Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy, by Roy E. Gane.Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy by Roy E. GaneReview by: Dennis PardeeJournal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 70, No. 1 (April 2011), pp. 122-123Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658850 .

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122 F Journal of Near Eastern Studies

Marian H. Feldman’s essay, “Mesopotamian Art,” offers an informative and useful survey of the meth­odological problems the discipline experienced in the past and is currently experiencing. It also discusses some of the most famous pieces of Mesopotamian art with an eye to both old methods and new ap­proaches. Indeed, this essay would have been bet­ter placed in part 2. The same can be said for Gary Beckman’s interesting overview, “How Religion Was Done,” which belongs to “Economy and Society” as much as to “Culture.”

In Part 5, Steven J. Garfinkle’s essay, “Public versus Private in the Ancient Near East,” revisits the long­

standing terminology of private and public as applied to the ancient world, in particular Mesopotamia, and rejects it in favor of “institutional vs. non­institutional.”

Many of this volume’s essays treat their respective topics in a conscious and successful attempt to create a new methodological framework for the study of the ancient Near East. The contributions of Garfinkle and Feldman are good examples of this trend.

A Companion to the Ancient Near East is a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in the study of the region. In addition, the volume is quite affordable in its paperback format, something readers will certainly appreciate.

Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy. By Roy E. Gane. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2005. Pp. xxi + 394. $39.50.Reviewed by deNNis paRdee, University of Chicago.

Judging from the author’s presentation, the present work is an outgrowth of his dissertation, done under J. Milgrom at the University of California, Berkeley, completed in 1992 and published in 2004.1 In this new study, the author is in constant dialogue with Milgrom and with the long tradition of serious inquiry into the Book of Leviticus and related traditions from the rabbis through the great European scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His is a relentlessly meticulous analysis of the rituals having to do with the concept of sin, in particular of the term hāṭā(ʾ)t, with its two primary meanings, ‘sin’ and the ‘un­sinning’ or ‘de­contamination’ offering by which sin is removed. He goes beyond his mentor in insisting that the primary function of the rites prescribed in Leviticus 4 is to de­contaminate (‘purify’ is the term preferred by Gane, following Milgrom) not the sanctuary but the sinner/offerer. It is the function of the Azazel rite in Leviticus 16 to remove the culpability that has built up in the sanctuary over the course of the year. In sum, the divin­ity has taken upon himself all the sins that were forgiven in the course of the year and it is his dwelling, the sanc­tuary, that must be decontaminated in keeping with his divine nature and that can only tolerate contamination on a provisional basis. Thus the entire process maintains the requirements for justice while enabling the deity’s loyal subjects to continue their existence in spite of be­

1 R. E. Gane, Ritual Dynamic Structure, Gorgias Dissertations 14, Religion 2 (Piscataway, 2004).

ing fallible humans—hence the terms ‘character’ and ‘theodicy’ in the title.

The approach is almost exclusively synchronic: occasional lip service is given to the theory of differ­ent sources, but, for example, the author integrates the sacrifice of the red cow prescribed in Numbers 19, ascribed by source criticism to the Holiness Code, fully into his overall view of the hāṭā(ʾ)t in Leviticus, primarily a Priestly document according to traditional source critics. Indeed, his only serious foray into dia­chronics is to study the Nanshe and Akitu festivals as known from Babylonian sources and to outline the similarities and differences between these rites and the biblical prescriptive rituals of decontamination. He concludes from this analysis that the rites known from Leviticus may have had preexilic origins.

One finds nary a word here about the linguistically closer ritual texts from Ras Shamra (thirteenth cen­tury b.c.), couched in a Northwest Semitic language that is fairly closely related to Hebrew and that shows several terms cognate with Hebrew sacrificial terms (DBḤ/ZBḤ, ‘to sacrifice’; šlmm/š əlāmīm, ‘sacrifice productive of well­being’; šnpt /t ənūpā, ‘presentation offering’) and others that, in spite of showing differ­ent forms, appear to be functionally parallel in the two languages (in particular, šrp/ʿōlā, ‘burnt offer­ing’). There is good reason for this: reference to sin, not to mention the sacrificial devices for dealing with it according to the biblical traditions, principally the manipulation of sacrificial blood and fat, are totally

