Household and Family Religion in Antiquity

John Bodel, Saul M. Olyan, John Bodel, Saul M. Olyan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118293522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

The first book to explore the religious dimensions of the family and the household in ancient Mediterranean and West Asian antiquity.

• Advances our understanding of household and familial religion, as opposed to state-sponsored or civic temple cults
• Reconstructs domestic and family religious practices in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Israel, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Emar, and Philistia
• Explores many household rituals, such as providing for ancestral spirits, and petitioning of a household's patron deities or of spirits associated with the house itself
• Examines lifecycle rituals – from pregnancy and birth to maturity, old age, death, and beyond
• Looks at religious practices relating to the household both within the home itself and other spaces, such as at extramural tombs and local sanctuaries

Chapter 1

Introduction

JOHN BODEL AND SAUL M. OLYAN

This volume grows out of a conference held at Brown University during the winter of 2005. Its purpose, like that of the event which preceded it, is 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. In order to achieve these goals, we invited a paper, and begin with a chapter, outlining the salient theoretical and methodological issues raised by the study of household and family religion in itself and showing the importance of cross-cultural comparisons for effective theory-formation. A series of essays follows, addressing the phenomenon of household and family religion in a number of different cultural contexts: Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar, Nuzi, Ugarit); First Millennium West Asia (including Israel); Egypt; Greece; and Rome. A comparative essay by the editors concludes the volume.

Family and household religion is a cutting-edge topic in several of the fields represented here. In some it is just emerging as a distinct subject of interest. In others it has long been studied, but often with a teleologically Christianizing bias that has obscured its essential nature. Past emphasis on religion as manifested in state-sponsored or civic temple cults has tended to give way in several fields to a new recognition that religious expression outside the physical and social contexts of national, regional, or civic worship – expression associated with household, family, and domicile – is also significant and must be investigated in a serious way. Such religious expression might include supplication of a household’s patron deities or of spirits associated with the house itself, providing for ancestral spirits, and any number of rituals related to the lifecycle (rites of pregnancy and birth, maturity, old age, and death). And it might occur in a number of different loci. For a number of the cultures represented here, the domicile was evidently a central locus for petition of family gods and, in some settings, for contact with dead ancestors. But for some of the cultures of interest to us, the domestic locus hardly exhausts the phenomenon we are calling household and family religion, for the household and family are social units, and the religious activity of their members might also occur in places other than the home, such as at extramural tombs and local sanctuaries. Furthermore, as Stanley Stowers emphasizes in his essay in this volume, the temporal dimensions of household and family religion cannot be ignored. Lifecycle events occur at particular stages of life, in a particular sequence. Thus, any study of household and family religion ought to be shaped by considerations of where a given ritual took place, in the presence or interest of what social group, and when – not only at what time of day (if that is known) but, in certain cases, at what times of year and at what stage in the life of either the participant or the property itself.

Readers might find redundancy in our title and wonder why we have chosen to refer to the phenomenon of interest as “household and family religion” rather than simply “family religion” or “household religion.” Because usages within disciplines vary, and because the phenomenon itself takes different forms in different cultural contexts, we did not want to prejudice the issue by imposing a single name, nor did we wish to become overly distracted by debate about nomenclature. Our primary interest is the phenomenon itself, how it was constituted and how it functioned within the cultures under consideration, rather than achieving a consensus regarding terminology. With the goal of approaching the subject from that perspective, we invited our contributors to use whatever terminology they preferred for the phenomenon in question but asked them to justify their usages by explaining the parameters of the territory that each term covered. We asked them, in other words, to begin to theorize the phenomenon for their own fields, thereby providing us with a basis for comparison among cultures.

Most contributors tend to prefer one term or the other, but some are inclined to speak of a “domestic cult” or “popular religion” instead of “family” or “household” religion. Predictably, perhaps, definitions of “household” and “family” vary by cultural and disciplinary context, but most can be broadly classified according to a few basic oppositional categories: families are generally conceived of either broadly, as comprising all descendants of a single male ancestor (a clan), or more narrowly, as constituting a smaller group of closer relatives. Within the latter category, the family can be further defined as either nuclear, having the triadic configuration of mother, father, and offspring, or extended, including also more distant relatives and often spanning several generations. Households, similarly, can be classified as either simple, consisting exclusively of biological kin, or complex, comprising household dependents (principally but not only domestic slaves) as well as blood relatives – in short, all who live within the house (or, more accurately in certain contexts, all who fall within the power of the head of the family). Within these basic categories much variation, of course, is possible – the compositions and configurations of complex households, for example, differed substantially among the cultures under consideration – and practically there is often considerable overlap among them, but fundamentally “family” and “household” characterize different realms, one primarily biological with an important temporal element, the other architectural with an important physical component. The terms chosen for our title may thus be seen to represent two related but essentially different ways by which the phenomenon of interest can be identified and, in a preliminary way, defined.

