Download or read book Ritual and Cult at Ugarit written by Dennis Pardee and published by Brill Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ugaritic ritual texts, which date to ca. 1200 B.C.E, provide the only extensive body of pre-biblical data on cultic practice in Syria-Palestine. This volume, aimed at biblical scholars and historians of religion, contains the original texts a general introduction, an English translation, and interpretative notes for each text. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)
Download or read book Incantations and Anti Witchcraft Texts from Ugarit written by Gregorio del Olmo Lete and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ugaritic literary and ritual studies have often neglected or even ignored the Akkadian material from the same archives, which can be used as a frame of reference for the Ugaritic texts. The aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive study of the consonantal (Ugaritic) as well as the syllabic (Akkadian) incantation and anti-witchcraft texts from Ras Shamra as a unified corpus. These texts, dealing with impending dangers (mainly snakebites) and witchcraft attacks, are placed in the context of Ancient Near Eastern magic literature. A discussion of general topics, including magic and religion, the Ugaritic gods of magic, and the definition of incantation, is followed by a new collation and translation of the Akkadian texts, as well as new photographic material for both series. The main focus of this book is the close reading of the consonantal texts in the context of the much larger and better analyzed corpus of Akkadian magic literature.
Download or read book Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit written by Theodore J. Lewis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book private archives of Ugarit The A functional analysis written by Gregorio del Olmo Lete and published by Edicions Universitat Barcelona. This book was released on 2018-11-04 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first impression one gains from a summary overview of the epigraphic finds from the tell of Ras Shamra is one of an ancient city packed with written documentation: from the Royal Palace, with its huge archives, to everywhere in the center and around the northern and southern parts of the town, collections of texts were held in private archives. Any place that an archaeological sounding was made, a more or less significant set of written documents has been found. Ugarit, even more so than the great capital cities of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, appears in this regard to be a paradigm of the triumph of writing as a decisive instrument in the cultural and economic development of the ancient Near East. Indeed, with its twelve public and private archives, Ugarit could rightly be labeled “the endless archive”.
Download or read book The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit written by Mary E. Buck and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit Mary Buck pursues a nuanced view of populations in the Bronze Age Levant, with the objective of understanding the ancient polity of Ugarit as a kin-based culture that shares close ties with neighbouring Amorite populations.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible written by Samuel E. Balentine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.
Download or read book Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus written by James W. Watts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus uses rhetorical analysis to expose the motives behind the writing of the central book of the Torah/Pentateuch and its persuasive function in ancient Judaism. The answer to the question, 'who was trying to persuade whom of what by writing these texts?' proves to be quite consistent throughout Leviticus 1-16: Aaronide high priests and their supporters used this book to legitimize their monopoly over the ritual offerings of Jews and Samaritans. With this priestly rhetoric at its center, the Torah supported the rise to power of two priestly dynasties in Second Temple Judaism. Their ascendancy in turn elevated the prestige and rhetorical power to the book, making it the first real scripture in Near Eastern and Western religious traditions.
Download or read book Life and Mortality in Ugaritic written by Matthew McAffee and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-12-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While topics such as death, funerary cult, and the netherworld have received considerable scholarly attention in the context of the Ugaritic textual corpus, the related concept of life has been relatively neglected. Life and Mortality in Ugaritic takes as its premise that one cannot grasp the significance of mwt (“to die”) without first having wrestled with the concept of ḥyy (“to live”). In this book, Matthew McAffee takes a lexical approach to the study of life and death in the Ugaritic textual corpus. He identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics, and he concludes by synthesizing the results of this lexical study into a broader literary discussion that considers, among other things, the implications for our understanding of the first-millennium Katumuwa stele from Zincirli. McAffee’s study complements previous scholarly work in this area, which has tended to rely on conceptual and theoretical treatment of mortality, and advances the discussion by providing a more focused lexical analysis of the Ugaritic terms in question. It will be of interest to Semitic scholars and those who study Ugaritic in particular, in addition to students of the culture of the ancient Levant.
Download or read book The Rituals and Myths of the Feast of the Goodly Gods of KTU CAT 1 23 written by Mark S. Smith and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2006 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text of the work known as The birth of the beautiful gods, in parallel columns: Ugaritic (romanized) and English (p. 18-25), with commentary and discussion in English.
Download or read book The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra written by Marguerite Yon and published by Eisenbrauns. This book was released on 2006 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: However, by that time the site had already seen more than 6,000 years of occupation, and the data from Ras Shamra - Ugarit thus have become important as a reference point for the early history of the Near East along the Levantine coast and the eastern Mediterranean."
Download or read book Israel s Beneficent Dead written by Brian B. Schmidt and published by Eisenbrauns. This book was released on 1996 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the ancient Israelites perform rituals expressive of the belief in the supernaturalbeneficent power of the dead? Contrary to long held notions of primitive society and the euhemeristic origin of the divine, various factors indicate that the ancestor cult, that is, ancestor veneration or worship, was not observed in the Iron Age Levant. The Israelites did not adopt an ancient Canaanite ancestor cult that became the object of biblical scorn. Yet, a variety of mortuary rituals and cults were performed in Levantine society; mourning and funerary rites and longer-term rituals such as the care for the dead and commemoration. Rituals and monuments in or at burial sites, and especially the recitation of the deceased's name, recounted the dead's lived lives for familial survivors. They served broader social functions as well; e.g., to legitimate primogeniture and to reinforce a community's social collectivity. Another ritual complex from the domain of divination, namely necromancy, might have expressed the Israelite dead's beneficent powers. Yet, was this power to reveal knowledge that of the dead or was it a power conveyed through the dead, but that remained attributable to another supranatural being of non-human origin? Contemporary Assyrian necromancers utilized the ghost as a conduit through which divine knowledge was revealed to ascertain the future and so Judah's king Manasseh, a loyal Assyrian vassal, emulated these new Assyrian imperial forms of prognostication. As a de-legitimating rhetorical strategy, necromancy was then integrated into biblical traditions about the more distant past and attributed fictive Canaanite origins (Deut 18). In its final literary setting, necromancy was depicted as the Achille's heel of the nation's first royal dynasty, that of the Saulides (1 Sam 28), and more tellingly, its second, that of the Davidides (2 Kgs 21:6; 23:24).
