NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 49, Issue 2, 1995

In the 1950s and 1960, only a few !Kung San, of Bushmen, continued to follow the traditional way of life of nomadic foodgathering in the Kalahari semi-desert of Southern Africa. Their religion is discussed in this article. Its central ceremonial was the curing dance. It is an all-night ritual, which they often practised. It served as their major means for maintaining solidarity in their nomadic bands and for removing conflict from it - an other means being the sharing of the food they gathered and meat they hunted. They maintained solidarity through the curing cance, for one reason because the dance was itself a process of sharing, of n/um, ‘curing power’; and for another because it was a ritual of exclusion. God and the deceased were blamed for all the evil present in the group, declared personae non gratae and refused admission as unwelcome aliens, the !Kung waging a continual ritual war upon them as their sole enemies. The special interest of this religion and this ritual for the comparative study of religions is highlighted by an examination of the link between the anthropological study of the !Kung curing dances and recent archaeological research on the San rock paintings, of which thousands have been found all over Southern Africa. They are interpreted now as reflecting a tradition of San curing dances which dates back many millennia.

In Tel Dan a fragment of a stele with an inscription was excavated. The language of the inscription seems to be mainly Aramaic but written in a local dialect. The inscription contains the expression bytdwd, which is interpreted as referring to the ‘House of David’, i.e. the territory of the dynasty of the Kingdom of Judah and not as an indication of a cultic object for a local deity Dôd (against Knauf, de Pury and Römer). On the historical level the inscription is difficult to relate with an event known from other sources. Since the inscription can be dated in the ninth as well as in the eighth century BCE, a connection with the destruction of Dan by the Damascene ruler Benhadad, referred to in 1 Kings 15:20, as made by Biran and Naveh, is premature. The inscription shows that David was seen as the eponymous king of Judah in the 9th-8th century BCE by non-Israelites. The inscription thus makes probable David’s existence. The historicity of the narrivates in Samuel and 1 Kings 1-2, however, cannot be proved by this find.

In this article we have tried to offer a new explanation of two of the three so-called ‘hymns of Amos’ (Amos 4:13 and 9:5-6). After a structural and theological analysis of both the hymns and their contexts, the conclusion is drawn that the hymns function in the attempts of the author of the book of Amos to undermine the false theological presumptions of his people and their popular expectations.

Papias’ view of the so-called ‘living voice’ and his evaluation and criticism of the written sources (i.e. the gospels of Marcus and Matthaeus) for the teachings of Jesus are put in their pagan cultural context. The written sources are important, but they have to be interpreted by means of an supplemented by oral traditions connected with the apostolic succession. The expresssion ta lechthenta kai prachthenta which characterizes the contents of Marcus is compared with pagan parallels concerned with the exemplary nature of the bios (way of life) of the wise man.