In addition to textual representations of cultic activity outside of the major sanctuaries, whether epigraphic or literary, relevant materials for reconstructing household and family religion include the material remains of distinct domestic or other loci, related utensils understood to serve cultic purposes, and pictorial representations of cultic acts, deities, or other relevant phenomena. For some cultures, the onomasticon forms another distinct class of pertinent data (e.g., Egypt, Emar, Israel). In some fields, recent archaeological discoveries have increased considerably the material available for study and have stimulated further investigation into the phenomenon. The evidence of Ammonite Tell Jawa, for example, has had considerable impact on discussions of Levantine household and family religion. Our authors draw on various kinds of sources, and their treatments of them are shaped both by the range of evidence available to them and by the questions they ask of it. Some privilege texts in their investigations, others material remains, including visual representations. Still others strive to balance the different classes of evidence. What they share in common is a focus on a distinct religious phenomenon attested cross-culturally and through time.

Why contextual and comparative perspectives? Studying family and household religion from the viewpoint of each individual cultural context of interest to us requires little justification. Such a contextual approach has been and remains routine in all of the fields represented in this volume and, what is more important, provides the requisite material for any attempt at comparison. In fact, there can be no worthwhile comparison without a detailed consideration of the phenomenon in each individual context. Thus far, such contextual work has been attempted in only a few of the settings under consideration here (e.g., Second Millennium Babylon, First Millennium Israel, classical Rome). For a number of other cultural contexts, the essays collected in this volume represent a significant initial step, a first attempt at a comprehensive understanding of household and family religion in a particular setting. In contrast to contextual work, which is uncontroversial in itself, being at worst harmlessly antiquarian, comparison has sometimes elicited resistance from scholars in the various fields represented in this volume, as Stowers notes in his essay. Whatever the reasons for such resistance – there are probably more than a few – comparison strikes us as particularly welcome and even necessary when the phenomenon under study, however it is to be more precisely defined, is attested as broadly and cross-culturally as is household and family religion. Comparison has the potential to generate new questions and novel insights; it can lead us to a more nuanced understanding of the category of religious behavior that interests us by revealing points of similarity as well as difference; and it can enable us to distinguish that which is common to a larger Mediterranean and West Asian cultural sphere from that which is particular to one or another cultural setting. First, however, we must explore the nature of the phenomenon in its various manifestations across the region. We therefore begin with a series of studies of household and family religion in individual civilizations, arranged chronologically and consequently moving (roughly) from east to west, in order to gain insight into the phenomenon of interest as it is evidenced in a number of discrete cultural settings over time. These individual studies are followed by an essay in which a preliminary attempt is made at comparison, in the hope of advancing our understanding of the nature of household and family religion across the larger Mediterranean and West Asian world of antiquity.

Chapter 2

Theorizing the Religion of Ancient Households and Families

STANLEY K. STOWERS

For areas of academic study with deep philological and humanist roots, the title of this volume announces a bold and important venture. The interest in method, and especially in theory and comparison, reflects a growing awareness that even particularistic fields like Classics, Biblical Studies and Egyptology are not self-justifying and autonomous domains of knowledge. Rather, they belong to the universe of knowledge and accountability named in the very concept of a university. I take my task as that of saying something about religion, household, and family in light of the tasks of comparison and theory formation. Although I believe that the principles of domestic religion that I discuss have a broad relevance, I admit up-front that I know almost nothing about many of the cultural areas represented in this volume. I do know a little bit about Greece and Rome and so will use examples from there. I will first make some remarks about family and household and then focus upon religion.

