Somewhere Under the Rainbow: Noah's Altar and the Archaeology of Cult in Ancient Israel

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents ..................................................................................... v

Tables and Illustrations ......................................................................... vii Acknowledgments ................................................................................... xi Abbreviations ......................................................................................... xiii

Noah’s Flood as Myth and Reception: An Introduction ................... 1

Jason M. Silverman

It’s all in the Name: Reading the Noah Cycle in the Light of its Plot Markers ................................................... 31

Elizabeth Harper

Sifting the Debris: Calendars and Chronologies of the Flood Narrative .................................................................. 57

Philippe Guillaume

Flood Calendars and Birds of the Ark in the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q252 and 4Q254a), Septuagint, and Ancient Near East Texts .................................. 85

Helen R. Jacobus

“Woven of Reeds”: Genesis 6:14b as Evidence for the Preservation of the Reed-Hut Urheiligtum in the Biblical Flood Narrative .................................................. 113

Jason Michael McCann

Major Literary Traditions Involved in the Making of Mesopotamian Flood Traditions ......................................... 141

Y. S. Chen

It’s a Craft! It’s a Cavern! It’s a Castle! Yima’s Vara, Iranian Flood Myths, and Jewish Apocalyptic Traditions ........................................... 191

Jason M. Silverman

Flood Stories in 1 Enoch 1–36: Diversity, Unity, and Ideology ..... 231

Ryan E. Stokes

vi OPENING HEAVEN’S FLOODGATES

Somewhere Under The Rainbow: Noah’s Altar and the Archaeology of Cult in Ancient Israel ....................... 249

Dermot Nestor

“Go-4-Wood”: The Reception of Noah’s Ark in Ark Replicas .... 291

Paul Brian Thomas

Comparative Theology and the Flood Narrative: The Image of God ....................................................................... 325

Máire Byrne

The Deluge, Written Differently: André Chouraqui’s Distinctive Rendering of the Flood Narrative (Genesis 6:5–9:17) .......... 345

Murray Watson

The Flood of Genesis: Myth and Logos. A Philosophical Examination .................................................... 369

J. Haydn Gurmin

Wicked Hearts, Grieving Heart: The Musical Afterlife of the “Flood Narrative” in the Nineteenth Century ............ 399

Siobhán Dowling Long

After Me, the Rapture: Eschatological Rhetoric and the Genesis Flood narrative in Contemporary Cinema ........................................................... 433

Egon D. Cohen and Rivka T. Cohen

Environmental Perspectives on the Genesis Flood Narrative ...... 461

Cathriona Russell

The Flood Narrative: A Polysemy of Promises ............................... 487

Amy Daughton

Responses: A Response (I) ...................................................................................... 511

Walter Brueggemann

Inundated ............................................................................................... 521

Philip Davies

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SOMEWHERE UNDER THE RAINBOW:

NOAH’S ALTAR

AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF CULT

IN ANCIENT ISRAEL

DERMOT NESTOR

AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT

This paper takes the mention of Noah’s ark in Gen 8:20 as a test case examining archaeological efforts to reconstruct ritual and religious practice as it pertains to ancient Israel. Drawing on recent work in the discipline of archaeology which seek to reassert the materiality of archaeological remains, it seeks to illustrate how the dominance of textual metaphors and models serves to limit our understanding of how religion was actually experienced in the past. Overcoming this “tyranny of the text” will allow for a richer, more holistic appreciation of the manifold ways that things influence rather than simply reflect particular belief systems.

“… close your eyes, tap your heels together three times and

think to yourself; there’s no place like home …”

—Wizard of Oz

I

In stark contrast to the near hysteric levels of anticipation that have accompanied archaeological expeditions in search of Noah’s fabled ark, interest in the altar upon which he offered sacrifice to Yahweh following the life-threatening crisis of the deluge (Gen 8:20) has

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been of the more restrained variety. The ark of course constitutes one of the most highly prized artifacts of a biblically inspired archaeology and since the early Church Fathers its location and discovery has ignited the passions of a motley crew of diplomats, geologists, former astronauts, and TV evangelists.1 While the fact that little beyond “solitude, silence, and snow”2 awaited these exhausted pilgrims would appear to confirm the old adage of love before first sight, the enduring vitality of such endeavors testifies to a narcissism, if not neurosis, of an altogether different and more familiar variety.

In launching their crusading assaults on “the forbidden mountain,” these modern day “ark-eologists”3 are doing nothing more than attempting to realize Alt’s prophetic claim that biblical archaeology was the “(as yet inadequate) primary source necessary to put the history of Israel’s origins onto a sound footing.”4 Cloaked in the veneer of its scientific credentials it was archaeology that was destined to conjure up the “feet of clay” which might anchor the Biblical claims of Israelite history and religion. The archaeologist’s spade, transfigured from instrumentum mutum to instrumentum vocale, was what would elevate the biblical narratives from the realm of allegory to authorized citations of historical fact. The Holy Grail that allegedly awaited was ample justification and abundant reward for those who clung faithfully to and defended the “doctrine.”

Although they certainly suffer the pillorying and gasps of incredulous disbelief that appears to be the universal fate of all who preach an unfashionable creed, the shared conviction of these “raiders” in the revelatory powers of archaeology brings into particular focus two questions that have plagued the discipline of biblical studies since its very inception: the identification of artifacts that relate to a distinctive Israelite identity and the isolation of the

1 Corbin, The Explorers of Ararat. See also, Pleins, When the Great Abyss Opened.

2 Pleins, When the Great Abyss Opened, 9. 3 Ibid. 10. 4 Thompson, “Review of The Archaeology of the Israelite

Settlement,” 322.

SOMEWHERE UNDER THE RAINBOW 251

material correlates of its religious behavior. Though they are necessarily related questions and ones which impact upon each other in a variety of ways, it is the latter of the two that is of explicit concern to this paper, namely the identification of Israelite religious activity in the material culture of Palestine.5

II

And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every

clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt

offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour;

and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the

ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s

heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more

everything living, as I have done. (Gen 8:20–22)

Harsh indeed is the evil inclination (b. Kid 30b) that even the purifying power of the deluge could not cleanse it. Having found grace in the eyes of the Lord (Gen 6: 8) however, Noah and his select cargo and crew now emerge from the apocryphal ark (תבה)6 to give praise to God for their salvation. For this purpose Noah builds an altar (מזבח), and sacrifices upon it a whole offering from amongst the clean animals and birds that sheltered 7(עלה)aboard the ark. While the anthropomorphic language that attributes to Yahweh sensations of satisfaction and contentment clearly echo the older Mesopotamian versions of the “flood myth,” the only form of consumption that takes place here is by fire. Of this particular act of piety nothing more is said and having returned to

5 On the question of Israelite ethnicity and its archaeological recovery

see most recently, Nestor, Cognitive Perspectives; Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis;

Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity. 6 The Hebrew word for “ark” (תבה) occurs only twice in the entire

Hebrew Bible; here in Gen 6:14 and again in Exod 2:3 where it refers to

the receptacle in which Moses’s mother Jochebed (Num 26:59) placed

him to save him from the infanticide ordered by Pharaoh. It is interesting,

however, that on both occasions the use of the term is connected with

salvation from water. 7 In terms of narrative development, this is the first occurrence of the

term עלה within the Hebrew Bible.

