{"product_id":"the-grammar-of-sacrifice-a-generativist-study-of-the-israelite","title":"The 'Grammar' of Sacrifice: A Generativist Study of the Israelite","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe notion that rituals, like natural languages, are governed by implicit, rigorous rules led scholars in the last century, harking back to the early Indian grammarian Patañjali, to speak of a \"grammar\", or \"syntax\", of ritual, particularly sacrificial ritual. Despite insightful examples of ritual complexes that follow hierarchical rules akin to syntactic structures in natural languages, and ambitious attempts to imagine a Universal Grammar of sacrificial\n\u003cbr\u003eritual, no single, comprehensive \"grammar\" of any ritual system has yet been composed. This book offers the first such \"grammar.\" Centering on *S--the idealized sacrificial system represented in the\n\u003cbr\u003ePriestly laws in the Pentateuch--it demonstrates that a ritual system is describable in terms of a set of concise, unconsciously internalized, generative rules, analogous to the grammar of a natural language. Despite far-reaching diachronic developments, reflected in Second Temple and rabbinic literature, the ancient Israelite sacrificial system retained a highly unchangeable \"grammar,\" which is abstracted and analysed in a formulaic manner.The limits of the analogy to linguistics\n\u003cbr\u003eare stressed: rather than categories borrowed from linguistics, such as syntax and morphology, the operative categories of *S are abstracted inductively from the ritual texts: zoemics--the study of the\n\u003cbr\u003eclasses of animals used in ritual sacrifice; jugation-the rules governing the joining of animal and non-animal materials; hierarchics-the tiered structuring of sacrificial sequences; and praxemics--the analysis of the physical activity comprising sacrificial procedures. Finally, the problem of meaning in non-linguistic ritual systems is addressed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46060692799726,"sku":"9780198705567","price":263.65,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/9612\/7726\/files\/9780198705567.jpg?v=1736517994","url":"https:\/\/bookland.com.au\/products\/the-grammar-of-sacrifice-a-generativist-study-of-the-israelite","provider":"Book Land AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}