Seth Sanders
Seth L. Sanders is an expert in the languages and cultures of the ancient Levant, from Ugaritic and Amorite to Hebrew and Aramaic. He has edited or coedited studies of the cuneiform texts from Israel and Palestine, writing in the ancient Near East, and ancient Jewish sciences, as well as writing two books, The Invention of Hebrew and From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon. His current work, which has been supported by the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation, is on a new approach to the composition of the Hebrew Bible, including the first open-access presentation of the sources of the Pentateuch beginning with the Priestly Work at pentateuch.digital. He is also interested in ancient and modern poetic and liturgical performance of religious texts from The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice to Black Sabbath. He currently teaches at UC Davis and will join Dalhousie University as McLeod Professor of Classics in Fall 2024.
Presenter at
February Bible & Archaeology Fest 2024
Barbecuing for the Lord: the Embodied God of the Biblical Priestly Tradition
Did ancient people believe in their Gods? A better question may be, what did they *do* for them, and how did religion affect their lives? In this regard the Priestly tradition of the Pentateuch is vital but controversial: it is the single longest ritual document we have preserved from the ancient Near East, but it takes the form of a literary narrative. But how real was it? Its ritual commands run from Genesis through Numbers and lay out an agenda for an embodied religion, one that nearly excludes human speech and focuses instead on physical action on objects and bodies, up to and including the body of God himself (called his kavod in Hebrew). In this talk I will lay out the main ideas of the Priestly tradition and present overlooked but concrete evidence on precisely what kind of historical reality is involved in Priestly sacrifice.