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the toil of an agricultural life that was his father’s occupation before him (Gen 5:28–29), Noah proceeds to succumb to the pleasures of the grape (Gen 9:21).

Although one can assume on the basis of the actions of Cain and Abel (Gen 4:3–5) that the edifice constructed by Noah on which to offer his sacrifice was, arguably, not the first altar, nor indeed the last,8 the lack of specific detail surrounding this paradigmatic event serves only to amplify the vagaries that have long defined any archaeology of religious practice. Indeed a straightforward reading of the biblical account of Noah’s actions would appear to offer us very little basis on which to proceed at all. For example, we know very little of the nature and significance of the particular ritual he undertook; we are provided with no description of the edifice upon which this ritual was undertaken; and we have very little by way of direction as to where this took event place. In terms of material evidence for religious activity then, there would appear to be very little beyond smoke and ash. Compounding such difficulties is, of course, the perennial question of the nature of our primary source material, the Hebrew Bible, and its relationship to any archaeological enterprise.

The Hebrew Bible presents to its reader a very clear, if not schematic, outline of the history of Israelite religion as something whose origins are to be found in a sequence of historical events and divine revelations which defined it as the “people of God.”9 Within that narrative, the foundations of the nation are seen to lay in its relationship with the one God, Yahweh. Other gods there may well have been, and into the worship of these the Israelites may well have succumbed, but in the eyes of the biblical authors this was, and is always presented as, apostasy. While this image of singular allegiance to its founding deity may well seek to define Israel over and against its wholly polytheistic neighbors whose

8 The biblical text goes on to attribute the construction and or renewal

of altars to several figures including Abraham (Gen 12:7; 13:4; 22:3), Isaac

(Gen 26:23), Jacob (Gen 33:29; 35:1,3), Moses (Exod 17:15), Solomon

(2 Chr 4:1; 1 Kgs 8:22, 64; 9:25), Asa (2 Chr 15:8), Ahaz (2 Kgs 16:14),

Hezekiah (2 Chr 29) and Ezra (Ezra 3:3–6). 9 Mayes, “Kuntillet ‘Arjud,” 51.


passions and desires found expression in the worship of various deities, this biblical presentation can, only with a serious loss of understanding, be equated with a history of Israelite religion.

This cautionary note is based primarily on the increasingly late dating of much of the biblical literature along with the recognition that these documents constitute partial, often fractured, perceptions on the nature of past societies as opposed to objective, absolute statements of the von Ranke variety.10 Rather than submit to the testimony of “those whose lives were as short and short lived as our own,”11 the minimalist orientation to the Bible pioneered by scholars such as Davies,12 Whitelam,13 Lemche,14 and Thompson15 amongst others, sought to rouse the discipline of biblical studies from its long, self-enforced, theoretical slumber. While certain elements of their critique can be seen traced to the “higher criticism” initially championed within Wellhausen’s Prolegomena,16 the true value of the critical brand of historiography they inaugurated has been to drive that discipline towards what Moore has referred to as a “hyper-focus on methodology.”17 As a slew of publications suggest,18 the desire to move beyond mere description of what happened in an effort to ask why it happened has forced scholars to engage in a critical revaluation of the various

10 von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen, vii. 11 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 21. 12 Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel; idem, Scribes and Scrolls; idem, The

Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures; idem, Whose Bible is it Anyway?; idem,

Memories of Ancient Israel. 13 Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel. See also, Coote and

Whitelam, The Emergence of Israel. 14 Lemche, Early Israel; The Israelites. 15 Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives; idem, Early

History of the Israelite People; idem, The Mythic Past. 16 Wellhausen, Prolegomena. 17 Moore, “Beyond Minimalism.” 18 As examples of this methodological focus, Bishop Moore cites the

following; Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know; Grabbe, Ancient Israel; Matthews, Studying the Ancient Israelites; Williamson, Understanding the History of Ancient Israel; Barstad, History and the Hebrew Bible.

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sources at their disposal; archaeological and epigraphic remains, yes, but first and foremost, the Hebrew Bible itself. While there is certainly no comfortable consensus to be found amongst the various scholars who question whether, when, and occasionally how, the biblical text is to be utilized in historical reconstruction, if indeed it is to be considered “history” at all, the rigor and occasional rancor of their efforts testifies to an enduring legacy that has served to recast some of the more fundamental questions within the discipline.

Not to be confused with the somewhat anodyne, rhetorical and oft-repeated question that has defined much of Dever’s sprawling œuvre,19 this enterprise embodies a wholly reflexive orientation that asks as much of the scholar as it does the particular evidence he or she might wish to marshal in support of any particular reconstruction. Within the context of a discipline that has long steered a course between the Scylla of “biblical theology” and the Charybdis that is a narcissistic denial of all truth, the imperative of reflexivity20 is not to be understood as the relentless self-questioning of method in the very movement whereby it is implemented.21 On the contrary it aims to expose, if not control, the concepts, methods and problematics inherited as a consequence of one’s specific location within the academic field and the levels of censorship exercised by disciplinary and institutional attachments. While such “surveillance of the third degree”22 has proven highly successful in overcoming (though not completely exorcizing) the personal invective that occasionally diminishes the significance of any debate, in raising questions about the nature of analysis in biblical studies, minimalism also calls into question the very unit of analysis itself: “Israel.”

19 The sub-title of Dever’s contribution to edited volume by Silberman

and Small, The Archaeology of Israel, says more than enough on this point:

Dever, “Philology, Theology and Archaeology.” 20 Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne”; idem, Leçon sur la leçon;

idem, Homo Academicus; idem, The Logic of Practice. 21 Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. 22 Bachelard, Le Rationnalisme appliqué, 77–78.


In many ways it was the publication of Davies’s In Search of Ancient Israel that served to ignite this particularly incendiary topic. Self-consciously styled as an attempt to inaugurate a paradigm shift in the discipline, Davies’s thesis is framed by the deceptively simple, yet equally complex notion that what the biblical text refers to as “Israel” is nothing other than a literary construct, a fiction created by a scribal elite in Persian Yehud with the explicit aim of enforcing and legitimating social, political, religious, and ethnic boundaries.23 Standing in opposition to this “biblical Israel” is “historical Israel,” an Iron Age state of less than two centuries duration that “existed in the northern and central Palestinian highlands.”24 Straddling these false antinomies, and wedding them together in an unholy and self-fulfilling alliance between a constructivist phenomenology of cognitive forms and an objectivist physics of material structures, is “ancient Israel.” While Davies’s identification of this scholarly construct as indicative of an “uncontrolled conflation of social and sociological … [or] folk and analytical understandings,”25 constitutes a significant insight, it is one that has remained largely under-theorized in much recent scholarship.

As a construct however, “Ancient Israel” is not simply to be read as an illustration of the degree to which scholars remain devoted to the “semiotic integrity”26 of the biblical text, but rather the extent to which the “linguistic proclivity to favor substance at the expense of relations”27 has permeated both popular and academic discourse. It is this “primary inclination to think the

23 This thesis was further developed by E. Theodore Mullen Jr. in

Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, and Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries. See also Van Seters, Prologue to History; Blum, Studien.

