John Dunnill (Body and Sacrifice, 128-9) argues that for Paul baptism is more than a “sign” of the new age: “For him, resurrection is the actual transformation of the mortal body of Jesus, the reversal of the deathward trend established by Adam: not merely the resuscitation of a dead body but a change in his mode of being human which begins with death and moves outward into life. Baptism, which he understands as a symbolic death, is the mode of... Read more
Summarizing the prophetic critique of sacrifice, John Dunnill (Sacrifice and the Body, 38) rebuts Roland de Vaux’s claim that “God demands first and foremost an interior religion” and that the prophets aimed their attacks as “outward religion” as such. Dunnill argues, on the contrary, that “the critique expresses the view that a religion which has an outward form is exactly what God demands – a religion whose form extends beyond the bounds of the rite, a religion which is in... Read more
John Dunnill’s summary of the interconnections of gift, creation, covenant, sacrifice, and Trinity is lovely (Sacrifice and the Body, 29): “To say that the world is gift, and that human life fulfills itself when it responds by giving, is more than a perception or ungrounded assertion about the world. It makes a claim about the fundamental being and character of God. The doctrine of the world’s createdness leads directly to Israel’s perception of itself as a people called by God... Read more
In Sacrifice and the Body, John Dunnill makes the simple observation that most of what ancient Israelites sacrificed was food. This means that “the elements of thanksgiving and tribute, which are always implicitly present in such meal offerings, not only attribute the harvest to God, and return a small gift in recognition of the greater gift: in doing so they include God in the economy of bodily goods.. God becomes a beneficiary of the harvest too” (36). Sacrifice is not only... Read more
Bodies are objects, but beginning with Husserl philosophers, anthropologists and others have considered not the objective character of the body but the “live body” that is both a living object and a cultural artifact. In the sense that the lived body is a cultural artifact, writes John Dunnill in his Sacrifice and the Body, there is “no ‘natural’ body.” He doesn’t deny the role of genetics or our dependence on material substances and processes, but “the body, as actually lived and... Read more
John is told to prophesy. Then he is given a “reed like a rod” and told to measure. Which is it – prophesy or measure? And if the former, why these tools? For starters, we can link this to the scene of measuring that is found in Ezekiel. John has been following the lead of Ezekiel in chapter 10, because Ezekiel too was given a book to eat that was like honey but made his stomach bitter. In Ezekiel 40,... Read more
One of the remarkable insights of Mira Balberg’s remarkable book on Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature is the contrast she draws between biblical and rabbinic notions of impurity. For biblical writers, she says, “the only participants in the impurity system, apart from the primary sources of impurity, are those who have direct contact with these primary sources. In contrast, in the mishnaic system even persons and objects several times removed from the source can be affected in terms... Read more
In his study of circumcision, Marked in Your Flesh, Leonard Glick picks up a suggestion made by Jon Levenson that circumcision in ancient Israel might symbolize child sacrifice. The cutting of the foreskin would function as a substitute for the cutting of the child, a reenactment of the aqedah. Citing the story of circumcision in Exodus 4 in support, he writes, “Zipporah might have sacrificed a lamb had she had one available; instead, she chose what we near at hand: her... Read more
In their 1994 The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw attempt a philosophically sophisticated definition of ritual. Through a survey of the existing literature on ritual, the authors seek to determine what kind of theory or ritual is needed. They reject theories that claim that ritual is a quality of every action (e.g., Leach) or a particular class of actions (most anthropological theories of ritual), and propose instead to focus on “ritualization.” Ritualization can theoretically happen to any... Read more
We think of other people as being, well, other, outside. Others might have some effects on the outer shell of the self, but not the hard core of me. At the very least, my physical self is my own. Aristotle might have predicted that this isn’t true. And recent neuroscience has been confirming Aristotle’s claim that we are social beings, all the way down. As Diane Ackerman points out (The Human Age, 177-8), however, our social interactions affect us at... Read more
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