Rosanne R. Liebermann, “Hearts of Flesh: Collective Identity and the Body in the Book of Ezekiel” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2019).
“Psh, books. They’re all dead. We’re alive. We eat, we grow. But, but but but, here’s the thing! We’re amateurs.” – Robin Sloane, Sourdough.[i]
The suggestion that books are dead is usually anathema to an academic, especially one who has devoted years to philological training. Yet when I read this line I felt like someone had articulated exactly what I was trying to say. Taking a break from the final stages of dissertation editing, I may have been susceptible to reading my research into a work of fiction that was, in reality, about bread. But now, bathing in the postdoctoral afterglow (or is it aftershock?), I’m glad I bookmarked that page. Obviously, I don’t believe that books are dead. But I do believe they’re not everything.
The character in Robin Sloane’s novel (a microbe-obsessed goat herder) is claiming that the cultures in fermented foods like cheese and sourdough are the foundation of the culture that defines a society. Archaeological theorists say more or less the same thing. Since a community’s location determines their access to materials, right down to the spores required to make certain foods, it influences their practices: eating, naturally, but also trade, housing, body modifications and other everyday behaviours.[ii] The practices an individual adopts, especially those most intimately connected with their body, communicate messages about their membership in a group and place within it. Repeated again and again in the context of social relationships, such practices affirm and continually recreate group and social identities.[iii]
When a society undergoes a dramatic change—like a forced migration to Babylon, for example—its members call everything into question. There are important political and religious investigations into how such an event could happen. But on a more basic, day-to-day level, the community has to exist in a new location. It can no longer access all the materials previously used to feed, decorate, and house its bodies. Members are deprived of their normal means of identity expression, forcing them to examine their ideology for what, if anything, can be salvaged in the new setting. Texts produced in such an environment can provide a unique glimpse into processes of group and social identity formation and the role played by materiality.
Such is the environment in which the majority of the book of Ezekiel was most likely written. My dissertation shows how Ezekiel’s references to body modifications and practices reflect the author’s ideology of collective identity for the Judeans in Babylonia. More importantly, these references reveal how he expected his group to embody that identity in material and practical ways. The theological treatises of Ezekiel and his contemporaries—their books, such as they were—could only have gone so far in persuading the Judeans to continue identifying as Judean; to continue worshiping a God who seemed to have abandoned them. They needed to be able to express that identity to each other and to outsiders, making it self-evident that they were different and, by extension, chosen.
Not all of Ezekiel’s suggestions took hold, but a core group of Judeans in Babylonia did maintain a distinct identity roughly according to his model. One reason for his influence may be that Ezekiel tapped into the community’s anxieties. Forced migrant groups often express concerns regarding the maintenance of purity.[iv] In the wake of societal disruption and loss of control, the desire to protect boundaries between what is pure and impure becomes pronounced. Nowhere is this more evident than Ezekiel 4:9-17. God commands the prophet to bake a loaf of bread made of siege rations, symbolizing the impending fate of Jerusalem (and, some millennia later, inspiring a health food line for people who’ve forgotten what bread tastes like). More significantly, God tells Ezekiel to bake the bread over human dung. As Ezekiel points out in dismay, human dung is ritually impure (ṭāmē’). For a priest like Ezekiel, what is ṭāmē’ must be avoided at all costs. And yet, God reveals, the defiled bread is a symbol of what Ezekiel is already experiencing: eating food in an unclean land (4:13). By virtue of being in Babylonia, Ezekiel is not only surrounded by impurity; it enters his very body.
The writer attempted to cope with this distressing situation by establishing firm ideological boundaries between his community and those he considered outsiders. The most obvious outsiders were non-Judeans. Ezekiel focuses primarily on the groups who had oppressed Judah and now surround them in Mesopotamia: Assyrians and Chaldeans. In an effort to “other” them, the book mentions their foreign practices and body modifications, including three-fold divination (21:26) and lack of circumcision (32:17-30; cf. 44:6-7). Ezekiel 23 describes the appearance of Assyrian and Chaldean elites in terms that emphasize their wealth, power, and military identities: they are clothed in rich, embroidered fabrics (23:6, 12); they wear royal headdresses (23:15); they carry swords and shields (23:24-25). These men stand in stark contrast to the Judean forced migrants. Although Ezekiel 23 is a literary metaphor, its author chose his language for the effect it would have on his audience. For example, describing Assyrian officials wearing těkēlet (valuable blue-dyed wool) evoked one of the tribute items Assyrians had demanded from their Levantine vassals. Its mention would have reminded Ezekiel’s audience how Mesopotamian imperialists had been sapping the resources of Syria-Palestine for centuries.
Foreigners aren’t the only ones Ezekiel sought to separate from his community. He also undermined the ethnic identity that had formerly bound all Judeans together, portraying those remaining in Judah as the descendants of Canaanites (16:3, 45). Their foreign origins are made manifest through their non-Judean ritual practices (33:25-29). In a vision, the prophet travels back to the Temple and sees the remaining inhabitants of Jerusalem defiling it in every conceivable way. This ranges from the explicit worship of foreign gods (8:14, 16) to the inappropriate use of incense burners (8:11).
The covenant between God and Israel stated that idolatry on Israel’s part would result in banishment from the land (e.g. Deut 4:25-28). Whilst it would have appeared to any observer that Ezekiel’s cohort, exiled in 597 BCE, had been so banished, Ezekiel claimed instead that God had set them aside for physical purification and renewal (11:16-20). Those who remained in Judah, by contrast, were destined for obliteration (15:6-8; 21:6-10). Jerusalem’s destruction in 587 BCE no doubt contributed heavily to Ezekiel’s credibility. Later, when some of the Babylonian group “returned” to Judah and noted the absence of practices which had gained significance in exile, such as Sabbath observance (Ezek 46:3; Neh 13:15-22), it confirmed to them that their community had been the one correctly upholding Judean identity.
Yet this new and exclusive in-group was no utopia, at least from Ezekiel’s point of view. He envisioned a society composed of various hierarchies, including gender. This is not uncommon in forced migrant contexts, where feelings of helplessness can incite hypermasculinity.[v] In Ezekiel 16 and 23, the writer uses misogynistic metaphors to warn the women in his community of the physical abuse they can expect if they step out of line (16:40-41; 23:47-49). He may have been anxious that Judean women were marrying outside the community[vi] or that female ritual specialists experienced some popularity (8:14; 13:17-23).
Ezekiel had deep concerns about the hierarchy of religious authority. As a priest without a Temple, he was removed from the source of his power. He dealt with this uncomfortable situation by envisioning a new Temple and policing its boundaries. Only male Zadokites could enter all of the imaginary Temple’s spaces, and only then if their bodies had maintained sufficient purity and were appropriately adorned (44:15-31). Laymen had to present themselves at the Temple for Sabbaths and festivals, yet were permitted at most a single straight path through its court (46:9-10).
Ezekiel simultaneously asserted his religious authority outside of the Temple by embodying the role of a prophet to the fullest extent, at least literarily. He conducted eccentric sign acts such as besieging a brick and lying on his left side for 390 days (4:1-8). Nobody observing the contortions of the priest’s body could doubt that the spirit of God was, as he claimed, upon him. Ezekiel condemned all other prophets as false (13:3-16; 22:28), constructing himself as the only true divine messenger of his age.
My work demonstrates how Ezekiel created concentric circles of group and social identities for his community. There is one boundary between Judeans and non-Judeans; another between Judeans in Babylonia and those who remained in Judah. Yet there are also many boundaries within Ezekiel’s idealized community: boundaries which reinforce hierarchies of gender and religious authority. Consciously or subconsciously, the writer expressed his ideology in ways that made use of the material world of the Judean forced migrants. These findings can inform understanding of other forced migrant societies, both ancient and modern. Ezekiel’s ideology was successful because it was one that his eating, growing audience of displaced Judeans could bear on and in their bodies, communicating and creating their group identity with every action, every bite of bread.
Rosanne Liebermann is the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
[i] Robin Sloane, Sourdough or, Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2017), 204.
[ii] Margarita Díaz-Andreu et al., The Archaeology of Identity: Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity, and Religion (London: Routledge, 2005).
[iii] Some of the social anthropologists who articulate this theory include Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Francesca Stavrakopoulou provides an excellent summary of how such findings can illuminate academic study of the Hebrew Bible: ‘Making Bodies: On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible’, HeBAI 2, no. 4 (2013): 532–53.
[iv] Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, The Religion of the Landless: The Social Context of the Babylonian Exile (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 80-83.
[v] Ruth M. Krulfeld and Linda A. Camino, ‘Introduction’, in Reconstructing Lives, Recapturing Meaning: Refugee Identity, Gender, and Culture Change, ed. Ruth M. Krulfeld and Linda A. Camino (Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1994), ix–xviii; T.M. Lemos, ‘The Emasculation of Exile: Hypermasculinity and Feminization in the Book of Ezekiel’, in Interpreting Exile: Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts, ed. Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames, and Jacob L. Wright (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 377–94.
[vi] Kathleen Abraham, “Negotiating Marriage in Multicultural Babylonia: An Example from the Judean Community in Āl-Yāhūdu” in Exile and Return, ed. Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggars (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015) 33-57.