24 Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel, 16. 25 Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination.” See also,

Schegloff, “On Integrity in Enquiry.” 26 Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 6. See also, Sign, Text, Scripture;

Aichele, Miscall and Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room.” 27 Wacquant and Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 15. See

also, Cassirer, “The Influence of Language.”

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world in a substantialist manner”28 which has not only conditioned generations of scholars to submit to the manifest charm of “biblical Israel” as an ontological entity, but to consistently and uncritically accept that “commonsensical” presentation as a frame for their own analysis. As Brubaker has pointed out, this is a deeply entrenched tendency in social analysis and also in moral and political theory that is not just analytically disabling but politically constricting.29 Thus, while the literary account of “biblical Israel” may well be an important resource, especially given the repeated imperative to avail of all the evidence, it is the repeated failure to engineer a break with such familiar, received understandings of everyday life, one’s own and/or those of one’s informants, that inevitably leads research towards fundamentally illusory goals and explanations. Although the heuristic potential of Davies’s tripartite identification has not been lost on recent scholarship,30 it has long been noted that challenges to the biblical meta-narrative of Israelite historical and religious development exist, albeit covertly, within the biblical text itself.

For all of its feverish determination to promote the history of Israel and its religious traditions as one founded upon and representative of a covenant faith in the one God Yahweh, and centered on the one place, Jerusalem, the Hebrew Bible acknowledges that there were variations on, and deviations from, this “national religion.” Indeed in many ways it is the abiding legacy of Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis that such transformations have come to light, whatever one is to make of the manner in which he interpreted them. Aside from the various names by which the god of Israel was known (Gen 1:1; Gen 7:1; Gen 49:24; Exod 3:14), we witness such noble characters as the patriarchs worshipping, without reproach, at a variety of sanctuaries and altars

28 Wacquant and Bourdieu, Invitation, 228. See Nestor, Cognitive Perspectives for a thorough explication.

29 Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups. Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond

‘Identity’”; Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition.” 30 See in particular, Liverani, Israel’s History.


(Gen 12:7; 13:18; 14:17–20; 28:8–20; 33:8–10);31 we are informed how the ark of the covenant itself rotated between a series of successive sites (Josh 24; 1 Sam 7:15; Judg 18:31; 20:1–2; 21:2–3; 1 Sam 7:1–2); and also how, during the period of the monarchy itself, religious practice was, for a long time, conducted at a variety of locations other than Jerusalem and not all of which were associated with Yahweh (1 Sam 15:12–15; 20:6; 21:1–6; 2 Sam 5:1–5; 21:6; Amos 8:14; Hos 10; 1 Kgs 18; 2 Kgs 10; Jer 7:12). Even the names bestowed by leading biblical figures such as Saul upon their children (1 Sam 14:51; 2 Sam 2:8; 21:8) are, at the very least, to be read as indicative of an attachment to non-Yahwistic religious practices.32 It is largely in recognition of this internal biblical dialogue that much recent scholarship speaks of the religions rather than religion of Israel or indeed Judah.

While in many ways such developments serve to epitomize Voltaire’s critique of French history as one populated solely by “kings, ministers and generals,”33 they also testify to an increasingly nuanced engagement with the idea that whatever else it may be, “religion is as much practice as it is the theoretical formulation of the meaning of that practice.”34 Understood as something through which individuals and communities seek to relate themselves to the transcendent, then, scholarly reconstructions of “religion,” and specifically, “Israelite religion” have come to place increasing importance on the diversity of social levels and locales through which this activity may have taken place. Thus, in addition to the national saving history or Heilsgeschichte of Israel whose practice the text firmly and unambiguously seeks to anchor in the environs of

31 While as Edelman has observed, there is never an explicit account

of sacrifice being offered at any of these altars, one is left with the

question as to why an altar was erected at all if only an invocation of name

”,was involved? Edelman, “Cultic Sites and Complexes (קרא בשם יהוה)

83. 32 On the general issue of personal piety as expressed through names

see most recently, Albertz, “Personal Piety.” 33 Cited by Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 178. 34 Mayes, “Kuntillet ‘Arjud’,” 57. See also, Stavrakopoulou and Barton,

“Introduction,” 1.

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the Jerusalem temple, scholars have come to acknowledge the significance of modes of religious expression that in many ways are uncoordinated with or unrelated to the salient features of this “national” version. While such studies on the varied social locations of worshippers have brought into critical focus the significance and particulars of familial35 even individual modes religious practice,36 such diversity also functions to undermine any simplistic dichotomy such as has been hypothesized between “Israelite” and “Canaanite”37 or indeed “official” and “popular” religion.38 In illustrating how the religions of Israel and Judah are most profitably understood as dynamic, polysemic entities, studies such as those by Mark S. Smith embrace a “bottom up mode of analysis” to demonstrate how this demonstrably endemic pluralism impacted upon the developing monolatrous or monotheistic Yahwism that comes to expression in the national myth. Within the context of a two sided process of convergence and differentiation, identification and rejection39 which seeks to challenge the syncretistic lens through which much Israelite religious activity has been understood, Smith continuously presses home the image of Yahwism as emerging from within and through rather than wholly against the polytheism that defined Israelite culture. While Yahweh may well have been the “God of Israel” from its earliest days, as Smith’s detailed studies illustrate, it was sometime before Israel was to become the people of Yahweh.40 It is this spectral understanding of Israelite religion then,41 as something which took a multiplicity

35 Meyers, Households and Holiness. See also, the various contributions in

Bodel and Olyan (eds.), Household and Family Religion. 36 Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion and also Persönliche Frömmigkeit. 37 Lemche, The Canaanites and their Land. Del Olmo Lete, “La religion

cananéenne. ” Niehr, “‘Israelite Religion’.” 38 Ackerman, Under Every Green Tree; Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion;

Berlinerblau, The Vow; Matsushima (ed.), Official Cult and Popular Religion. 39 Smith, The Early History of God, xxiii. Cited in Mayes, “Kuntillet

‘Arjud’,” 65. 40 Mayes, “The Emergence of Monotheism in Israel,” 26. 41 Smith, Early History, xxvii; See also, Stavrakopoulou and Barton,

“Introduction,” 7.


of forms, in a variety of locations and was practiced by all strata of society in respect of a multitude of deities that furnishes the landscape upon which much recent archaeological investigation has been conducted.

III

The archaeological study of the land of Israel constitutes one of the most time-honored traditions of excavation and scholarly enquiry in any region of the world. While a historical interest in the region in the sense of the exploration of biblical topography and antiquities goes back to the earliest pilgrim’s reports of the Byzantine period, it was only with the disintegration of the Ottoman empire towards the end of the nineteenth century that the region became an attractive target for economic, political and cultural penetration from the West.42 Throughout this period, archaeological exploration, along with health, education, missionary work, and civil engineering projects, became one of a number of highly visible European endeavors in the “Holy Land.” Despite the multiplicity of agendas and national competitions that played themselves out in this early phase,43 from its inception, archaeological work in the region was driven by a primary concern to furnish material evidence of specifically Israelite religious practice/s, and thus “Israelite” presence.

