SBL Review Panel for Anathea Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body: Emodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature
Co-Sponsored by the Religious Experience in Antiquity and Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds Program Units of the Society of Biblical Literature
November 23, 2024
In this study a sustained, interdisciplinary argument is offered for the presence of women in parables where they are not named or explicitly described.
The understanding that Jews engaged with a full sweep of Islamic sciences was arguably one of the earliest insights of modern Jewish historiography; indeed, medieval Jews were sometimes explicit about turning to non-Jewish sources. But scholarship has traditionally highlighted Jewish engagement with the larger world in fields other than law, such as poetry, theology, and linguistics. Building on the work of others, After Revelation recognizes that medieval Jews and Muslims structured their traditions in similar ways.
May conversations such as these prompt experiences of embodied connection, even across digital spaces, and help us to recover a bodily awareness so often buried beneath reams of paper. May we be mindful of the care and feeding not only of the prophet (and sometimes the deity), but also of the scholar, the student, the writer, and the reader.
The question of how many sisters were portrayed with Jesus at the Raising of Lazarus in early Christian art has not previously been explored, and interestingly, the hypothesis that Martha was added later aligns with the number of sisters portrayed in early art of the Raising of Lazarus.
Scenting a space with anointing oil and incense, creates a sensory experience of fragrant divine presence, burning a sacrifice on an alter creates the perception of a divine receiver, veiling and obscuring a sanctuary’s adyton creates a perception of an inhabitant etc.
The task ahead in repairing the violence done by the dualistic mind/body hierarchy—and especially the notion of some bodies and their worth as superior/inferior—is not simply an individual task, but a communal one. Indeed, the notion of text as embodied creates not only new avenues of research but also a deep responsibility to the communities who hold these texts as sacred.
The prophet mediates or “incarnates” divine emotions, serving as their bodily representative; in other words, the prophetic body becomes the site of the bodily prophecy.
So, if they are characters who may or may not replicate the experiences of a tangible historical person, then do they have a body? Are their imagined or projected bodies actual bodies that can be psychoanalyzed or engaged as if they were human? Is a character’s fictional embodiment part of its function as avatar for the audience?
Scully’s book commendably demonstrates the need for renewed and careful attention to a pattern of thought that has been treated poorly, and it does so with sharp analytical clarity.
“Ophir insists that he is not simply claiming the modern sovereign as a “secularized political concept,” but something deeper: a deification of the state itself, as the one concept that we cannot think without, just as the biblical writers could not imagine not being ruled by God.”
As scholars continue to investigate the bowls from multiple angles – paleographic, onomastic, linguistic, social historical, legal, literary, ritual, visual, gendered, comparative – our understanding of Babylonian Judaism and late antique society will continue to develop. Manekin-Bamberger’s insights about the bowls’ contractual dimensions and the professional scribes who produced them – as well as about the overlap of law and magic on a broader scale – are an essential contribution to this field, and will no doubt shape, methodologically and historically, how future studies approach this corpus and its relationship to other ancient Jewish texts and artifacts and to the long history of magic, law, and religion.