Anthropology focuses on human diversity in terms of social relations and structures and cultural expressions and processes, resting on the firm assumption that such diversity reflects a single, common humanity; thus, the motto of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Anthropology: “What makes us different is what makes us human.” Anthropology always attends to the relationship between society and culture. However, anthropologists vary in the relative attention they give to each. Thus, the scholarly discipline was commonly specified as “social anthropology” in Great Britain and as “cultural anthropology” in the United States, indicating differences of theoretical emphasis. However, within British social anthropology itself there were disputes between two of its most influential figures over the relative weight of attention given to the social versus the cultural: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown urged that the proper focus of the discipline was social organization; Bronisław Malinowksi emphasized cultural beliefs and practices (Kuper 2015). While the distinctions between and within British and American and other expressions of what is now sometimes termed social-cultural anthropology have softened considerably (Lemos 2013: 157), the history of these differences has left its traces in ongoing anthropological theory and practice (Barth et al. 2005).
Anthropology is a disciplinary field that includes its own reflexive historical studies as an important scholarly genre. A number of works have been written tracing the history of the field, covering such subjects as the emergence and consolidation of anthropology in the Victorian era (Stocking 1987), the development of distinct British schools of social anthropology (Stocking 1995; Kuper 2015), how American anthropologists have elaborated on the concept of culture (Kuper 1999), and the distinctive characteristics of American anthropology (Patterson 2001).
The practice of ethnographic fieldwork, long-term participant-observation in a particular socio-cultural community, has become a defining feature of anthropology. It stands in sharp contrast to the “armchair” anthropology, entirely based on textual data, exemplified by the work of Edward B. Taylor, that characterized the discipline at its initial development in the 19th century. As Edmund Leach puts it of the established ethnographic approach: “The work of the social anthropologist consists in the analysis and interpretation of ethnographic facts, customary behaviour as directly observed” (Leach 1976: 1).
“The relationship between biblical studies and anthropology,” the anthropologist Harvey E. Goldberg notes, “is long and complex” (Goldberg 1996: 9). The two disciplines have been closely connected since the emergence of the comparative study of human culture in the 19th century (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990: 7–12, 75; James 2003: 122–125). The emergence and development of anthropology and critical biblical scholarship in the 19th and early 20th century had a symbiotic character. For example, William Robertson Smith figures in the history of anthropology as well as of biblical studies (Stocking 1995; James 2003). Also of significance for this formative period is Émile Durkheim and his younger associates Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (the latter being Durkheim’s nephew), whose still-influential work on sacrifice (Hubert and Mauss 1964) dealt extensively with biblical data in comparison with Vedic texts.1
There has been an uninterrupted stream of interest focused on the interpretation of ritual in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel on the part of anthropologists (Goldberg 1996: 9, 33–34), with particular attention to the practice of sacrifice, although this stream did narrow to a trickle for a lengthy period shortly after the heyday of James G. Frazer (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990: 17, 75). It is, therefore, appropriate to speak of a new surge or “second wave” of interest beginning in the 1960s (Goldberg 1996: 9; Wilson 2012: 7), which has continued to the present. The beginning of this surge can be dated rather precisely to 1966, the year of the publication of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, which includes a chapter (“The Abominations of Leviticus”) that explores the biblical dietary laws as a rational system of socio-cultural categorization. The interest by anthropologists in biblical ritual was mirrored and met by that of biblical scholars; indeed, work on ritual by biblical scholars beginning in the 1970s was clearly catalyzed by the work of anthropologists, especially that of Douglas (Rogerson 1978, 1992; Eilberg-Schwartz 1990; Goldberg 1996; Meyers 2012).
The comparative and theoretical study of ritual, including the technical use of the term to specify a category of human behavior, began with the inception of anthropology as a distinct scholarly discipline (Asad 1993; Boudewijnse 1995). This anthropological treatment of ritual laid a strong foundation for the interdisciplinary project of “ritual theory” or “ritual studies,” which developed in the 1970s. Anthropology remains an important component of ritual theory, well-exemplified by the fact that Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, the co-editors of the Journal of Ritual Studies and co-authors of the volume on ritual in the influential Key Concepts in Religion series (Stewart and Strathern 2014), are both anthropologists. Ritual theory continues to be nourished by anthropology, as is clear from the bibliographies of works by ritual theorists who are not anthropologists, such as Ronald L. Grimes (2013), Catherine Bell (1992; 1997), Jonathan Z. Smith (1982; 1987), and Philippe Buc (2001). Likewise, much recent work on ritual by anthropologists engages closely with the studies of non-anthropologists (see, e.g., Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994).