Despite the near universal prestige of, and fascination with, religious artifacts, the task of identifying religion and religious behavior in the archaeological record is no easy task. Quite simply, on what basis does one attribute to one pit of animal bones and assorted artifacts the title of “refuse,” and to another that of “ritual deposit”? When, and by what criteria, can one legitimately elevate

42 Though no full-scale history of this branch of archaeology has yet

been written, reviews of the historical development of the discipline

before, during and after this watershed period can be found in Frendo,

Pre-Exilic Israel; Cline, Biblical Archaeology; Davis, Shifting Sands; Silberman,

Digging for God and Country; Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology. 43 See for example, Trigger, “Alternative Archaeologies”; Shavit,

“Archaeology, Political”; Elon, The Israelis; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots; idem, “Transhistorical Encounter.”

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one group of terracotta figurines to the status of “idols,” while simultaneously dismissing a similar collection as mere “children’s toys”?44 While responses to such questions have more often than not often served to expose what Kent Flannery once caricatured as the “split personality”45 of the archaeological fieldworker, it is a syndrome that he attributes quite clearly to the lack of any “coherent and consistent theoretical framework by means of which ritual or religious data can be interpreted.”46 It is this caveat that the doyen of British archaeology, Colin Renfrew, sought to address in the published results of his detailed excavations at the late Bronze Age town of Phylakopi on the Aegean island of Melos. In seeking to navigate a path between the extreme optimism and/or naïve empathy that has characterized much archaeological inference on matters of religion, Renfrew plotted what amounts to an effective check-list of archaeological correlates by which a particular area or site can legitimately be deemed “sacred.” Although he cautions against several obvious pitfalls in the employment of this “list,” particularly the fatal error of translating as “religious” expressive actions and behaviors that may have been entirely secular in intention,47 his admittedly selective list of behavioral correlates has attained near canonical status within the discipline and furnishes the template by which virtually all archaeological excavation in Israel concerned with the phenomenon of “cult” has been undertaken.48

The logistical difficulties and financial constraints that limit full-scale excavation at any one site have certainly curtailed any exploration of religious activity in ancient Israel that might hope to

44 Renfrew, The Archaeology of Cult, 2. Katz, The Archaeology of Cult, 1. 45 Flannery (ed.), The Early American Mesoamerican Village, 331. 46 Ibid. 331. 47 Renfrew, The Archaeology of Cult, 20. 48 See for example; Katz, The Archaeology of Cult, 82–83; Nakhai,

Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel, 35–36; Hess, Israelite Religion;

Levy, Archaeology, Anthropology and Cult; See also, Levy (ed.) Archaeology of Society, 331 where he states, “… most researchers have intuitively followed

criteria similar to those proposed by Renfrew …”


anchor the lordly claims of Jeremiah (Jer 11:13).49 Notwithstanding such obstacles however, archaeologists have proceeded to uncover a rich variety of cultic spaces and assemblages that map well the diversity of practice alluded to earlier. While it is certainly beyond the scope of this paper to provide detailed analysis of each and every element within the “known social realities of [ancient] Israelite religion,”50 it is nevertheless pertinent to explore certain elements within that nested matrix that have a particular bearing upon the discussion to hand. Given that it is the actions of Noah that lend to this paper both its title and analytical focus, it is entirely legitimate that such discussion begin with the topic of altars.

Defined universally within the biblical text as מזבח, the morphology of the term does not accurately reflect the activity that took place upon it. Rather than a “place of slaughter” (Gen 13:4) these altars are simply “manufactured solid based installation[s] or artifact[s] upon which something is burnt for, or displayed before, or presented to a deity.”51 While Zevit naturally draws heavily upon the biblical text, specifically Exod 20:24–6, for a specification of the materials permitted in the construction of a מזבח, as well as the nature of any sacrifice conducted upon it, neither shape nor scale is specified in this particular piece of legislation. Given the fact that such altars are imagined as being used by someone who must scale the artifice to engage in their selected activity (Exod 20:26), Zevit engages in a series of calculations to conclude that altars such as that discovered at Arad had a minimum height of 75 cm, with each side of the square being no less than 200cm in length thus revealing a surface area anywhere between 3.1 and 4.4 m2; ample scope, he

49 Edelman, “Cultic Sites and Complexes,” 90. 50 Zevit, “False Dichotomies,” 233. As Stavrakopoulou notes

however, despite the appeal of Zevit’s deconstruction of the dichotomy

he describes, his appeal to a nested hierarchy of social forms which is

itself drawn from the Biblical text (Josh 7:13–14) serves to only expose

the degree to which his analysis is indebted to a uncritical adherence to

the “biblical portrayals of social stratification…as discernible historical

realities.” Stavrakopoulou, “‘Popular’ Religion and ‘Official’,” 48. 51 Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 276.

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claims, for burning a large herd animal.52 While the location of the Arad altar raises certain questions about the practicalities of its intended use,53 a range of altar styles, from the four-horned variety found at Beer-Sheba to the many smaller horned, hornless,54 and/or rimmed forms discovered at sites such as Dan, Kadesh and Lachish testify to the widespread practice of multiple sacrificial rites and rituals, often with different objectives which, more often than not, were directed towards or in the service of deities other than Yahweh.55 As to whether any stylistic differences, such as that between square and round altars, can be equated with a particular deity, or whether the horns themselves were solely decorative as opposed to necessarily cultic is a question which, for Zevit, any answer long ago disappeared.56

Though they are never mentioned in biblical sources,57 ceramic stands constitute a significant percentage of the cultic paraphernalia unearthed throughout the land of Israel. Dating from the Late Bronze period onwards, such items, which include the “fenestrated” and “plain” styles, in short or tall form, in many cases, though certainly not all, constitute the primary cultic implement at the site of their discovery.58 While such loci of

52 Ibid. 279–280. 53 Ibid. 298–301 54 Against Gitin’s evolutionary interpretation, Zevit argues that the

presence or absence of horns, especially in respect of the smaller altars is

best explained in terms of cultic function. Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 308; See also, Seymour Gitin, “Incense Altars.”

55 The small “low built” altar discovered in the “altar room” at Dan

provides a clear illustration of this point. On the basis of comparative

analysis with similar styles attributed to the Geometric and Archaic

periods in Greece, it is assumed this “altar” relates to a chthonic rather

than celestial deity. See Grintz, “Do Not Eat on the Blood.” 56 Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 347. 57 See however, Na’aman, “King Mesha and the Foundation of the

Moabite Monarchy”; Beck, “The Ta’anach Cult Stands.” 58 This is the case with respect to ‘Ai, the Jerusalem “cult cave” and

Hazor. On ‘Ai see, Amiran and Perrot, “A Cult Vessel”. On the Jerusalem

cult cave see, Kenyon, “Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961”; idem,


discovery, which range from households and temples to graveyards, are not always determinative of an unambiguous cultic association,59 what is significant about such stands is the decoration. Aside from the basic shape, size, and placement of the fenestrations which can be interpreted as indicative of either local stylistic preferences and/or highly symbolic and coded arrangements, the stands discovered at Ta’anach, Megiddo, and also at Jerusalem display a variety of motifs, icons, and figures that are particularly interesting. Including sphinxes, cherubs, bulls, goats, lions, palm trees, winged sun discs and, on the smaller Ta’anach stand discovered by Lapp in 1968,60 a naked, splay-legged woman, the iconography of these stands is representative not simply of a widely known and widely attested symbolic register, but one which is clearly indicative of divine forms other than Yahweh.

