Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Review of Leuchter, The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity.

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note | The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity (Ethan Schwartz).
Mark Leuchter. The Levites and the Boundaries of Israelite Identity. Oxford University Press. New York, 2017.
Excerpt:
It would be a mistake, however, to focus on the Levites in the first part of Leuchter’s title at the expense of the “boundaries” in the second. For Leuchter has written neither an encyclopedic catalogue of the Levites’ appearances nor a linear reconstruction of their history. Rather, the book is undergirded by a keen perception of the Levites’ penchant for appearing at the boundaries—whether spatial, temporal, ethnic, cultic, or literary.
Richard Elliott Friedman's recent book, The Exodus, has some similar interests.

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