Unfamiliar Selves invites biblical studies to engage in broader discussions in the study of religion through comparison of our primary texts with ethnographic work on spirit possession practices across the world today.

In this project, I map spirit language, rituals, and myths in select texts from the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature using conceptual categories and frameworks incubated in the fields of ethnography and cultural anthropology. While spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament, I argue that possession is also depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical western paradigm.