Whether this disputed female figure61 is to be understood, even minimally, as a consort of Yahweh is perhaps an overly optimistic interpretation,62 the concern with fertility marked by these stands directs our attention towards another collection of finds indicative of religious practice in ancient Israel: the model shrines. By no means unique to the region,63 and often stylistically similar to the cult stands mentioned above, these model shrines, it is claimed, are indicative of a “wholly different theology”64 than

“Excavations in Jerusalem, 1967.”; idem, Digging Up Jerusalem; Eshel, “The

Functional Character of the Two Jerusalem Groups”; On Hazor see, Ben-

Tor, “Tel Hazor, 1996”; Ben-Tor and Ben-Ami, “Hazor and the

Archaeology of the Tenth Century B.C.E.” 59 Eshel is adamant that the pottery found at the Jerusalem “cult-cave”

(which, in addition to many bowls, jugs, cooking pots and lamps, includes

horse and rider figurines, human figurines, miniature chairs, and various

animal figurines and even a rattle) is largely domestic in nature. Eshel, “The

Functional Character of the Two Jerusalem Groups.” 60 Lapp, “The 1968 Excavations at Tell Ta’annek.” 61 Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 34; Hestrin, “The Cult Stand

From Ta’anach.” 62 Cf Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 324. 63 See for example, Epstein, “Temple Models and their Symbolism.” 64 Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 340.

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that which prevailed at the major cultic centers and/or temples. Although such an interpretation may be valid on the basis of the largely, though not exclusively, domestic nature of the finds themselves, the conventional decorative elements which ordained these shrines, in addition to the various often humanoid figurines and vessels often found with them, do serve to challenge any notion of widespread aniconic worship in the land of Israel.65

Some scholars have sought to establish a direct relationship between such miniature or model shrines and full-scale versions on the basis of a claim that the former can be understood as an attempt to replicate a particular example of the latter.66 While this is perhaps ultimately unverifiable, the geographic and chronological dispersion of these models is again indicative of a mode of religious behavior that can only enrich our understanding of a diversity that the Hebrew Bible seeks to disguise, if not eliminate.

As Albertz has variously demonstrated, this veil of biblical orthodoxy falls heaviest on the most limited level of piety and religious practice, that of the individual. Amongst the many assemblages found in private houses, which include the cult stands and model shrines mentioned above, it is those amulets thoroughly marked by Egyptian influence that constitute perhaps the most significant finds. Though they take the form of scarabs, seals and/or anthropomorphic figures, as Herrmann has noted these amulets reveal a very restricted acquaintance with the Egyptian pantheon.67 Variously termed as שביסים and שהרנים in the Hebrew Bible (Isa 3:18–20), and denounced by Ezekiel as גלולים (Ezek 14:3; 20:7),68 these amulets reflect a concern for divine protection from and defense against either the various misfortunes that might befall individuals through life, or, from specific forms of

65 See however, Cullican, “A Terracotta Shrine”; On the

representation of deities in general see, Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry. 66 Masuda, “Terracotta House Models.” 67 Herrmann, Ägyptische Amulette. 68 Though based on the stem גלל, meaning “to roll, or to be round,”

this term, which occurs variously in Lev 26:10, Deut 29:16 and 2 Kgs

17:12 is best translated with reference to the noun from which it is

derived, gālāl or gillūl, meaning “dung.”


harmful magic.69 While it is thus assumed that the function of such amulets in an Israelite context differed from the primarily identifying function they held in Egypt, as Zevit has noted, the fact that “Israelites” may have found them “charming, perhaps meaningful”70 does not provide definitive proof of their “cultic association.”

This important caveat notwithstanding, the piety reflected by such artifacts is echoed by a host of other discoveries throughout the land of Israel. Ranging from the many stylized figurines of nude women attested at sites such as Tell en-Nabesh, Tell Beit Mirsim, Beth Shean and Megiddo,71 to the incense burners/stands that populate many domestic structures,72 “religion” was something that occupied people outside of the various “centers” and shrines that populate the landscape. Even these centers, which include such well documented examples as the “Bull Site” discovered near Dothan in Samaria,73 the many במות or “high places,” and מצבת or “standing stones,”74 and even those “centers” associated with trade such as Kuntillet ‘Arjud,75 all reflect a concern with and a desire for that sense of divine immanence which, according to the

69 Schmitt, Magie im Alten Testament. 70 Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 344. 71 On the nature of these figurines, and particularly the classification

system applied to them, see Pritchard, Palestinian Figurines. Although it has

been common to associate these figurines with “fertility,” particularly

types II and VI isolated by Pritchard, Zevit’s claim that such an

association is “not particularly informative” is more illustrative of a

chauvinistic rather than scholarly attitude. Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 273.

72 Gitin, “New Incense Altars from Ekron”; idem, “Seventh Century

BCE Cultic Elements at Ekron.” 73 On this site and difficulties surrounding its interpretation see

particularly Coogan, “Of Cults and Cultures.” See also, Ahlström, “The

Bull Figurine.” 74 On the range of uses and symbolism of such structures see, Avner,

“Mazzebot Sites”; Mettinger, No Graven Image; van der Toorn,

“Worshipping Stones.” 75 See more recently, Na’aman and Lissovsky, “Kuntillet ‘Arjud.”

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Deuteronomists can be found only in Jerusalem and through the services of the priests that minister in the service of the one God, Yahweh.

In exposing what Zevit has referred to as the “polydoxies and polypraxises within Yahwism”76 archaeological investigation of Israelite religious expression can certainly be viewed as a successful enterprise. Over and against the traditional and highly schematic biblical presentation, the ability of archaeology to bring into critical scrutiny the various divine beings that constituted the focus of such expression has done much to advance our knowledge of ancient Israelite and Judahite religions. Such success notwithstanding, however, there is a very real sense that much of this discussion relates simply to the material residues of religious activity as opposed to what the recovered materials might actually encode.77 That is, despite an increased sensitivity to the material dimension of religion, namely that religion is something that “people do,”78 the material items which constitute the medium of such “doing” are all too often framed as a passive reflection of the cultural values, thoughts, and cosmological beliefs that are understood to prefigure them.79 They are conceptualized as the entirely passive embodiment of a somehow a priori idea. While in many ways the idealism of this position is something which archaeology has long sought to exorcise,80 its enduring vitality reflects the degree to which the dualism of Cartesian logic continues to inform much archaeological thinking. Rather than see human action and cognition as coming to expression in and through material forms, archaeology, and biblical archaeology in particular, continues to separate them, to treat material remains as somehow “just there.” If, as Webb Keane has recently argued, “religions … always involve

76 Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, 349. 77 Insoll, “Introduction,” 3. 78 Stavrakopoulou and Barton, “Introduction,” 1. 79 Boivin, “Grasping the Elusive and Unknowable.” 80 See especially Binford, “Archaeology as Anthropology”; idem,

“A Consideration of Archaeological Research”; idem, “Archaeological

Systematics.”


material forms”81 then it is incumbent upon us ask what these material forms can tell us about the lived experience of religion.

