BMCR 2009.07.68: Gay on Bodel, Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories

John Bodel, Saul M. Olyan (ed.), Household and Family Religion in
Antiquity. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories.  Malden,
MA/Oxford:  Blackwell Pub., Pp. xii, 324.  ISBN 9781405175791.
$100.00.

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Indiana University, Bloomington
([email protected])
Word count:  1064 words
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Household and Family Religion in Antiquity is a volume of essays that
grew out of a 2005 conference at Brown University. The purpose of the
book and the conference, the editors explain in their introduction, is
"to advance our understanding, both contextually and comparatively, of
a distinct and widespread ancient religious phenomenon--household and
family religion--within a number of discrete cultural and historical
settings of Mediterranean and West Asian antiquity." (p. 1) To achieve
this end the editors brought together a range of scholars to discuss
"the phenomenon of household and family religion in a number of
different cultural contexts: Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia,
Emar, Nuzi, Ugarit); First Millennium West Asia (including Israel);
Egypt; Greece; and Rome." (p. 1)

On the positive side the essays, which range from relatively brief
summaries like Barbara Lesko's "Household and Domestic Religion in
Ancient Egypt" (pp. 197-209) to detailed surveys, like Rainer Albertz's
"Family Religion in Ancient Israel" (pp. 89-112), are generally sound
introductory statements of the current situation in their respective
fields concerning the study of family and household religion. The
essays all follow a similar format, which aids in making comparisons,
and are accessible to both the non-specialist scholar and general
reader. Though the editors do provide a comparative essay by way of
conclusion, comparison is little used elsewhere: the primary focus of
these essays is on case studies of the particular cultural group and
time covered in the individual essay rather than on the comparative
study of the materials.

That said, it must also be noted that the book could have been much
more. The main problem with the book is its failure to address the
previous literature on household and family religion. There is an
enormous literature on the problems of household and family
religion--or, as it is more often called, popular or folk religion--in
a number of fields, including folklore, history, anthropology,
religious studies, and sociology. It is a scholarship that also ranges
across a number of languages: from my own work in folk religion I know
of important works in, for instance, German, French, Italian, Dutch,
Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. Granted, the last two are unlikely to
be known by many, but the others are nevertheless major scholarly
languages....... It is discouraging to read a book on a topic where so
much excellent work has been done in languages other than English and
yet no use made of the theoretical and methodological insights of this
previous work. Rainer Albertz is the only author to mention this wealth
of scholarship, though he doesn't get it quite right: "The division
between official and popular religion or Volksfroemmigkeit is very
popular among Old Testament scholars, but only a few are aware that it
was derived from the Volkskunde of the nineteenth century and was
developed to analyze the customs of the people in Christian, mainly
Catholic, societies. In this context the term "popular religion"
denotes a phenomenon in which laymen take elements of orthodox Catholic
beliefs, rites and symbols and redefine them and reuse them for their
own religious purposes.... Thus, popular religion in this original
sense is a kind of degenerate subtype of official religion. It
presupposes the establishment of orthodoxy, a clear stratification
between a priestly elite and an unprofessional laity, and a claimed
priestly monopoly over all goods of salvation." (p. 91) To correct a
couple of points Albertz makes, I would note that while there are
nineteenth-century precursors to the study of popular religion, the
major work on the topic was really twentieth century, with much of the
early theoretically oriented work originating in German Lutheran
seminaries. The study of popular religion quickly moved beyond the
Lutheran seminaries to cover Catholic and Jewish folk religion as well,
and as scholarship on folk religion progressed, it came to cover many
other religious traditions too. His notion that the study of popular or
folk religion, as it is currently imagined, assumes that the folk
religion is a degenerate form of the elite or official religion shows
that he is out of touch with current scholarship on folk religion.

This lack of connection to twentieth-century scholarship on folk
religion runs throughout the book, and renders most of the effort at
theorizing, but especially Stanley K. Stowers "Theorizing the Religion
of Ancient Households and Families" (pp. 5-19), the second essay in the
book, into an exercise in reinventing the wheel. This is unfortunate,
as the essays would have been much better had they attempted to engage
previous scholarship.

Still, Family and Household Religion in Antiquity will prove useful for
its case studies, which will at least give a reader new to the topic a
guide to the texts and material remains for the individual religious
traditions covered, and to the current scholarship on these religions.
But, the reader will then have to go elsewhere to find out more about
the theoretical and methodological concerns in the study of folk
religion.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan.
2. Theorizing the Religion of Ancient Households and Families: Stanley
K. Stowers (Brown University).
3. Family Religion in Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar,
Nuzi): Karel van der Toorn (University of Amsterdam).
4. The Integration of Household and Community Religion in Ancient
Syria: Daniel E. Fleming (New York University).
5. Family, Household, and Local Religion at Late Bronze Age Ugarit:
Theodore J. Lewis (Johns Hopkins University).
6. Family Religion in Ancient Israel and Its Surroundings: Rainer
Albertz (Westfalische Wilhelms University, Munster).
7. Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First
Millennium BCE: Saul M. Olyan (Brown University).
8. Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women's Religion in Ancient
Israel: Susan Ackerman (Dartmouth College).
9. Ashdod and the Material Remains of Domestic Cults in the Philistine
Coastal Plain: Rudiger Schmitt (University of Munster).
10. Household Religion in Ancient Egypt: Robert K. Ritner (The Oriental
Institute, Chicago).
11. Household and Domestic Religion in Ancient Egypt: Barbara S. Lesko
(Brown University).
12. Household Religion in Ancient Greece: Christopher A. Faraone
(University of Chicago).
13. Family Matters: Domestic Religion in Classical Greece: Deborah
Boedeker (Brown University).
15. Cicero's Minerva, Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: An Outline
of Roman Domestic Religion: John Bodel (Brown University).
16. Comparative Perspectives: John Bodel (Brown University) and Saul M.
Olyan (Brown University).
Bibliography.
Index.