Book Note I Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives

Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)

In the preface to Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives, Christy Cobb presents an image of a 19th century shovel, produced according to its label by a “female slave and blacksmith on the Cobb family farm” around 1850 (viii). Cobb notes that this artifact of enslavement in her family history serves as the impetus for this book; she seeks to open up the historical record and bring to light the truth-telling power of three enslaved women in Luke-Acts: the woman in the courtyard who recognizes Peter as a disciple of Jesus in Luke 22: 47-62, Rhoda, enslaved of Mary, who answers the door to find Peter freed from incarceration in Acts 12, and the divining slave of Acts 16. Cobb deftly combines the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin with feminist biblical hermeneutics, arguing that these enslaved women are “focalizors” in Luke-Acts who speak truth to power despite their doubly marginalized status as both women and slaves (63).

Chapter 1, “Introduction: (Re)Turning to Truth,” situates the enslaved women of Luke-Acts within a broader historical and literary landscape. Cobb utilizes a wide range of materials, necessary given the sparse evidence for the circumstances of the enslaved in antiquity. Drawing on Page duBois’ Torture and Truth, Cobb shows how the bodies of the enslaved were 1) subject to corporeal punishment; and 2) conceived as unable to tell the truth except under duress. Luke-Acts, however, renders it differently. In Cobb’s view, while truth and logos were indeed often understood to be the exclusive property of free male subjects, truth here “is found in the ‘other’”, that is, “in the words of three female slaves” (10). To get to this point, Cobb grapples with the Glancy-Harrill debate: the question of whether it is possible to arrive at such conclusions, given that elite perspectives overwhelmingly mediate our access to the experiences of the enslaved. In the end, Cobb concurs with Glancy in that, while our sources are biased, it is still possible to glean historical evidence from the representation of slaves in literary sources, particularly when literary and archaeological sources are read side by side. Furthermore, Cobb asserts that a Bakhtinian lens (explained further in the next chapter) allows for greater recognition of moments in which enslaved figures exceed or counteract the constraints of their representation, speaking outside the aims or desires of the author.

Chapter 2, “Theoretical Foundations: Bakhtin and Feminism,” outlines the theoretical framework of the book. After delineating the theoretical vocabulary structuring her analysis (menippea, the novel, the role of the author, outsidedness, polyphony and dialogism, carnivalesque, and heteroglossia), Cobb addresses the thorny question of engaging Bakhtinian theory and feminist hermeneutics side by side given Bakhtin’s infamous lack of attention to issues of gender (73). In response, she notes that feminists have made productive use of Bakhtin’s body of work in literary studies. Julia Kristeva’s theory of “intertextuality,” developed in conversation with Bakhtin’s work on dialogue and ambivalence, argues that texts are interconnected through the polyphonic and citational nature of textual “utterances” (74-77).  While Kristeva does not outrightly claim her work as feminist, Cobb highlights that intertextuality as a theoretical and hermeneutical tool has been influential in feminist and postcolonial circles (77). She concludes that just as Bakhtin’s work sheds new light on Luke-Acts, so also does feminist theory enhance and refine Bakhtin’s analysis of power. Here, Cobb’s analysis turns our attention to the ways in which theoretical frameworks are not isolated entities but stand in dialogic conversation.

 The next three chapters analyze the text of Luke-Acts, connecting the three enslaved women truth-tellers to one another and to their counterparts in contemporaneous ancient texts and material culture. In Chapter 3, “The One Who Sees: Luke 22:47-52,” Cobb argues that the unnamed enslaved woman in the courtyard becomes a ”focalizor” of truth and a “mouthpiece of Lukan theology,” whose statement of truth defines Lukan discipleship as those who are “with” Jesus (82). In the famous scene of Peter’s denial of Jesus, Cobb attends to the slave girl (paidiske), who identifies Peter with a withering gaze and names him as one who was “with” Jesus despite his pleading to the contrary. Cobb notes that in each version of this scene in the Gospels, it is the slave girl who recognizes and names Peter. In so doing, the slave girl pushes the boundaries of her marginalized status in the elite space of the courtyard and in relation to the free men around her (89).

 In order to provide context both for the circumstances of enslaved women in elite households and for the relationship between slavery and truth, Cobb turns to an intertextual reading of Chariton’s Callirhoe (93-100). Cobb also highlights the powerful and prophetic nature of the gaze of the enslaved by placing Luke in conversation with the flute-player Acts of Andrew (110). When she turns back to the paidiske in Luke 22, Cobb argues that, positioned near the light which further indicates her truth-telling power, the enslaved woman “provides a clear definition for discipleship, even amidst Peter’s betrayal” (112). Bakhtin’s polyphonic dialogism is at work here; the narrative gives equal weight to the two competing perspectives of Peter and the enslaved wo/man even as the reader knows all along that the slave’s witness is the truthful one.  

