Liane Feldman, Other Stories of Sacrifice: Ritual and Writing in Second Temple Judaism

Isadore and Rosalie Sharp Lecture
Liane Feldman (Princeton University)

Other Stories of Sacrifice: Ritual and Writing in Second Temple Judaism

The practice of writing about ritual is pervasive in Second Temple Jewish literature. Typically, these texts have been read through the lens of the Pentateuch, with the assumption that they are rewriting or interpreting sacrificial instructions from Leviticus. In this talk, I argue that such approaches have unnecessarily limited the ways in which we have read these texts and constrained discourse about ritual into a descriptive/prescriptive binary. Setting aside the Pentateuch and reading these texts in their own contexts reveals that writing about ritual was a tool for thinking and theorizing across a broad range of issues such as the function of sacrifice, understanding of the sensorium, and expressions of mathematical thinking.

Liane Feldman is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source (Mohr Siebeck 2020), and The Consuming Fire: The Complete Priestly Source from Creation to the Promised Land (UC Press 2023).