Samuel E. BALENTINE, ed.  The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible. 2020. pp. 592. $131.68. ISBN: 978-0190222116. Reviewed by Alice L. LAFFEY. Sutton, MA 01590.
 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190222116.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190222116.

This has been a difficult review to write.  In this reviewer’s judgment, the content is informative, interesting, and important; it provides a broad context for understanding ritual and worship in the Hebrew Bible as well as a broad trajectory of its later interpretation.  Those goals it fulfills well.  The Handbook’s title does not, however, give a good (traditional?) indication of the volume’s content. 

OUP has recently published twenty or more single volume handbooks and the articles included in the other ones with which I am familiar fall more easily under the umbrella of the book’s title.  This Handbook, while purporting to focus on ritual and worship in the HB, does that to some extent, but does much more than that.  Comprised of thirty-four articles organized into seven sections in addition to its “front” and “end” matter, the volume contains only a few articles specifically targeted to ritual and worship in the HB.

Section three, for example, contains an article on “Ritual Experts and Participants in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible,” an article on “Sacred and Ritual Times” of the year in ancient Israel, as they are presented in the ritual calendars of the HB, and an article specifically devoted to “Ritualizing Iconic Jewish Texts,” while section six contains an article on “The Economics of Worship in Ancient Israel and Judah.”  In contrast, the five articles in section one provide a broad historical context that includes articles on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hittite, Syria-Palestinian and Greek religion.  

The three articles in section two provide “Interpretive Approaches,” from the perspectives of History of Religion, Rituals and Ritual Theory, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. Section three zeroes in on ritual objects, i.e., God, gods, and humankind, sacred space, sacred time, ritual objects and practices; the section also includes Christian and Muslim texts. Section four provides cultural and theological perspectives (e.g., sin and expiation, clean and unclean, sickness and healing, death and afterlife, divine presence and absence).  Section five contains a history of interpretation and follows the HB trajectory through Qumran, Early Christian Worship and Early and Rabbinic Judaism.  Section six considers social and cultural functions of ritual and worship including their politics and ethics.  The book’s final section examines the theology and theological heritage of ritual and worship and includes an article on what it refers to as “secular religiosity,” that is, welcoming the Sabbath on the kibbutzim; the volume concludes with articles on the multiple rituals and theologies of Christianity and Islam. 

The Handbook is both well organized and worth reading. One comes away with a much fuller knowledge and appreciation of ritual and worship in general.   One also comes away with a sense of how the HB’s portrayal of ritual and worship fits into a much larger picture comprised of past (historical context) and future (history of interpretation), as well as interpretive methods, ritual elements, theological perspectives, and social and cultural functions that have been and can even now be usefully applied to the HB as well as to other times and other religious texts.

So, this reviewer gives a solid recommendation to the Handbook but cautions its readers not to expect it to be explicitly concentrated on the HB. In that regard, it is very different from some of OUP’s other Handbook volumes, for example, The Oxford Handbook of Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible, with which I am more familiar.