Ritual Text and Ritual Practice

A persistent challenge in my research is articulating the precise relationship between biblical texts about ritual and actual religious practice in ancient Israel. Text and Ritual in the Pentateuch: A Systematic and Comparative Approach (co-edited with Christophe Nihan) constitutes the first scholarly attempt to systematically map the conceptual and methodological issues that concern the study of text and ritual in the Pentateuch. 

The volume offers new insights by contrasting biblical evidence with ritual texts from Assyria, Anatolia, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece, while also using archaeology and reception history to discern the distance between what the Pentateuch prescribes and what ancient Israelites and Jews practiced in reality.

My essay, “The Reception of Ritual Laws in the Early Second Temple Period: The Evidence of Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles” examines three cases in which ritual law is cited in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles, arguing that Second Temple scribes used the Pentateuch as a guide for how ritual action should be ideally configured. Yet, these scribes did not treat the ritual laws of the Pentateuch in a rigidly prescriptive manner. They rather treated them as providing exemplars of ritual action that were compatible with innovation and able to be negotiated with respect to other authorities, be they written or customary.

My other publications that address the complex dynamics between ritual text and ritual practice include:

• Two pieces, “Ritual Text and Ritual Practice: Some Remarks on Ezra-Sanctuary Slaughter in Leviticus” and “The Prohibition of Local Butchery in Leviticus 17:3–4: The Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls” in which I explore the interpretive issues raised by Leviticus 17—the law forbidding the practice of butchery anywhere besides the temple—and argue that ritual law, somewhat paradoxically, did not need to be practicable in order to be considered normative.
• My long essay “Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: The State of the Discussion and Future Perspectives” (co-authored with Christophe Nihan), meanwhile, reimagines the relationship between the biblical purity texts and actual purity rites in ancient Israel and early Judaism.
• My article “Ritual Textualization in the Priestly Traditions of the Hebrew Bible and Late Babylonian Priestly Literature” (co-authored with Céline Debourse)  provides the first detailed comparison of the Priestly rituals texts of the Pentateuch and the Late Babylonian temple ritual texts, highlighting several distinctive features they shared in common. These similarities support the theory that the textualization of ritual in the Priestly traditions was inspired by similar historical dynamics to those that informed the textualization of ritual in the Late Babylonian materials; namely, the cultic disruption caused by foreign imperial interference and temple destruction, and the resultant challenges of rebuilding the temple in the absence of a local king with a stake in the cultic restoration.