Corresponding very closely to this larger scholarly context, much of the most recent work on ritual in the Hebrew Bible is theoretically eclectic and properly identified with the broad field of ritual studies (see, e.g., Gruenwald 2003; Klingbeil 2007). It is therefore somewhat artificial to distinguish anthropological and broadly social scientific approaches to ritual from ritual theory. Nevertheless, anthropological study of ritual has a distinct history and ethos, and the relationship between biblical studies and anthropology in the interpretation of ritual pre-existed the full development of ritual studies as an interdisciplinary data field. Thus, this article will attend specifically to the contributions of guild anthropologists to the study of ritual in the Hebrew Bible and the engagements of biblical scholars with anthropological work on ritual, largely eschewing reference to non-anthropological work that has influenced the study of ritual in the Bible.
The term “ritual,” assigned to types of human behavior, is an “analytical category” constructed by scholars, not a natural one, which means that an essentialist definition is impossible (Sax 2010: 4, 7). Moreover, “we cannot in any absolute way separate ritual from non-ritual in the societies we study” (Tambiah 1979: 116). Thus, defining ritual amounts to establishing criteria by which particular instances of social activity can be identified with the analytical category, determining the extent to which such activity fits the category. To define ritual is also to theorize its nature, to identify what kind of behavior it is and how it functions.
Anthropologists invoke a great variety of criteria, to which they assign differing values (Kapferer 2004: 36). Wendy James urges that any understanding of ritual must “include the idea that it is deliberate ceremonial performance, physically enacted or enactable, and transformative in intention or effect” (James 2003: 107). According to Roy A. Rappaport, ritual is best understood as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (Rappaport 1999: 24). Stanley J. Tambiah’s often-cited definition characterizes ritual as “constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts . . . whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition)” (Tambiah 1979: 119). As exemplified by these definitions, formality and repetition are frequently highlighted as defining characteristics of ritual. David I. Kertzer (1988) notes that Siegfried F. Nadel (1954: 99) was one of the first anthropologists to emphasize these characteristics, an approach that allowed for understanding ritual as not limited to religious contexts; Kertzer’s own work focuses on political ritual.
Many definitions add to these basic characteristics the claim that the action performed in ritual is “communicative.” According to Mary Douglas, for example, ritual is “pre-eminently a form of communication” (1970: 20).2 Elaborating on this understanding of ritual, Tambiah’s definition begins by identifying it as “a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication” (1979:119). Similarly, Kertzer defines ritual as “symbolic behavior that is socially standardized and repetitive,” noting that this definition reflects how many anthropologists understand the category. He elaborates his definition by characterizing ritual as “action wrapped in a web of symbolism” (1988: 9), adding that symbols “provide the content of ritual” (11).
The predominant anthropological understanding of ritual as symbolic communication—which has been referred to as “canonical” (Handelman and Lindquist 2004: 1) and “almost a social compact in anthropology” (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 73)—can be termed “representational” (Asad 1993; Sax 2010; Handelman and Lindquist 2004); that is, ritual actions stand representatively for various phenomena (most quite abstract): social relations, beliefs, values, concepts, or worldview. As Talal Asad notes, this understanding of ritual as symbolic activity goes back to the first definitions of ritual that were formulated as anthropology emerged as a distinctive scholarly discipline (1993: 56–60). It is expressed by key figures in the development of the discipline. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, for example, is quoted by Asad as referring to ritual actions (“rites”) as “the regulated symbolic expressions of certain sentiments” (32, n. 9).
While the identification of ritual as symbolic activity has a long history in anthropology, it took on a new life with the emergence of what came to be termed “symbolic anthropology” (especially in American contexts). Symbolic anthropology first emerged at the end of the 1950s, developed through the 1960s, and came into its own in the 1970s. It took as its starting point the identification of culture with symbolism, which developed in American cultural anthropology, particularly out of Talcott Parsons’ Harvard Department of Social Relations (Kuper 1999: 47–72). Culture was identified as “a collective symbolic discourse. What it discoursed on was knowledge, beliefs, and values” (Kuper 1999: 16). Clifford Geertz, who studied in the Department of Social Relations, and is named as a graduate research assistant who contributed to the preparation of a foundational study on the definition of culture (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: v), characterizes this theory of culture as “semiotic” and affirms: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (1973: 5).3 More simply, he refers to culture as a “symbolic system” (17) and asserts that cultural activity is “activity in which symbolism forms the positive content” (91). Within the context of symbolic anthropology’s conceptualization of culture, ritual—as a cultural activity, part of the “webs of significance”—must be understood as essentially symbolic.
The mainstream dominance of this approach in anthropology is exemplified by Robbie Davis-Floyd’s definition of ritual in the new (2008) edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: “a patterned, repetitive, and symbolic enactment of a cultural belief or value” (Davis-Floyd 2008: 259 [my emphasis]). Elaborating on the definition, Davis-Floyd explains that, “a belief system is enacted through ritual,” highlights as a major characteristic of ritual “the symbolic nature of ritual’s messages,” and asserts that “rituals work through symbols” (259, 260).
This understanding of ritual as symbolic communication necessarily raises the question of what a symbol is. A number of definitions (and theorizations) have been offered (Hamburg 1964; Hartley 1964; Foster 1990: 119–121). Geertz makes it clear that the issue of definition matters a great deal and calls for “precision” in determining its meaning. He continues: “This is no easy task, for, rather like ‘culture,’ ‘symbol’ has been used to refer to a great variety of things, often a number of them at the same time” (1973: 91). In “Ideology as a Cultural System,” an essay originally published in 1964, Geertz laments that social scientists had failed to engage with what he terms, “one of the most important trends in recent thought: the effort to construct an independent science of what Kenneth Burke has called ‘symbolic action,’” citing Burke’s 1941 The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. He sums up the social scientific failure: “the question of how symbols symbolize, how they function to mediate meanings has simply been bypassed” (Geertz 1973: 208). In developing his conception of symbolism in his response to this problem, Geertz draws on the philosopher Suzanne Langer (Philosophy in a New Key, 1942) to define a symbol as anything that “serves as a vehicle for a conception” (208, n. 19). Elaborating on his earlier discussion in his famous “Religion as a Cultural System” (first published in 1966), Geertz outlines several definitional identifications of a symbol before offering the following as his preference:
any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a conception—the conception is the symbol’s ‘meaning’ . . . The number 6, written, imagined, laid out as a row of stones, or even punched into the program tapes of a computer, is a symbol. But so also is the Cross…, the expanse of painted canvas called ‘Guernica’ or the bit of painted stone called a churinga, the word ‘reality,’ or even the morpheme ‘-ing.’ They are all symbols, or at least symbolic elements, because they are tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible form, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs (91).
Clearly, Geertz is offering an expansive definition and conception of “symbol,” which encompasses almost everything that could be termed a “cultural activity”; anything can function as a symbol if it functions as a vehicle for a conception. Thus, Geertz does not sharply distinguish ritual from other types of symbolic activity. Rather, ritual represents just one aspect of various interwoven systems of symbols that constitute culture.
Representative of the coalescence of American “cultural anthropology” and British “social anthropology” around approaches to culture that emphasized the category of the symbol, Victor Turner contributed influentially to the theorizing of symbolism called for by Geertz. His approach, therefore, “can be viewed as paradigmatic for symbolic anthropology,” and his work as “an exemplary approach to symbolic analysis” (Foster 1990: 121, 123).
According to Turner, a symbol is “a thing regarded by general consent as naturally typifying or representing or recalling something by possession of analogous qualities or by association in fact or in thought” (1967: 19). Turner insists that symbols have to be understood contextually, both in terms of the cultural context in which they are deployed and their relative placement within cultural performances (especially ritual activity): “The total ‘significance’ of a symbol may be obtained only from a consideration of how it is interpreted in every one of the ritual contexts in which it appears, i.e., with regard to its role in the total ritual system” (1968: 2).
According to Kertzer (1988), who builds on Turner’s approach, symbols have three properties fundamental to their role within ritual: “condensation of meaning, multivocality, and ambiguity.” Condensation of meaning “refers to the way in which individual symbols represent and unify a rich diversity of meanings. The symbol . . . somehow embodies and brings together diverse ideas.” Multivocality refers to “the variety of different meanings attached to the same symbol. While condensation refers to the interaction of these different meanings and their synthesis into a new meaning for an individual, multivocality suggests another aspect, the fact that the same symbol may be understood by different people in different ways.” Ambiguity means that “the symbol has no single precise meaning. Put in more positive terms, this means that symbols are not arcane ways of saying something that could be more precisely expressed in simple declarative form. The complexity and uncertainty of meaning of symbols are sources of their strength” (Kertzer 1988: 11).