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Book Reviews F 123

absent from the standard Ugaritic ritual texts.2 The fact that the hāṭā(ʾ)t was clearly a sacrificial type in the biblical texts but finds no obvious counterpart in the extant Ugaritic texts may be taken as a reasonably clear indication, though an argument from silence, that a decontamination sacrifice was not a part of the Ugaritian system. If that conclusion be granted, however provisionally, one must also conclude that decontamination from sin was not an important goal of sacrifice at Ugarit. On the other hand, the appear­ance of the verb ḤṬ ʾ in a very peculiar but clearly oft­repeated rite (RS 1.002 and parallels) as well as in an incantatory text (RS 78/20) where this root is in par­allel with RŠʿ, ‘evil,’3 shows that the concept of sin was

2 D. Pardee, Les textes rituels, Ras Shamra – Ougarit XII (Paris, 2000), 923–24, 931; idem, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, Writings from the Ancient World 10 (Atlanta, 2002), 236–37.

3 These two texts were reedited in Pardee, Les textes rituels, chap­ters 2 and 81 (pp. 92–142, 875–93) and presented in briefer form in idem, Ritual and Cult, texts 22 and 49 (pp. 77–83, 159–61).

not absent from the Ugaritic cult nor from Ugaritian views on the origins of illness. It would have been of interest to read Gane’s view on the contribution of these meager data to the origins and development of the biblical traditions on the sin offering.

What this book needs most is a list of works cited. In the footnotes, there appears to be no system of bibliographical citation: first citations are complete but subsequent citations may be either complete or abbre­viated according to the “Journal of Biblical Literature” system (abbreviated title, no publication date). With­out a comprehensive bibliography, such citations are of no more use than the traditional “op. cit.” and hence extremely frustrating. There is an author index and one of biblical passages, but no index of non­biblical texts, nor of subjects, nor of Hebrew words. In sum, this is an interesting book to read, but a difficult one to consult except to check the author’s views on a specific biblical passage or citations of a specific author.

The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. By C. D. Elledge. Archaeology and Biblical Studies 14. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. Pp. xii + 148. $15.95 (paperback).Reviewed by deNNis paRdee, University of Chicago.

The author’s intent has been to provide an introduc­tion to the Dead Sea Scrolls for a general readership. The attempt must be judged unsuccessful for the following reasons.

1. To begin with the beginning: what piqued my interest when asked to review the book was its title. I was curious to see how a book devoted to the im­plications of the Dead Sea Scrolls for biblical research would be organized. I was disappointed, however, for the title is just a bit misleading. Relatively small portions of the book are devoted to the biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls or to the implications of the non­biblical scrolls for biblical interpretation. These topics are addressed explicitly in chapters 5 and 7, which deal respectively with the Hebrew Bible (pp. 87–96) and the New Testament (pp. 115–30)—the intervening chapter deals with Second­Temple Judaism, which is reflected, to much debated degrees, in various books of the Hebrew Bible and more obviously in the so­called “apocry­phal” books. Thus, inverting the primary points of reference in the title would perhaps have led to a less marketable result but one that would have been more accurate.

2. Although a great many useful details are provided on the history of discovery, publication, and interpreta­tion of the vast body of texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, no bibliography is provided, neither a general one in the alphabetical order of authors’ names, nor one organized by topics. Bibliographical information is provided in endnotes (located at the end of the book, not after each chapter) and in the so­called “Journal of Biblical Literature” format, that is, with the full citation at first mention and subsequent references in an ab­breviated form, roughly the modern equivalent of “op. cit.” The system is not totally useless but it is frustrat­ingly time consuming. If it is to be easily exploited, it must be accompanied by a list of works cited.

3. The scrolls are assigned to the Essenes who are supposed to have stored the texts that had been inscribed in the community’s scriptorium at Khirbet Qumran in the caves located at various distances from the site itself. The identification of the scriptorium is based on the discovery there of “two inkwells” (p. 20).1 No mention is made of the fact that several

1 According to E. Tov (“Scriptorium,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Schiffman and VanderKam [Oxford, 2000]; reviewed in this journal in vol. 64 [2005]: 290–92, 831), three

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