Hospitality in the First Testament and the ‘Teleological Fallacy’

Abstract

This paper recognizes the importance of hospitality in traditional Mediterranean societies as a part of the social fabric of ancient Israel/Judah. The practice as reflected in the First Testament is open to misunderstanding in some modern scholarly literature because some interpretations have been burdened with modern, romantic Western notions of the practice—the ‘teleological fallacy, a tendency to use ancient documents as a springboard for a modern polemic. This paper examines the use of such a notion of hospitality in some recent First Testament studies. It then seeks to establish a fuller model of hospitality, using not only studies of the modern practice, but also historical and ethnographic data from the traditional Mediterranean world. The model is then applied to two important examples of hospitality in the First Testament, 2 Kgs 3.8-34 and 1 Samuel 25.