Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion

Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion
Author: Brett E. Maiden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2020-10-08
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 1108487785

Recent tools and findings from the cognitive sciences illuminate religious thought and behaviour in ancient Israel and the Bible. Primarily intended for scholars of the Bible and religion, it is also relevant to cognitive scientists, researchers, and graduate students interested in the intersection of cognition and culture.

Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion

Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion
Author: Brett E. Maiden
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9781108738071

"In this book, Brett Maiden employs the tools, research, and theories from the cognitive science of religion to explore religious thought and behavior in ancient Israel. His study focuses on a key set of distinctions between intuitive and reflective types of cognitive processing, implicit and explicit concepts, and cognitively optimal and costly religious traditions. Through a series of case studies, Maiden examines a range of topics including popular and official religion, Deuteronomic theology, hybrid monsters in ancient iconography, divine cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical idol polemics, and the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. The range of media, including ancient texts, art, and archaeological data from ancient Israel, as well theoretical perspectives demonstrates how a dialogue between biblical scholars and cognitive researchers can be fostered"--

Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion

Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion
Author: Brett E. Maiden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2020-10-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1108859259

In this book, Brett Maiden employs the tools, research, and theories from the cognitive science of religion to explore religious thought and behavior in ancient Israel. His study focuses on a key set of distinctions between intuitive and reflective types of cognitive processing, implicit and explicit concepts, and cognitively optimal and costly religious traditions. Through a series of case studies, Maiden examines a range of topics including popular and official religion, Deuteronomic theology, hybrid monsters in ancient iconography, divine cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical idol polemics, and the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. The range of media, including ancient texts, art, and archaeological data from ancient Israel, as well theoretical perspectives demonstrates how a dialogue between biblical scholars and cognitive researchers can be fostered.

Mind, Morality and Magic

Mind, Morality and Magic
Author: Istvan Czachesz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317544412

The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.

Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity

Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity
Author: Dermot Anthony Nestor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-10-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567468003

Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity breaks new ground in the study of ethnic identity in the ancient world through the articulation of an explicitly cognitive perspective. In presenting a view of ethnicity as an epistemological rather than an ontological entity, this work seeks to correct the pronounced tendency towards 'analytical groupism' in the academic literature. Challenging what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'our primary inclination to think the world in a substantialist manner,' this study seeks to break with the vernacular categories and 'commonsense primordialisms' encoded within the Biblical texts, whilst at the same time accounting for their tenacious hold on our social and political imagination. It is the recognition of the performative and reifying potential of these categories of ethno-political practice that disqualifies their appropriation as categories of social analysis.

The Sod Hypothesis

The Sod Hypothesis
Author: Alex Shalom Kohav
Publisher:
Total Pages: 906
Release: 2011
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9781124980768

The apparent absence of secrecy in Israelite religion in early antiquity, in contrast with the Greek mystery schools and the pervasive, structural secrecy of Egypt, is the dissertation's opening problem. the study posits that the First Temple priests crafted a "disaster-proof" transmission of their initiatory lore to future generations. Faced with a Derridean dilemma, they made "the secret" public yet without revealing it. the treasured esoteric knowledge was embedded within the Pentateuch as a "second-channel," noetic narrative called the Sod ("secret") by the study, via systemic and systematic use of advanced literary means, especially figuration. the compilers' intentional act originating from hyletic, mysterium tremendum encounters with a supernatural agent, YHWH, who signifies unprecedented transitivity, resulted in an intensional text of singular complexity. the study demonstrates that the J and E strands constitute priestly esoteric matter par excellence, while traditional priestly sections are their exoteric material. Using a transdisciplinary approach based on emergence and complex systems dynamics, the study develops the Pentateuchal theoretical model by constructing and mapping relevant contexts into demonstrata. the Pentateuch emerges as a multipurpose entity comprising a multilevel, multicode, multicontext, multi-addressee, multimessage textual production. Engaging (1) Husserl's noetic-noematic-hyletic phenomenological framework; (2) semiotic signifier-signified-referent aspects; (3) Jakobson's factors/functions of literary texts; and (4) Habermas's "communicative actions," the study proposes (i) manifold discursive planes; (ii) multiple contexts, grounds, semantic fields; (iii) inferential "continuums," domains guiding textual data derivation and constraining data analysis; and (iv) methodology using interrogative "inferential coordinates" and a custom-developed "noetic-literary" method. An ongoing, "oscillating" narrative metalepsis is observed, a consequence of parallel narratives colliding and periodically warping the narrative integrity of one or the other channel. the dissertation effectively opens a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism that is akin to the "center," or "organizing principle," of biblical theology. the Sod is exoterically discordant vis-a-vis the rabbinical project and incongruent with it esoterically. the study's results are falsifiable, and their validity is attested. the interdisciplinary study, situated in religious and literary studies, intersects with phenomenology; epistemology; linguistic anthropology; anthropology and psychology of religion; classicism; Egyptology; semiotics; cognitive science; communication studies; mysticism; biblical studies; and consciousness studies.

