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Jewish Myth and Ritual and the Beginnings of Comparative Religion: the Case of Richard Simon

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Jewish Myth and Ritual and the Beginnings of Comparative Religion: the Case of Richard Simon The)ournalo[jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 6, pp. 19-35 © 1997 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by licence only Jewish Myth and Ritual and the Beginnings of Comparative Religion: The Case of Richard Simon Guy G. Stroumsa Department of Comparative Religion, Hebrew University, Mount Scopus 91905, Israel The study of "Myth and Ritual" in Judaism is not a self evident task. In the following pages I hope to clarify some preliminary issues through a few reflections based on the history of scholarship. The locution "Myth and Ritual", as the name of a "school" focusing its work upon Biblical religion, seems to have been coined by S.H. Hooke in 1933. Hooke used it as the title of a study in which he "sought to identify the connection between ritual acts and the words that accompanied them - that is, the myths, the "libretto" of the ritual score".1 In a more general sense, the locution became associated with a "school" of British scholars of the ancient Near East working in collaboration with Hooke, and also with a group of Scandinavian Biblical scholars, followers of Sigmund Mowinckel,2 and active mainly between the two world wars. In both cases, a new approach to Israelite religion was developed seen in the context of ancient Near Eastern myth and kingship. To be sure, Hooke and Mowinhl were not the first to raise the question of the relationships between myth and ritual in archaic and ancient religions. Both were the inheritors of two great traditions of 1 SeeW. Harrelson, "Myth and Ritual", Encyclopediaof Religion, 10. 282-285, and F. Stolz, Grundziige der ReligionJwiJSenschajt (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988), 85-90. 2 Mowinckel had published his Psalmen-Studien in four volumes between 1921 and 1925. His Religion und Kultus appeared in 1953 in a rranslation from Norwegian. 19 20 Guy G. Stroumsa learning which had revolutionized the study of anCIent religion (and of the religion of Israel in particular) in the second half of the 19th century. Hooke stood in the line of Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) and her followers of the Cambridge "ritualist school". The towering figures of William Robertson Smith (1848-1894) and of James Frazer (1854-1941) remained major presences for anyone seeking to understand better matters of cult in early Israel, or of the relationships between mythologies of the ancient world.3 Mowinckel, on his side, sought to broaden an approach first developed by Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932), one of the leaders of the so-called Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. This "school" had been established in the last years of the 19th century by a small group of brilliant young theologians in Gottingen.4 As Christian theolo- gians, these scholars were interested not only in Israelite religion, but also in what they called following Wilhelm Bousset (1865- 1920) SPatjudentum as the immediate background to the birth and earliest development of Christianity.5 To be sure, post-Biblical Judaism, which represented for these scholars the decadent state of a religion which had reached its highest point with the prophets, interested them mainly as the praeparatio evangelica. As Lutherans, moreover, they had little interest in cult and ritual which they identified, consciously or unconsciously, with Catholicism. Religion meant for them above all faith and the acceptance of a few saving ideas. Although they recognized the importance of myth in the Near Eastern context of Biblical religion, they insisted on the novelty of the latter.6 A clear example of the difference of 3 See R. Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New york, London, 1991). For a contemporary discussion of the issues involved, see H.S. Versnel, "Greek Myth and Ritual: the Case of Kronos", in J. Bremmer, ed., Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London, Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987), 121-152. 4 The "school" was given its name in 1903. See K. Rudolph, "Religions- geschichtliche Schule", Ene. Rei. 12, 293-297. 5 On Bousset, see A.F. Verheule, Wilhelm Bousset: Leben und Werk (Amsterdam, 1973). Bernd Schaller, from Gottingen University, who is prepar- ing a revised edition of Bousset - Gressmann, Die Religion des Judentum, argues that it is Bousset who coined the term SPatjudentum. 6 See for a particularly clear instance of this approach Bousset, Das Wesen der Religion, dargestellt an ihrer Geschichte (Tiibingen, Mohr, 1903)..
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