Chapter 6 offers summary reflections on the conclusions and contributions of the present work, including its findings for the study of the royal palms, the study of Syro-Palestinian inscriptions, Hebrew Bible theology, and the history of Israelite religion. In addition to proposing a new analytic for royal psalms (i.e. psalms of defeat), the book adds depth and specificity to previous scholarship on the theology of the royal psalms. It draws in sharper silhouette the animating commitment of royal psalms: Yhwh’s loyalty to his one individual client king. The book also calls attention to the non-narrative and lyric qualities of inscriptions, and it emphasizes the rhetorical centrality of their closing curse sections. For the study of Hebrew Bible theology, the present work holds up the important and distinctive theological offer of royal psalms. Historically, Levantine memorial inscriptions reflect an earlier engagement with Neo-Assyrian royal ideology and its monuments than scholars have argued heretofore, and a deeper indigenization.

This brief concluding chapter recaps the main conclusions of the body chapters, affirms the importance of cognitive theorizing for the study of ancient religion, locates the different religious expressions studied in these chapters along a continuum of cognitively optimal and costly religion, and points to potential areas of future research at the intersection of biblical studies, Israelite religion, and cognitive science of religion (CSR).

This opening chapter introduces a key set of distinctions in cognitive science and the cognitive sciences of religion between intuitive and reflective types of cognition, implicit and explicit concepts, and cognitively optimal and costly religious traditions. The chapter argues for the importance, relevance, and applicability of cognitive theories and findings for the study of ancient Israelite religion. It is argued that an informed cognitive perspective can illuminate ancient texts, art, and religion, while also acknowledging that such historical materials can be used as valuable fact-checks to critically test and refine current cognitive theories. The chapter envisions a multi-disciplinary endeavor in which historians, biblical scholars, and cognitive researchers contribute to a richer understanding of religion in ancient Israel.

This chapter reframes the traditional dichotomy between popular and official religion and argues that ritual practices in both official and domestic settings were informed by intuitive conceptualizations of supernatural agency. As an alternative to popular and official religion, the categories cognitively optimal and cognitively costly religion are proposed as a fruitful framework for understanding the diversity of religious expression in ancient Israel. It is argued that from the standpoint of human cognition, ritual offerings performed in both popular and official contexts share deep structural features in common − whether in households, villages, local shrines, or state-sponsored temples. The final section of the chapter evaluates the recent shift to the study of family or household religion in ancient Israel. An analysis of material artifacts and religious ritual practices in domestic and official contexts reveals interesting points of continuity across these domains. Overall, a cognitive perspective suggests that the difference between home and temple, ancestors and the national deity, may not have been as great as it is sometimes imagined.

Images of revivification are attested widely and deeply in ancient Near Eastern history, and such images are often used for political restoration. In the Amarna Letters, and in Hittite and Neo-Assyrian letters, vassals who have been saved by the emperor regularly write and describe themselves as dead men who have been brought back to life; the same enduring motif is also found in the Cyrus Cylinder. This royal role was in some way a reflection of divine life-giving, as many deities, from Marduk to Baal, were said to raise the dead. One of the standard roles of the king and gods in the ancient Near East was as a giver or restorer of life.

Therefore, biblical passages that deploy the same images offer no inherent grounds for late dating. Revivification imagery is not, in other words, a basis on which to date a passage to a late period. The passages describing Yhwh’s power over death in Isa 25:7-8 and 26:19 lack the literary cohesiveness and detail found in Ezek 37:1–14, as well as the references to sectarian differences and eternal fates found in Dan 12. The less developed Isaiah passages should be considered earlier.