The World of Ancient Israel

The World of Ancient Israel
Author: Society for Old Testament Study
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 1991-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521423922

Encapsulating as it does research that has been undertaken on the sociological, anthropological and political aspects of the history of ancient Israel, this important book is designed to follow in the tradition of works in the series sponsored by The Society for Old Testament Study which began with the publication of The People and the Book in 1925. The World of Ancient Israel is especially concerned to explore in greater depth than comparable studies the areas and degrees of overlap between approaches to the subject of Old Testament research adopted by scholars and students of theology and the social sciences. Increasing numbers of scholars have recognised the valuable insights that can be gained from a cross-disciplinary approach, and it is becoming clear that the early biblical traditions about the formation of the Israelite state must be examined in the light of comparative anthropology if useful historical conclusions are to be drawn from them.

Judaic Technologies of the Word

Judaic Technologies of the Word
Author: Gabriel Levy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317543459

Judaic Technologies of the Word argues that Judaism does not exist in an abstract space of reflection. Rather, it exists both in artifacts of the material world - such as texts - and in the bodies, brains, hearts, and minds of individual people. More than this, Judaic bodies and texts, both oral and written, connect and feed back on one another. Judaic Technologies of the Word examines how technologies of literacy interact with bodies and minds over time. The emergence of literacy is now understood to be a decisive factor in religious history, and is central to the transformations that took place in the ancient Near East in the first millennium BCE. This study employs insights from the cognitive sciences to pursue a deep history of Judaism, one in which the distinctions between biology and culture begin to disappear.

Religion, Morality and the Person

Religion, Morality and the Person
Author: Meyer Fortes
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1987-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780521336932

Meyer Fortes (1906-1982) was one of the foremost anthropologists of this century, who for many years worked among the Tallensi of northern Ghana. Although he published seminally important monographs on Tallensi family and kinship and on political organization, his work on their religion has hitherto remained confined to disparate journals and edited volumes. This collection brings together in one place his major writings on religion.

Archaeology and Ancient Israelite Religion

Archaeology and Ancient Israelite Religion
Author: Avraham Faust
Publisher:
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2020-09-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9783039368082

Israelite religions have always fascinated scholars. Initial studies used the Bible as their main source of information and attempted to read it critically in order to learn about the religion of ancient Israel. With the advent of modern research in the Near East, more and more information on other Ancient Near Eastern religions was accumulated and initially used to illuminate Israelite religious practices as described in the Bible, but gradually led to challenging some of the accepted truisms. The new information was collected mainly through archaeological excavations, and archaeology had gradually become a major player in the study of ancient Israelite religion(s) and religious practices. The massive amount of information on the various subthemes related to Israelite religions, the shifting trends in scholarship, the multiplicity of approaches, and the interdisciplinary nature of the field means that no single scholar can master all the data today. Indeed, there is currently no comprehensive and updated book that covers all or even most aspects pertaining to Israelite religion(s). This volume is a partial attempt to fill some of this lacuna. The volume includes a number of broad, summarizing studies, presenting readers with the up-to-date state of the research on a number of important issues, from Solomon's temple to broader studies of the loci of cultic activity in ancient Israel through to analysis of the difference between the "official" and "popular" expression of religion, the place of women in Israelite cult(s), similarities and differences between the religious practices in Israel and Judah and those of other Iron Age religions, and the religion of some of Israel's neighbors to the role of zooarchaeology in the study of religion, ancient Israelite festivals, and more.