Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 4 Volume 2 2013 Body and Religion Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Martti Nissinen Introduction: New Perspectives on Body and Religion 453–457 Jeremy Schipper and Jeffrey Stackert Blemishes, Camouflage, and Sanctuary Service: The Priestly Deity and His Attendants 458–478 Esther J. Hamori Heavenly Bodies: Pregnancy and Birth Omens in Israel 479–499 T. M. Lemos Physical Violence and the Boundaries of Personhood in the Hebrew Bible 500–531 Francesca Stavrakopoulou Making Bodies: On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 532–553 New Findings Jürgen K. Zangenberg, Stefan Münger, Raimo Hakola, and Byron R. McCane, The Kinneret Regional Project Excavations of a Byzantine Synagogue at Horvat Kur, Galilee, 2010 – 2013: A Preliminary Report 557–576 New Projects Martti Nissinen, Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions: A Centre of Excellence of the Academy of Finland at the University of Helsinki 579–586 2 4 Mohr Siebeck e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel Herausgegeben von Gary N. Knoppers (University Park PA), Oded Lipschits (Tel Aviv), Carol A. Newsom (Atlanta GA) und Konrad Schmid (Zürich) Redaktion: Phillip Michael Lasater (Zürich) Die Annahme zur Veröffentlichung erfolgt schriftlich und unter dem Vorbehalt, dass das Manuskript nicht anderweitig zur Veröffentlichung angeboten wurde. Mit der Annahme zur Veröffentlichung überträgt der Autor dem Verlag das ausschließliche Verlagsrecht für die Publikation in gedruckter und elektronischer Form. 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ISSN 2192-2276 (Gedruckte Ausgabe) ISSN 2192-2284 (Online-Ausgabe) e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission Francesca Stavrakopoulou Making Bodies: On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible Body-modification practices are well attested in the Hebrew Bible, but little understood. This discussion argues that the body can be understood as an on-going social and religious ‘project,’ to which various modification practices contribute. Accordingly, certain aspects of this bodily ‘topography’ of religion are mapped by exploring selected biblical portrayals of body modification, including cutting and adornment. The body has long been recognised by anthropologists and cultural theorists as a site of social and cultural construction. It is the material place at which – and in which – ideologies of identity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age and status are performed and negotiated.1 Once undervalued in older post-Cartesian, Western intellectual traditions as merely the fleshy vessel in which the ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ was housed,2 the body has gained cross-cultural credit as perhaps the most important of social currencies. In recent scholarship, across a range of disciplines, the body has also come to be understood not only as a socially-constructed presence, but as a recursively engaged social ‘project’: a body is continuously brought into 1 Among the most important works are M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1974); idem, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984); B.S. Turner, The Body and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1990); C. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage: 1993). For a critical review of some of the major shifts in the debate, see S. Van Wolputte, “Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 251–269; and Z. Crossland, “Materiality and Embodiment,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (ed. D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 386–405. 2 Influential engagements with the dualistic Cartesian paradigm include M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: The Cresset Press, 1970); B.S. Turner, Religion and Social Theory (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983); E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); M. Gatens, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996). HeBAI 2 (2013), 532–553 ISSN 2192-2276 DOI 10.1628/219222713X13933396528405 © 2013 Mohr Siebeck e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 533 being by means of an array of practices, social relations, and cultural performances.3 As John Robb comments, “[t]he human body is never complete, but always an unfinished project.”4 If the body is to be seen as essentially incomplete – an “unfinished project” – the pervasive Western notion of the ‘natural body’ as a body unchanged and unadorned is itself rendered unstable – as is its use as an interpretative lens within the study of religions. Indeed, this notion has been extensively challenged in a number of ways within various scholarly disciplines, resulting in an increasing acceptance that there are no “natural bodies,” only those “marked by the history and specificity of [their] existence.”5 Put differently, bodily-ness is not a universally shared corporeality, but a culturally-embedded and socially-constructed experience.6 Each body thus exhibits its own ‘topography’ of culture – and hence by extension, its own ‘topography’ of religious reality.7 This discussion seeks to map certain aspects of this bodily topography of religion by exploring selected biblical portrayals of the body as an ongoing social project in relation to particular modification practices. From circumcision to hair techniques, the careful construction of the body is frequently attested in the biblical texts, but – somewhat surprisingly – little understood in scholarship. Most commentators characterise modification practices in generic terms as ‘rituals’ of a sort, but rarely pause to interrogate the fundamental role the body’s own materiality plays in the construction of religious meaning. By contrast, this discussion offers new ways to think about the biblical portrayal of the body and religion. 1. The modified body as a site of religion in the Hebrew Bible Bodies matter in the realm of religions. The ways in which people dress, use their voices, eat, have sex, gather together, arrange themselves and deal 3 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4 5 6 7 1977); L.M. Meskell and R.A. Joyce, Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Mayan and Egyptian Experiences (London: Routledge, 2003); J. Robb and O.T. Harris, The Body in History: Europe from the Palaeolithic to the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). J. Robb, “Towards a Critical Ötziography: Inventing Prehistoric Bodies,” in Social Bodies (ed. H. Lambert and M. McDonald; New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 100–128, here 124. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 141–142. Meskell and Joyce, Embodied Lives, 10; Robb and Harris, The Body in History, 4. Cf. P. Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 534 Francesca Stavrakopoulou with their dead are not only directed by religious preferences but freighted with religious meaning. Within the context of religion, the body is not simply a canvass onto which certain ideals and preferences are projected and displayed; rather, as D. Morgan argues, “more than passively enabling it, the body shapes, colors, tunes, tastes, and performs belief.”8 The performance of religion thus renders the material body an essential site of religion. As such, the body is unsurprisingly a matter of great concern both in the Hebrew Bible and in the societies from which these ancient texts emerged. Following M. Douglas, scholars often assume the biblical management of the body is governed by an overriding concern for the wholeness of the ‘natural’ body, so that the ritual regulations pertaining to purity, foodways, sex, birth and death are best understood as strategies for the proper maintenance of the wholeness – and hence stability and wellbeing – of the social body. In her famous volume Purity and Danger, Douglas argues that “the idea of holiness was given an external, physical expression in the wholeness of the body seen as a perfect container.”9 To a notable extent, this interpretative position has since been assumed by a number of scholars. However, Douglas’ view throws up a number of problems in seeking to better understand the interrelation of the body and religion in the Hebrew Bible. Not only do a number of biblical texts challenge her paradigm,10 but her distinction between the ‘natural’ body and the social body is deeply problematic, for it reaffirms the dualistic Western dichotomy of body and mind (and arguably the supremacy of the latter over the former)11 in ways that are deeply at odds with the portrayal of the material body and its sociality elsewhere in the biblical texts. Indeed, despite certain assumptions underlying dominant Jewish and Christian theological anthropologies, it is difficult to argue that the Hebrew Bible exhibits any coherent notion of the paradigmatic ‘natural’ or 8 D. Morgan, “Materiality, Social Analysis, and the Study of Religion,” in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (ed. D. Morgan; London: Routledge, 2010), 55–74, here 59; cf. L. Meskell, “The Irresistible Body and the Seduction of Archaeology,” in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity (ed. D. Montserrat; London: Routledge, 1998), 139–161, esp. 149. 