IV

The restrictive assumptions inherent in Hawkes’s famous “Ladder of Inference”82 offers a convenient and oft cited summary of what archaeologists once felt about their ability to access the “superstructure” of past societies. Without some point of reference in the historical order, Hawkes claimed, “in which the specifically human, intentional mode of life” was revealed, this “ideological superstructure would forever elude archaeological enquiry.”83 Unaided by written texts and/or oral traditions, then, the celebrated “Indian behind the artifact”84 was destined to remain forever elusive. Although such pessimistic assumptions served to reinforce the subservient status of archaeology as the “handmaiden of history” they simultaneously endorsed a conceptualization of culture as an essentially mentalistic phenomenon, one in which material remains were considered the mute products of internalized traditions, ways of doing things that were passed down from generation to generation largely unchanged. What changes did occur in either the form or appearance of artifacts was generally explained as either resulting from contact between, what in true Hederian fashion, were considered discrete, bounded and relatively homogenous cultural entities, or, as in the writings of Kossinna85 or Albright,86 the displacement of entire populations.

As Bruce Trigger has noted, the “pots = people” equation endorsed by this “culture historical” paradigm was not only highly seductive but proved enormously successful as a means of placing order upon the immense range of material remains uncovered in

81 Keane, “The Evidence of the Senses.” 82 Hawkes, “Archaeological Theory and Method.” 83 Ibid. 160. 84 Flannery, “Culture history v. culture process,” 120. 85 Kossinna, Die Herkunft der Germanen. 86 Albright, History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism.

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the discipline’s formative years.87 In much of the archaeological literature that post-dated the 1960s, however, the “innocent”88 notion that material culture directly related to or somehow reflected the cognitive structures collectively held by specific named groups of people was abandoned by many. While it had certainly been prefigured by calls for increased conceptual sophistication and problem solving89 the demise of “culture history” as the dominant paradigm in Anglo-American archaeological theory was effectively sealed by Lewis Binford. Though his early “fighting articles”90 highlight at every point a conviction that the normative conception of culture was positively untenable in archaeological explanation and manifestly implausible as a general theory of cultural change, Binford’s crusade is not to be understood as a simple exercise in hyperbole. Rather, as Wylie has illustrated, from the outset, his frustrations were informed by a clear vision of a constructive alternative.91 Indeed in many ways his objections to the reduction of archaeological variability to simple mentalistic norms and conventions firmly anticipated the main component of what was rapidly to become the “New Archaeology”: that culture be conceived in systemic (eco-) materialist, not idealistic terms.

In seeking to undermine the single explanatory frame of reference provided by traditional archaeology, Binford had direct recourse to the materialist, neo-evolutionary theories of Julian Steward,92 and in particular, Lesley White.93 Inspired by White’s

87 Trigger, Time and Tradition. For a convenient account of this

methodological approach to material remains within European and

“biblical” archaeological traditions, see, Nestor, Cognitive Perspectives, 46–77. 88 Clarke, “Archaeology.” 89 Wylie, Thinking from Things, 6–42. 90 See in particular Binford and Binford (eds.), New Perspectives in

Archaeology. 91 Wylie, Thinking From Things, 67. 92 Steward, “Evolution and Process”; idem, Theory of Culture Change. 93 White, The Science of Culture; idem, The Evolution of Culture; idem, The

Concept of Cultural Systems.


definition of cultures as elaborate thermodynamic systems94 Binford proposed that, rather than a univariate phenomenon whose form and dynamics are explicable by reduction to a single component, culture be conceived as the “extrasomatic means of adaptation for the human organism.”95 The analytical consequence of this reconceptualization of culture was that there were, as Binford’s ethnographic work clearly illustrated,96 behavioral, and thus material, that is, archaeological correlates of the various adaptive responses made to alterations in the natural environment. Should ecological and/or environmental changes occur, people would, or at least could change their material culture in order to accommodate those new conditions.

It was this core definition of culture as an adaptive and participatory, as opposed to shared, mechanism that was to anchor Binford’s unified program for the renewal of the discipline. It is precisely because culture is conceived as a “complex system” in which each element interacts with, and is responsive to all others, that the ideational norms so long isolated as the single generative force in the creation of archaeological variability could be reconnected with the behavioral, material, and organizational dimensions which comprise the total cultural system. As such, “material culture can be expected to bear the marks of its implication in all the constituent subsystems of cultural life.”97 It was Binford’s continued advocacy of this systemic view of culture which opened up a distinctly anthropological level of enquiry within the discipline,98 one that fore-grounded questions about the particular processes responsible for the specific forms of cultural life that produced the archaeological record. Rather than Flannery’s mythical “Indian behind the artifact” the focus of concern would now become the system behind both Indian and artifact, a cultural

94 White, “Energy and the Evolution of Culture.” 95 Binford, “Archaeology as Anthropology,” 218. 96 See in particular “Model Building,” in Binford and Binford (eds.)

An Archaeological Perspective, 244–94. 97 Wylie, Thinking From Things, 70. 98 Willey and Phillips, Method and Theory in Archaeology, 2.

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subject which, according to Binford, was archaeologically knowable.

While the desire of “New Archaeologists” to conform to a more prestigious model of scholarly behavior can legitimately be understood as an extension of a concerted effort to harden the social sciences that took root across the United States during the 1960s,99 such consolidation served only to impoverish rather than advance our understanding of the very things that have long provided the focus of the discipline. In large measure this was a direct result of the particular brand of explanation championed by Binford and his disciples. For within the context of the covering-law model of explanation and conformation which they embraced, one in which all explanation should be causal in nature,100 material culture could only be read in a narrow and wholly functionalist manner. Every object, it was assumed, had its own specific function and was created with the specific intention of fulfilling that function. Material artifacts were simply tools for survival; harmonizing systemic needs with the realities of the physical and cultural environment.

In treating material remains as the outcome of universally recognizable and observable processes, however, New Archaeology simultaneously transformed people from active agents to passive consumers who simply responded to events and processes that were beyond their control, if not their very cognition. In seeking to decode the unwritten musical score according to which the actions of such agents are organized, and thereby ascertain the objective regularities they obey, New Archaeology produced an ersatz rather than a comprehensible subject. The world of will and

99 Gibbon, Explanation in Archaeology, 139–40. 100 Binford and Binford, An Archaeological Perspective, 18. In many ways

Binford’s characterization of his reorientation of the discipline as

involving a “shift to a consciously deductive philosophy,” echoes

Steward’s hope that “anthropologists would accept the position that

culture is an orderly phenomenon in which causality operates and whose

operation is accessible through scientific method.” See Murphy,

“Introduction,” 10. See also, Hempel, “The Function of General Laws”;

idem, Aspects of Scientific Explanation.


representation so effectively demonstrated by Schopenhauer101 is negated as historical agents are put on vacation while the mechanisms of the idealized “system” work out their independent and mathematical logic behind their backs. Within the context of any archaeological analysis of religion, the poverty of this thesis is all too apparent for as soon as any element of individual choice is involved, behavioral and functional laws are exposed as simplistic if not wholly inadequate.

