Matthew J. Suriano’s A History of Death in the Hebrew Bible furnishes the reader with a lucid examination of death in the Hebrew Bible, uniting social theory and archaeology with textual analysis. He calls his approach “contextual,” aiming to examine death in ancient Judah by engaging “their language, social institutions, and cultural practices” (p. 35). His purpose is “to examine the intricate imagery associated with death and the dead in biblical literature by integrating the study of this literature with the archaeological interpretation of mortuary remains” (p. 2).
The prolegomenon of the book primarily surveys the social theory of mortuary practice (pp. 11–36). Part 1 discusses the archaeology of death in Iron Age Judah. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to the Judahite bench tomb (pp. 39–97), which Suriano believes supports the idea that death was understood as a transition from death to becoming an ancestor. Chapter 3 analyzes the...
