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Meeting Program Units

2023 Annual Meeting

San Antonio, Texas

Meeting Begins11/18/2023
Meeting Ends11/21/2023

Call for Papers Opens: 1/23/2023
Call for Papers Closes: 3/14/2023

Requirements for Participation

Meals in the HB/OT and Its World


Program Unit Type: Section
Accepting Papers? Yes

Call For Papers: The SBL ‘Meals in the HB/OT and Its World’ unit will host two sessions at the 2023 SBL annual conference in San Antonio. The first is a joint-session with the ‘Book of Psalms’ unit. This open session welcomes paper proposals on the topic of ‘Agrarian and Food-Focused Readings of the Psalms.’ This session will consider agriculture/food within both the context and the content of the Psalter. If the majority of the population in ancient Israel—even among the elites—had a close connection to the land, how might this familiarity with agriculture/husbandry have influenced the literature they produced? And given that many of the psalms possibly arose from or were used during feasts and fasts in ancient Israel, how might these food-based contexts have influenced the imagery and language used in their poetic compositions? Fruitful avenues for investigation include (but are not limited to) trauma/violence depicted as meal scenes (language of ‘being eaten’), food and power (the royal psalms), as well as explorations of the Psalter’s use of food language, meal scenes, and agricultural imagery. The second is an open session on the theme of ‘Feminist Perspectives and Gendered Realities at Meals the HB/OT and Its World.’ This session continues to explore trajectories identified in the ‘Future Directions for Meals Research’ session at SBL 2021, in this instance, the trajectory of Feminist and Gender Studies in the study of meals in the Hebrew Bible and the ANE. There have been ground-breaking insights from feminist approaches to the field of food studies (cf. foremost the work of Carol Meyers) starting with the re-evaluation of food and foodways in the ancient world. In addition, the growing fields of masculinity studies and other gender studies offer fresh perspectives on familiar meal scenes in biblical texts. For this session, we welcome proposals that address this topic by drawing from cultural-anthropological, textual or archaeological investigations.

Program Unit Chairs

Dorothea Erbele-Kuester
Michelle A. Stinson

Propose a Paper for this Program Unit

If you are a SBL member, you must login before you can propose a paper for this or any other session. Please login by entering your SBL member number on the left in the Login box.

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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