inform our selection of salient evidence, our classification and organization of the
data, and our articulation of what the evidence selected and so organized means.
These notions comprise one’s theoretical or conceptual models – one’s “take” on
the evidence.
The upshot of the foregoing is that different accounts of the same phenomenon
are inevitable. Some accounts will be complementary, others contradictory; some more
satisfying by standards of scholarship, some less so. Complementary accounts high-
light different aspects of the phenomenon under analysis. Accounts which arguably
ignore or patently distort salient and pervasive evidence must be deemed deficient.
Not being able to articulate and, when called upon, to defend one’s conceptual
or theoretical models, one’s “take,” is problematic. Moreover, one’s “take” must be
open to refinement, ramification, or abandonment, should the evidence so indicate.
This constitutes a norm which distinguishes scholarly conceptual and theoretical
models from doctrinaire stances. Again in a chapter such as this, one cannot provide
a complete rendering of one’s conceptual and theoretical models and of their appro-
priateness over against others. Permit me, however, in summary fashion to give an
account of the principal elements which comprise this chapter’s “take.”
My conceptual and theoretical framework is informed from three complementary
venues. The first stems from the social-anthropological insight that all humans live
in shared, socially constructed “worlds” and that the elements or various spheres that
comprise these worlds must “hang together” sufficiently. In other words, these ele-
ments must be sufficiently congruent and mutually re-enforcing so as to give the
whole an air of “self-evidence” for the social actors (see especially Berger and Luckman
1966; Douglas 1973, 1975). Moreover, those elements which hang together and
mutually reinforce one another have both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. In
other words, elements which exist at the same time(syn-chronic) reinforce one another
by replicating in sphere after sphere the same basic patterns. For example, in bib-
lical Judaism, about which we shall speak at greater length below, the mapping of
territory, the social caste system with its marriage restrictions, the purity laws, to
name just several socially constructed spheres constituting the Jewish Bible’s “world,”
all exhibit the same general pattern; the rules governing eachsphere define concen-
tric circles of gradations of holiness, with the most holy, protected, “powerful,” or
authoritative at the center. The social actor, experiencing the same basic patterning
in sphere after sphere of his or her life, comes to experience that pattern as simply
the way things are, as nature-like. However, especially in pre-modern societies, the
elements of one’s socially constructed world must also be perceived to have con-
tinuity over time(dia-chronic)with an authoritative past, even if matters have in
reality changed, sometimes significantly over time. In large part this requisite is a defining
element of “traditional societies.” Sometimes this is achieved by focusing attention
in formal practices and processes on what is preserved of the past; sometimes the
record of the past is rewritten to accord with the present. The biblical authors engage
in the latter, when they put into Moses’ mouth teachings characteristic of a much
later period. As regards the former, witness Rome’s consistent attempts during the
imperial Roman period to portray itself as operating in direct continuity with Roman
republican norms and institutions; the imperial system gives the senate a formal role
352 Jack N. Lightstone