Walking in Their Sandals: A Guide to First-Century Israelite Ethnic Identity

This volume invites readers to walk in Israelite sandals that is to take a journey of the imagination and to immerse themselves in the identity values and institutions of first-century CE Israelites with the help of contemporary social-scientific studies and theories. What emerges is that the Israelites did not practice a religion. Rather they were an ethnos or as this book describes it an ethnic identity who lived out a particular way of life and culture the customs of the fathers. It is to belong to a people who obtained their collective identity honor and sense of worth from their socialization and membership in Israel and from the social convention of loyalty to their rich cultural tradition. It was to belong to a world or having a perspective on the world with its own quality of knowledge which among other things preferred collectivism over individualism and orthopraxy over orthodoxy. Cromhaut tidily synthesizes Social Identity Theory Social Construction of Reality theory Primordial and Constructionist theories of ethnicity the importance of group practices for ethnic boundary marking and ethnicity models. He details ancient Israel as a boundary-marking ethnic group and Pauls offering an alternative ethnos--new core values and a new inclusive way of life. This informed informative readable study will engage and reward both introductory students and advanced scholars. --Dennis C. Duling Emeritus Professor Canisius College Buffalo New York Utilizing ethnicity theory and other social sciences with sophistication and insight Markus Cromhout challenges many assumptions of what it meant to be a first-century Judean. In the process he also questions traditional understandings of the apostle Pauls entire enterprise as well as significant aspects of the New Perspective on Paul. He provides in addition an intriguing answer as to why most Israelites rejected Pauls message. His excellent summaries are themselves worth the price of the book. --Walter F. Taylor Jr. Ernest W. and Edith S. Ogram Professor of New Testament Studies Trinity Lutheran Seminary Cromhout has written an absolutely essential book in which he connects central topics of the New Perspective on Paul with insights about their social and cultural background within the ancient Mediterranean world. Based on a complex and well argued socio-cultural model of Israelite ethnic identity the book deepens our understanding of Pauline concepts like works of the law faith/belief righteousness etc. and traces them back to their contemporary discourses. --Wolfgang Stegemann Augustana-Hochschule Germany Markus Cromhout is a Research Associate in the Department of New Testament Studies at the University of Pretoria. He is the author of Jesus and Identity: Reconstructing Judean Ethnicity in Q (Cascade Books 2007).