A massive bibliography from several fields exists on the family and household.1 Those categories are far from unproblematic, but only limited discussion about them is feasible here. Understanding the conjunction of the categories family, household, and religion stands as central to the project of this volume. The difficulty of the task finds illustration in one problem. If religion of the family is defined as the religion that any member of the family might practice, then all religion is religion of the family, since in theory everyone belongs to a family of some sort. Another approach and account is needed to treat religion of the household and family. The vast contemporary literature on the family is a highly political minefield. On one extreme, evolutionary psychologists simply posit that the nuclear family consisting of heterosexual monogamous husband and wife with biologically related children all residing together, and the man working outside the home with the wife tending the hearth and raising the children, is hard-wired in the brain, genetically determined.2 On the other extreme, some sociologists and cultural anthropologists argue that actual patterns of social relations are so varied that there is no family, but only culturally specific ideologies of the family.3 Unlike the evolutionary psychologists, at least, the anthropologists have evidence – too much of it.4 They can point to types of societies in which husbands and wives never live together, or where biological paternity is impossible to know and not taken into account in locating and raising children, and on and on with variations.5

In the nineteenth century and the early part of the last century, pan Indo-European evolutionary theories of the family pictured a development from pervasive large extended families in societies based on blood ties toward smaller families in societies based on rational organization finally realized in modernity. These ideas affected writing on Greek and Roman families.6 After the mid-twentieth century, there was a general reaction against these views and a movement among historians of European and the Mediterranean cultures to show that the nuclear family had always been the norm, including in Greece and Rome.7 There has been some criticism of this trend, but it still dominates.8 I find the pioneering work of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill that focuses on various kinds of residences as social places particularly suggestive for thinking about new directions.9 I will not challenge the consensus about the nuclear family and its focus on “blood ties” except to point to some methodological flaws in the way that the case has been mounted. Noting these flaws will be useful for theorizing the conjunction with religion.

It seems to me that the case for the nuclear family has often been made by using an implicit scheme of analysis that made the husband, wife, and biological children an essence in opposition to slaves, resident workers, freedmen, and other relatives who are treated as non-essential. But, for example, were slaves in Roman households during the later Republic and Empire non-essential? Greece and Rome were cultures that did not even have words for the nuclear family. They were indeed societies in which husbands, wives and their children residing together were important. But making family trump household misses the lesson from the massive work of the anthropologists. The sum and intensity of actual social relations is what counts. Families in which those who make up the supposed nuclear essence have relations and even lifelong emotional attachments to resident slaves, for example, are different from the nuclear family. Families in households in which slaves and nurses rather than the nuclear mother do most of the child-rearing are different. A household in which there is no distinction between work and home, and in which public and private, insiders and outsiders blur is different from the nuclear family that evolutionary psychologists find to be universal. Households in which members of the nuclear family regularly have children with slaves and do not allow slaves to form families are different. The examples could be multiplied. The lesson for the task of this volume is that place and residency must be given their due weight. Who lived together and what were their relations? What configuration of relations did the people who lived in that place have with other places? What were the dynamics and cycles of changes in the compositions of those households? Family should not be abstracted from household. Ideologies of household and family should then be analytically distinguished with the awareness that ideology and actual relations affect each other.

Because theory and method have been understood in various ways within and across fields, some comments about my assumptions are in order. I understand theory formation as the activity of critical definition, classification, comparison, and interpretation that aims toward explanation.10 Explanation is a form of redescription. Most often it involves taking a subject matter described in native, folk, and local terms and redescribing it in terms designed by the researcher to answer the researcher’s questions, to broaden the scope of the data, and to understand it systematically, if possible. Theory possesses whatever explanatory power it has by virtue of its difference from the local and native terms of the subject matter. Theory formation is a process that presupposes the fullest possible description and understanding of the local native point-of-view, but is itself a distinct intellectual activity. As Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us with Jorge Luis Borges’s parable of the mapmakers, a map is only useful to the extent that it differs from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Theorizing the Religion of Ancient Households and Families
• Chapter 3: Family Religion in Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar, Nuzi)
• Chapter 4: The Integration of Household and Community Religion in Ancient Syria
• Chapter 5: Family, Household, and Local Religion at Late Bronze Age Ugarit
• Chapter 6: Family Religion in Ancient Israel and its Surroundings
• Chapter 7: Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First Millennium BCE
• Chapter 8: Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel
• Chapter 9: Ashdod and the Material Remains of Domestic Cults in the Philistine Coastal Plain
• Chapter 10: Household Religion in Ancient Egypt
• Chapter 11: Household and Domestic Religion in Ancient Egypt
• Chapter 12: Household Religion in Ancient Greece
• Chapter 13: Family Matters: Domestic Religion in Classical Greece
• Chapter 14: Cicero’s Minerva, Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion
• Chapter 15: Comparative Perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index