One of my long term plans involves developing a course to teach here in Honolulu entitled “Kohen and Kahuna.” It would be an upper-level class for undergraduates that would compare taboo, myth, religion, and social organization in pre-contact Hawaii and ancient Israel. I might also extend it to Mormons, but I need to read more about Mormons before I commit to that.

Actually what I really need to read more about is ancient Israel, which is not my area of specialty. I was doing some research on anthropological accounts and in addition to the usual (Mary Douglas on the abominations of Leviticus, Edmund Leach on Genesis, bits of Peter Brown) I came across “The Savage in Judaism”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0253205913/104-3116847-3170343?v=glance&n=283155 by the wonderfully-named Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Schwartz was just another innocent Rabbinical student until he read The Savage Mind and was almost thrown out of yeshiva for attempting an analysis of regulations about semen in Leviticus and Deutoronomy. Since then he’s gone on to produce “other work”:http://books.google.com/books?q=eilberg-schwartz&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0.

The Savage in Judaism actually has two parts. The second half of the book is a very anthropological analysis of ancient Jewish practice (however one determines what that might have been) which looks to be quite good. The first half focuses on the situation of Judaism in European (i.e. Christian) approaches to studying other societies. Why wasn’t Judaism compared to other so-called ‘savage’ religions that Europeans discovered in their colonies? And where was it positioned vis-a-vis the study of the classics or ‘oriental’ texts? A big part of the answer, of course, is that even thought Judaism was one dispensation away from The Real Deal that Christianity represented, it remained a source of ‘Western Civilization’ different from the legacies of Greece and Rome. Very interesting.

I’m not very far in the book yet, however I also “recently reccomended”:/2006/03/11/from-orifice-all-to-double-entry-bookkeeping/ James Aho’s little book on double-entry bookkeeping without having read much of it and it ended up being just wonderful, so I won’t hesitate to reccomend this book as well.