9 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 51–52. 10 See further S.M. Olyan, “Mary Douglas’s Holiness/Wholeness Paradigm: Its Potential for Insight and Its Limitations,” JHS 8 (2010): article 10, and the examples cited there (online at http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_87.pdf), reprinted in S.M. Olyan, Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Significance of Ritual and Social Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 187–195. 11 Van Wolputte, “Hang on to Your Self,” 253; cf. M.A. Vásquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 535 ‘pre-cultural’ body.12 Instead, a number of texts do indeed present the material body as an on-going social project: it is a body culturally constructed and reconstructed, frequently by means of body modification. Whilst this practice appears to range relatively widely in its forms, the body is nonetheless portrayed as a site at which, and by which, sociality and its religious manifestations are experienced and performed. One of the more obvious examples of body modification is circumcision. Although it too is an activity varied in its biblical portrayals, with some texts inferring it is a fertility practice (for example, Gen 17:6–11), others an apotropaic ritual (Exod 4:24–26), and others still a demonstration of ritual obedience (Gen 17:14),13 circumcision is nonetheless privileged in Torah as a modification practice by which the male body (or perhaps better, the penised-body) is materially marked and manifested as a site of Yhwh-religion. Contrary to certain theological interpretations, the circumcised penis is not merely a ‘symbol’ or ‘sign’ pointing to an implicitly immaterial or non-material theological or ideological construct;14 it is the very medium of religious meaning-making and renders the body fit for the ‘male’ performativity of religious activity (Gen 17:14; Exod 12:43 – 48; Jer 9:25).15 Accordingly, the modified body is idealised, and the unmodified – uncircumcised – body is necessarily problematized.16 It is uncertain whether in ancient Israel and Judah – and by implication, in the Hebrew Bible – circumcision required only an incision 12 Even in the narrative found in Genesis 2–3, a well-worn ‘proof-text’ in theological 13 14 15 16 debates about human nature, embodiment and the status of the body, the woman is generated by means of the material modification of the man’s body (2:21–23). Cf. N.E. Livesey, Circumcision as a Malleable Symbol (WUNT 295; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). Cf. D.A. Bernat, Sign of the Covenant: Circumcision in the Priestly Tradition (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). N. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); H. Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). As is well known, the bodies directly problematized are those of women and uncircumcised men, both of whom are frequently depicted as ‘other’ or ‘foreign.’ In common with other forms of body modification across cultures and time, in certain biblical and post-biblical texts, circumcision and other forms of body modification can thereby also index interaction between indigenous and colonial cultures, or ‘mainstream’ and marginal social groups, demonstrating the power of the modified body as a site of negotiation and resistance. See further A. Cole and A. Haebich, “Corporeal Colonialism and Corporal Punishment: A Cross-cultural Perspective on Body Modification,” Social Semiotics 17 (2007): 293–311; V. Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 536 Francesca Stavrakopoulou in the foreskin, or its partial or complete removal.17 Nonetheless, its biblical portrayal infers both that it is to be understood as a permanent form of body modification, and that it is to be differentiated from other forms of ritual cutting – forms outlawed in certain texts.18 This apparent distinction between circumcision and other forms of body-cutting has obscured or distorted key similarities between them, similarities which are arguably suggestive of a shared function. With one exception,19 biblical references to alternative techniques of body cutting tend not to specify the parts of the body modified (unlike circumcision), but mention instead the implements employed (swords, spears) or the results of the cutting (incisions, slashes or cuts; bloodied flesh). Despite their pejorative portrayal in some texts, these forms of body modification share with circumcision an explicitly ritual context, for they are associated with prophecy and divination (1 Kgs 18:28; Zech 13:6), pilgrimage (Jer 41:5), mourning and the veneration of the dead (Lev 19:28; 21:5; Deut 14:1; Jer 16:6) and temple worship (Jer. 41:5; cf. 1 Kgs 18:28) – all of which are contexts suggesting that body-cutting is a ‘communicative act’20 directed not only at the human community (whether restricted to worshippers, cult functionaries or the wider social group), but also at the attention of divine powers, be it the gods in the heavenly realm or the dead in the netherworld.21 In considering these biblical portrayals of body-cutting, and reflecting on the ways in which incisions in the skin or flesh might index more broadly cultural constructions of the body, it is worth considering the material impact of these actions on the body itself. P. Connerton analyses the three-fold process suggested by body-cutting: the first stage is the initial wounding of the skin; the second is the subsequent healing of the wounds; the third is the residue of durable markings on the skin.22 This process is suggestive of a longer-lasting, embodied presence of the wounds that extends beyond the initial cutting action itself. The skin is altered, so 17 Three texts suggest that at least some of the foreskin is removed: Exod 4:25; 1 Sam 18:25–27; 2 Sam 3:14. 18 Deut 14:1; Lev 21:5; 19:27–28; 1 Kgs 18:28; Jer 16:6; 41:4–5; 47:5; Zech 13:6. 19 Zech 13:6 suggests that the wounds are located “between the hands,” a phrase usually taken as a reference to the chest. 20 On the application of this designation to body modification techniques, see A. Gramsche, “Transformative and Communicative Practices,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial (ed. S. Tarlow and N. Stutz; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 459–474. 21 The dead are the specified beneficiaries of the living community’s ritual acts of bodycutting in Lev 19:28; 21:5; Deut 14:1 and Jer 16:6, whilst in 1 Kgs 18:28 and Jer 41:5, deities appear to be a primary audience. 