The Vow and the "Popular Religious Groups" of Ancient Israel: A Philological and Sociological Inquiry.

• Author: Milgrom, Jacob
• Position: Review

By JACQUES BERLINERBLAU. JSOT Supplement Series, vol. 210. Sheffield: SHEFFIELD ACADEMIC PRESS, 1996. Pp. 219. [pounds]39, $58.50.

Through the medium of the vow, Berlinerblau investigates ancient Israel's unofficial, popular religion. In his introduction (pp. 13-45), he defines official religion as "the religion of an orthodoxy, one which wields [misspelled as 'yields'] power against others through coercion and/or consent" (p. 44). The "others" he focuses on are women, nonprivileged economic classes, and heterodoxies.

In part I (pp. 48-112), Berlinerblau describes four basic mechanics of the Israelite vow: individual initiation, privacy, spoken invocation, and autonomous regulation, by which he means that the individual determines what to promise to YHWH and when to pay it. In part II (pp. 114-48), he studies the explicit but questionable evidence for the vow "which the Yahwistic literati wanted their readers to know" (p. 114) against the more reliable implicit evidence that can be teased out of the biblical text. The latter he discusses under the rubrics "indecision and economic accessibility, social accuracy, women and her vow." In part III (pp. 154-74), he investigates the reaction of the functionaries of official religion to the popular vow, concluding that it was "powerless to regulate, prescribe or control the votive activity of the populace" (p. 151). Four appendices (pp. 17582) conclude the book.

This summary of the book's contents should suffice to indicate that Berlinerblau's inquiry runs along sociological lines, to which he brings a rich and informative bibliography. Biblical and Northwest Semitic texts are also included, but not extensively. The reason, I believe, is that other important examples have already been analyzed in an equally excellent and recent book on the vow by T. W...