The Savage in Judaism: Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (review)

Volume 9, No.4 Summer1991 135 torical chronology of Israel and Judah, and Babylonian/Jewish month names. With bibliographies of ancient and modern sources and three indices, this book is a highly serviceable reference work for biblical and related historical chronologies. Minor flaws. There is one glaring typo in the book: in the first table of chronological data (Gen. 5-11) on p. 7, the columns of figures culled from the LXX and SP are reversed (they are correctly presented in the tables on pp. 12, 19f., 45, and Appendix A). The omission of both captions for the many tables of figures scattered throughout the text and of a list of these tables limits somewhat the reader's ease of access to this information. Jeremy Hughes' book, in my opinion, represents an outstanding addition to the rather esoteric branch of biblical studies devoted to chronology. While I hesitate to call any secondary work on the Bible indispensible, I know of no other recent study on biblical chronology in any language that I would prefer to have in my personal library. Steven W. Holloway Ph.D. Candidate University of Chicago The Savage in Judaism: Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism , by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.289 pp. $35.00 (c); $17.95 (p). The author, now a professor of religious studies at Temple University, acknowledges that this revolutionary book had its genesis in his disillusionment , while a rabbinical student, with previous models for understanding ancient Israelite history and religion. In particular, he eschewed then, and now in this book, the tendency of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, mostly Christian, to exclude ancient Israelite religion and later Judaism from the study of "primitive religions" ("the savage"). Thus this tradition was eliminated from consideration by modern comparative religion, ethnography , and anthropology-to its detriment. Eilberg-Schwartz begins in Part I with a review of scholarship since the Enlightenment, arguing that leading students of comparative religion such as Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Boas, Mead, Krober, Benedict, and others rarely influenced the study of Israelite religion. He contends that only since the mid-sixties, with such studies as those of Mary Douglas on food taboos and Edmund Leach on structuralist approaches to religious narrative, has the picture changed. Most previous studies up to this time, theologically based and apologetic in nature, had tried to 136 SHOFAR demonstrate that Israelite religion had left animism and mythological thought far behind, and was thus superior to anything in the ancient world. But to Eilberg-Schwartz, such "comparative" studies only "served a defensive posturing and evolutionary agenda." Despite inevitable polemics, this first section is provocative, often persuasive . Nevertheless, the author has minimized the very rapidly growing use of sociological and anthropological models, even by mainstream biblical scholars, since the 19708. He takes brief notice of some such scholars, like Robert Culley, Norman Gottwald, and Robert Wilson. But he is unaware of seminal and very influential recent works by C. H. 1. de Geus (1976); N. P. Lemche (1985, 1988); F. S. Frick (1985), J. W. Flanagan (1988), R. A. Oden (1987), and others-not to mention the "new archaeology" movement and its use of socio-anthropological paradigms, which as I have shown elsewhere is now having at last a truly revolutionary impact on the study of ancient Israelite cultural history, society, and religion.1 Part II, entitled "Cows, Blood, and Juvenile Fruit Trees," is EilbergSchwartz 's own comparative, anthropological analysis of such aspects of ancient Israel as the use of animal metaphors in narrative; circumcision and the language of fertility, descent, and gender; and menstrual blood, semen, and the fluid symbolism of the human body. In general, the attempt at a sort of functionalist-structuralist approach is fresh and often provides new insights, gained either from cross-cultural comparisons or sometimes from appeal to common sense and universal human experience. Here the author is often at odds, of course, with more traditional studies, based as many of these are on a rather narrow philological and theological approach. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the author's lack of credentials as a technical biblical scholar (as he acknowledges quite candidly) is often...