Brian R. Doak. Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Over the past three decades, the body has come increasingly into focus in biblical studies, providing a material dimension to interpretations of biblical texts. Brian Doak’s Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel contributes a new angle to this illuminating trend. Doak contends that the Hebrew Bible—specifically, the history of Israel narrated from Genesis to 2 Samuel—focuses on the heroic body to an extent unmatched elsewhere in the literature of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean (except perhaps by The Iliad and The Odyssey). Doak’s main thesis is that heroic bodies in the Hebrew Bible express the national story of Israel, primarily through what he calls “bodily determinism” or “narrative physiognomy” (xii). In his view, descriptions of heroic bodies reveal something about those bodies’ future and, by extension, the future of the nation.
In Chapter One, Doak defines the “hero” as a character who functions at the intersection of three categories: warrior, king/ leader, and founding figure. He acknowledges that only Saul and David occupy all three of these categories, but argues that others, such as Jacob, Ehud, and Samson provide additional “heroic-bodily moments” that illuminate a broader relationship between the hero and the nation (23-26). Doak sets up a comparative (and primarily literary) approach, engaging both ancient Near Eastern and Greek materials, while also using studies of gender and disability that have been prominent foci in biblical scholarship on the body.
Chapter Two presents a case study of Jacob, a founding figure intimately associated with the nation. The main features of Jacob’s body are his hairlessness and his disabling wound. His twin, Esau, has contrasting hairiness, highlighted at birth (Gen 25:24-26), which Doak interprets as a type of physiognomy: physical features that “express something permanent” about a character’s identity (40). Doak examines comparative materials, including the characterization of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh, to demonstrate that hairiness often bears an association with wildness and perhaps animality, including lack of foresight. By contrast, the word for “smooth” (ḥālāq), used to describe Jacob’s hairlessness, can indicate slipperiness in the sense of trickery. Later narratives bear out of these character traits about the brothers; Jacob behaves with more foresight than Esau, but also greater duplicitousness (Gen 25:27-34; 27:1-40). Jacob’s physical appearance is therefore ambiguous and is further complicated by the wound he receives when wrestling a mysterious figure in Genesis 32:25-33. Doak interprets the wound as heroic, showcasing the founding figure’s courage and endurance.
In Chapter Three, Doak delves further into themes of violence done to the body and the ambiguity of heroic bodies in his examination of the book of Judges. Judges, Doak observes, both begins and ends with dismemberment (1:1-7; 19:29) and is stuffed with episodes of bodily violence in-between, indicating the divided and vulnerable status of Israel in the pre-monarchic era (61). Meanwhile, its heroic bodies are ambiguous: Ehud’s left-handedness, for example, typically an unfavorable trait, is an advantage in combat against the Moabite king Eglon (3:15-30). Samson’s long hair is equally multivalent (13:1-16:31), as it could indicate wildness (like Esau’s), Samson’s piety as a Nazirite, a military identity as suggested by Judges 5:2, or even Samson’s beauty (like Absalom’s: 1 Sam 14:25-26; 2 Sam 18:9). Doak concludes that such multifaceted heroic bodies in Judges are reflective of “a nascent group poised on the edge of various forms of political control and complete anarchy” (61). Ultimately, they are fallible precursors to bodies better suited to national unity: the bodies of kings.
Doak’s fourth chapter diverges from the biblical narrative to focus instead on material treatments of heroic bodies in a broader environment. In this process, Doak singles out the warrior aspect of the hero. Examining first the iconographic representations of divine and human warriors from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, Doak shows that an image of a warrior with a raised arm and in striking position is preeminent across all these areas (although examples primarily date to the Late Bronze Age and before; 115). Doak then turns to the archaeological evidence of warrior burials across the ancient Near East, which are defined by the presence of specific weapons (especially axes; this tradition, too, seems to drop off during the Late Bronze Age). Doak concludes that the heroic body was not just a literary feature of imagined heroic culture but also a lived experience (122). What that experience might be in Iron Age Israel, however, can only be conjecture, as there is little evidence of heroic male bodies in the iconographic record from this time.
Chapters Five and Six return to the biblical narrative. Here, Doak analyzes bodies in the Saul and David narratives, forming the strongest part of the book. Doak claims that the elaborate—if complex—bodily treatment Saul and David receive is a significant interpretive feature of their personal stories and, in turn, of the national body during their reigns. Saul’s tallness, for example, is a promising quality for a leader according to ancient Near Eastern tradition. Yet in the Hebrew Bible, excessive height can also indicate arrogance, even becoming monstrous if unchecked (c.f., Goliath). David is presented as quite the opposite; he is small (or young; qāṭān) and, unlike Saul or Goliath who rely on heavy armor for protection—“machine bodies,” as Doak has it—relies on his “nature body” (147). David’s beauty also seems fit for a ruler of Israel, as it places him within the genealogy of beautiful founding figures in Genesis (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Joseph).
According to Doak, David also manipulates the bodies of others to secure the united “body” of the nation and his control over it. The most powerful example of this occurs after Saul’s death. 2 Samuel 21 relates how a famine ravaged the land—an occurrence that must have exacerbated the precarity of David’s kingship. Yet, as Doak demonstrates, David turns it into an opportunity to assert his authority over both the nation and the troublesome remains of Saul’s body. He retrieves Saul’s bones from where they had been buried in Gilead, an area loyal to Saul’s family, and reburies them in Saul’s ancestral land of Benjamin, not far from David’s capital in Jerusalem. Doak suggests that this episode is part of a Mediterranean koine of the hero cult. Several texts, including the Sophoclean Oedipus cycle, relate how the transfer of a hero’s bones to a city in need can bring that city good fortune. Finally, while Doak understands both David’s and Saul’s bodies to be heroic, he observes that they are heroic in complex and distinct ways. Rather than be stifled by this contradiction, however, he concludes that the conflicting representations of the hero-body are ultimately reflections of the biblical text’s ambivalence about kingship.
Heroic Bodies addresses a wide range of topics, including gender, hairiness, violence, size, and beauty, to name a few. It interrogates an embodied identity that has hitherto not been fully explored in the Hebrew Bible: that of the hero. Its comparative studies of ancient Near Eastern and especially of Greek material—often less familiar to the biblical scholar—provide valuable insights into a widespread heroic tradition. Heroic Bodies does not claim to be comprehensive, and yet I wonder if it might have benefitted from more discussion of why certain “heroes” were chosen over others. Joseph, for example, crops up in several chapters—and seems a clear candidate for consideration (founding figure, beautiful, bone transferal)—yet doesn’t fit Doak’s “warrior” model. Addressing potential alternative criteria for biblical heroes could strengthen the discussion of the topic. Interestingly, Doak gestures in this direction at the end of the book, noting, for instance, that the warrior-hero disappears after David, and suggesting that future studies could examine new types of heroes in other/later biblical traditions. I still question if other heroic standards might be applied to the traditions he is already examining. Doak’s gesture toward “more,” however, leads me to believe that his Heroic Bodies will open up multiple avenues of inquiry that will no doubt continue in coming years.
Rosanne Liebermann is the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her Ph.D. is from Johns Hopkins University and she writes about the body and embodiment, prophecy, and gender in the Hebrew Bible.