Household and Family Religion in Antiquity.

• Author: Bellotto, Nicoletta
• Position: Book review

Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Edited by JOHN BODEL and SAUL. M. OLYAN. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories. Maiden, Mass.: BLACKWELL PUBLISHING. 2008, Pp. xvii + 324, illus. $100.

In Household and Family Religion, Bodel and Olyan have edited the essays on domestic religion presented at a conference held at Brown University in 2005. Spatially, the essays cover the cultural settings of the Mediterranean and Western Asia, and chronologically they span from second-millennium B.C.E. Mesopotamia to the first century B.C.E. in Rome. The articles, two or three per area, are roughly arranged in geographical order from east to west.

The book begins with a short introduction by the editors (pp. 1-4), in which they explain the purpose of the research: "to advance our understanding, both contextually and comparatively of a distinct and widespread ancient religious phenomenon--household and family religion--within a number of discrete cultural and historical settings of Mediterranean and West Asian antiquity." The editors also justify the use in the title of two similar terms, "household" and "family," as a deliberate choice made so as not to prejudice the issues, given that different disciplines use different terms, and that in some cultures there is a distinction between family and household.

Stan Stower in "Theorizing the Religion of Ancient Households and Families" (pp. 5-19) offers a theoretical introduction to the volume and analyzes the categories of household, family, and religion. He debates the formation of theory, emphasizing the danger of method without theory. He stresses the need to give an explicit definition of religion, in order to orient both the writer and the reader. The scholar then defines religion as a set of practices that involves the imagined participation of gods or other non-observable beings. He argues that the two central characteristics of ancient domestic religion were the place and the coordination of spatial and temporal place.

The following three chapters are devoted to the ancient Near Eastern cultures. Karel van der Toorn (pp. 20-36) explores family religion in Mesopotamia, Emar, and Nuzi. He takes into consideration the gods of the family and the cult of the ancestors, drawing a sociological and psychological picture of family religion. In this contribution van der Toorn stresses that the central idea underlying the theology of family is that the privileged relationship between a family and its...