“Anthropologists and the Bible” Adam Kuper

Lecture by Adam Kuper Visiting Professor, Department of Anthropology, BU Anthropologists and Bible scholars have maintained an uneasy, often one-sided dialogue for the 150 years since the anthropology of religion emerged alongside German critical studies of the Bible. Anthropologists identified primitive beliefs and practices in ancient Israel, explicated puzzling biblical texts with reference to ethnographic examples, and proposed structural analyses of myths and rituals. A muted dialogue continues, but there are unresolved problems with the comparative method, and with the very conception of “religion,” both in ancient Israel and cross-culturally. Light lunch provided