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Saul M. Olyan, "Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions"

A comprehensive analysis of the ritual dimensions of biblical mourning rites, this book also seeks to illuminate mourning's social dimensions through engagement with anthropological discussion of mourning, from Hertz and van Gennep to contemporaries such as Metcalf and Huntington and Bloch and Parry.

Olyan begins his book with the claim that existing studies of biblical mourning rites are lacking in some way, either partial in their treatment or dated and methodologically flawed. Accordingly, he proposes to study mourning in the many settings it occurs, both funerary and what he calls non-death-related, with the goal of establishing a comprehensive paradigm for understanding the social and ritual significance of mourning behavior described in the Hebrew Bible. The result is an exceedingly meticulous and well-organized exploration of biblical mourning behaviors and the circumstances in which they occur. For all its textual and contextual thoroughness, however, the book's limited attention to ritual theory and social-scientific studies of mourning results in a book that does not meet is own expectations: no satisfactory paradigm for understanding the ritual and social dimensions of biblical mourning emerges from it.

After an introduction, three long chapters (chs. 1-3) treat the full range of mourning activity depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Olyan identifies a cluster of mourning behaviors and assigns them to a fourfold classification: mourning for the dead, petitionary (both penitential and non-penitential) mourning directed to a deity or human authority, non-petitionary mourning marking social or personal crisis, and non-petitionary mourning associated with skin disease. While acknowledging a wide variation in mourning behavior, especially in terms of its duration and social location, Olyan looks for a common element that unites these diverse uses and accounts for why mourning behavior appears in so many different settings. His explanation--"the self-diminishing power of mourning rites and their evident adaptability to new ritual settings" (p. 95)--is unconvincing for two reasons. First, precisely when Olyan should introduce cross-cultural examples of mourning's versatility to strengthen his argument, he says he is speculating for lack of evidence. Second, non-death-related mourning, that is, mourning focused on the self and not the deceased, embodies an element of attention seeking and/or protest (unexplored by Olyan) that is the very opposite of self-debasement. On this point, Olyan's study could have benefited from existing anthropological research on ritual inversion.

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