Mary Douglas’s symbolic understanding of ritual behavior should be understood against the background of her view of social relations as being “impossible . . . without symbolic acts” (Douglas 1966: 62) and her commitment to a positive appreciation of ritual behavior as symbolic activity. In Purity and Danger, Douglas combats what she terms the “baneful” influence of Frazer’s appropriation of Robertson Smith’s distinction between religion and magic: “He [Frazer] disseminated a false assumption about the primitive view of the universe worked by mechanical symbols, and another false assumption that ethics are strange to primitive religion” (28). Douglas argues that all forms of ritual are fundamentally symbolic, so that it is impossible to set a firm distinction between religious ritual and magical ritual. The fourth chapter of Purity and Danger, “Magic and Miracle” (58-72), focuses on this issue, which she also addresses in Natural Symbols, where she writes: “belief in the efficacy of instituted signs . . . is the sacramental, and equally the magical, theology. I see no advantage for this discussion in making any distinction between magical and sacramental” (1970: 8).
Many anthropologists have dichotomized symbolic representation and efficacy in their understanding of ritual, so that the symbolic character of ritual depends on its lack of efficacy (Goody 1961; Sax 2010: 6–7). Douglas, however, does not set such a dichotomy between symbolism and efficacy. “Ritualism,” she posits, “is most highly developed where symbolic action is held to be most certainly efficacious” (1970: 8), and she refers to ritual actions as “efficacious signs” (10). She does, however, distinguish between “expressive” and “efficacious” (also termed “magical”) functions of ritual behavior, but without using this dichotomy to define what is ritual against what is not ritual (1970: 17). For Douglas, ritual is always symbolic behavior, but there are cultural variations in whether that behavior is seen as efficacious (magical or sacramental) or simply expressive.
For Geertz, Turner, Douglas, and many other anthropologists, symbolism is an essential, definitional characteristic of ritual as such, not something to be identified on a cultural case-by-case basis. This theory of “ubiquitous symbolism,” therefore, claims that ritual has “inherent symbolic meaning” (Klawans 2006: 67). Symbolism is definitional of ritual as a cultural practice; that is, if one assumes, as so many anthropologists do, that symbolism is an essential characteristic of ritual, one will approach any specific ritual performance, including ancient Israelite ritual, deploying this assumption.
Given the dominance of the theory of “ubiquitous symbolism” in anthropology as it developed from the 1960s, most applications of anthropological perspectives to ancient Israelite ritual since that time have treated it as symbolic activity. The following highly selective survey of the development of the “second wave” of anthropological scholarship on the Bible and ritual will focus on the ways this emphasis on symbolism has played itself out, giving particular attention to early, foundational works and to a recent major affirmation of symbolic interpretation of ritual in the Hebrew Bible.
As noted previously, the new wave of anthropological interest in biblical ritual was catalyzed by Mary Douglas’s work, although her initial treatment of biblical ritual focused on the dietary laws and more generally on purity practices, rather than on sacrifice, the major ritual institution of ancient Israel. Notably, while there was a great deal of social scientific work on various aspects of Israelite society and culture in the ten years between 1966 and 1976, no anthropologically informed treatment of Israelite sacrificial ritual appeared until Edmund Leach, whose biblical interpretation had previously focused on structuralist analysis of narrative texts as embodiments of “myth,” offered an exploratory treatment of the priestly ordination rite of Leviticus 8 and Exodus 29 (Leach 1976: 81–93). In this study, Leach applies his understanding of ritual activity as predominantly concerned with “movement across social boundaries,” such performances having “the double function of proclaiming the change of status and of magically bringing it about” (1976: 77). Like Douglas, Leach affirms both the representational character of ritual and its efficacy. However, as Turner notes, Leach was generally dismissive of “native” beliefs about ritual efficacy, focusing on the meanings that could be identified by the anthropological observer on the basis of structural analysis of ritual behavior itself (1969: 7). This perspective is on full display in the study of the priestly ordination ceremony.
A year after the appearance of Leach’s treatment, the publications of Douglas Davies’s “An Interpretation of Sacrifice in Leviticus” (Davies 1977) marked a milestone, the first attempt by a biblical scholar to apply ideas and models derived from British social anthropology to the interpretation of biblical sacrificial rituals. Davies’ study begins with a critique of Robertson Smith and carries on a running dialogue with his theoretical work. Referring to Purity and Danger, Davies affirms that Douglas’s analysis of the biblical dietary laws had demonstrated how “this one aspect of Israelite life mirrored a broader attitude to the world” and sets out his aim “to develop this approach and to apply it to the institution of sacrifice as described in Leviticus” (389). Davies also refers to Leach, Turner, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, but Douglas is clearly his main theoretical source and model. In agreement with Douglas, Davies interprets sacrifice in Leviticus as a coherent symbolic representation of social values.
The impact of anthropological work on ritual within biblical studies was signaled by Frank Gorman’s dissertation, “Priestly ritual and creation theology: the conceptual categories of space, time, and station in Lev 8; 14; 16; Num 19; 28–29,” completed in 1985 under the supervision of John H. Hayes at Emory University. Published in 1990 as The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly Theology (Gorman 1990), it was the first monograph focused on the systematic application of anthropological models and methods to biblical ritual materials. The study treats sacrifice as a symbolic expression of worldview. Gorman’s definition of ritual represents his debt to the anthropological theory of the time: “a complex performance of symbolic acts, characterized by its formality, order, and sequence, which tends to take place in specific situations, and has as one of its central goals the regulation of the social order” (19).
In 1989, Ronald Hendel—who had met Mary Douglas in 1983 while he was a graduate student and encouraged her interest in the book of Leviticus (Douglas 1999: ix)—published a sophisticated application of symbolic anthropology to the covenant rites of Exod 24:3–8, “Sacrifice as a Cultural System: The Ritual Symbolism of Exodus 24:3–8” (Hendel 1989). This study shows the maturing of the new wave of scholarship, marked especially by the influence of Douglas. Like Davies, Hendel begins with a critique of Robertson Smith’s approach to sacrifice, lamenting its continuing influence. He then sets out a treatment of the “cultural system” of sacrifice exemplified by the ritual performance narrated in Exod 24:3–8. The title of this piece clearly evokes the “cultural system” theory of Clifford Geertz, but the substance of the piece strongly reflects British social anthropology, with its emphasis on the social significance of ritual.
Published in the same years as Gorman’s study, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990) took a broader and more theoretically sophisticated approach to the topic, providing, in particular, a treatment of the larger intellectual context out of which Gorman’s study (as well as Hendel’s) emerged. Eilberg-Schwartz’s study is a work of great erudition, genuinely interdisciplinary in its deep and broad understanding of anthropological theory and method in relation to ancient Israelite and Jewish religions. Although now somewhat dated, it remains the best single entry-point to the subject.
Eilberg-Schwartz was explicit about the particular anthropological tradition that most influenced his work, “namely, the one that emerges from the work of Durkheim and is carried forward by the British social anthropologists, particularly Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas, and Turner, as well as the work of Lévi-Strauss.” He also notes his attention to “symbolic and cultural anthropology, as exhibited particularly in the work of Geertz and Fernandez” (25). This theoretical background is clearly displayed throughout the work. In particular, there is deep engagement with Douglas’s work, especially in Eilberg-Schwartz’s chapter on purity and impurity, “Menstrual Blood, Semen, and Discharge: The Fluid Symbolism of the Human Body” (177–194).
His discussion of circumcision exemplifies the issue of identifying the meanings of symbols in relation to larger cultural codes. Following Douglas, Eilberg-Schwartz identifies circumcision as a “natural symbol” for concepts of fertility and descent, over against biblical interpreters who urged that its association with the covenant had disengaged it from such associations, so that any other body modification, such as piercing the ears, could equally have served as a sign of the covenant (146). With reference to this particular case, he expresses his general perspective on identifying the meanings of ritual performances:
My analysis assumes that a practice may have had a symbolic meaning that did not find explicit articulation in Israelite literature. Since the historical anthropologists cannot question natives about the meaning of practices, she or he is in the position of doing cultural archaeology, a mode of interpretation which involves imagining what practices meant from incomplete cultural remains. Unstated meanings can often be detected from symbolic artifacts such as metaphors which point to larger complexes of meanings that never found explicit articulation. (143–144)
Eilberg-Schwartz draws on comparative ethnographic data for suggestions about how to make sense of phenomena in ancient Israel. Finding that circumcision is frequently associated with fertility in other societies (144–146), he considers the possibility that this was also the case with ancient Israel. Ritual involves “actualization of metaphor” (122–126). Thus, the metaphorical use of circumcision language with reference to fruit trees in Lev 19:23–25 serves as his major clue. As Eilberg-Schwartz’s argument is summarized by Jonathan Klawans: “the metaphor allows us to understand the ritual’s symbolic value in ancient Israelite society” (Klawans 2006: 43).