Expanding the study of the archaeological record beyond the mere subsistence levels of enquiry mandated by Hawkes’s Ladder has been perhaps the single, unifying standard around which the various practitioners of post-processual archaeology can be seen to have rallied.102 Over and against the excessive and reductive materialism of processualism which dismissed all “ideas” as either functionally irrelevant, or sought to explain them as a form of clandestine economic rationality,103 post-processualism sought to restore their theoretical significance within the context of a dialectical relationship between people and things. Material items it argued are not simply tools for survival, nor are they passive reflections of the unique mental templates of their makers, rather they are important carriers and transmitters of meaning in the living world of humans. They are to be understood as a form of non-verbal communication which, following the linguistic model of sign systems proposed by de Saussure, functions to project, to negotiate, to manipulate and often to subvert particular symbolic schemes. Rather than simply “active” in the adaptive strategies of particular groups, then, material culture is understood to be meaningfully constituted: it is produced in accordance with specific symbolic schemes and structured according to the systems of meaning inherent within and determinative of particular social

101 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. 102 Though its title may imply a coherent approach, even a unified

body of theory or method, post-processual archaeology is best understood

as an amorphous beast that acts as a receptacle for every reactive trend to

emerge within the discipline since the 1970s. 103 See for example, Cook, “The Incidence and Significance of

Disease,” 1946; Harner, “The Enigma.”

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groupings.104 As a by-product of what Lyotard defined as The Postmodern Condition,105 post-processual archaeologists advocated a reading of material remains wholly in keeping with the “paganism”106 that defined the new era. Over and against the objective statements about the past which processualists such as Binford felt confident could and should be made, converts to the new creed sought to articulate a view of that past as an indeterminate and open ended network; one in which material remains necessarily have a multiplicity rather than a singularity of meanings.

Despite the optimism generated by its focus upon social agents as thinking and plotting agents working their way through society in an unending series of signals and signs, the polysemic understanding of material culture generated by post-processualism tended to draw attention away from the very physicality of artifacts and other material things. Within the context of its understanding of culture as a communicative medium, post-processualism failed to give adequate attention to the communicative ability of things. Material artifacts were simply carriers of meaning, a meaning that was always understood to have been somehow encoded by human agency. Things, in short, spoke messages that their human creators and/or users fully intended them to speak. While this tendency to “abstraction,” which can be traced to the early structuralist work of Leroi-Gourhan107 and indeed Lévi-Strauss,108 may well have facilitated an analysis of the role of material culture in reproducing and/or transforming particular cosmological structures, it simultaneously reduced “material culture to a mere sign, little

104 Hodder, Symbols in Action. 105 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 106 Related to Lyotard’s basic commitment to an ontology of singular

events, “paganism” rejects any universal criteria of judgment in favor of

specific, plural judgments devoid of any pre-existing criteria in matters of

truth, beauty, politics, or ethics. 107 Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man. 108 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology.


different from a linguistic sign, its physical properties devoid of all but highly abstracted meanings.”109

Thus while post-processualism certainly wrought considerable advances within the field, the interpretive framework it employed in an attempt to mine the upper rungs of Hawkes’s Ladder serves only to resurrect the deep-seated antinomy between objectivist and subjectivist modes of knowledge which gave birth to it in the first place. For in challenging the sterile “artifact physics” of its precursor, post-processualism advanced a view of social reality as a “contingent ongoing accomplishment” of competent social actors who continually construct their social world via “the organized artful practices of everyday life.”110 While the value of this particular social phenomenology lies precisely in the emphasis it places upon the actions and cognitions of social actors, it tended to view those actions and thoughts as wholly arbitrary and thus divorced from the material phenomena whose apparent purpose is simply to present them. As Boivin has commented, the material world becomes little more than a theater with objects functioning as props in a story already written by human agents.111 While this subordination of “matter” to “mind” resurrects the Platonic dogma that material things are to be understood as simple projections of ideas and concepts, a host of scholars across several disciplines have recently been concerned to rehabilitate the materiality of material culture and to show that the history of human engagement with the material world is not so clearly one of form being imposed upon substance, but one in which mind and matter continually bring each other into being.112

This multi-disciplinary desire to collapse, if not transcend, the deeply rooted Cartesian separation of mind and body that characterizes the western intellectual tradition finds strong empirical support in the theory of practice articulated by Pierre Bourdieu. Perhaps the most influential and original French social

109 Boivin, “Grasping the Elusive and the Unknowable,” 272. 110 Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 11. Cited in Wacquant and

Bourdieu, Invitation, 9. 111 Boivin, Material Cultures, Material Minds, 21. 112 Ibid. 23.

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theorist since Emile Durkheim,113 Bourdieu’s stress on social life as simultaneously a practical logic and a logic subject to improvization dissolves the dualism of empiricist thought that posits ideas and values as somehow prior to material forms. Rather than simply mirroring pre-existing social distinctions or ideational norms,114 Bourdieu’s social praxeology115 understands material forms as constituting the very medium through which these values, ideas, and distinctions are produced, reproduced, legitimized, and ultimately, transformed. Material object and social subject are indelibly intertwined in a dialectical relationship where they each form part of the other. It is through things that we understand both ourselves and others—not because they are externalizations of ourselves, reflecting something more prior or basic in our consciousness or social relations but because material things are the very medium through which we make and know ourselves. It is in the creation and employment of things then that the social self is itself created. While an explicit account of this material component of human and social cultural existence is provided for in Bourdieu’s well cited examination of the Kabyle house,116 his emphasis upon the physicality of that material world, and the way in which it might stimulate, rather than simply re-create thoughts and ideas117

113 Some of the more readable and engaging accounts of Bourdieu’s

life and works can be found in Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu; Calhoun, LiPuma

and Postone (eds.), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives; Swartz, Culture and Power; Lane, Pierre Bourdieu; Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu.

114 In many ways this is a challenge to the seminal idea first introduced

by Durkheim and Mauss that the cognitive systems operative in primitive

societies are derivations of their social system. Lacking the innate capacity

to produce complex systems of classifications, it was social arrangements

that provided primitive man with a model for the arrangement of his

ideas. See, Durkheim and Mauss, “De quelques forms de classification.”

See also, Durkheim, The Elementary Forms. 115 On Bourdieu’s work as praxeology see, Coenen, “Praxeologie en

strukturatietheorie.” 116 Bourdieu, Outline; Algeria 1960. See also, Celik, Urban Forms, 87–

113. 117 See also Rapoport, The Meaning of the Built Environment.


provides a richly rewarding avenue for reconceptualizing the relationship between religion and material culture.

