The Five-Minute Archaeologist in the Southern Levant - Cynthia Shafer-Elliott
43. How do you define cultic context?
The Five-Minute Archaeologist in the Southern Levant - Cynthia Shafer-Elliott
Jonathan S. Greer [+]
Grand Valley State University
Jonathan Greer is an archaeologist and biblical scholar. He earned his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include ancient Israelite religion, sacrifice, and feasting. He is Visiting Professor of Archaeology at Grand Valley State University and Associate Director of excavations at Tel Dan, Israel. He has published a number of works on the relationship of the Bible to the ancient world, e.g. “Feasting and Festivals.” Pages 299–320 in The T&T Clark Handbook to Food in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, Edited by Janling Fu, Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, and Carol Meyers (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); “Drinking the Dregs of the Divine: Daniel 5 and the
Motif of “King and Cup” in its Ancient Near Eastern Context.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 79.1 (2020): 99–112; “‘The ‘Priestly Portion’ in the Hebrew Bible: Its Ancient Near Eastern Context and Its Implications for the Composition of P.” Journal of Biblical Literature 138 (2019): 263–84; “The Zooarchaeology of Israelite Religion: Methods and Practice,” Religions 10.4, 254 (2019): 1–19; and Dinner at Dan: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sacred Feasts at Iron Age II Tel Dan and Their Significance (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013).
Description
This essay addresses methods employed by archaeologists to determine the plausibility that an installation was used for religious purposes. The problematic nature of differentiating between the overlapping spheres of “religious” and “secular” activities is addressed and three main categories of evidence for cultic contexts—architecture, artifacts, and animal bones—are discussed.