 In Chapter 4, “The One Who Answers: Acts 12:12-19,” Cobb develops a portrait of Rhoda as much more than a parodic servus currens (running slave) in the narrative of Acts. Rather, she is a truth-teller situated at a pivotal point in the narrative where the focus shifts from Peter to Paul. Cobb then reads Rhoda’s scene in Acts alongside the torture and truth-telling of Euclia in the Acts of Andrew in order to draw out elements of the carnivalesque in both narratives. In each case, though to differing extremes, categories of social power are (temporarily) upended and the enslaved emerge as special bearers of truth and knowledge over against those in power. Rhoda’s recognition of Peter at the gate signals a carnivalesque turn in Acts, as she is placed in a position of superior knowledge of the truth in relation to the free persons who reject her claims. As Cobb writes, “The climax of this Bakhtinian carnivalesque moment occurs in the doorway of Mary’s house, not inside yet not outside, as the hierarchies within the text (female/male; slave/ free; minor character/apostle) are suspended and the most marginalized of all the characters emerges a truth-teller” (149). While Euclia is represented in Acts of Andrew as a stereotypically deceitful and licentious slave, she is able to masquerade as a free woman for several months and her successful performance reveals the fluid boundary separating free and enslaved. In the end, she tells the truth of Maximilla’s plot and, while she pays for it with her life, she also reveals herself to be more truthful than her enslaver (161).  In both texts, the axis of power returns (violently, in the case of Acts of Andrew) to the elite, but Cobb argues that the emergence of Rhoda and Euclia as truth-tellers poses an ongoing challenge to the notion that the enslaved do not possess the logos to speak the truth.

 In Chapter 5, “The One Who Prophecies: Acts 16:16-18,” Cobb argues that the much-discussed divining slave of Acts 16 should be engaged through the lens of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, or the use of “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (164). Her prophetic words ring true in the narrative and she, like the slave in Luke 22:47-52, becomes a mouthpiece for Lukan theology. Cobb contrasts this unnamed slave woman with Lydia of Thyatira in order to emphasize the “outsider” status of the enslaved woman when compared to Lydia’s influential role as an “insider” in the narrative. This “outsider” status gives her a unique perspective from which to see and speak the truth of Paul and Silas, at great cost to the enslavers who used her prophetic power for profit. Cobb also uses evidence from literature and material culture to connect the truth-telling power of the unnamed slave girl to powerful oracular figures in Delphi and elsewhere in the Greek world. Cobb understands the slave girl’s claim that Paul and Silas are “slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim the way of salvation” (Acts 16:17) as heteroglossia, encompassing multiple meanings as the “Most High God” can be “the God of the Hebrew Bible, the God of Paul and Silas, and even the God of the slave girl” (192). Furthermore, the identification of Paul and Silas as “slaves” not only echoes Paul’s use of the discourse of enslavement in his letters but also foreshadows the treatment that Paul and Silas receive at the hands of the authorities later on in Acts 16. In a close reading of each element of her prophetic statement, Cobb sees truth that unfolds as the narrative progresses.

Each of the enslaved women that Cobb analyzes in this book speaks truth to power, despite the risks inherent to doing so from their position as enslaved women. Cobb very effectively utilizes the polyphonic, menippean nature of Luke-Acts to connect these women not only to one another but also to other voiceless enslaved women in ancient narratives. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is its use of intertextual analysis to demonstrate that the distinction between enslaved and enslaver was not as clear-cut as those in power wished it to be. In speaking their truth, the enslaved women addressed in this volume challenge the boundary between free and enslaved, revealing the great lengths to which ancient writers must go in order to construct and naturalize these categories.

 Bringing feminist biblical interpretation in conversation with Bakhtinian literary theory, Cobb’s work is itself polyphonic. While tense at times, bringing these areas of inquiry into conversation allows for the voices of the enslaved women in Luke-Acts to rise to the surface in new and exciting ways. This book will be of great interest to those interested in the intersections of gender and enslavement but also as a model for using theory not just as a tool to reconstruct the past but as a way to engage the past in the service of justice and truth-telling in the present.

 Kelsi Morrison-Atkins is a ThD candidate in New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Kelsi_morrison-Atkins@mail.harvard.edu.

Book Note I Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

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.