V

It was noted earlier in this paper that scholarship on the phenomenon of ancient Israelite religion attests to an increasingly nuanced engagement with the notion that religious beliefs and practices are social and cultural activities. As Stavrakopolou explained, “people do religion, and religion cannot be divorced from those doing it.”118 While this reorientation is certainly welcome given scholarship’s earlier preoccupation with the highly schematic and idealized biblical presentation, its attempt to follow Clifford Geertz and read archaeological remains in the manner of a text119 simultaneously disassociates those material forms from the very contexts it seeks to reconstruct.120 Material remains, ranging from the altars that furnish this paper with its raison d’être, to incense strands, model shrines, and “cultic” figurines, along with a host of other cultic paraphernalia become mere pawns in a game “where what really matters are concepts, symbols, ideologies and human agents.”121 Despite the professed interest in the material dimension of religion and religious practice, then, recent studies would appear to negate the very materiality of “religious” objects that serves to distinguish them from texts, from language, from code, and from discourse. Given the pervasive influence of this “textual” metaphor within biblical scholarship, then,122 any effort to reconnect “mind” and “matter” in a holistic fashion is bound to have an impact upon the manner in which we identify and understand the material dimension of Israelite religion.

118 Stavrakopoulou and Barton, “Introduction,” 1. 119 Geertz, “Deep Play,” 448. 120 Ibid, 1. 121 Boivin, “Mind over Matter,” 63. 122 Champion, “Medieval Archaeology.” Although Champion’s

criticisms are clearly directed towards the undue influence exercized by

the written word in historical analysis, the metaphor can quite legitimately

be extended to critique the pervasive and deeply rooted idealism of

Western culture that conditions us to read things as texts.

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Principally it demands that we break with the subject-object dualism that continues to define much thinking in the field of archaeology and move towards a more symmetrical understanding of the complex entanglement that exists between people and things.123 Rather than persist with a representational view of material culture, one that prioritizes human intentionality, we must reckon with the notion that things can often move or force people to act. That is, that objects have the capacity to shape, rather than simply be shaped by humans. This idea that the concept of agency be extended beyond humans to non-human actors is a central feature of Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory.”124 Although he has been critiqued for his suggestion that intentionality is a trait that applies with equal force to both the human and non-human constituents of any hypothesized network, his terminological imprecision does nevertheless highlight a dimension of the material world long ignored, namely its ability to influence and even direct behaviors and actions.125

If we integrate the material into a concept of mind and meaning then we also, perforce, include the body.126 Not one understood as a vacuous, virtually redundant prism through which culture is somehow mediated, but rather an integrative, wholly corporeal and thus finite entity. Yet while the body may well, as the studies of Victor Turner have shown, serve as a repository for and source of meaning for many material symbols,127 thus anchoring and limiting their potential range of meanings to the properties of the biological realm, a focus upon the body also draws our attention towards the nature and role of sensory perception in mediating experience of the material and immaterial world. As Hamilakis has shown, in raising questions as to the range and form of sensory experiences in any given context, an “archaeology of the senses”128 is richly rewarding when it comes to addressing

123 Hodder, Entangled. 124 Latour, “The Powers of Association”; idem, Reassembling the Social. 125 Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 471. 126 Boivin, “Mind over Matter,” 64. 127 Turner, The Forest of Symbols. 128 Hamilakis, “Archaeologies of the Senses.”


questions of ritual and religious behavior. For while language may well, as Mayes observed earlier, facilitate an appreciation of religion as a particular set of beliefs to which people subscribe,129 the grammatical rules of this model are ill-equipped to capture an extended understanding of that phenomenon as “an event that takes place as individuals seek to relate themselves to the transcendent.”130 This entirely practical, and fundamentally material, attempt at engagement with the “elusive and the unknown” cannot be forced into the distorting prism of a symbolic system any more that it can the “procrustean bed of covenant faith.”131 Quite simply, it is the materiality of things, their tactile, visual and even olfactory qualities that evokes ideas of and facilitates access to the sacred and the divine.

This “material turn” in the discipline of archaeology132 allows us to view the altar constructed by Noah from a new and radically different perspective. Following the charter suggested by Hamilakis, it demands that we direct our analytical lens not to questions of shape, size, or even location, but rather how the tactile and visual experiences such qualities afford function to inspire ideas of the transcendent; how the smell and perhaps taste of burning flesh and suffusing smoke stimulates a sense of communion between the divine and human worlds. And finally, disregarding any sense of a chronological accuracy in the biblical narrative itself, “what kind of prospective memories would these events and experiences have sedimented onto the bodies of the participants, and how were these memories reactivated during subsequent occasions?”133

Such questions become all the more significant when one recalls that within Jewish tradition, the “Foundation Stone” that supports the base of the temple is the same object upon which “Noah offered the first sacrifice of the renewed cosmos.”134 This

129 Mayes, “Kuntillet ‘Arjud,” 57. 130 Ibid. 57. 131 Mayes, “Kuntillet ‘Arjud,” 58. 132 Hicks, “The Material-Cultural Turn,” 8. 133 Hamilakis, “Archaeologies of the Senses,” 209. 134 Smith, Map is not Territory, 116.

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stone, standing at the exact center of the cosmos is said to possess a magnetic attraction so great that even the dead of the Diaspora are pictured as tunneling through the ground to reach it.135 It is the very materiality of the stone then, its solidity, its sturdiness and its strength which imprints upon the mind an image of a fixed and unyielding center, one which not only anchors the very cosmos but which simultaneously exhibits a “superabundance of reality,” or in other words, an “irruption of the sacred into world.”136 Functioning as and at the center, then, it is the very materiality of Noah’s altar, along with the paradigmatic activates and emotions stimulated by and associated with it, that the relationship between the human and the divine is established.

The questions thus raised by Hamilakis and others then clearly provide for a reorientation of our thinking around the nature and function of things in ritual or religious experience; a reorientation which, finally, may allow us to approximate an understanding of how religion was actually felt and experienced within specific contexts rather than simply how it was understood. At a deeper and more profound level however, an insistence upon the materiality of things, on their ability to inspire rather than simply reflect those ideas that have long been taken to define “religion” places the “demand for evidence on a different footing.”137 It serves to undermine those crusading quests for the realia of the bible, and thus supposedly “Israelite” religious activity, by overturning the expectation that such materials “provide evidence of something hidden, such as belief.”138 While this may well introduce a degree of uncertainty if not ambiguity into the archaeology of cult, one can be consoled by the words of Sir Francis Bacon:

135 Zahavi, Eretz Israel, 99–100. Cited in Smith, Map is Not Territory, 114.

136 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 45. 137 Keane, “The Evidence of the Senses,” S110. 138 Ibid. S110.


“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts;

but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in

certainties.”

It was, after all, only by overcoming her own initial skepticism with respect to the transformative and transportable capacity of her ruby slippers that Dorothy could make her way home. Similarly, it is only by transcending the restrictive and obstructive nature of our own ingrained and culturally conditioned certainties that we, as biblical scholars, can ever hope to comprehend how distant others engaged with the mysterious yet affirming realm of the divine.

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Albertz, Rainer. “Personal Piety.” Pages 135–146 in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah. Edited by Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton. London: T&T Clark, 2010.

———. A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period. 2 vols. OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994.

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Somewhere Under the Rainbow: Noah's Altar and the Archaeology of Cult in Ancient Israel

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