“The Shape of Death in the Biblical World” Colloquium Sponsored by HUC-JIR Grants to Promote Scholarship and Advance Ideas

In furthering its commitment to promoting scholarship and advancing open exploration, examination, and critical study, HUC-JIR supports creative initiatives through the Grants to Promote Scholarship and Advance Ideas program. The program offers grants for faculty members to organize initiatives that enhance the culture surrounding faculty scholarship at the College-Institute and beyond. These initiatives provide opportunities to further faculty work, while also broadening the diversity of perspectives in classrooms and public conversations.

The most recent grant was awarded to Kristine Garroway, Ph.D., Professor of Bible, for “The Shape of Death in the Biblical World” which took place January 13-14, 2024.

Kristine Garroway at Forrest Lawn Memorial Park

Sarah Bunin Benor, Ph.D., Vice Provost, Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics, and Director of the Jewish Language Project, shares, “Over the past two years, several faculty members have applied for and received grants for small and large initiatives. Dr. Kristine Garroway’s conference is a great example of a scholar identifying an under-researched topic, convening top scholars, and organizing enriching meetings and activities to advance scholarship on that topic. We look forward to future HUC-JIR initiatives using Dr. Garroway’s conference as a model.”

Death is a universal human experience–and although it is an ending, it is also a beginning. “Facing our own mortality elicits some of the truest and most lasting reflection on the meaning of our lives,” Dr. Garroway says. “Every clergyperson and psychologist knows the profound impact that death has on people and communities. Our responses to death teach us about the community of the living who bury and mourn… One might assume, since texts of the Hebrew Bible provide the foundation for Jewish and Christian beliefs about death and the afterlife, that the response to death in ancient Israel would be rather straightforward. However, the archaeological record suggests that such beliefs were anything but monolithic. There was great diversity in belief and practice.”

In order to break down the traditionally siloed conversations in the field, Garroway shaped a cross-disciplinary convening that fostered collaboration. This colloquium brought together ten leading scholars in the field to discuss their research so that these ideas can cross-pollinate and lead to a more holistic understanding of death and burial in ancient Israel.

“Without this gracious grant from HUC-JIR, we would not have been able to bring together leading scholars in the fields of Egyptology, Levantine archaeology, and biblical studies who focus on death and burial in their scholarship,” Dr. Garroway adds. “Our working group continued conversations long into the evening to investigate questions that have yet to be satisfactorily answered by scholarship.”

Group at Forrest Lawn Memorial Park

Participants in the conversation included: Alice Mandell (Johns Hopkins), Christopher B. Hays (Fuller Seminary), David Ilan (Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion), Jeremy Smoak (UCLA), Kara Cooney (UCLA), Kerry Sonia (Colby College), Kristine Garroway (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion), Lynn Swartz Dodd (USC), Matthew Suriano (University of Maryland), and Melissa Cradic (Curator, Badè Museum).

The conference was able to bridge the past and present by thinking about the profound impact that death has on individuals and communities. Each paper reinforced that responses to death teach us about the community of the living who bury and mourn, something which is just as true in the past as it is today. The main questions that the group focused on were the status of ancestors, the economics of death, and the social memory created in the mortuary space.

Alice Mandell lecturing at Mountain View Cemetery

Three faculty grants were awarded earlier in this academic year. Yoram Bitton, Director of Libraries, Rabbi Joseph Skloot, Ph.D., the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History, and faculty member AJ Berkovitz, Ph.D. were awarded for their project “History of the Jewish Book;” Rabbi Wendy Zierler, Ph.D., Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies, for a Prooftexts lecture series; and Michal Muszkat-Barkan, Ph.D., Head of Education and Professional Development Department and Professor of Jewish Education Parallel Track, for “Reality Demands Democracy: An Emergency Conference for Educators Preparing for the Upcoming School Year.”