Folk Religion in the Ancient Levant and Mediterranean

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Religions seeks to provide a broad discussion of folk (or popular or family) religion in antiquity. In studies on both ancient and modern religious behavior, scholars have worked to articulate a basic distinction between elite and folk religion. The result has been more robust and nuanced descriptions of societies. What makes this dichotomy powerful is its two-fold valence—on one hand, reflecting non-state and non-standard practices that may more closely reflect the individual’s and community’s understanding of their own religious positioning, and, on the other hand, highlighting the dialectic by which these behaviors feed into, resist, take away from, and re-analyze state-endorsed religious behaviors and thoughts.

Aim and Scope

While the archaeological revolution has provided innumerable materials that make the study of folk religion in the ancient world possible, peering behind the veil of state religion, as represented in written sources, remains difficult. We acknowledge that exploring when and how we can speak meaningfully about folk religion or even identify it is challenging, and a lack of common standards of evidence has rendered discussion desultory. This Special Issue of Religions, then, intends to fulfill a two-fold mandate. First, to publish substantive studies that further our knowledge of particular aspects of folk religion in the ancient western Levant and eastern Mediterranean and, second, to publish studies that self-consciously elucidate a methodological framework within which future studies of folk religion can be conducted.

This Special Issue will focus on the Western Levant and Eastern Mediterranean worlds from the Late Bronze through the end of the Iron II or Archaic Ages. We hope that this wide net will allow scholars to work in areas where the evidence is most illuminating and enable interdisciplinary discussion about how to productively study this difficult topic. For this project, we are seeking papers, ideally self-conscious about method, on any aspect of folk practice, in realms including religious textual genres, behaviors and products, symbols either explicit or implicit, and beliefs. Studies with a focus on the material correlates of folk religion recovered through archaeology are particularly welcome.

Please note that we welcome contributions from outside these bounds as well.

Suggested Themes

In the areas one might call folk, popular, or family religion, the variety of data points is matched by the number of possible approaches to them. Three such approaches to the study of folk religion stand out to us. The first is the study of material correlates (iconography, writing, and materia magica) that contrast with state-endorsed forms of religion. The second is the state’s relationship to folk religion in all its facets—a topic largely accessed via a comparison of archaeological and written sources. The third is a focus on highly organized forms of non-state behavior that illuminate relationships between folk and state religion, such as funerary societies, feasting, and fairs.

Texts are replete with reports and hints of folk beliefs and folklore and the meanings and connections they inspired. These have been traditional realms of study, and we applaud the intellectual value of well-grounded speculative approaches. However, contributions engaging material culture are crucial for setting limits to reflection-dedicated case studies most of all. Such material correlates could include the place and role of iconographies that differ from state presentations; non-institutional art, writing, or divinatory or other magical assemblages (not just manuals); ritual gear found mainly outside public architecture, such as miniature altars; or other small finds and substances employed in common with religious activity. Given the preponderance of state-derived textual sources, such items provide one of our few unfiltered windows into folk practices.

The issue of borrowings and the relationship between state and non-state practices is also of concern. What kinds of practices, rooted in traditional life, does the state mirror, coopt, or extend? Realms of borrowing include kinship networks (such as funerary practices, incorporating ancestors, and genealogical traditions), daily life (ritualized foodways, feasting, and divination), professional or commercial practices, and more. What do these adoptions (including of gods) tell us, and what do the condemnations and cases of acknowledgment without adoption also tell us? Studies from the opposite perspective—non-elite response to state religion—are also welcome.

Some refer to folk religion to embrace any ritualized behavior that is not demanded by civil authorities. Therefore, another area deserving exploration is that of non-state ritual kin-groups or cross-cutting social and economic practices, such as regular or predictable gatherings, fairs, funerary societies, and voluntary festivals, including those for calendrical events. Such highly organized but non-state events can help us better understand the network transmitting both meaning and practice in a folk religion context. The contrast to occasional religious behavior (including life-cycle events) may be subtle—as in cases such as hemerologies, divination, exorcism, and healings—but worth pursuing. Contributions that identify these types of behaviors and artifacts, which may have overlaps with broader civic culture and religion, are welcome.

Any stimulating insight illuminating folk practice is a contribution, whether grounded in material culture or in the comparative excavation of meaning.

Tentative Timeline:
Abstracts submission deadline: 31 March 2025;
Manuscripts submission deadline: 30 June 2025.

Prof. Dr. Baruch Halpern
Dr. Tyler Kelley
Dr. Amanda Walls
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• folk religion
• domestic religion
• folk theology
• material culture
• Bible
• Levant
• Judah
• Israel
• Greece
• Anatolia
• Bronze Age
• Iron Age
• Archaic Period