Christophe Nihan has been invited by the Collège de France assembly, on the recommendation of Professor Thomas Römer, administrator of the Collège de France.
The practice of feeding a family's deceased members at more or less regular intervals is well documented throughout the Ancient Near East. Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that this practice was also an important element of funerary worship in Israel during the royal (pre-exilic) period. According to a classical thesis, this practice was gradually abandoned after the exile, in connection with the emergence of Yahwistic monotheism. This thesis seems to be supported by certain texts, but it is also contradicted by other data, which show on the contrary a continuation of the practice of feeding the dead long after the exile. This raises the question of how to explain this apparent contradiction. To date, this question has hardly been satisfactorily answered. While some recent works, particularly in the USA (M. Suriano, K.M. Sonia), rightly consider the classical thesis to be too rigid, they do not propose interpretations to explain the coexistence of contradictory views on the feeding of the dead.
In this talk, we'll start by reviewing the main elements making up this dossier. We will then propose a new explanation, based on the distinction between two conceptions of funerary worship and, more broadly, of relationships with the dead. While the practice of feeding the dead was never really abandoned or rejected, it was the very concept of the dead that was gradually transformed. Finally, we'll look at the reasons for and stakes in this transformation from a comparative history of religion perspective.
