Articles
Ritual care for the dead was a fundamental aspect of family and household religion in ancient Israel and powerfully influenced biblical writers’ conceptions of deity, covenant, and national identity.
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A reconsideration of what reciprocity meant in the cult of dead kin provides new insight into the significance of ancestors in the Hebrew Bible.
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Biblical polemics against Mesopotamian “necromancy” are inaccurate but still informative: even stereotyping requires partial knowledge. This asks us to interrogate the cultural stability of funerary practices we think we know.
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As constructed in the Hebrew Bible, caring for the deceased is an enterprise carried out by men, women, and children, as well as biological, chosen, and fictive family members.
Biblical scholarship has acknowledged that “Bible” is an anachronistic category when contemplating the contexts in which this literature emerged. “Scripture/scriptural” has taken its place, but what is Scripture?
Questioning whether it continues to remain helpful or adequate to use “scripture” as an obvious, natural, and universal concept for comprehending the function and history of certain kinds of texts.
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Argues that there have been three main stages in thinking about the biblical canon, and that Lambert is proposing a fourth stage, which moves the discussion on.
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This article argues for the utility of the term "scripture" in marking hierarchies among texts and other forms of ancient media.
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Continuing Metatron’s conversation about what ancient Jewish literature was, Chontel Syfox responds to David Lambert’s work in progress “What is Scripture? An Introduction to Biblical Assemblages.”
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There was no “Bible” as such even by the end of the Second Temple period. How do scholars organize this corpus in the absence of the category?
How do we move beyond anachronistic frameworks for understanding ancient Jewish literature? A multivariable approach may help.
This response to Zahn emphasizes how using literary qualities as variables rather than categories allows us to redescribe hybridity in our archive, and perhaps, reimagine some of our Qumran manuscripts.