Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the dead.

• Author: Carter, Charles E.

This volume will be the standard work on Iron Age burial practices in Judah and its environs for coming generations of biblical scholars and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists. Bloch-Smith has compiled an impressive amount of data on burial-types, grave construction, and grave goods and attempted to integrate them with biblical evidence to present a comprehensive view of Judahite beliefs concerning the dead. Her work is marked by sound methodology and sensitivity to a variety of factors that influenced both burial customs and the attendant beliefs they represented, including geological and environmental influences, ethnicity, cultural patterning, the selective nature of the archaeological evidence, and the need to treat that evidence as an independent witness to beliefs. Once again, she first examines the archaeological data and then correlates that evidence with the literary traditions of the Hebrew Bible.

The study is divided into four chapters, followed by an extensive appendix. In chapter one, Bloch-Smith identifies eight burial types as most common in this region: simple graves; cist tombs; jar burials; anthropoid, wooden, and stone coffins; bathtub coffins; cave, chamber, and shaft tombs; arcosolia and bench tombs; and cremation burials. Each burial type is described in detail and its geographic and temporal distribution analyzed. She suggests that, over time, the bench or arcosolia tomb was adopted by, and came to be representative of, the Judahite population.

Chapter two analyzes both the bone contents of graves and the grave goods buried with the dead. Of considerable interest are her analyses of the gender and age distribution represented in the published burials and the placement of bones in multiple burials. Grave goods typically included pottery (different types of assemblage predominated in the eight burial types, according to archaeological era and geographic region), jewelry (beads, bracelets, rings, earrings, pendants, and Egyptian amulets; Bloch-Smith suggests that they indicate beliefs in the protective power of the items), and various personal items (stamps and seals; grooming and dress items). Also accompanying burials were tools and weapons, terra-cotta models and figurines, foods, inscriptions, burial markers, and animal bones.

In chapter three, Bloch-Smith surveys the biblical data concerning the interment of and beliefs about the dead from the ancestral period to the end of the monarchy. Bloch-Smith links the act of...