when it comes to theophoric names, Yahwistic compounds are upper-class and Baal names are lower-class. He argues that this is not the case and that variation tends to be regional rather than reflecting class. Moreover, to complicate the issue, Baal can be a metanym for Yahweh! He looks at bull imagery, which can apply to more than one god, and contrasts the Deuteronomist s belittling of such imagery. He looks at the Shaddai tradition for God and sees child sacrifice as a legitimate feature of some forms of Judahite cultic expression, only made other by the polemic of the biblical authors. He writes, The constituent micro-religions of pan-israelite religion found expression in a number of different modes and were adapted to divergent uses by different constituencies among the biblical authors. when bundled together through literary and editional devices these various micro-religions were portrayed as constituent elements of their respective macro-religions, and hence of pan-israelite religion (167 68). Grabbe s essay also focuses on geography and archaeology. He focuses on the variety of divine names. He is interested in the question whether Yahweh was worshiped by non- Israelites and looks at evidence from Ebla, Mari, Ugarit, and northern Syria. He then goes on to look at diaspora communities from Elephantine, Samaria, Idumaea, Iraq-el-Amir, and Leontopolis in Egypt. His overall conclusion is that Yahweh was not worshiped outside Israel and Judah and that the cults seem thus to be unique to those geographical locations. The diaspora witnessed to outgrowths of the main cult that were essentially in keeping with that cult. The volume is rounded off with a postscript by Barton. He points out that the idea of difference is not entirely new. Wellhausen, radically for his time, showed how different Judaism was from Yahwism/Jehovism through his reconstruction of religious development using the sources of the Pentateuch. He also questioned monotheism as normative. Wellhausen thought the spontaneity of early Israelite religion had been lost in the wooden rigidity of priestly systems and that an official, fully monotheistic, centralized, and nonsyncretistic religion was a late development. This volume celebrates the possibilities of polytheistic origins for Israelite religion, yet Barton points out that, surprisingly perhaps, monotheism did develop. How did that development happen? Was it an indigenous development, and why was only Israel s God the One in the end? Questions always remain, including that of why Judaism became a religion of the book, when it seems that the book has been responsible for all kinds of misreading, at least of the real and piecemeal nature of religious life in its local and national manifestations.
This book is a very worthwhile enterprise and shows how emphasis on the marginal is, ironically, now becoming the new mainstream! Ideas of the nonreliability of the historical presentation of the text, on the role of ideology, on the distortion of official or central concerns are becoming commonplace and widely accepted. The stress on the local, on the agricultural, and on the lives of ordinary people is also indicative of this shift away from taking the text as read. I wonder whether these concerns, however, also reflect back on the modern reader of the text. Concern with the small, local context, the ordinary man or woman s perspective, the liminal rather than the central these all seem to me to find echoes in our own embracing of diversity and of our modern democratic, green, and liberationist perspectives. All readers shape interpretation of texts, as I am sure the contributors to this volume would agree, and this book is no exception. This generation of ideas will be judged by its successors, but one wonders if the pendulum of interest will swing back again in more traditional directions, almost as Barton indicates in his closing analysis. This volume is a fresh and stimulating type of overview and deserves to be read widely both by scholar and interested wider public alike (although I would not like to create another dichotomy here!).