Böcker av Emanuel Pfoh

This handbook presents an overview of the main approaches from social and cultural anthropology to the Hebrew Bible. Since the late 19th century, biblical scholarship has addressed issues and themes related to biblical stories from a perspective which could now be considered socio-anthropological. It is however only since the 1960s that biblical scholars have started to produce readings and incorporate analytical models drawn directly from social anthropology to widen the interpretive scope of the social and historical data contained in the biblical sources. The handbook is arranged into two main thematic parts. Part 1 assesses the place of the Bible in social anthropology, examines the contribution of ethnoarchaeology to the recovery of the social world of Iron Age Palestine and offers insights from the anthropology of the Mediterranean for the interpretation of the biblical stories.Part 2 provides a series of case studies on anthropological themes arising in the Hebrew Bible. These include kinship and social organisation, death, cultural and collective memory, and ritualism. Contributors also examine how the biblical stories reveal dynamics of power and authority, gender, and honour and shame, and how socio-anthropological approaches can reveal these narratives and deepen our knowledge of the human societies and cultural context of the texts. Bringing together the expertise of scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Archaeology, this ethnographic introduction prompts new questions into our understanding of anthropology and the Bible.

Patron-client relationships have been documented and studied by anthropologists and sociologists since the 1950s. They are known in rural settings and urban locations alike, and virtually in every region of the world. But it was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that this analytical model was slowly incorporated into the socio-political interpretation of biblical texts and other ancient Near Eastern sources. The patronage model proves to be a useful interpretative tool, casting new light on many aspects of the history of Israel and of other socio-political communities in the southern Levant. Moreover, the concept of patron-client relationships clarifies many of the implicit socio-politics found in the narratives and motifs of several biblical books. This remarkable and comprehensive new reader collects over 20 studies by renowned scholars dealing with different aspects and situations of patronage: in the context of Southwest Asia (the 'Middle East') during the second millennium bce, in relation to the history of ancient Palestine during the first millennium bce, and as well with references to patron-client ties in texts of the Hebrew Bible. While these selected papers do not presume to offer an exhaustive treatment of periods, historical cases and themes in ancient Palestine and in Hebrew Bible literature, they variously illustrate the many possibilities of the concept of patronage to elucidate them.

Taking advantage of critical methodology for history-writing and the use of anthropological insights and ethnographic data from the modern Middle East, this study aims at providing various understandings on the emergence of Israel in ancient Palestine and the socio-political dynamics at work in the Levant during antiquity.