22 Connerton, Spirit of Mourning, 132 e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 537 that the body’s surface is at least partially transformed. The remaining scars, even if small or faint, memorialise and materialise the blurring of a distinction between the inside and the outside of the body, so that the hiddenness of the inside of the body is experienced differently.23 Ritual cutting brings the inside out. Set alongside the biblical references to flowing blood (1 Kgs 18:28) and visible wounds or scars (Zech. 13:6) and coupled with evidence of a widerranging biblical interest in the binary oppositions of body morphology (above/below; right/left; back/front), all of which are credited with a cosmic and mythic orientation,24 it is not unreasonable to propose that biblical constructions of body-cutting are suggestive of the ritual harnessing of the body’s powerful but ambivalent inside/outside distinction. Within this broader context of body-cutting, it might also be argued that circumcision functions in a similar way, so that the purpose of the modification of the penis is not so much to remove the foreskin, but to ‘open’ the penis by bringing the glans ‘outside’ the body, rendering the penis ritually as well as culturally empowered. However, there remains an important difference between these two particular forms of body modification: as it is portrayed in the Hebrew Bible, circumcision can occur only once (despite the peculiar and ambiguous claim in Josh 5:2; cf. 5:5), whereas ritual body-cutting can potentially be carried out repeatedly – as indeed might be suggested by the claim in 1 Kgs 18:28 (cf. Jer 47:5) that this practice was ‘customary’ among the prophets of Baal. Thus, although it has been argued that the outlawing of body-cutting in some texts reflects either an inherent abhorrence of marking the flesh25 or (more plausibly) a resistance among some groups to body-modification practices that are not easily or rapidly reversible,26 it seems likely that ritual cutting might also be deemed especially efficacious given both its long-lasting material impact on the body and its capacity for repeated performance. It is perhaps no coincidence that as circumcision came to be deemed the most powerful of modification techniques acceptable to Yhwh, as indeed it appears to be in the Torah, the 23 Connerton, Spirit of Mourning, 94. 24 N. Wyatt, Space and Time in the Religious Life of the Near East (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 33–52. 25 E.g., J. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPSTC; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 136. 26 Olyan argues that the association of body-cutting and hair manipulation with ritual practices for the dead played a part in their restriction in the cult of Yhwh, ensuring that priests and other cult specialists did not ‘mix’ rites of mourning and rejoicing. See further S.M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 538 Francesca Stavrakopoulou performance of some other forms of long-lasting body marking was correspondingly restricted in certain texts. In contrast to these forms of body marking, transitory or temporary modification techniques need not rupture or refigure the skin or flesh. Rather, certain activities frequently – but at times misleadingly – grouped together as methods of ‘adornment’ not only manifest diverse, culturally embedded expressions of embodiment, but can also demand or allow for repeated performance. Whether dressed with clothing, paint, cosmetics, perfume, a mask, a veil, headwear or ornaments, a body temporarily modified can performatively act on people, objects and spaces in ways that are just as powerful as those permanently modified. Indeed, in certain contexts, the capacity for the transitory or repeated performance of body modification can often enable more expansive or effective methods of engendering, negotiating or reconstructing social identities within communities.27 Temporary or transitory forms of modification might mark an interruption in everyday life28 or realise a reconfiguration of a ‘corporeal biography,’ manifesting in diverse ways particular changes in social, political, religious or territorial status or group membership.29 Accordingly, the objects and practices associated with temporary forms of body modification ought not to be dismissed as mere ‘costume’ or ‘props;’ instead, as L. Meskell and R. Joyce argue, “they are extensions of the materiality of the embodied person.”30 It is to some of these forms of body modification that the discussion will now turn. 27 M.M. Lee, “Body Modification in Classical Greece,” in Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco- Roman Antiquity (ed. T. Fögen and M.M. Lee; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 155–180. Lee argues that in classical Greece, permanent body-marking was the activity of ‘barbarians,’ rendering them unable to transgress the social boundaries demarcating ‘Greek’ culture, which mostly favoured temporary forms of body modification. On the distinction between ‘Greeks’ and the ‘barbaric Other,’ and a discussion of earlier works, see most recently L.G. Mitchell, Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007). On the performativity of repeated behaviours and body practices in the service of stabilizing a ‘core’ identity, J. Butler’s classic discussion Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990) remains instructive. 28 Connerton, Spirit of Mourning, 127. 29 Cole and Haebich, “Corporeal Colonialism and Corporal Punishment,” 300. 30 Meskell and Joyce, Embodied Lives, 10. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 539 2. The modified body and the transaction of the gaze in 2 Kgs 9:30–37 Given the relative ease with which a number of forms of temporary or transitory body modifications might be made and remade, many techniques are located on a social register of display and exhibition: their visibility renders their transitory state more impactful, and thus more effective in materialising a more empowered embodiment. As such, the head and face particularly lend themselves to modification as effective social sites of transitory or temporary markings. In many cultures, as A. Synnott argues, these parts of the body are especially “unique, physical, malleable and public,” and can therefore function as “the prime symbol of the self”31 – however the ‘self ’ (or perhaps better, ‘personhood’) is constructed among and within various social groups.32 The modification of the face and head thus plays a part in the visual transaction between the ‘self ’ and ‘others’: it is a material form of embodiment rendered visible as a social commodity of sorts, displayed to others to whom its value is asserted and by whom its value is assessed. The performance of modification techniques on the head or face thus brings about an experiential dimension to both viewer and exhibitor.33 Within this frame of social and visual transaction, temporary or transitory modifications of the head and face can often therefore function as implicit or explicit assertions of status and power, and are frequently bound up with the performance of religious and ritual activities and identity.34 As such, a number of biblical texts attest to these social dynamics of transitory or temporary body modification. However, they have received relatively scant attention in scholarship beyond the detailed study of hair and identity by S. Niditch35 and a more limited interest among other scholars in narratives dealing with veiling or ritual anointing, many of 31 Synnott, The Body Social, 73. 32 See further Van Wolputte, “Hang on to Your Self,” 251–269; C. Fowler, “From Identity and Material Culture to Personhood and Materiality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (ed. D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 352–385. 33 Adapting K. Tranberg Hansen’s observation in her article “The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 369–392, here 373. 34 H. Eilberg-Schwartz and W. Doniger (ed.), Off With Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); J. Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 35 S. Niditch, ‘My Brother Esau is a Hairy Man’: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 540 Francesca Stavrakopoulou which are subjected to theological rather than sociological or anthropological treatments.36 Instead, biblical attestations of temporary forms of face or head modification tend to go unnoticed or are handled uncritically with a cultural insensitivity or an ill-informed clumsiness, often resulting in caricature and stereotype. A particularly pertinent example is the way in which commentators have responded to the story of Jezebel’s encounter with Jehu in 2 Kgs 9:30–33, a text to which the discussion will now turn. In this episode, Jehu sets about to overthrow Jezebel in her role as a key member of the royal powerhouse of the northern kingdom of Israel: When Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; she kohled her eyes,37 and adorned her head, and looked out of the window. As Jehu entered the gate, she said, ‘Is it peace, Zimri, murderer of your master?’ He lifted his face to the window and said, ‘Who is with me? Who?’ Two or three eunuchs looked out at him. He said, ‘Throw her down.’ So they threw her down; some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses, which trampled on her. Scholarly perceptions of Jezebel’s actions in preparing to meet Jehu have traditionally been filtered through a lens of disdain and misogyny – in part encouraged by the hostility of the biblical narrator towards this character (1 Kings 18–19; 21; 2 Kings 9),38 but also in concert with the pervasive downgrading and degrading of women in Western culture, to which the Bible itself has contributed.39 Commentators thus frequently portray Jezebel as a manipulative and dangerous seductress, donning the cosmetic weaponry of a woman relying on her looks to take on her enemy, an interpretation that R. Cohn’s words represent well: “primping in her boudoir, preparing for his arrival […] she paints, pretties, and peers out her window.”40 However, in contrast to this persistent perception in scholarship, Jezebel might be better understood here as undertaking forms of body modification which manifest and communicate particular culturally-coded statements and objectives. Some scholars already note that the reference to 36 Notable among the exceptions are V.H. Matthews, “The Anthropology of Clothing in 37 38 39 40 the Joseph Narrative,” JSOT 65 (1995): 25–36; K.B. Low, “Implications surrounding Girding the Loins in Light of Gender, Body, and Power,” JSOT 36 (2011): 3–30. On this translation, see M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 11; Garden City: Doubleday, 1988), 111. See further, for example, P. Dutcher-Walls, Jezebel: Portraits of a Queen (Interfaces; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004). See further T. Pippin, “Jezebel Re-vamped,” in A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings (ed. A. Brenner; Feminist Companion to the Bible 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 196–206; H. Eilberg-Schwartz, “The Spectacle of the Female Head,” in Off With Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture (ed. H. Eilberg-Schwartz and W. Doniger; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1–14. R.L. Cohn, 2 Kings (Berit Olam; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000), 69. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 541 her “adorning her head” (or more literally, “making good her head,” using the hiphil form of ‫ )יטב‬connotes not Jezebel’s sexuality, but a reassertion of her high status as a woman of power, whether as a queen or queen mother41 or as a member of the elite class.42 But this action goes beyond an assertion of personal prestige. Instead, as a temporary modification of repeated action, refiguring or dressing the head or the hair in ancient West Asian and eastern Mediterranean cultures could often engage wider social dynamics of commodification and consumption,43 so that the repeated performance of head and hair modification might be better understood as a ritualised (though not necessarily cultic) behaviour of power in relation to the ‘other,’ rather than only as an exhibition of personal status.44 Indeed, a number of biblical texts dealing critically with the exhibition of conspicuous consumption (with its attendant connotations of religious and political power) appear to employ motifs of body and hair adornment as a means of indexing precisely this complex of embodied power performances (for example, Isa 3:24; Amos 6:4–6), whilst in Isa 3:16–26 and elsewhere, this imagery is explicitly gendered and feminised as a means of berating the elites of Jerusalem.45 Much has been made of the window location of Jezebel’s actions. At first blush, its setting as the frame of presentation for her newly adorned head and face suggests an assertion of power in keeping with the cultural dynamics signalled by the modification of her head: a familiar biblical motif employed in a variety of narratives dealing with female characters, the ‘woman at the window’ functions not as a literary construct marking passivity and subjugation, as some literary and feminist critics have suggested, but as a means of signalling a specific narrative interest in challenges to social boundaries, hierarchies and opposition.46 The power ascribed to Jezebel at the window similarly finds expression in the well-worn claims that the biblical references to her painted eyes and stylised hair are an intentional literary allusion to the frequently attested 41 E.g., F.O. Garcı́a-Treto, “The Fall of the House: A Carnivalesque Reading of 2 Kings 9 42 43 44 45 46 and 10,” in Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible (ed. D.N. Fewell; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 153–172, here 164. Niditch, My Brother Esau is a Hairy Man, 124–126. Lee, “Body-Modification in Classical Greece,” 155–180; M. Marcus, “Incorporating the Body: Adornment, Gender, and Social Identity in Ancient Iran,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 3 (1993): 157–178; idem, “Sex and the Politics of Female Adornment in Pre-Achaemenid Iran,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (ed. N. Kampen; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41–54. Cf. Meskell and Joyce, Embodied Lives, 58. E.g., Ezek 16:9–19; 23:40–42. D. Seeman, “The Watcher at the Window: Cultural Poetics of a Biblical Motif,” Prooftexts 24 (2004): 1–50. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 542 Francesca Stavrakopoulou iconographic motif of the ‘woman at the widow’ in ancient West Asian and eastern Mediterranean art,47 which has often been interpreted as portraying the eroticised and inviting face of a goddess.48 For some commentators, Jezebel’s carefully-crafted pose at the window thus signals her role as a priestess or embodiment of a goddess.49 Others, hoodwinked by the biblical polemic against ‘foreign’ ritual practices, and seemingly encouraged by the Orientalist fantasies of the wider Western intellectual tradition,50 sexualise her further and cast her as the high-class whore of ‘Canaanite’ or ‘Phoenician’ religious practice, ready for sacred sex and thereby “adorned as a prostitute…as befits the greatest of all the patrons of the fertility cult.”51 However, in contrast to these views, the window-setting of Jezebel’s actions is suggestive of an alternative interpretative frame – one which moves beyond the bounds of conventional Western caricatures of female sexuality and cosmetics to focus attention instead on the cultural and anthropological contexts of body modification which resonate throughout the biblical narrative itself. As a number of cultural theorists and anthropologists argue, a window is often culturally-coded as a liminal space between inside and outside, between spectacle and spectator, and between fixity and change. But as P. Connerton also explains, the oppositions marked by a window are also permeable and reversible, rendering it a transitional place in the topography of culture, and a space in which the transference of the body’s own morphology may often be powerfully felt.52 47 P.R. Ackroyd, “Goddesses, Women and Jezebel,” in Images of Women in Antiquity (ed. 48 49 50 51 52 A. Cameron and A. Kuhrt; London: Croom Helm, 1983), 245–259; E.F. Beach, “Transforming Goddess Iconography in Hebrew Narrative,” in Women and Goddess Traditions: In Antiquity and Today (ed. K.L. King; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 239–263. R. Herbig, “Aphrodite Parakyptusa (Die Frau im Fenster),” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 30 (1927): 917–922; R.D. Barnett, The Nimrud Ivories (London: British Museum, 1957). N. Aschkenasy, Women at the Window: Biblical Tales of Oppression and Escape (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 15; cf. S. Ackerman, “The Queen Mother and the Cult in Ancient Israel,” JBL 112 (1993), 385–401. On the Orientalist attitudes of Western scholars (ancient and modern) in interpreting iconography in this way, see Z. Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 167–170. For a persuasive refutation of the existence of cultic prostitution in ancient West Asian religions, see S.L. Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a sharp overview of the arguably false biblical distinction between ‘Israelite’ and ‘Canaanite’ religion, see H. Niehr, “‘Israelite’ Religion and ‘Canaanite’ Religion,” in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (ed. F. Stavrakopoulou and J. Barton; London: T&T Clark, 2010), 23–36. I.W. Provan, 1 & 2 Kings (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1995), §41. Connerton, Spirit of Mourning, 86–99, esp. 98. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 543 As such, a window can be viewed as an appropriate site of transitory or temporary body modification. This understanding is precisely the way in which the window appears to function in the biblical portrayal of Jezebel’s own transitory modification, the cultured performativity of which is arguably underscored by the presence of eunuchs alongside her at the window (9:32–33), themselves embodying both the liminality of the space and their own bodily modification.53 The window’s function as a site of significance both in terms of cultural topography and bodily morphology thus renders Jezebel’s painted eyes even more conspicuous. Whilst her actions appear to invite Jehu and the reader to look upon her face, her positioning at the window also underscores her own gaze: “she looked out of the window” (9:30). She is thus not only a woman to be seen at the window, she is the ‘watcher at the window;’54 she is not only the spectacle, she is the spectator. Within the context of the narrative, Jezebel is performing the politics of visibility, in which the transaction of the gaze, emphasized by her kohled eyes, is presented both as a cultural commodity and as a vehicle of potential social conflict. This is evident in the tense dynamic between Jehu and Jezebel: she looks out of the window, prepared to see and be seen (9:30) – an invitation underscored by her direct address to him (9:31). But although he “lifts his face to the window,”55 Jehu appears to direct his gaze beyond Jezebel, rendering her invisible by addressing instead somebody – anybody – else: “Who is with me? Who?” (9:32). The dynamics of this visual transaction, coupled with Jezebel’s painted eyes, point to cultural anxieties and corresponding management techniques about the gaze of the other – often couched as the evil eye. Well-attested across a number of societies, both ancient and modern, the prevalence and fear of the evil eye indexes a number of cultural elaborations of a belief in a malevolent power possessed by humans, deities or animals who might voluntarily or involuntarily cause harm to another by means of a look.56 In a number of societies, the evil eye is often attributed 53 Cf. K. Stone, “1 and 2 Kings,” in The Queer Bible Commentary (ed. D. Guest et al.; London: SCM Press, 2006), 222–250, esp. 246–249; J.S. Everhart, “Jezebel: Framed by Eunuchs?,” CBQ 72 (2010): 688–698. 54 Cf. Seeman, “The Watcher at the Window,” 1–50. 55 On this phrase in the MT, see further below. 56 For an overview, see F. Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction (2nd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 200–236. Detailed studies are numerous, but vary in their quality and rigour – often (but not primarily) due to their engagement with what are now outdated anthropological models. Among the most influential are C. Maloney (ed.), The Evil Eye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); A. Dundes (ed.), The Evil e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 544 Francesca Stavrakopoulou to those whose differences set them apart from normative or dominant constructions of social order,57 attesting not only to the othering of the gaze, but also to a fear of the gaze of the ‘other’ and its disruptive power.58 Alongside the evidence of so-called ‘eye of Horus’ amulets and other apotropaic objects thought to protect against the evil eye and other dangerous powers in a variety of Israelite and Judahite archaeological assemblages,59 traces of a belief in the evil eye also pepper texts in the Hebrew Bible,60 though they are often overlooked or misrepresented in modern scholarship.61 Some of these texts refer to a form of envy or hostility which prompts illness, destruction, punishment or social estrangement (for example, Prov 23:6 – 8; cf. 1 Sam 18:8–9). Others, in keeping with a wider ancient West Asian cultural usage, associate the evil eye with motifs concerning the devouring of human flesh (Deut 28:54, 56; Qoh 4:4–8),62 a loose cultural trope exploited and further embellished in rabbinic commentaries on both the evil eye and later Jewish constructs of the so-called ‘evil inclination.’63 It is widely agreed by archaeologists and biblical commentators that protection from the evil eye in Israelite and Judahite cultures included amulets worn on the body and displayed at the doorways and windows of the home.64 The impressive quality and likely expense of some excavated 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 Eye: A Case Book (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1981); P.B. Gravel, The Malevolent Eye: An Essay on the Evil Eye, Fertility and the Concept of Mana (New York: Lang, 1995). G. Riordan, “Cultural History of the Eyes,” in Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body, Volumes 1 & 2 (ed. V. Pitts-Taylor; Westport: Greenwood, 2008), 110–116, here 111. Cf. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 30. See further C. Herrmann, Ägyptische Amulette aus Palästina, Israel mit einem Ausblick auf ihre Rezeption durch das Alte Testament (Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 1994); idem, Ägyptische Amulette aus Palästina/Israel, III (Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2006); idem, “Weitere ägyptische Amulette aus Palästina/Israel,” ZDPV 123 (2007): 93– 127. See, for example, Deut 15:9; 28:54, 56; Prov 23:6; 28:22; cf. Sir 14:6, 8, 10; 31:13; Tobit 4:7, 16. J.H. Elliott, “The Evil Eye in the First Testament: The Ecology and Culture of a Persuasive Belief,” in The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Norman K. Gottwald on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (ed. D. Jobling, P.L. Day and G.T. Sheppard; Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991), 147–159, here 148. J.N. Ford, “‘Ninety-Nine by the Evil Eye and One from Natural Causes’: KTU2 1.96 in Its Near Eastern Context,” UF 30 (1998): 201–278; N. Wazana, “A Case of the Evil Eye: Qohelet 4:4 – 8,” JBL 126 (2007): 685–701. R. Ulmer, The Evil Eye in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature (Hoboken: KTAV Publishing, 1994). E.g., Exod 12:7, 13, 22–27; 28:36–38; 39:30–31; Josh 2:18 – 21; 6:22 – 25; Isa 3:18–21; 2 Macc 12:40; cf. Prov 6:21. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 545 examples is suggestive of their use among high status social groups,65 complementing finds from a number of other cultures in which more affluent members of society were believed to be particularly prone to the threat of the evil eye and thus employed amulets and other protective materials to ward off any danger.66 This in itself resonates with the biblical contexts of references to the evil eye, in which envy of those more fortunate often plays a prominent role.67 As such, the use of protective amulets might also function as a technique of body modification particularly associated with the exhibition and manifestation of social status and ritual power. However, objects were probably not the only form of material protection against the evil eye in these societies. It is also likely that cosmetics – particularly eye make-up – could function apotropaically. Cross-cultural ethnographies and other anthropological studies suggest that, along with amulets, incantations and gestures, the application of make-up around the eyes could serve both to protect the wearer from the evil eye and to prevent those with the power of the eye from inflicting harm upon others.68 Whilst indications