Centralizing the Cult

Rhyder, Julia

doi:10.1628/978-3-16-157686-7

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…21-22 envisioned the concept of the sanctity of YHWH, and in turn of the community, as interconnected with the preservation of the sanctuary where YHWH resides among the people. 40 Lev. 22.2 then suggests that such preservation (not profanation) includes handling collective donations to the temple responsibly.…”

Section: Temple Income Imperial Taxes and Sabbathmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…22.2 then suggests that such preservation (not profanation) includes handling collective donations to the temple responsibly. 41 With this in mind, she and other scholars suggest that H also positions Sabbath observance and revering the sanctuary as the framework of all the laws, establishing two crucial elements in the Israelites' concept of sanctity: temporal and spatial sanctity. 42 However, Rhyder takes the argument further by arguing that the Sabbath in H consisted of two elements: not only refraining from labor but also paying homage to YHWH at the sanctuary through offerings.…”

Section: Temple Income Imperial Taxes and Sabbathmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…41 With this in mind, she and other scholars suggest that H also positions Sabbath observance and revering the sanctuary as the framework of all the laws, establishing two crucial elements in the Israelites' concept of sanctity: temporal and spatial sanctity. 42 However, Rhyder takes the argument further by arguing that the Sabbath in H consisted of two elements: not only refraining from labor but also paying homage to YHWH at the sanctuary through offerings. especially, required the people to offer regular donations on the Sabbath in addition to those on annual festivals.…”

Section: Temple Income Imperial Taxes and Sabbathmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Offerings Matter: Revisiting the Sabbath Transgression in Nehemiah 13 and the So-Called Sabbath Reform

Noya

2023

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

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Recent interpretations of the Sabbath rest concept in the Hebrew Bible tend to highlight its humanitarian aspect. However, in this paper, I aim to nuance this claim by attending to a rarely discussed Sabbath text in Nehemiah 13. I will argue that the Sabbath rest motif in Nehemiah is less concerned about the humanitarian aspect than the temple’s maintenance while at the same time fulfilling the imperial tax obligation. The Sabbath rest motif supports Nehemiah’s demand for the temple’s communal funding through tithes and offerings. To support this argument, I begin by reviewing the discussion about the Achaemenid imperial rule over the Jerusalem temple and its tax obligation. Scholars differ on how significant the Jerusalem temple was for the imperial administration, but some sort of obligation to the empire is generally accepted. After that, I analyze how the Sabbath concept is manifested in Neh. 13.15–22 in relation to its literary contexts. Along with clearing the temple storeroom, maintaining temple resources, and restricting exogamy, the Sabbath concept facilitates the temple’s maintenance and the meeting of the imperial tax obligation.

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Section: Temple Income Imperial Taxes and Sabbathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Temple Income Imperial Taxes and Sabbathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Temple Income Imperial Taxes and Sabbathmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Offerings Matter: Revisiting the Sabbath Transgression in Nehemiah 13 and the So-Called Sabbath Reform

Noya

2023

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

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The idea and study of sacrifice in ancient Israel

Feldman

2020

Religion Compass

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This article offers an introduction to the idea of sacrifice in Israel across the first millennium BCE, and presents data from both the first and second temple periods. In the first part of the article, I discuss three different types of evidence available for the study of sacrifice-archeological, comparative, and literary-the strengths and limitations of each form of evidence, and highlight recent trends in this area of study. In the second part of the article, I turn to a more direct discussion of the what, where, who, why, and how of sacrifice in ancient Israel. 1 | INTRODUCTION In this article, I will introduce the basic idea of sacrifice in ancient Israel, with a particular focus on the first millennium BCE. 1 This article proceeds in two parts. The first part discusses the different types of evidence and approaches for the study of sacrifice in ancient Israel. In that section, I give a brief overview of the types of evidence, along with a selected history of scholarship that points toward the latest trends in the study of sacrifice. For those who are interested in studying sacrifice further, the footnotes in this first section are meant to be a roadmap to both the most historically influential work and the cutting-edge research being done today. In the second section, I provide an overview of the what, where, who, when, and why of sacrifice, focused primarily on ancient Israel. There are a number of reasons for my choice of ancient Israel as the focus for this article beyond the fact that an overview of sacrifice across the entirety of the ancient Middle East is too massive a topic to treat in so little space. My focus on ancient Israel, in part, mirrors the fact that some of the foundational theories about how sacrifice works have been based on the study of ancient Israelite texts. 2 This may well be due to the seemingly systematic nature of the presentation of the ancient Israelite materials (similar to the also much-studied Vedic materials in this sense) compared with the more abundant but disparate textual evidence from Mesopotamia and the Levant. 3 It is, of course, also impossible to ignore the fact that the ancient Israelite materials have been so widely studied in large part because of their inclusion in the Bible. Indeed, the Bible is the context in which most This article provides an overview of sacrifice in ancient Israel during the first millennium BCE, and offers an introduction to literary, archeological, and comparative evidence for its study.

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Writing and imagining ritual in the Babylonian New Year festival texts

Debourse

2024

Religion Compass

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In cuneiform culture the New Year Festival was an important ritual of kingship. The most fundamental source for the reconstruction of this festival is a small corpus of cuneiform ritual texts that describe the ritual actions and prayers to be performed during the first days of the year. Those texts were written by Babylonian priests during the Persian‐Hellenistic period (484–140 BCE), when Babylonia had come under foreign rule. Why were these ritual texts outlining a royal ritual created at a time when Babylonia was governed by foreign rulers, who had little interest in Babylonian religious traditions? Why write down rituals at all? In this paper, I show how these New Year Festival texts are programmatic more than instructional, as they give shape to a new ritual paradigm in which Babylonian priests, not kings, are the central authority of the cult.

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Centralizing the Cult

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Offerings Matter: Revisiting the Sabbath Transgression in Nehemiah 13 and the So-Called Sabbath Reform

Offerings Matter: Revisiting the Sabbath Transgression in Nehemiah 13 and the So-Called Sabbath Reform

The idea and study of sacrifice in ancient Israel

Writing and imagining ritual in the Babylonian New Year festival texts

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