Medidas cautelares decretadas antes de conformarse el Tribunal de arbitramento y sus antecedentes:

For the classical world, Deborah H. Roberts demonstrates that life-cycleritual practices of burial and mourning at the end of a text provide evidence of closural

strategies by ancient Greek authors. Rituals associated with death are, in Roberts’ words, “a kind of closural ritual par excellence.” 33 When the ancient Greek author replaced a natural closural event in the text, death, with a culturally constructed ritual, that is, a funeral or burial, the author used the platform of the ritual to provide insight about the situation or character. A funeral, in addition to marking the end of life for someone, “punctuates the lives of survivors, bringing different mourners together in a communal act and sets ‘socially constructed limits on the potentially unlimited, natural expression of grief.’” These rituals affect readers as they too may attempt to deal with the end of a life:

For the readers too, these rituals although they do not conceal residual tensions and terrible events to come or cancel differences

32 _{Wright, Aqhat, 15-16.}

33 _{Deborah H. Roberts, “The Frustrated Mourner: Strategies of Closure in Greek Tragedy,” in Nomodeiktes:}

Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald, 574. She attributes the expression she uses later in this paragraph, ‘socially constructed limits on grief,’ to Richard Seaford, “The Destruction of Limits in Sophokles' Elektra,” in The Classical Quarterly, New Series35, no. 2 (1985): 320.

A different strategy is posited by Francis M. Dunn for the ends of Euripides’ plays. In Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama, 7-8, Dunn relates the use of “closing gestures” including closing etiologies, choral exit lines, and closing prophecy at the ends of the plays, but not the use of information related to themes and goals of the plays. He concludes that Euripides was not so interested in the hero’s end. Nevertheless he used a formal rhetoric of closure, or “closing gestures.” Dunn contrasts Euripedes with Herodotus, who considered that at the end (of a work or a person’s life), moral or didactic points must be made.

between us, still give us, in Kermode’s words, a sense of an ending. 34

In a similar way, analysis of burial rituals at the ends of Genesis narratives demonstrates closural strategies of biblical writers. In Genesis the burial locations are specified, and in one example, the ritual makes explicit the relationship of the burial to other activities related to a death. The three burials that are in the end-sections of their

narratives are all burials of women, Sarah (Gen 23:19),35 Deborah, the Rebekah’s nurse

(Gen 35:8), and Rachel (Gen 35:20). Sarah’s and Rachel’s conclude the lives of

matriarchs who had important roles in many of the earlier narratives. Each of the burials is connected with a location that readers would be familiar with in Canaan. Sarah’s in Hebron marks the first burial property owned by a patriarch in Canaan.36 Later, Abraham and then the other patriarchs are buried there.37 Deborah’s burial at Allon- bacuth is connected to the site where the narrative concludes, Bethel, but is otherwise unconnected to the story of Jacob’s construction of an altar there. Yet it does record a death and that in itself is closural. Rachel’s burial site is not identified with a specifi location—it is merely “on the road to Ephrat”—yet the location would be easy to find

c ,

34 _{Roberts, “The Frustrated Mourner,” 575.}

35 _{The death of Sarah begins the narrative rather than concludes it. But,as will be noted, that event is not}

the destabilizing event in the narrative. Abraham’s decision to purchase a burial site for her is the event that precipitates the narrative.

36 _{As noted in Chap 2, n. 34, property used for burial may be a special kind of property with its own legal}

considerations as indicated in the history of “various societies ancient and modern,” according to Delbert R. Hillers, in “Palmyrene Inscriptions and the Bible” in Zeitschriftfür Althebraistik 11 (1989), 40-44. In Genesis, non-burial property is acquired by Jacob in Gen 33:19.

37 _{Abraham dies in Gen 25:7-10, after living 175 years. He is buried by his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, “in}

the same cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites,” where Sarah too was buried.

the narrator indicates. He says to his ancient readers that Jacob set up a “pillar” הבצמ, over her burial site and it can be still seen “to this day” This is the only reference in the Bible to the use of a pillar to mark a gravesite.

The burial of Sarah is noteworthy because it provides a “socially constructed limit” to Abraham’s mourning process. According to the narrative, Abraham had “mourned” her and “bewailed” her, remaining by her side after she died (23:1-3). Then he rises and engages with the local population to purchase land so that he can bury her in a site that he owns, which is a difficult feat since he is not a native but a “resident alien.” The physical act of burying Sarah marks the end of the narrative and the end of

Abraham’s activities—mourning, purchasing land, the burial—that are related to her death. The burial is a marker of Abraham’s ownership of the site “absolute and uncontestable,” valid into the future.38 Together the three burials reflect culturally constructed ways of mourning, burial, marking burial locations, and legal ownership of burial land.

Other life-cycle rituals that appear at the ends of their narratives are also culturally constructed. These include circumcision (Gen 17), the blessing given by a character near death (Gen 27), and marriage (Gen 24). These rituals can continue to resonate with readers in part because of readers’ familiarity with these types of activities. But even activities that are less familiar to readers, such as building altars or setting up a

38 _{Also noted in Chap 2, n. 34 is the comment of Nahum Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary, Genesis, 160. “It}

is the act of burial that legally completes the transaction, that makes the sale absolute and incontestable, and that confers the power to dispose of the property by testament or will.”

pillar to God, resonate because the rituals illuminate aspects of the characters’ lives and situations, and also because readers note their inclusion by the writers and editors in these normally laconic texts.