Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions

Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions. By Saul M. Olyan. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 174. Cloth, $85.00.

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.

The next two shorter chapters of the book turn to the regulation of mourning behavior: the prohibition of mortuary shaving and self-laceration (chapter four) and the segregation of mourning and rejoicing behaviors (chapter five). Why such constraints on mourning behavior? Olyan asserts that mourning and rejoicing constitute a ritual binary, so that any mixing of the two, at least in a single ritual actor, would be an affront to the established ritual order and the holiness system as a whole. In the case of shaving and self-laceration, these behaviors leave a long-term or permanent reminder of mourning that would be out of place on a person who had completed the period of mourning and turned to rejoicing. Once again, Olyan considers this explanation speculative, and he offers no evidence from the anthropological literature to make his analysis more plausible.

Instead, he offers two exceptions from the Hebrew Bible--two violations of the mourning/ rejoicing dichotomy--to prove the rule. In doing so, he exposes the methodological weakness of the book. As Olyan reads it, Amos 8:3a depicts worshippers wailing the joyous liturgical hymns of the temple and thus fusing mourning and rejoicing behaviors, which would be tolerable only with the disintegration of the holiness system, the very thing envisioned in 8:3b. While this is a plausible reading of the verse, there are other defensible renderings of both parts that would not serve Olyan's cause. Textual ambiguity aside, it is hazardous to rest so much of an argument's weight on so little evidence. The other passage, Jeremiah 41:4-5, which reflects a time shortly after Babylon's conquest of Jerusalem, depicts northerners on pilgrimage to the south exhibiting signs of mourning but bearing festival offerings and gifts. This mixing of mourning and rejoicing behaviors, Olyan asserts, can only mean that the ritual order has collapsed, which came with the destruction of the temple. Consultation of the sizable anthropological literature on pilgrimage, however, would lead to a different explanation: the liminal status of pilgrims means that the normal order of things is suspended for them.

True to the priority that Olyan articulates in his introduction, that textual analysis should precede theorizing and arbitrate theoretical claims, social-scientific research plays a secondary role in the book. As a consequence, while the book offers the reader an excellent text-based study of biblical mourning, it only scratches the surface of mourning's social and ritual aspects.