375 48 Family Religion in Ancient Israel A NDREW R. DAVIS Introduction At one point in Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, the epony- mous narrator describes Grandma Lausch’s commemoration of her deceased husband: “Grandma, all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch’s death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was bak- ing, as a kind of ofering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the giant God of the Creation, who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion at that” (Bellow 2003, 393). The kind of rites that Augie catalogs and terms as “kitchen religion” are not unique to twentieth-century Jewish grandmas, but rather have a long history in Judaism. Indeed, such “kitchen religion,” or “family religion,” has been an integral part of its cultic tradition since the beginnings of Israel. Although Augie distinguishes between fam- ily religion and the magnalia dei, the distinc- tion may not have been so sharp in ancient Israel. Admittedly, God’s mighty deeds take center stage in the biblical narrative, and in- stances of family religion usually occur in marginal scenes of this main drama. Often family religion is mentioned in polemical passages, which are tricky sources to evalu- ate. On the one hand, a polemic against this or that cultic activity indicates its prevalence; if no one performed the cultic practice, there would be no need to censure it. On the other hand, interpreters must weigh this popular- ity against the polemical view of the biblical author/editor. Would all Israelites have viewed a denounced cultic practice as transgressive, or is the criticism unique to the author/editor describing it? To take a concrete example, a Deuteronomistic editor disapproves of Micah’s teraphim (Judg. 17:5–6), but other passages mention them without condemnation (Gen. 31:19; 1 Sam. 19:13). These references agree that teraphim were part of family religion but depict the cult objects with varying degrees of censure. The sometimes obscure biblical evidence for family religion makes recourse to nonbiblical sources an indispensable part of interpretation. (Unpublished manuscript—copyright protected Baker Publishing Group) _Greer_BehindScenesOT_BKB_djm.indd 393 6/15/18 11:51