Writing a Commentary on Leviticus : Hermeneutics - Methodology - Themes

This volume features presentations delivered at annual conferences of the Society of Biblical Literature.

In 2014 and 2015, they were offered for the Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement section, which existed between 2007 and 2015; its objective was the study of the practices, interpretations, and reception history of sacrifice and cult in early Judaism, Christianity, and their larger cultural contexts (ancient Near East and Greco-Roman antiquity). This program unit offered panels under the title Writing a Commentary on Leviticus that were intended to provide scholars working on such commentary volumes with a forum of scholarly discussion and exchange.

The panel series was proposed by Thomas Hieke, who was then work-ing on a Leviticus commentary for the academic series Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament (HThKAT, published by Herder in 2014).

It was welcome and adopted by Christian A. Eberhart, founder and former chair of the Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement section.

The third and final panel was housed in the Ritual in the Biblical World section at the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2016.The present volume makes the presentations by these scholars, and with them an important segment of the work of the Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement section, available to a wider academic audience.

It is thus a sequel to the volumes Ritual and Metaphor: Sacrifice in the Bible (SBLRBS 68; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Liter-ature, 2011), edited by Christian A.

Eberhart, and Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement in Early Judaism and Christianity: Constituents and Critique (SBLRBS 85; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017), edited by Henrietta L.

Wiley and Christian A. Eberhart.We wish to thank Nicole Duran, Steve Finlan, Bill Gilders, Jason Tatlock, and Henrietta L. Wiley, the members of the steering committee of the Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement section, for their ongoing collaboration. They have pur-sued the themes of this program section with scholarly rigor and professional engagement for almost a decade.

We are also grateful to Ada Taggar-Cohen and Jason Lamoreaux, the chairs of the Ritual in the Biblical World section, for hosting the final panel of our project, thus allowing us to complete the three-year cycle.

We would also like to express our deep gratitude to all of the scholars who enthusiastically accepted our invitation.

They shared their research on Leviticus first through presentations, then in writing, and finally by submitting further samples of their previously published scholarship that were considered to enrich this volume. Thus, some of the contributions are revised or translated versions of essays that were printed roughly within the last decade (Watts, Unperformed Rituals; Eberhart, Sacrifice; Meshel, Form and Function; Hieke, Prohibition; Wright, Law and Creation).