The Family in Life and in Death: The Family in Ancient Israel

This volume explores the advantages of seeing a topic from two different but complementary perspectives. All of the papers in the volume were read at two sessions at SBL (2005 and 2006) that were co-sponsored by the Social Sciences and the Hebrew Bible Section of SBL and the American Schools of Oriental Research. The sessions were designed to promote dialogue among scholars by juxtaposing research based in the social sciences and archaeology. Scholars contributed papers from within their own methodological and research perspective, but addressed possible interactions and overlaps that their research might contribute to the complementary perspective. Significant intersections between the approaches emerged when patterns of social interactions accessed by social scientific methods paralleled patterns in material remains accessed by archaeological methods.

The sessions and thus the book achieve coherence because all of the papers attended to aspects of the family in ancient Israel. While the presenters selected their own topics in the subject area, several foci emerged that reflect current research interests in these fields. These foci include research on ancestors and the cult of the dead, configurations of family house structures, and family relational interactions. All of the papers make their methods and approaches visible and delineate clearly the textual or material basis of their research, so that the dialogue among the papers is facilitated.

Inhalt

Chapter One: The Clarity of Double Vision: Seeing the Family in Sociological and Archaeological Perspective
Chapter Two: "It's 'All in the Family': Aspects of Identity in Ancient Israel
Chapter Three: Lying and Deceit in Families: The Duping of Isaac and Tamar
Chapter Four: Average Families? The Problem of Variability in Iron Age Houses
Chapter Five: "Home Economics 1407" and the Israelite Family and their Neighbors: An Anthropological/Archaeological Exploration
Chapter Six: Food, Family, and Clothing at Passover: Ancestor Worship in Exodus 12:3-13
Chapter Seven: Death, Kinship, and Community: Funerary Practices and the hesed Ideal in Israel
Chapter Eight: From Womb to Tomb: The Israelite Family in Death as in Life