In a paper published in 1998, Saul M. Olyan displays the potential of a nuanced application of anthropological theory for illuminating biblical ritual material in a study of hair shaving practices: “What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish and What Do They Signal in Biblical Ritual Contexts?” (Olyan 1998). As the title of the paper indicates, Olyan is concerned with both the effectiveness of ritual activity and its representational function. Commenting on this dual concern, he writes: “There has been much discussion among students of ritual about whether rites simply mirror social distinctions or actually bring them into being. My own view is that they must do both” (612, n. 4). He cites Kertzer (1988) in support of this perspective, over against what he terms “the older view, that ritual patterns encode and promote prevailing social arrangements,” which he attributes to Douglas, citing Natural Symbols (1970). He also refers to Leach’s characterization of transition rituals as having “the double function of proclaiming the change of status and of magically bringing it about” (1976: 77). This perspective on the simultaneous efficacy and representationality of ritual activity continues in Olyan’s subsequent publications (Olyan 2000; 2004).
During the period when biblical scholars were increasingly engaging with anthropological theories and models, Mary Douglas pursued her interest in the book of Leviticus. In Leviticus as Literature (1999) she offers what can be characterized as a “structuralist” reading of Leviticus, emphasizing the ways in which the meanings of its individual elements are defined through consideration of their relationships. Identifying parallels, interpreted analogically, is basic to this project. She insists that the analogical mode of reasoning is inherent to the book of Leviticus itself, to the cognitive mode of its authors (which she distinguishes from that of the authors of Deuteronomy).
The general value of Douglas’s approach to ritual is strongly affirmed in Jonathan Klawans’s monograph, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (2006), and in two follow-up essays (Klawans 2008; Klawans 2010). In line with the dominant anthropological approach to identifying and interpreting ritual with reference to its empirical ineffectiveness (and against Douglas’s emphasis on keeping efficacy and symbolism together), he asserts that “it is very difficult to establish empirically that ancient Israelite rituals accomplished very much at all” (Klawans 2010: 112). He accepts that ancient Israelites did articulate purposes for their rituals, such as purification and expiation, but, like Leach, he argues against taking these purposes seriously:
But of what use is it for scholars to assert that sacrifices served these purposes and achieved these goals? These are not measurable goals, for these are not empirical problems. Neither sin nor defilement exists as such in any empirical, measurable way. Purification and atonement are not therefore real accomplishments of Israelite ritual at all. They are perceived accomplishments: the rituals in question are mechanisms of pretense for dealing with problems that exist only in the realm of ideas. (2010: 112)
Having thus asserted that ancient Israelites’ expressed goals for ritual behavior “have no empirically measurable correlation with reality,” Klawans argues that, “ritual also has communicative roles, above and beyond what believers claim it achieves and alongside whatever it may or may not measurably accomplish” (112–113). These communicative roles of ritual are properly treated using the term “symbol” (114).
Klawans follows Eilberg-Schwartz’s approach to filling in interpretive gaps in the symbolic meanings of ritual practices, in particular picking up his claim that metaphors can point to “larger complexes of meanings that never found explicit articulation” (Eilberg-Schwartz, 1990:143). He assembles a variety of metaphors that suggest that God relates to Israel as a sacrificer, which he takes as evidence that Israelites understood sacrifice as a mechanism for imitation of God (Klawans 2006: 56–68). This is clearly a case of symbolic gap-filling, since no biblical source states explicitly that sacrificial practice involves imitation of God (in contrast to such explicit interpretation of Shabbat observance; Exod 20:8–11; 31:12–17).
The best-known challenge to the meaning-communicative view of ritual, exemplified by Klawans’ work, came from the Indologist Frits Staal, who boldly asserted the “meaninglessness of ritual” (Staal 1979). However, the “social compact” that ritual is essentially symbolic action has also been challenged by some anthropologists, during the time of the genesis of “symbolic anthropology” (Goody 1961) and as it consolidated (Spiro 1969).
A number of critiques, in good anthropological form, derive from fieldwork experiences involving the unwillingness or inability of informants to engage in symbolic exegesis of practice, which undercut the Turnerian method of beginning symbolic interpretation of ritual with what Turner referred to as “indigenous interpretation (or, briefly, the exegetical meaning)” (1967: 50). Gilbert Lewis, for example, writes that the Gnau, with whom he worked in New Guinea, “do not have a style of ritual marked by didactic explanations of the symbolism of what they do” (1980: 141). Dan Sperber invokes a similar experience in his work with the Dorze of Ethiopia (Sperber 1975: 17–18). Caroline Humphrey and John Laidlaw (1994), undertook work with Shvetamber Jains in Jaipur, in western India expressly to explore “the range of symbolic meanings” of their image veneration (puja) rituals (1). They found that their Jain informants offered abundant symbolic interpretation of puja (comparable to the elaborate symbolic exegesis Turner gathered from his Ndembu informants), but were perplexed by the fact that these same informants also insisted on the meaninglessness of puja, indeed, of all ritual, identifying it as an empty vessel that had to be infused with significance not dependent upon the rite itself. On the basis of this fieldwork experience they concluded that “anthropologists have been mistaken in thinking that the communication of meanings is distinctive or definitional of ritual” (2).
