Why Does the Bible Have No Word for “Ritual”?

Although the Hebrew Bible is very much concerned with rituals, the word itself (along with ceremony and rite), rarely occur in the standard English translations. Moreover, there is no word in biblical Hebrew that is the precise equivalent of any of these terms. Peter Leithart speculates about the reason:

A great deal of the Pentateuch, after all, is concerned with what theologians call “ceremonial law,” what we would instinctively identify as “ritual” matters. . . . [T]he lack of a specific biblical vocabulary of “ritual” raises the suspicion that the Bible does not isolate ritual as a distinct sort of activity in the way that we do. In anthropological theories of ritual, it is often assumed that ritual activities are symbolic and expressive forms of action, distinct from the functional and pragmatic activities of daily life. Almost by definition, “ritual” has come to mean “merely symbolic” or “non-functional.” The fact that the Bible does not employ a distinct vocabulary of ritual suggests that it assumes continuities between ritual and other types of activity that moderns find hard to grasp.

Read more at First Things

More about: Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Bible, Jewish ritual, Religion & Holidays, Torah

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF