How is Social Anthropology Used to Understand the Hebrew Bible?

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, social (or cultural) anthropology produced observations about “primitive” societies that were in some way related to the Hebrew Bible. For instance, William Robertson Smith (1885) studied rituals and religions of ancient and modern Semitic populations, and James G. Frazer (1918) examined the mythic qualities of some biblical stories. The twentieth century saw a new focus on the cultural legacy of the Hebrew Bible in Western civilization. In both cases, the key factor was to consider the biblical text as a cultural artifact like any other, an artifact to be tested against other cultural human expressions in history...