Wednesday, May 03, 2023

SBL review panel on Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves, part 4

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW has published another essay in its SBL review-panel series on Reed Carlson's book, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena (De Gruyter 2022):
Jewish Spirits and Christian Specters (Ethan Schwartz)

... This book is a crucial entry in the study of biblical spirit phenomena. I am confident that it will play a prominent role in future work on the topic. Yet in some ways, what I want to suggest is that the most significant and wide-ranging contribution of Carlson’s book is how he invites us to think about what it means to contend with problematic intellectual-historical genealogies in the discipline—even, and perhaps especially, when those contentions are messy and not entirely successful. ...

I noted the earlier essays here and links.

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