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Meeting Program Units

2018 Annual Meeting

Denver, CO

Meeting Begins11/17/2018
Meeting Ends11/21/2018

Call for Papers Opens: 12/18/2017
Call for Papers Closes: 3/6/2018

Requirements for Participation

Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World


Program Unit Type: Section
Accepting Papers? Yes

Call For Papers: Cultic Personnel in the Biblical World (formerly Levites and Priests in History and Tradition) will host four sessions in 2018: an invited session on masculinity and cultic personnel; an open session on any topic related to the aim of the program unit; and two joint sessions, for which we also welcome submissions. Joint session with Assyriology and the Bible: Inclusion and Exclusion among Cultic Personnel. Submissions should focus on the ancient Near East and should, ideally, be comparative in nature. The session will be dedicated to rules and boundaries governing cultic officiants broadly construed (e.g., gender considerations, exclusive/excluding behaviors, etc.). Joint session with Greco-Roman Religion and Hellenistic Judaism: Making Priests: Intersections of Discourse and Practice in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Eastern Mediterranean. This open call seeks proposals focusing on discourses and practices that embed cultic personnel and their functions in particular social and political contexts. It is interested in studies of the various agents involved in the making of cults, including ruler cults, such as cultic personnel, paracultic role players like freelance religious experts, or entrepreneurial, smaller-scale cultic practitioners. How do cultic personnel derive and perpetuate their position? What influences and borrowings, and what appeals to traditional authority, played a role in the authority claimed by or attributed to cultic personnel in the Hellenistic and Roman periods? How did the institutionalization of the ruler cults and the appointment of their personnel interfere and/or intersect with traditional local practices? Proposals should move beyond the merely descriptive, toward a comparative theorizing of discourses, practices, and institutions. Proposals on Asia Minor, the Levant, and ancient Egypt are welcome. Papers will be available beforehand, and can be requested from Gerhard van den Heever, vdheega@unisa.ac.za.

Program Unit Chairs

Madhavi Nevader
Sarah Shectman

Propose a Paper for this Program Unit

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For all other persons wanting to propose a paper, you must communicate directly with the chair of the program unit to which you want to propose. Chairs have the responsibility to make waiver requests, and their email addresses are available above. SBL provides membership and meeting registration waivers only for scholars who are outside the disciplines covered by the SBL program, specifically most aspects of archaeological, biblical, religious, and theological studies.

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