According to Lewis, anthropological interpretation often involves scholars imposing meaning because of dissatisfaction with the explanations provided by their “native” informants (1980: xv). Lewis’s judgment on anthropologists applies equally to biblical scholars in their engagement with the “strange customs” presented in the Hebrew Bible. Lewis also asserts that, “To presume that ritual is essentially a form of communication prejudges what is to be found out” (1980: 117).
Similarly to Lewis, Asad proposes that anthropologists have engaged in symbolic interpretation in order to address what they perceive as conceptual gaps in “native” explanation: “Anthropologists have, I would suggest, incorporated a theological preoccupation into an avowedly secular intellectual task—that is, the preoccupation with establishing as authoritatively as possible the meanings of representations where the explanations offered by indigenous discourse are considered ethnographically inadequate or incomplete” (1993: 60). He adds that it is always the ethnographer who “identifies and classifies symbols, even when he or she draws on the help of indigenous exegetes to interpret them” (61).
Lewis offers a detailed exploration of how symbols are identified and the frequent resort of scholars to the distinction between technical, practical activities and non-instrumental, non-rational or irrational actions to establish that ritual behavior is symbolic (1980: 6–38; see also Sax 2010). He argues that symbolic actions must be identified not through seeing a disconnection between means and ends, but because symbols are like metaphors:
If symbolism involves the notion of one something standing for or representing something else, it must depend on a particular classification that separates the one thing from the something else it represents. It rests on an intellectual perception of the boundaries of the categories . . . This involves awareness. The same arguments apply to “metaphor” when it is used by anthropologists in relation to the ideas, words or actions of other people. The people must recognize distinctions between two concepts for one to be used metaphorically for the other by them. (Sax 2010: 112)
For something to be a symbol, it must be recognized to stand for something else, from which it can be distinguished in some way. Because this type of association between things requires conscious awareness of a specific system of classification, it must be conventional.
The American “father of semiotics,” Charles Sanders Peirce, emphasized the conventionality of symbols, and therefore sought to distinguish symbols from other types of signs.4 Following the lead of Roy Rappaport (1999) and Nancy Jay (1992), I have found Peirce’s distinction between symbols, icons, and indices (indexes) as three types of signs extremely helpful to my work with ancient Israelite ritual (Gilders 2004; 2006; 2009; 2013). I affirm that there is, indeed, a communicative aspect in Israelite ritual as it is textually represented, and I attempt to be precise about how it is communicative and clear about my interpretative categories.
The meaning of a symbol, Peirce emphasizes, is assigned to it and is not inherent in the thing itself (Peirce, in Buchler 1955: 102). An indexical sign, however, “is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand” (107). While discussing examples of indices, Peirce provides perhaps his simplest definition of an index: “A rap on the door is an index. Anything which focusses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience” (108–109). This explanation clarifies that Peirce’s category of the index includes deliberate human actions that indicate something. In his refinement of Peirce’s theory, Rappaport refers to “Constructed Indices” that “are deliberately constructed and employed by humans to indicate whatever they do indicate” (1999:63). Although conventional in the sense that they are dependent on human intention for their operation, such indices do not depend on convention for their significance. Rather, as Jay clarifies, “Because the relation of sign to signified is not conventional, indices can be understood across cultural and linguistic boundaries. They indicate their object rather than represent it” (1992: 6).
Roy Rappaport poses a significant challenge for interpreters of biblical ritual who wish to deploy anthropological theory. He writes:
Unless there is a performance there is no ritual. This is obvious in the case of fleeting greeting rituals which serves to order ongoing interactions, but it is no less true of elaborate liturgical rituals. Liturgical orders may be inscribed in books, but such records are not themselves rituals. They are merely descriptions of rituals or instructions for performing them…Liturgical orders are realized—made into res—only by being performed. (1999: 37)
Clearly, for Rappaport, it would be impossible to study biblical representations of ritual performances as ritual performances. This issue has been addressed by a number of scholars, who have acknowledged that there is a necessary difference between the interpretation of ritual practices encountered in a fieldwork situation and those encountered in texts (see, e.g., Wright 2012).
