By David Janzen
This paintings makes use of anthropological idea and box reviews to enquire the social functionality and which means of sacrifice. All rituals, together with sacrifice, converse social ideals and morality, yet those can't be made up our minds outdoors of a research of the social context. hence, there's no unmarried reason for sacrifice - similar to these complicated by means of René Girard or Walter Burkert or late-19th and early-20th century students. The ebook then examines 4 diversified writings within the Hebrew Bible - the Priestly Writing, the Deuteronomistic heritage, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles - to illustrate how various social origins bring about assorted social meanings of sacrifice.
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Additional info for The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible: A Study of Four Writings
Example text
Our sources for the study of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible will be the textual contexts in which we find the rituals, and among other things we will also explore these works for information concerning historical background, what the writers considered to be the ideal political structure, the place of king or governing power in the writer's worldview, and the importance (in Ritual's Formality and its Social Message 19 some writings) of performing the sacrifices in Jerusalem. Just as we need all the resources at our disposal in order to discover the meaning of sacrifices to the different biblical writers, we should not handicap ourselves by relying on monolithic theories of the meaning of sacrifice.
As a type of rhetoric, I want to argue in this section that ritual's extremely formal character shows it to be a kind of communication that actively discourages dialogue not in agreement with the social goods it advances. There are many anthropologists who claim that ritual promotes social goods. Clifford Geertz argues that ritual convinces people that a society's religious beliefs are truthful. In the ceremony of ritual, he writes, "the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of 20 The Rhetorics of Ritual symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world".
34 The Rhetorics of Ritual tems. The social meaning of rituals can change over time, and this is precisely why we need to know as much about the context of ritual as we can if we are to rightly interpret it. We do know that rituals advance the social goods of a given group, but precisely what those goods are is not predetermined. Not all rituals are aimed at increasing group unity as Durkheim believed; rituals may display the world as it should be, they might support the social hierarchy, they might dramatize the social order, they might clarify social messages, and they might degrade a social group competing for members, among other things.