“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.     

Parameters in the use of pXRF for archaeological site prospection: a case study at the Reaume Fort Site,Central Minnesota

Field portable/hand-held x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyzers have been characterized as potentially useful for archaeological site prospection, but little has been published on the parameters of their use in this manner. The purpose of this study is to explore whether the variability of surface geochemistry as characterized with a pXRF analyzer corresponds with subsurface archaeological features at a site subsequently excavated, and what conditions influence the success of this endeavor, including feature depths, soil moisture, and sample processing. A 520 m² within-site area was systematically surveyed on a 2 m interval, within which several types of archaeological features were excavated (chimney bases, wall trenches, and a bonebed of faunal waste), taking readings in situ and collecting samples for ex situ testing (undried, dried but not powdered, and dried/powdered). The four different tests of each grid location, analyzed through univariate and multivariate tests, showed that the pXRF surface data does correspond with some types of subsurface features when those features are very shallow (within 5 cm of surface level) and are associated with clayey fills. Further, the data from the subsurface samples provides excellent distinction of feature fills from other sediments, regardless of sample preparation. In situ surface survey with pXRF analyzers may however be adequate for sites with a thorough baseline geochemical database.     

A short-snouted trematosauroid (Tetrapoda,Temnospondyli) from the Early Triassic of Australia: the oldest known trematosaurine

The trematosauroid temnospondyl Tirraturhinus smisseni gen. et sp. nov. from the Arcadia Formation of central Queensland, Australia, is described on the basis of its rostrum. This is the first trematosaurine (short-snouted) trematosauroid from Australia, and is considered to be most closely related to Tertrema acuta from Spitzbergen. Tirraturhinus smisseni occurs alongside lonchorhynchine (long-snouted) trematosauroids in the Arcadia Formation; the co-occurrence of both trematosauroid morphotypes in that fauna is repeated in a number of non-marine Early Triassic faunas elsewhere in Pangaea. The Arcadia Formation is probably Griesbachian (earliest Triassic), so that T. smisseni is the oldest known trematosaurine.     

Eilert Sundt. A founding father of the social sciences in Norway

The cult of St Nicholas spread in Scandinavia and northern Rus' in approximately the same period, namely in the last decades of the 11th and the first decades of the 12th centuries. In spite of such a correspondence, the dissemination of the cult in the two adjacent regions has been treated as two separate phenomena. Consequently, the growing popularity of the cult in Scandinavia has traditionally been dealt with as an immanent part of the transmission of the Catholic tradition, and a similar phenomenon in northern Rus' has been discussed with reference to the establishment of Orthodox Christianity. By contrast, the evidence analysed in this article shows that the establishment of the cult of St Nicholas in the two regions was an intertwined process, in which the difference between Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy played a minor role. The early spread of this particular cult thus suggests that, as far as some aspects of the cult of saints are concerned, the division between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Northern Europe was less abrupt in the 11th and 12th centuries than has been traditionally assumed. This was due to the fact that the medieval cult of saints was not limited to the liturgy of saints, but was a wider social phenomenon in which political and dynastic links and cultural and trading contacts across Northern Europe often mattered more than confessional differences. When we leave the liturgy aside and turn to kings, princes, traders and other folk interacting across the early Christian North, then the confessional borders are less useful for our understanding of how some aspects of Christian culture were communicated across Northern Europe in the first two centuries after conversion.     

Discursive Representation and Pearson's Quest for a Radical Centre

Noel Pearson is one of Australia's most prominent and influential Indigenous intellectuals. This article examines a major idea in Pearson's writing, the ‘quest for a radical centre’. It examines this idea from the perspective of both its usefulness in understanding the deficiencies in public conversation about Indigenous affairs, and its persuasiveness in legitimating the role that Pearson has played nationally as a champion of the Indigenous responsibility discourse. The article argues that conceptualising public debate as a quest for a radical centre resonates strongly with the theory of deliberative democracy. Similar to Dryzek and Niemeyer's work on ‘discursive representation’, the idea of the radical centre reveals the legitimacy possessed by unelected champions of discourses.

诺艾尔·皮尔森是澳大利亚最杰出的原住民知识分子。本文考察了皮尔森写作的一个主要思想,“探索激进的中心”。在作者看来,这思想有助于理解有关土著事务的公共对话的缺陷,它还让皮尔森在全国扮演的角色——土著人责任话语的捍卫者——富于说服力。将公共辩论理解为对激进中心的探索,这与商议民主的理论非常合拍。与德雷泽克和尼美耶论“话语代表性”的著作相类,激进中心的思想指出了未被选择的话语卫士的合理性。     

Gender and Sanctity in the Middle Ages

This review essay examines recent trends and developments in the study of medieval sanctity and gender, looking at the range of approaches which have been and are being taken by both historians and literary scholars to a wide variety of hagiographic texts. Two recent studies of medieval hagiography are reviewed, John Kitchen, Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography and the collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters edited by Catherine Mooney. These works are representative of differing approaches to the issue of male authors' representations of female sanctity and concomitant issues of gender ideology.     

Frontiers of Contact: Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida

The arrival of Europeans in the New World had profound and long-lasting results for the native peoples. The record for the impact of this fundamental change in culture, society, and biology of Native Americans is well documented historically. This paper reviews the biological impact of the arrival of Europeans on native populations via the study of pre- and postcontact skeletal remains in Spanish Florida, the region today represented by coastal Georgia and northern Florida. The postcontact skeletal series, mostly drawn from Roman Catholic mission sites, are among the most comprehensive in the Americas, providing a compelling picture of adaptation and stress in this setting. Study of paleopathology, dental and skeletal indicators of physiological stress, stable isotope (carbon and nitrogen) analysis, tooth microwear, and skeletal morphology (cross-sectional geometry) reveals major alterations in quality of life and lifestyle. The bioarchaeological record indicates a general deterioration in health, declining dietary diversity and nutritional quality, and increasing workload in the contact period. The impact of contact in Spanish Florida appears to have been more dramatic in comparison with other regions, which likely reflects the different nature of contact relations in this setting versus other areas (e.g., New England, New France). The bioarchaeological record represents an important information source for understanding the dynamics of biocultural change resulting from colonization and conquest.