Edmund Leach encouraged readers of Culture and Communication to treat biblical texts as if they were ethnographic field notes (1976: 84–85), which is problematic. Biblical texts are not ethnographic writings, records of what an ethnographer experienced. Rather, they are cultural products, best regarded as equivalent to the information provided by “native” informants, whose statements about their society and its culture must be recorded, organized, compared, collated, and interpreted.
The fact that their “informants” speak through texts means that every biblical scholar must of necessity be an “armchair anthropologist” who risks depending on data that is variously incomplete or unreliable, or of making too much of the data that is available. The issue of unreliability is particularly significant, as Leach emphasizes in advice to ethnographers:
The observer must distinguish between what people actually do and what people say that they do; that is between normal custom as individually interpreted on the one hand and normative rule on the other. When they come to write up the results of their research different anthropologists will, for doctrinal reasons, give very different weight to those two major aspects of the data, but in the field, the anthropologist must always pay attention to both sides. He…must distinguish behavior from ideology. (1982: 130)
Scholars of biblical ritual must attend to the possibility that a text is not simply describing practice as it really was but is shaping a picture in service to some ideological purpose, and must recognize that there is no way to compare a textual claim with observed reality. Some form of a hermeneutic of suspicion is always necessary.
In relation to what the biblical texts do provide to biblical scholars who deploy anthropological perspectives, it must be emphasized how little there is that could be called “indigenous interpretation” in Turnerian terms. Like Lewis’s Gnau, the ancient Israelites encountered through the texts of the Hebrew Bible “do not have a style of ritual marked by didactic explanations of the symbolism of what they do.” A vital contribution of comparative ethnographic data is the clear evidence that not all societies engage in representational (symbolic, expressive, or communicative) interpretation of practices that are commonly identified as ritual. This fact requires interpreters of the biblical data, taken ethnographically as informant discourse, to give serious consideration to the possibility that ancient Israelites did not engage in systematic symbolic interpretation of ritual.
The ethnographer, of course, may elect to construct symbolic meanings that go beyond what cultural insiders could have consciously recognized. It is necessary, however, for interpreters of biblical ritual to distinguish their theoretical models from those of the biblical writers as informants. Humphrey and Laidlaw provide a helpful model for this approach. They write, of their ethnographically based theory of ritual, that
the chapters which follow will explore two distinct, but in this case ethnographically related problems about meaning in ritual. Our own discussion of the senses in which ritualized actions can be said to have (or not to have) meaning, will be interleaved with, and we hope will illuminate, an ethnographic account of the Jain puja, and of the distinct Jain sense of what meaning is in ritual, as an input which is spiritually significant. (1993: 2)
In dealing with emic (indigenous, insider) discourse in relation to the scholar’s etic perspectives, a hermeneutic of good will is necessary. Ethnographers try to take seriously what the “native” informants say, even if they do not actually agree with or believe it. Lewis models such an approach in his discussion of the penis-bleeding practice of the Wogeo people of New Guinea. He takes seriously their indigenous theory of menstruation as ridding women of semen acquired during intercourse (which endangers them), a theory that explains why men induce bleeding from their penises. They do so in order to rid themselves of dangerous pollutions acquired from women; this is male “menstruation,” which to the Wogeo is just as real as female menstruation. Lewis strives to make sense of the Wogeo practice in its own terms and shows how it can make sense even in “our” terms:
Their concept of “menstruating” differs from ours—men and women both “really” menstruate. Men do not menstruate symbolically, they menstruate. If I say I went to London, then just because you walked and I went by car, you would not feel that because you went naturally and I went artificially that I went symbolically. The concept of going (in “went”) does not bother about this distinction. If I choose nonetheless to report that Wogeo men “symbolically” or “metaphorically” menstruate, I must accept that I have imposed my own categories on what they do. I tell you about my categories, not theirs. And you may prefer what I tell you to what the Wogeo say because my categories correspond with yours and those of the Wogeo do not (1980: 112).
With Lewis’s model in mind, scholars will attend to the fact that much Israelite interpretation of ritual is not “symbolic”; it makes instrumental claims. Such claims should be taken seriously, and an effort should be made to work out how they make sense within the framework of ancient Israelite cultural assumptions. Moreover, as Douglas emphasized, symbolism need not be dichotomized to efficacy. Asserting that ritual is symbolic action does not preclude understanding it as highly effective, productive activity (James 2003; Olyan 2000).