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WILLIAM K. GILDERS, Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Pp. xii + 260. $55.
As the title indicates, this monograph is a comprehensive analysis of the ritual use of animal blood in the Hebrew Bible, covering all laws, narratives, and prophecies that mention the manipulation of blood.
Since Gilders's topic of investigation is ritual as represented in literary texts, he favors an anthropological approach to ritual and a reader-response approach to texts. He starts with what most interpreters would regard as the "conceptual foundation" of all ritual involving blood: blood is or contains the "life" (soul = nepes). This definition appears in three pentateuchal sources: Deuteronomy (D), the Priestly Writer (P), and the author of the Holiness Code (H). Because G. agrees with Israel Knohl that P is earlier than H, the proposal that drives this book is that Lev 17:11 "not be employed as a key for explaining blood manipulation in P or elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, at least if one's goal is the historical elucidation of the texts" (p. 176). Only Lev 17:11...