ABSTRACT
Scholars who focus on how rituals operate and their role in the ordering of society—structural–functionalists—generally find in them a socially stabilizing force. Ritual transgression, entails conflict, contestation, and disputing identity. In the case of Antiochus, it was certainly more than ritual transgression that sparked the Judean uprising against him known as the Maccabean revolt. The focal point of the brutal encounter between both Eleazar and the family and Antiochus' agents was not their torture and deaths but their refusal to ingest sacrificial meat they regard as unclean. Ethical, religious, ritual, and dietary matters become intertwined in this justification. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, British and North American Christianity underwent a vigorous religious revitalization that came to be known as the second great awakening. The rhetorical question that begins this quotation suggests that whoever presented Jesus in this way meant to confront and provoke. Yet taboo breaking can also reflect the assertion of a new identity.