of this function of eye cosmetics are not explicitly attested in the Hebrew Bible, it is perhaps significant that some texts associate eye make-up with ritual contexts (Ezek 23:40; cf. Jer 4:30), whilst certain rabbinic interpretations of biblical passages claim that the “arrogant” eyes of women (Isa 3:16–17; Prov 6:16–17), explicitly assumed by the rabbis to be lined with make-up, bring about leprosy and are thereby said to be associated with the destructive power of the evil eye.69 65 Most prominent among the archaeological examples are the famous inscribed silver 66 67 68 69 amulets from Ketef Hinnom. For a comprehensive discussion, see J.D. Smoak, “May YHWH Bless You and Keep You from Evil: The Rhetorical Argument of Ketef Hinnom Amulet I and the Form of the Prayers for Deliverance in the Psalms,” JANER 12 (2012): 202–236, which includes a detailed bibliography of publications on these artefacts (205, n. 6). Other examples and discussions of excavated amulets can also be found in R. Schmitt, Magie im Alten Testament (AOAT 13; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2004); R. Albertz and R. Schmitt, Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012). M. DeMello, Faces Around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the Human Face (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 86–91; E. Dwyer, “Evil Eye,” in Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art (ed. H.E. Roberts; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 287–292. Elliott, “The Evil Eye in the First Testament,” 149. DeMello, Faces Around the World, 89; M. Dean, “From Darsan to Tirusti: ‘Evil Eye’ and the Politics of Visibility in Contemporary South India” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011). Ulmer, Evil Eye, 30. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 546 Francesca Stavrakopoulou Given their shared concern for the potentially dangerous power of the gaze, these anthropological, biblical and rabbinic perceptions of the evil eye are suggestive of a broader and more richly-textured cultural context in which Jezebel’s modification of her eyes in 2 Kgs 9:30–33 might be understood. Sited and sighted at a window (a cultural topos inherently suggestive of bodily morphology) and flanked by eunuchs, elsewhere notably described as “watchers of the threshold” (Esth 2:21), Jezebel’s body modifications manifest her role as both the spectacle and spectator, evoking the fear of the evil eye, and prepared to engage Jehu in the transaction of the dangerous gaze. However, whether her eyes are made up apotropaically to protect herself or her adversary – and whether her words to Jehu are to be understood as conciliatory or confrontational – her modifications appear impotent in the presence of her enemy, who lifts up “his face” (MT) or “his eyes” (LXXL) in what is understood elsewhere as a gesture of ritual power (Num 24:2).70 Jezebel’s deficit in the transaction of the gaze is marked not only by her being rendered invisible to Jehu, who appears not to engage her eyes and instead looks past her (9:32), but also by her being passed beyond and through the window to her annihilation – a process not insignificantly cast in terms associated with the motif of the evil eye elsewhere in both biblical and other ancient West Asian traditions: the consumption of human flesh. The biblical portrayal of her demise is indeed suggestive: …He said, “See to that cursed woman and bury her; she is a king’s daughter.” But when they went to bury her, they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. When they came back and told him, he said, “This is the word of Yahweh, which he spoke by his servant Elijah the Tishbite: In the territory of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel; the corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, ‘This is Jezebel’” (2 Kgs 9:34–37) In this final scene, Jezebel’s modifications to her head and face, temporarily performed, perhaps as a means of both empowering and protecting her embodied gaze, are powerfully subverted; her encounter with Jehu renders her explicitly “cursed” (9:34); her kohled eyes and adorned head not only disappear from view, but are rendered permanently 70 On the interrelation of gestures, incantations and the evil eye, see D.R. Miller, “In- cantations in Ancient West Semitic Corpora and in the Hebrew Bible: Continuity and Change” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2006). e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 547 invisible in their consumption and transformation into nothing more than a ravaged skull and excreted faeces.71 Indeed, in the transaction of the gaze, the seemingly temporary and transitory modifications of Jezebel’s body bring about not an empowered embodiment, but disempowerment and destruction. With the loss of her face, and the desiccation of her head, Jezebel’s corporeal materiality, and thereby her sociality, is so severely compromised that she is ultimately rendered a ‘no-body;’ for “no one can say, ‘This is Jezebel’” (9:37). 3. The modified body and the performance of religious materiality in Deut. 6:6–9 and 11:18–21 The empowering efficacy of body modification is perhaps nowhere better illustrated in the Hebrew Bible than in Deut. 6:6–9 and 11:18–21. These verses fall within a relatively small group of texts in which body-modification practices are positively appraised and promoted, contrasting sharply with the restriction, defamation or prohibition elsewhere of other forms, including ritual cutting, as observed above. Indeed, just as biblical presentations of circumcision and specific shaving rituals are employed to endorse specific modification practices performed within certain ancient and contemporary Judaisms,72 so too these texts are widely understood to have given rise to forms of body modification well-attested and privileged among particular groups in later periods of Yhwh-worship, including some of those of the present day. The texts read as follows: Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are in your house and when you are walking on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem between your eyes. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:6–9) Put these words of mine in your heart and being, and bind them as a sign on your hand and fix them as an emblem between your eyes. Teach them to your children, talk about them when you are in your house and when you are walking on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied on the land that Yhwh swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are over the earth. (Deut. 11:18–21) 71 On the devouring of Jezebel’s corpse as a means of indexing social nonexistence, see further F. Stavrakopoulou, “Gog’s Grave and the Use and Abuse of Corpses,” JBL 129 (2010): 67–84. 72 See further S.M. Olyan, “What do Shaving Rites Accomplish and What do they Signal in Biblical Ritual Contexts?,” JBL 117 (1998): 611–622. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 548 Francesca Stavrakopoulou It is widely assumed that a literal interpretation of these texts gave rise to the tefillin and mezuzah practices common among certain early Jewish (and Samaritan) groups in the Hellenistic and later periods,73 groups for whom the textuality of ritual and the ritualization of text were notably prominent features of religious practice.74 But this scholarly focus on the textuality of ancient Yhwh-worship has generated relatively little interest in the ways in which Deut. 6:6–9 and 11:18–21 index the body. Most scholars agree the divine command to “bind” (‫ )קשר‬the words of Torah (or more traditionally, the Shema in 6:45) as a sign (‫ )אות‬upon the hand, to have them as some sort of an object or mark75 “between the eyes” (or perhaps on the forehead), and to write the words on doorposts and gateposts, alludes to the use of inscribed amulets on the body, as well as in the home and city, to keep worshippers from harm.76 In their biblical context, the inferred use of inscribed amulets points to a broader cultural landscape in which the efficacy of ritual objects, known to have been worn on the body or exhibited at liminal places in buildings, tombs and settlements,77 might be combined with the power of protective or similarly potent incantations and manifested in material, written form.78 73 See further Y.B. Cohn, Tangled Up in Text: Tefillin and the Ancient World (Providence: Brown University Press, 2008). 