Rites in and Out of Place

Abstract

It is within the broader concern with ritual and space that Old Testament authors extensively deal with the question of the ritual production of space. The Haggai–Zechariah 1–8 corpus is among the finest examples of prophetic literature where this theme of the ritual production of space is thoroughly addressed (Hag 2; Zech 3–4; Zech 7–8, as prime examples). The present study sought to answer the question of how the Haggai–Zechariah 1–8 corpus describes the complex dynamics of the ritual production of space by developing a new approach that combines insights from ritual studies (Ronald L. Grimes) and critical spatiality (Henri Lefebvre). In order to answer that question, chs. 3 deals with the physical aspect of God’s, the people’s, and nature’s space as delineated in the Haggai–Zechariah 1–8 corpus and sets the ground for the discussion of the ritual production of the ideological and lived aspects of these three types of space in the rest of this study. All three sections that follow chapter 3 and deal with Hag 1–2 (chs. 4–5), Zech 1–6 (chs. 6–7), and Zech 7–8 (chs. 8–9) first do a space-sensitive reading through the lens of Lefebvre’s spatial triad (critical spatiality) with special focus on ideological and lived aspects of space. This is then followed by an examination of rituals by using Grimes’s theoretical framework, including an analysis of ritual elements and the efficacy of rituals with respect to the production of space. The research demonstrates that the Haggai–Zechariah 1–8 corpus purposefully shows that felicitous rituals have a purpose to create an ideological aspect of space, and infelicitous rituals produce a lived aspect of space that is opposed to that ideological portrayal. More important, by intentionally portraying rituals within an imaginative visionary world, Zechariah, in his vision reports (Zech 1:7—6:8), exhorts the people to move from practicing infelicitous rituals to performing felicitous ones.