Download or read book God in Translation written by Mark S. Smith and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God in Translation offers a substantial, extraordinarily broad survey of ancient attitudes toward deities, from the Late Bronze Age through ancient Israel and into the New Testament. Looking closely at relevant biblical texts and at their cultural contexts, Mark S. Smith demonstrates that the biblical attitude toward deities of other cultures is not uniformly negative, as is commonly supposed. He traces the historical development of Israel's "one-god worldview, " linking it to the rise of the surrounding Mesopotamian empires. Smith's study also produces evidence undermining a common modern assumption among historians of religion that polytheism is tolerant while monotheism is prone to intolerance and violence.
Download or read book Household and Family Religion in Antiquity written by John Bodel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to explore the religious dimensions of the family and the household in ancient Mediterranean and West Asian antiquity. Advances our understanding of household and familial religion, as opposed to state-sponsored or civic temple cults Reconstructs domestic and family religious practices in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Israel, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Emar, and Philistia Explores many household rituals, such as providing for ancestral spirits, and petitioning of a household's patron deities or of spirits associated with the house itself Examines lifecycle rituals – from pregnancy and birth to maturity, old age, death, and beyond Looks at religious practices relating to the household both within the home itself and other spaces, such as at extramural tombs and local sanctuaries
Download or read book Sacred Ritual written by Bryan C. Babcok and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Israelite festival calendar texts (Exod 23; 34; Lev 23; Num 28–29; Deut 16; and Ezek 45) share many features; however, there are also differences. Some of the most-often-cited differences are the following: festival dates, festival locations, date of the New Year, festival timing, and festival names. Scholars have explored these distinctions, and many have concluded that different sources (authors/redactors) wrote the various calendars at different times in Israelite history. Scholars use these dissimilarities to argue that Lev 23 was written in the exilic or postexilic era. Babcock offers a new translation and analysis of a second-millennium B.C. multimonth ritual calendar text from Emar (Emar 446) to challenge the late dating of Lev 23. Babcock argues that Lev 23 preserves an early (2nd-millennium) West Semitic ritual tradition. Building on the recent work of Klingbeil and Sparks, this book presents a new comparative methodology for exploring potential textual relationships. Babcock investigates the attributes of sacred ritual through the lens of sacred time, sacred space and movement, sacred objects, ritual participants, and ritual sound. The author begins with a study of ancient Near Eastern festival texts from the 3rd millennium through the 1st millennium. This analysis focuses on festival cycles, common festival attributes, and the role of time and space in ritual. Babcock then moves on to an intertextual study of biblical festival texts before completing a thorough investigation of both Lev 23 and Emar 446. The result is a compelling argument that Lev 23 preserves an early West Semitic festival tradition and does not date to the exilic era—refuting the scholarly consensus. This illuminating reading stands as a model for future research in the field of ritual and comparative textual studies.
Download or read book Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible written by David Noel Freedman and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-31 with total page 1506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible gathers nearly 5,000 alphabetically ordered articles that thoroughly yet clearly explain all the books, persons, places, and significant terms found in the Bible. The Dictionary also explores the background of each biblical book and related writings and discusses cultural, natural, geographical, and literary phenomenae matters that Bible students at all levels may encounter in reading or discussion. Nearly 600 first-rate Bible authorities have contributed to the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Intended as a tool for practical Bible use, this illustrated dictionary reflects recent archaeological discoveries and the breadth of current biblical scholarship, including insights from critical analysis of literary, historical, sociological, and other methodological issues. The editorial team has also incorporated articles that explore and interpret important focuses of biblical theology, text and transmission, Near Eastern archaeology, extrabiblical writings, and pertinent ecclesiastical traditions - all of which help make the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible the most comprehensive and up-to-date one-volume Bible dictionary on the market today.
Download or read book Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit written by Theodore J. Lewis and published by Harvard Semitic Monographs. This book was released on 1989 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Ugaritic Texts -- Biblical Texts -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index of Citations -- Author Index.
Download or read book The Power and Purpose of Blood in God s Design written by Cynthia Hsing-Wei Chang and published by Langham Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can Christians delve into the relationship between biblical law, narrative, and rituals to reconcile beliefs with cultural heritage? In this study, Dr. Cynthia Hsing-Wei Chang addresses the unfamiliar and impractical nature of Leviticus’s ritual teachings for Christians, particularly in the context of Chinese culture’s common practice of eating cooked blood pudding. Combining principles from biblical laws and rhetoric to distinguish Leviticus’s literary structure, this book examines well-being offerings in the Old Testament and Ugaritic sacrificial documents, and explores the meaning of blood atonement in rituals to provide a comprehensive theological response. By bridging ancient rituals and modern culture, Dr. Chang offers unique insights for cross-cultural understanding and practical guidance for those seeking to navigate cultural complexities while honoring their faith.