74 See further D. Lincicum, “Scripture and Apotropaism in the Second Temple Period,” BN 75 76 77 78 138 (2008): 63–88; N.B. Levtow, “Text Production and Destruction in Ancient Israel: Ritual and Political Dimensions,” in Social Theory and the Study of Israelite Religion: Essays in Retrospect and Prospect (ed. S.M. Olyan; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 111–139. The meaning of the term ‫טוטפת‬, often rendered “emblem,” “pendant” or “bands,” is uncertain. The probability that it refers to an object or markings is suggested primarily by its context in these verses (cf. Exod 13:16) and the specification of a location on the face or head as a place of display (cf. Deut 14:1). See further O. Keel, “Zeichen der Verbundenheit: Zur Vorgeschichte und Bedeutung der Forderungen von Deuteronomium 6,8 f und Par.,” in Mélanges Dominique Barthélémy: études bibliques offerts à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire (ed. P. Caselli, O. Keel, and A. Schenker; OBO 38; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 159–240; A. Lemaire, “Deuteronomy 6:6, 9 in the Light of Northwest Semitic Inscriptions,” in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Literature presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (ed. C. Chaim et al.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 525–530. E.g., Exod 12:7, 13, 22–27; 28:36–38; 39:30–31; Josh 2:8–21; 6:22–25; Isa 3:18, 20; 2 Macc 12:40; cf. Ezek 13:17–23. E.g., Num 5:23–24; Ezek 2:8–3:4. The use of Num 6:24–26 in the Ketef Hinnom Amulet I inscription is well known; see n. 65, above and J.D. Smoak, “Prayers of Petition in the Psalms and West Semitic Inscribed Amulets: Efficacious Words in Metal and Prayers for Protection in Biblical Literature,” JSOT 36 (2011): 75–92. Other inscriptions attest to the magical presence and power of words and images at liminal places, including tombs; for a recent study, see (for example) M. Leuenberger, “Blessing in Text and Picture in Israel e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 549 The exhibition of ritualized writing points to a pervasive and frequently attested ancient West Asian understanding that writing was believed to possess what is often (although not unproblematically) termed a “numinous” quality,79 and that it might function as one among a number of ritual substances drawn from both the divine and non-divine worlds.80 Accordingly, the Hebrew Bible persistently attests to the notion that writing is the medium of the divine: in common with several other ancient West Asian deities,81 Yhwh writes, inscribes and creates texts himself,82 rendering him the ‘heavenly scribe’ and author of a divine book in which the existence of the living is recorded.83 Significantly, however, the divine might also write on human bodies. In Gen 4:15, Yhwh sets (‫ )שים‬a mark (‫ )אות‬upon Cain in order to protect him from those seeking to kill him,84 whilst in Ezek 9:4–6, specific bodies are marked by the inscription of a taw, written on the forehead by a divine scribe equipped with a writing case. In their immediate contexts, the marks are presented in these texts as apotropaic in function, protecting those whose bodies are modified in this way from the destruction wrought by others, whether divine or human.85 Similarly, in Job 31:35, the protagonist appears to wish for a divine written mark on his body, seemingly to protect him from judgement. The precise nature of these written marks is uncertain, though some texts, including Num 6:27 and Isa 44:5, might infer that they manifest the 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 and the Levant: A Comparative Case Study on the Representation of Blessing in H[irbet el-Qom and in the Stela of Yeh[awmilk of Byblos,” BN 141 (2009): 67–90. S. Niditch, Oral Word and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (LAI; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 83; W.M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 25; D.M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 46. See further F. Stavrakopoulou, “Materialism, Materiality, and Biblical Cults of Writing,” in Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton (ed. K.J. Dell and P.M. Joyce; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 223–242. See further Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, 129; cf. F. Rochberg, Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); K. van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. 75–108. E.g., Exod 24:12; 31:18; 34:1; Deut 4:13; 5:22; 9:10; 10:2, 4; Jer 31:33; Ezek 2:9–10. E.g., Exod 32:32–33; Ps 40:7–8; 69:28; 139:16; Dan 7:10; 12:1; Mal 3:16. For the suggestion that the verb ‫ שים‬can connote the physical act of writing and its display on the body, see Smoak, “May YHWH Bless You and Keep You From Evil,” 234. For a discussion of the ambiguous function of the taw in Ezek 9:4–6, see S.S. Tuell, “The Meaning of the Mark: New Light on Ezekiel 9 from the History of Interpretation,” in After Ezekiel: Essays on the Reception of a Difficult Prophet (ed. P.M. Joyce and A. Mein; LHBOTS 535; New York: T&T Clark International, 2011), 185–202. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 550 Francesca Stavrakopoulou ‘signature’ of Yhwh, expressing a divine ‘ownership’ of sorts.86 It might be supposed that the marking of the body in these texts alludes not to inscriptions directly applied to the skin, but rather to amulets or other prophylactic objects, akin in some ways to the “stones of remembrance,” which comprise Aaron’s priestly breastplate and which are inscribed with the names of the Israelites (Exod 28:9–29). However, this interpretation reflects a misunderstanding of the correspondence of ritual adornments and bodies: these adornments are better understood as manifestations of material embodiment, so that, as J. Robb and O. Harris argue of a number of traditional cultures, both bodies and objects “are the subject of the same [intra-cultural] rules…thus both bodies and objects can be persons, and both can be parts of a person.”87 This understanding of the relationship between the body and its material forms of ritual adornment makes good sense of the instructions in Deut 6:6–8 and 11:18–19, in which the command to keep or place divine words in the “heart” and “being” (in its context, perhaps a more appropriate rendering of the term ‫ )נפש‬reaches beyond metaphor to index instead the extended materiality of the embodied worshipper: setting and binding divine words on the head and hand appear to be practices equated with or related to the teaching of Torah, which is itself presented in these verses as an on-going bodily practice, exhibited and encountered by others in the household – namely, children or descendants. In these texts, then, embodiment is expressed in the performative actions of ritual adornment and recitation, utterance, walking, sleeping, and waking. For this reason, too, the notion of the extended, material embodiment of the worshipper is also attested in the corresponding divine directive to modify the doorposts and gateposts of the community with the same efficacious words (6:9; 11:20). These are precisely the liminal spaces in the cultural topography particularly associated with body morphology, as illustrated above. They are also the places at which the very sociality of the household might be felt most strongly. As a number of scholars have argued, a house is more than a building, and a settlement is more than a collection of houses. Like all objects and spaces, neither the house nor the settlement is a static entity, with an abstract, encoded meaning – both are socially constructed;88 they comprise ‘practiced space’ in which certain people, actions and objects come together to create a familiar locality: a 86 Cf. D.I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1 – 24 (NICOT; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 307. 87 Robb and Harris, The Body in History, 13. 