Funerary and mortuary practices are things I think about. As a teenager at Tel Dan, I was given the responsibility of carefully removing the ancient dirt from around the skeletal remains and simple stones of a Muslim grave near the surface in the area above the city gate. As a pastor, I have a hand in shaping the funerary and mortuary practices of families and communities. Does the absence of grave goods signify absence of care for the dead? Not in your life.
In her study of the “funeral kit” of Middle
and Late Bronze Age chamber tombs of Canaan – a kit consisting of (1) a recognizable set of ceramic vessels
(packaging for commodities, food service-ware, and table-ware, “utilized” [a
great word in this context], one imagines, during the funerary banquet held in
honor of the deceased), (2) a scarab, and (3) a toggle pin – Jill Baker speaks about three
categories of grave goods -- personal, status, and essential. I run through
these categories over a broader set of realia as I work with funeral
directors and the cemetery committee of my parish (three cemeteries to keep up;
two nestled among fields in the countryside; one in town, on a tree-lined hill
overlooking the football field of the high school). Most especially, with families, musicians, and
the kitchen crew, in preparing the celebration of the life of a loved one. Don’t
think the marzeah/ funerary meal is unimportant! What Methodists lack in the
libation department they make up for in home cooking.
While serving as a pastor in Sicily, I became
acquainted with the neualt (“new-old”) practices of that part of the
Mediterranean basin. The eerie wailing in ancient dialect around the deathbed
of the deceased by women in black. The funeral procession which sometimes
involves a whole town (I once officiated at a funeral which attracted six
thousand attendees; the little chiesa metodista di Scicli could hold no more than a hundred souls, so I asked my friends in the Communist Party to
set up loudspeakers in the adjacent town square for the crowds to hear; of
course they obliged). The most important day on the calendar: il giorno dei
morti, the day of the dead, in which extended families picnic around the
tombstones of their loved ones.
I learned from Jörg Kleemann, a Lutheran
professor at the Waldensian Theological Seminary in Rome, to speak at a
funeral according to a template he derived from the theology of Karl Barth. It’s
the notion that a eulogy is an occasion for preaching the gospel in the sense
of treating the life and death of an individual as a mirror of failure and forgiveness,
of grace and glory. Sometimes it’s more about failure, in which case, it’s more
about grace. Sometimes it’s more about “all things bright and beautiful,” if
you know the hymn.
One thing that is badly needed is a competent
cross-cultural study of funerary and mortuary practices in the ancient world, a
study that integrates literary, epigraphic, and anepigraphic evidence and asks
probing questions about the relationship of “faith” to “practice” and “visible”
and “invisible” data. The cultural sequence from Bronze Age Canaan to Iron Age Israel
(what a difference between Iron I-IIA and IIB-C!) to Roman Palestine is extremely
discontinuous, yet continuous over the long duration at the same time. I think about these things as I read through the splendid articles on
the Kuttamuwa stele in the last issue of BASOR. Reflections on that stele in
context, perhaps, in a future post.
Three examples of eulogies from my files: here, here, and here.
Bibliography
Jill L. Baker, “The Funeral Kit: A
Newly Defined Canaanite Mortuary Practice Based on the Middle and Late Bronze
Age Tomb Complex at Ashkelon,” Levant 38 (2006) 1-31.
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