Ritual in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible

Abstract Biblical scholarship has experienced a marked increase in work at the intersection of ritual studies and the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (HB). Alongside anthropologists and archaeologists, recent generations of biblical scholars have re-examined the Priestly literature of the HB in league with emerging ritual theories from anthropology and comparative studies from the ancient Near East. Definitions of ritual within these studies are beholden to various proposals about religion, the history of religions, source criticism, sociological models, and anthropologies with their respective philosophies of mind. Apart from early 20th-century attempts to find universal interpretations of ritual, functional approaches asked: What are rituals for? What differentiates a normal action (e.g., eating) into a ritual (e.g., animal sacrifice)? And, for biblical scholars, what do rituals do in the literature of the HB? How are the various rituals, found across the HB, related to each other in form or aim? Rituals in the HB are multi-valent, employed to various ends with proliferating effects. Thus, understanding the HB’s textual accounts of rituals as a system of behaviors and strategies allows for understanding rituals as a nexus of activities, cultural beliefs, and formation of the social and individual body. The twin difficulties of access to only the textualized accounts of rituals and the cultural/temporal distance from their practice frames these discussions of rites in the biblical literature. Rather than decoding the symbols of rituals, the HB’s use of rituals to produce particular kinds of community agents might provide a way to understand the logic of biblical rituals, even if interpreting their precise meanings cannot be assumed. A brief survey of rituals beginning in the primeval history in Israel’s literature will lead to the contest between prescribed rituals, on one hand, and how to understand various attempts to improvise on those biblical prescriptions, on the other. The HB’s internal discourse about rituals and the prophetic critique of malformed rites should also figure into any understanding of biblical rituals, what makes a rite work. Finally, the unique framing of rituals in the HB is contrasted with the general use of rites elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Unlike almost anywhere else in the ancient Near East, Israel’s ritual efficacy is bound to the nation’s ethical behaviors prior to ritual sacrifices and ensuing them. Hence, ritual practices attempt to produce a particular kind of person in and through Israel’s ethical and discerning community. Moreover, many of the rites in the HB have epistemological goals: “so that you all will know.” These two integral aspects of biblical rituals, ethical and epistemic, might suggest that the HB offers a distinct view of rituals among Israel’s peer ritual text traditions in the ancient Near East.