Tracing the Ritual Body by Ada Taggar Cohen, Richard E. DeMar... - 9780567710550

Tracing the Ritual BodyCatherine Bell and Rituals of the Ancient Biblical World\nAuthor(s): Ada Taggar Cohen, Richard E. DeMaris, Jonathan Schwiebert\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, United Kingdom\nImprint: T.& T.Clark Ltd\nISBN-13: 9780567710550, 978-0567710550\nSynopsis\nThis volume utilizes Catherine Bells ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating ritual and practice. Only recently, however, has Bells theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This cross-disciplinary examination assesses the utility of Bells theorizing for studying the textual evidence for rituals of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea.