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Fasting as a Penitential Rite: A Biblical Phenomenon?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2004

David Lambert
David Lambert
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, several ethnologists became interested in the phenomenon of fasting. They found, in the words of one study, that “the custom of fasting is wide-spread among peoples at very different stages of civilization, and is practiced for a variety of purposes.” The impulse to order such multifarious data led later scholars to construct systems of classification. One such attempt describes the motivations for fasting as follows: “it may be an act of penitence or of propitiation; a preparatory rite before some act of sacramental eating or an initiation; a mourning ceremony; one of a series of purification rites; a means of inducing dreams and visions; a method of adding force to magical rites.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 96 , Issue 4 , October 2003 , pp. 477 - 512
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Professors Gary Anderson, James Kugel, Jon Levenson, and Don Seeman for reading and commenting on drafts of this article in preparation for publication. Passages from the Hebrew Bible are cited according to the NJPS translation, and have been slightly modified on occasion. Passages from the New Testament and Apocrypha are cited according to the NRSV translation.