This handbook presents an overview of the main approaches from social and cultural anthropology to the Hebrew Bible. Since the late 19th century, biblical scholarship has addressed issues and themes related to biblical stories from a perspective which could now be considered socio-anthropological. It is however only since the 1960s that biblical scholars have started to produce readings and incorporate analytical models drawn directly from social anthropology to widen the interpretive scope of the social and historical data contained in the biblical sources.
The handbook is arranged into two main thematic parts. Part 1:
- Assesses the interpretive angles since the 19th century
- Examines the place of the Bible in social anthropology
- Looks at the social images created by travellers to the Holy Land and the anthropological approach to the archaeology of Palestine
- Examines the contribution of ethnoarchaeology to the recovery of the social world of Iron Age Palestine
- Offers insights from the anthropology of the Mediterranean for the interpretation of the biblical stories and the history of ancient Palestine.
Part 2 provides a series of case studies on such themes as:
- kinship and social organisation
- power and authority
- economy
- gender
- biblical anthropologies
- honour and shame
- ethnicity
- reciprocal exchange
- orality and literacy
- myth and narrative
- cultural and collective memory
- ritualism
- prophecy
- commensality
- death
- iconography
- spatiality and territoriality
