“When an ancient community’s life involved a focus upon a specific holy place, that group’s ideas about pilgrimage and travel were necessarily pivotal to its religious praxis. To understand the complex interrelations between a community’s ideology of pilgrimage and travel and its religious activities, relevant examples must be critically examined in their geographical, political, social, and religious contexts.”

Hekhal is calling for papers on this theme for its annual conference. Submissions in any historiographic and/or archaeological field of research in all periods up to and including late antiquity, and on topics as diverse as diaspora Judaism, early Christianity, Qumran, early Samaritan studies, and any other fields of research referencing these paradigms, will be welcomed.