88 D. Morgan, “Materiality, Social Analysis, and the Study of Religions,” in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (ed. D. Morgan; London: Routledge, 2010), 55–74. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 551 home.89 As such, the ‘home’ is a continuously changing, dynamic space, (re)produced through a series of social and material practices.90 Thus, from the settlement to the buildings and their occupants, and the places, spaces and activities they share, the materiality of the household itself – its people, places and objects – is the very fabric of religion.91 And it is for this reason that the modification of the body finds complementary expression in the modification of the house and the settlement. As such, Deut. 6:6–9 and 11:18–21 reflect the empowered extension of the material person within a complex cultural matrix that is socially constructed and rendered meaningful by means of the material interrelation of people, objects, actions and spaces. Thus, whilst the directives of these texts can be understood as a carefully-tailored attempt to appropriate the amulet culture common to ancient West Asian religions for the purposes of a distinctively scribal Yahwism (cf. 2 Macc 12:40),92 their significance is also further reaching. Rather, written Torah functions in these verses as a particularly potent form of body modification in its incorporation into both the human body and the social body: in its material form, Torah marks the brow and the hand in order to modify the body, whilst at the same time it also marks the thresholds of the home, so as to embody the household in an extended material form, thereby further modifying the domestic landscape.93 Alongside the emphatic biblical command to practice circumcision, the exhibition of Torah modifies and transforms the body and household of the obedient (male) worshipper into a form acceptable to the deity, so that 89 J. Gray, “Open Spaces and Dwelling Places: Being at Home on Hill Farms and in the 90 91 92 93 Scottish Borders,” in The Anthropology of Pace and Place: Locating Culture (ed. S.M. Low and D. Lawrence-Zúñiga; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 224–244; cf. V. Buchli, “Households and ‘Home Cultures,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (ed. D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 502–517. D. Miller, “Behind Closed Doors,” in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors (ed. D. Miller; Oxford: Berg, 2001), 1–19. See further F. Stavrakopoulou, “Religion at Home: The Materiality of Practice,” in The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel (ed. S. Niditch; Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). Note that the promotion of scribal Yahwism – and its prominent depiction of Yhwh as the paradigmatic scribe – is a religious construction elaborated in the later rabbinic modelling of Yhwh himself as an observant Jew, wearing tefillin (Berakhot 6a, 6b). See further K.C. Patton, Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 249–281. On the promotion of scribal Yahwism in the book of Deuteronomy, see J.-P. Sonnet, The Book Within the Book: Writing in Deuteronomy (Leiden: Brill, 1997). On this particular form of body-marking as one of several methods in the biblical construction of cultural memory, see J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (trans. R. Livingstone; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 16–21. e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission 552 Francesca Stavrakopoulou the corporeality and embodiment of the worshipper is dictated and shaped by the authoritative, material words of the divine. In this way, Deut. 6:6–9 and 11:18–21 together offer one of the more vivid illustrations of the power of body modification – a ritualised, corporeal strategy empowering the worshipper’s embodied sociality which, by extension, brings about the perpetuation of fertility, territorialism and the socio-religious longevity of the community (11:21; cf. 6:1–3) in a way that the unmodified body, by implication, cannot. 4. Summary The materiality of body, and its potent religious significance, has been consistently undervalued within biblical scholarship. Although the old Western paradigm of the body as mere vessel for a spiritually-charged ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ has been destabilized in favour of more nuanced models of the body’s social construction, there remains a culturally-conditioned resistance in biblical studies to recognising that the body is an essential site of religion. As such, practices which alter or modify the body have tended to be caricatured simply as ‘symbols’ or ‘markers’ of theological constructions and religious identities. Too often, the powerful and transformative significance of the body’s materiality has been missed. By contrast, this discussion has sought to argue that evidence of the body’s material role in the construction and performance of religious realities is well attested in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, taken together, the various forms of body modification explored in this discussion – from body-cutting to adornment – can be seen to index a religiously-charged cultural milieu in which the empowering and harnessing of bodily materiality is essential to the sociality and religious experience of ‘being’ in the world. The biblical texts examined here attest to an understanding of the body neither as ‘symbol’ nor as ‘stable,’ but rather as a recursively engaged social ‘project’ in which bodily activities themselves construct and reconstruct the body. More than an instrument of ritual practice, the body is therefore presented in the Hebrew Bible as a site of religious performativity, manifesting and embodying cultural preferences and anxieties. The body thus not only shapes religious beliefs and practices, but brings them into being. It is within this context that modification techniques render the e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission On Body Modification and Religious Materiality in the Hebrew Bible 553 body one of the most important of materialities in the construction of religious realities. Francesca Stavrakopoulou Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion University of Exeter Theology and Religion Department Amory Building Rennes Drive Exeter EX4 4RJ United Kingdom 01392724290 [email protected] e-offprint of the author with publisher's permission Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel Edited by Gary N. Knoppers (University Park PA), Oded Lipschits (Tel Aviv), Carol A. Newsom (Atlanta GA), and Konrad Schmid (Zürich) Redaction: Phillip Michael Lasater (Zürich) Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel publishes only invited articles. Submission of a paper will be held to imply that it contains original unpublished work and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. All articles are refereed by specialists. Acceptance for publication will be given in writing. When an article is accepted for publication, the exclusive copyright is granted to Mohr Siebeck for publication in a print and an electronic version. 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Newsom (Atlanta GA), and Konrad Schmid (Zürich) Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel is a new, peer-reviewed, quarterly journal focusing primarily on the biblical texts in their ancient historical contexts, but also on the history of Israel in its own right. Each issue has a topical focus. The primary language is English, but articles may also be published in German and French. A specific goal of the new journal is to foster discussion among different academic cultures within a larger international context pertaining to the study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel in the first millennium b. c. e. Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel ist eine neue Zeitschrift, die vierteljährlich erscheint und deren Beiträge durch einen Peerreview-Prozess evaluiert werden. Ihr Thema sind die Texte der hebräischen und aramäischen Bibel in ihren historischen Kontexten, aber auch die Geschichte Israels selbst. Jedes Heft wird einen thematischen Fokus haben. 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