This article addresses a gap in current biblical scholarship regarding food production and consumption. Using meat and beer as two brief case studies, the potential of food to symbolise and inculcate identities and status in the agro-pastoral Israelite and Judahite household will be demonstrated. A case will also be made for attributing agency to food. In particular, this method elucidates the roles and identities of various members of the household, including its animals and deities, and especially focuses on the ritual agency of women.
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Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). See also Jean Soler, ‘The Semiotics of Food in the Bible’, in Carol Counihan and Penny Van Estrik (eds.), Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 55-66.
Juliana Claasens, The God Who Provides: Biblical Images of Divine Nourishment (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004).
Ken Stone, Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective (London: T & T Clark, 2005), p. 7.
Nathan MacDonald, Not Bread Alone: The Uses of Food in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); David E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repast: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001).
Andrew T. Abernathy, Eating in Isaiah: Approaching the Role of Food and Drink in Isaiah’s Structure and Message (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
Peter Altmann, Festive Meals in Ancient Israel: Deuteronomy’s Identity Politics in their Ancient Near Eastern Context (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011).
Karel Van Der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (London: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 1-2.
Cynthia Shafer Elliot, Food in Ancient Judah: Domestic Cooking in the Time of the Bible (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013).
For example Carol Meyers, ‘Having Their Space and Eating There Too: Bread Production and Female Power in Ancient Israelite Households’, Nashim, 5 (2002), pp. 14-44; Carol Meyers, ‘Material Remains and Social Relations: Women’s Culture in Agrarian Households of the Iron Age’, in W.G. Dever and S. Gitin (eds.), Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), pp. 425-44; Carol Meyers, ‘Household Religion’, in Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton (eds.) Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (London: T & T Clark, 2010), pp. 118-34.
Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); See also Carol Meyers, Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005).
Carey Ellen Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000).
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 71.
Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 72. For the attribution of agency to inanimate objects in archaeological discourse, see, for example, Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, Art’s Agency and Art History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); L. Malafouris, and Colin Renfrew, The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (Cambridge: McDonald Institute, 2010).
L. Foxhall and H.A. Forbes, ‘Sitometreia: The Role of Grain as a Staple Food in Classical Antiquity’, Chiron 12 (1982), pp. 41-90; Magen Broshi, Bread, Wine, Walls and Scrolls (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), p. 123.
Simon J.M. Davis, The Archaeology of Animals (London: Batsford, 1987), p. 155; Aref Abu Rabia, The Negev Bedouin and Livestock Rearing (Oxford: Berg, 1994), pp. 75, 77, 85-86.
Roland Boer, The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), p. 93.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (trans. Patrick Gregory; Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977); Walter Burkett, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (trans. Peter Bing; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 36.
Jeremy Geller, ‘Bread and Beer in Fourth-Millennium Egypt’, Food and Foodways 5 (1993), pp. 255-67 (259); Michael M. Homan, ‘Beer and Its Drinkers: An Ancient Near Eastern Love Story’, Near Eastern Archaeology 67 (2004), pp. 84-95 (84); Robert I. Curtis, Ancient Food Technology (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 219.
Ebeling, ‘The Contribution of Archaeology’, p.390; Homan, ‘Beer and Its Drinkers’, p. 84.
Judith M. Bennet, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 17.
Kate Crehan, ‘Women and Development in North Western Zambia: From Producer to Housewife’, Review of African Political Economy 10 (1983), pp. 51-66 (62).
Ian S. Hornsey, A History of Beer and Brewing (Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2003) pp. 51-55, 79-80.
Geller, ‘Bread and Beer,’ p. 263; Ram Gophna and D. Gazit, ‘The First Dynasty Egyptian Residency at ‘En Besor’, Tel Aviv 12 (1984), pp. 9-16 (12-13). See also Marie-Henriette Gates, ‘Dialogues between Ancient near Eastern Texts and the Archaeological Record: Test Cases from Bronze Age Syria’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 270 (1988), pp. 63-91 (66-67); and Hornsey, Beer and Brewing, p. 80.
Tim Unwin, Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography of Viticulture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 49.
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This article addresses a gap in current biblical scholarship regarding food production and consumption. Using meat and beer as two brief case studies, the potential of food to symbolise and inculcate identities and status in the agro-pastoral Israelite and Judahite household will be demonstrated. A case will also be made for attributing agency to food. In particular, this method elucidates the roles and identities of various members of the household, including its animals and deities, and especially focuses on the ritual agency of women.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 596 | 108 | 10 |
Full Text Views | 316 | 11 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 415 | 32 | 3 |