“If I were hungry,I would not tell you” (Ps 50, 12): Perspectives on the Care and Feeding of the Gods in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

In the Hebrew Bible, sacrifices are described as food for Yahweh and thus the sacrificial system corresponds with the general Ancient Near Eastern system of the “care and feeding of the gods” At the same time, human-divine commensality is problematized in narrative texts such as Judges 6 and 13, where the burnt offering is stressed as the only and necessarily different way the deity may consume food. Finally, some passages, such as Psalm 50, quoted above, explicitly reject the notion that sacrifices and offerings should be required as sustenance for Yahweh since he is the creator and owner of the world and everything in it.

This article offers a survey of various views on sacrifice as food for the deity in the Hebrew Bible and discusses these views in their Ancient Near Eastern context. It is suggested that the main understanding of sacrifice as meal in the Hebrew Bible is one that emphasizes difference through commensality and stresses the incompatibility of the human and the divine sphere through the social locus of the meal.     

The Diplomatic Career and Historical Work of Olympiodorus of Thebes

Abstract

The rise of the Druze emir, Fakhr al-Din II Ma’n, is best treated as a case study in political dynamics. A tax farmer in the Shuf in 1590, who received his first administrative appointment three years later, he became the most powerful provincial leader along the Levantine coast by the late 1620s, when he controlled three districts (sanjaks) in the Ottoman province of Damascus, and also the province of Tripoli. Except for Jaffa and Alexandretta, he controlled the key ports along the coast of Syria and Palestine — Sidon, Beirut, and Tripoli; smaller ports like Acre; and most of the trade in regional goods and the associated revenues. ¹ Of die five ports along the southern Levantine coast - Acre, Sur, Hait~, Tanmra, and Jaffa - olfly tile last earned sigtfificant revenues ill tile late sixteenth century, from pilgrims: W. Hfitteroth and K. Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan, and Southern Syria in the Late 26th Century (Erlangen, t977)., pp. 15, 18q9, 2.5-6, 95.