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"McGeough, Kevin M"
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Debt and Credit: Entangling the Marginal and Liminal in the Non-monetary Economies of Bronze Age Ugarit
In a non-monetary economy, one of the main mechanisms for the storage of wealth is debt. For people living on the margins of the major urban societies of the Bronze Age Near East, debt and credit offered means of participating in larger aspects of economic life yet simultaneously allowed elites to gain access to their bodies, their family members, and their property as means of wealth storage. This paper seeks to explore how debt and credit were used to entangle marginal and liminal groups but also, perhaps, offered these same groups opportunities for resistance or for integration into larger polities. Textual evidence for debt and credit can allow us the opportunity to gain access to different information about the lives of marginal and liminal people. Using the Late Bronze Age Syrian city of Ugarit as a case study, this paper will explore some of the possible ways that the debt and credit mechanisms attested in the administrative record reflect practices through which marginal and liminal individuals became integrated into a larger Ugaritic society.
Journal Article
Ugaritic economic tablets : text, translation and notes
Ugaritic Economic Tablets: Text, Translation and Notes provides new translations of more than 800 Late Bronze Age economic texts written in the alphabetic script of the Syrian city of Ugarit. Each translation is accompanied by transliteration as well as commentary, textual notes and up-to-date bibliography. The texts are grouped according to findspot and indexed by both publication numbers and excavation numbers allowing for easy reference. An extended introduction discusses some of the grammatical and historical problems with interpreting these texts. Produced as a companion volume to McGeough's Exchange Relationships at Ugarit and edited by Mark S. Smith, this volume will be of use to Ugaritic specialists, Near Eastern studies and Biblical scholars, historians of ancient economics, and students new to Ugaritic studies or economic history/anthropology.
Book
The perils of ethnographic analogy. Parallel logics in ethnoarchaeology and Victorian Bible customs books
In recent years, ethnoarchaeology and the use of ethnographic analogy have come under increasing criticism. Analogy seems necessary because, as post-industrial academics, archaeologists worry that they do not possess the knowledge necessary to interpret archaeological materials directly and thus must consult with coeval ‘premodern’ peoples to develop interpretive baselines. In this paper, we draw attention to a form of scholarly enquiry – 19th-century Bible customs books – that faced a similar challenge and used methodologies that parallel archaeology's use of ethnoarchaeological data. These were books written by missionaries who lived in Palestine for extended periods of time and studied Palestinian life to make sense of obscure elements of the biblical text, believing that life there had remained fundamentally unchanged for the past three thousand years. Using the Bible customs books as a kind of ‘cautionary tale’ typical of ethnoarchaeology, we argue that a consideration of this literature brings into focus some of the challenges faced by archaeologists’ use of analogy. Specifically, Bible customs books expose significant issues in how relations are conceptualized between archaeologists, others and ancients, and show how a strict empirical focus in ethnographic research can insulate key assumptions from critical scrutiny.
Journal Article
The Problem with David: Masculinity and Morality in Biblical Cinema
The King David of the Bible, and especially as portrayed in the books of Samuel, is one of the most complex characters in ancient literature. We are told his story from his youth as a shepherd until his death as king of Israel. He kills a mighty warrior with a slingshot, goes to war with his king and later his son, and has an affair that threatens to throw his kingdom into disarray. The stories surrounding David seem perfect for cinematic adaptation yet what makes this character so compelling has been problematic for filmmakers. Here, three types of Biblical filmmaking shall be considered: Hollywood epics (David and Bathsheba (1951), David and Goliath (1960), and King David (1985)); televised event series (The Story of David (1976) and The Bible: The Epic Miniseries (2013)); and independent Christian films (David and Goliath (2015) and David vs. Goliath: Battle of Faith (2016)). Issues that shall be considered include: tone and genre, casting, democracy and ideology, masculinity, and sexual morality. This investigation shall explore how these issues are treated in different types of Biblical filmmaking and how genre constraints impact the reception of David on film.
Journal Article
Celluloid Esther: The Literary Carnivalesque as Transformed through the Lens of the Cinematic Epic
The reception of
has often been fraught with attempts to make the book more palatable to the audience receiving it and to interpret the book in a manner more consistent with the values of that community. This is evidence in cinematic adaptations of the book, where the story is transformed to better suit the genre expectations of the Biblical epic and the perspectives of the intended viewers. By examining two films based on
(1960) and
(2006) – some of the interpretive issues surrounding the tone and content of the Biblical source become apparent. If
is best understood as a carnivalesque work, as many scholars have suggested, then the expectations of this kind of work have not been met in the cinematic adaptations. Given the importance of film in contemporary Biblical reception, these new readings of
are perhaps particularly influential, at least within the restricted communities who view these movies. Likewise, analysis of these changes highlights the values of the makers of these films and the audiences who consume them.
Journal Article
The Roles Of Violence in Recent Biblical Cinema: The Passion, Noah, And Exodus: Gods And Kings
When The Passion was released, its extremely graphic violence horrified critics and scholars of religion although its success at the box office indicates that this, if anything, made the story of Jesus more appealing for viewers. Now that more time has passed and expectations surrounding levels of acceptable violence in cinema have changed, it is worth reconsidering how cinematic violence is used as reception strategy in Biblical cinema. Considering The Passion with more recent Biblical films, Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings, it becomes apparent that violence is not only used to expand laconic Biblical narratives but to invest them with a sense of verism, to situate the stories in either specifically historical or generally mythological time, to elicit audience sympathy, to remake Biblical characters into figures of heroic masculinity, and to harmonize Biblical story-telling with cinematic genre conventions. Viewing violence from a genre perspective, this article explores how considering instances of cinematic violence as light or heavy helps to better understand the complexities of the roles violence plays in adapting Biblical stories for the screen.
Journal Article
Esther the Hero: Going beyond \Wisdom\ in Heroic Narratives
Kenneth Craig's interpretation of Esther as a carnivalesque story, based on Mikhail Bakhtin's approach to literary criticism, has been influential, and it has been wholeheartedly followed by Adele Berlin.6 For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque in literature represents a folk narrative that at a surface level inverts social norms and power structures but at the same time reifies these same power relationships.7 If Esther is read in this light, it is an inherently conservative tale, created for the enjoyment of a Jewish Diaspora audience but at the same time not substantially attacking existing power structures. The MT version of Esther, according to him, differs from the original court legend because of the addition of the etiology of Purim, the several climaxes, the farcical elements, and the fact that the action of the story takes place throughout the empire rather than just at court.11 Although Wills's reconstruction of the textual history of the book is plausible, it clearly reflects the difficulty in defining the genre of Esther.\\n VI.
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