Vayyikra: It’s Sacrificetastic!
by Alex
This week marks the start of the “Book of Leviticus”:http://www.hareidi.org/bible/Leviticus1.htm#1 for all of who follow the Laws of the God of Jacob. Leviticus is one of my favorite books of the bible because of all the rich ethnography. I mean: it’s sacrificetastic! When I finished reading this week’s portion I gave a sort of self-satisfied sigh as I figured how an anthropological theory of sacrifice could make sense of a Torah portion that many Jews consider weird and unrelated to their lives. I thought to myself: “Ah, my discipline really _does_ construct models with genuine analytic ability.”
Then I pulled myself up short and realized that modern anthropological theories of sacrifice more or less originated with “William Robertson Smith’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Robertson_Smith ground-breaking work _Lecures on the Religion of the Semites_. See kids, this is why you can’t just read forty pages of Foucault and claim to be versed in ‘anthropological theory’ or produce a theoretical work on ‘global flows’ which just unknowngly recapitulates notions of ‘diffusion’ and ‘acculturation’. If you don’t have that deep knowledge of Books of Enduring Worth you’re going to end up thinking anthropology explains disused Jewish sacrificial rites when in fact it’s the other way around.
Then I thought to myself: Jeez, there’s got to be a copy of _Religion of the Semites_ online for free. And indeed, my friends, “there is”:http://www.cwru.edu/univlib/preserve/Etana/Lectures/Lectures.html. In fact, the same people who made that classic text available also have about “seven hundred”:http://lib16.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/abzu-processquery.pl?SID=&UID=&auth=&selectsearch=etana&searchstring=active&sort=alpha other “titles on the Ancient Near East”:http://lib16.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/abzu-processquery.pl?selectsearch=ebooks&searchstring=active&sort=alpha
And oh yeah, just in case you think I forgot, here’s a “little bit of Mauss and Hubert fo’ dat ass”:http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/classiques/mauss_marcel/melanges_hist_religions/t2_sacrifice/sacrifice_tdm.html
_Old School Anthropological Theory 4evar!!!!_
As I finish the first rough draft of most of my first book, the last chapter of which is centered around Lev 16, the center in time (new year) and space (temple) of the Torah (middle chapter of middle book) and Israel (renewed and redeemed), I think I might quote you on this. Fantastic!
S