T&t Clark Handbook of Anthropology and the Hebrew Bible - (T&t Clark Handbooks) by Emanuel Pfoh (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"This is an incredibly rich volume that demonstrates how insights from the various disciplines of anthropology can enrich our understanding of the biblical text." --Review of Biblical Literature

"[T&T Clark Handbook of Anthropology and the Hebrew Bible] examine[s] how the biblical stories reveal dynamics of power and authority, gender, and honor and shame, and how socio-anthropological approaches can illumine these narratives and deepen our knowledge of the human societies and cultural context of the texts." --Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

"With their roots in the ground-breaking scholarship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the likes of William Robertson Smith, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, the social sciences have made a major contribution to critical and creative biblical interpretation." --Theology

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