A Response

Reading and rereading these responses in July 2025, I am struck by various waves of the intrusions of the present – especially the acceleration of violent rhetoric and violent actions of the past few years – so that the time of writing the book, the time of these reviews, and the time of my response to the reviews feels radically different. At the same time, one of the most gratifying parts of reading these responses has been the way they use the present to sharpen the stakes of my argument. In other words, all three scholars attend to the cultural, political, and spiritual investigation I have tried to pursue beneath particular questions of literature, biblical interpretation, and biblical reception.

I want to express my deep gratitude to Karma Ben Johanan, Raphael Magarik, and Yael Fisch. To be in dialogue with these profound thinkers and beautiful writers is a rare gift, especially in these dark and terrible times. The scholarship being written by Karma, Raffi, and Yael makes me excited to be part of a community of thinkers who are dedicated to both the craft of close reading ancient texts and to politically engaged accounts of intellectual history. Thanks also to Andrew Tobolowsky, who initiated the panel, and to Daniel Picus, the ever-patient editor of this virtual panel, as well as to Amital Stern for her lucid translation of Karma’s essay.

My book focuses on biblical texts, specifically on prophetic texts, especially on the way they have been read in post-Enlightenment culture since the mid-eighteenth century. Although, as Raffi points out, I am writing outside the customary guilds of bibical studies, English Romanticism, and Hebrew Literature, (and I appreciate his lovely description of the “capacious archive” in my work), I’d like to join the company of scholars who do what Erin Runions has called “critical biblical studies,” which is a “theorized analysis of the way that scriptures are formed, given authority, and made to respond to or uphold power.”[1]

I begin with an image from the present, seemingly unconnected to the book, but one that I would like to use to illustrate this matter of authority and power – considering the way a hegemonic symmetry is imposed on materials that are disturbing, jagged, and unresolved. I’m thinking of a portable radio that is often turned on in my family’s living room since October 7th, 2023. Though wireless, it is designed to look like an old-fashioned radio, complete with dials for volume and tuning. For months now, it has been permanently tuned to an Israeli station which plays pleasant and unchallenging music: my family’s background for doing dishes, building Lego towers, scrolling though phones.

Sometimes, though, in the middle of some banal hit from the ‘90s, the radio turns grave and strange, filling the room with staccato announcements and uncanny pauses, announcing the penetration of missiles from Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria, listing cities and towns on alert. My first reaction is alarm, a flooding of fight-or-flight hormones. After this initial panic, the radio helps me compose the proper affect. Is this a full-blown crisis? A new front in our forever-war? In this case, the playlist will become mournful, melancholic, filled with old Israeli songs reminiscent of the Red Army choir. Or possibly it’s just a minor blip, a drone incursion. Then the playlist will go back to normal. Or, perhaps the mood it reflects and creates is that shaky, emotional rollercoaster of hope and despair of the weeks in which hostages were returned, when the radio played Bob Dylan, Arik Einstein. “You and me will change the world,” it sang earnestly, interrupted by the recurring jingle: “הביתה הביתה” (homeward, homeward).

What I am trying to say is that the radio, with its soothing music as well as its hostile penetrations into the everyday, has been working to tune me into a certain affective range, a national mood, a collective soundtrack. The radio has been suggesting when to be sad, afraid, angry, vengeful, as well as when to calm down. We could think, metaphorically, of the playlist of the radio as a bourgeoise contemporary Israeli version of an antiphonal choir – heavenly or otherwise – tuning together the citizen with the state, the inside with the outside.

Yet how do I stand against the radio, the national tune, which taps into my emotions of fear, anger, relief, to tune me to into a genocidal reality? And correspondingly, how do I/we “untune” (to use Rob Halpern’s phrase) from the pleasing symmetries, the familiar affective responses, the entire, seamless, coherent world constructed by this “radio”?[2] We can think of the radio, with its faux air of antiquity and authority, as a figure for the hegemonic texts we tune into, which in turn, tune us to collective aesthetic and national experiences.

One way of conceiving of my book is as a way to listen to the static, the breaks, the fissures in this smoothness, what Yael has generously called an “ethical reading.” This listening can help us hear the efforts that have gone into creating this seemingly smooth experience: the one in which I feel that the radio is playing and reflecting my feelings, rather than actually creating them. In The Poetics of Prophecy, I explore a mode of listening, a mode of knowing, a way to wake up out of the dream of the victory song. This is a listening for muteness, the muteness of God and the muteness of humans (to riff off the midrash Yael presents). As NourbeSe Philip writes in her prophetic revisioning of the horrors of the middle passage, scattering the bones of Ezekiel’s vision, until the sea gives up its dread secret: “w/ho can bear t o hear the bo/ nes of g od lie here.”[3]

The Poetics of Prophecy, then, presents the tension between the construction of a strong authoritative prophetic voice (the ever-present radio!) and the weakness, uncertainty, doubt, and fissure built into prophecy from the Bible onward, through three staged encounters between scholars and poets, all of whom are deeply invested in the idea of prophecy, and come to shape its very form in modernity. I hope that these particular encounters serve as metonymies for larger intellectual and literary responses to the Bible from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. I can also see, in retrospect, that they comprise investigations into my own intellectual genealogies.

I came to biblical scholarship belatedly, through a love of literature. Even before studying with him at UC Berkeley during my PhD, I was inspired by Robert Alter’s re-animation of the biblical text. (His retelling of the story of Joseph and his brothers in the Art of Biblical Narrative still moves me to tears.) The first two chapters of my book try to historicize Alter’s and others’ work on the “The Bible as Literature,” marking its historical development as well as its blind spots. That is to say, the process of aestheticizing the Bible, especially the prophetic texts, can sometimes smooth over these texts’ revolutionary political potential as well as their seismographic ability to chart their own culture’s crises in meaning. The first chapter of the book focuses on the British biblical exegete Robert Lowth, famous as the discoverer (or inventor) of biblical parallelism. Lowth was one of the first to suggest reading the Bible as literature, though the phrase was later coined by Matthew Arnold. Lowth is put into conversation with the poet, artist, printer, and all-around eccentric genius, William Blake. While Lowth “smooths out” the formal and thematic fissures of the prophetic text so that they can function as a monumental part of Western culture, Blake rediscovers the cracks and weaknesses of prophecy. As opposed to Lowth’s emphasis on harmony and balance, Blake’s literary prophecies constantly unsettle symmetries. In my chapter on Blake, rather than using a single image to unlock the allegory of the biblical text – such as Ezekiel’s chariot – I consider Blake’s version of the prophet Isaiah, especially his walking, as a mode of interpretation through the difficult, irregular biblical text, as well as Blake’s own stormy present.

The second encounter I stage shifts from aesthetics to history, and is my attempt to contend with the intellectual lineage of modern biblical scholarship, that is, my (often-reluctant, even recalcitrant) induction into the guild of what my sister once called “bearded biblical professors.” Despite the aspirations of the guild to be objective, almost scientific in its pursuit of scholarship, “the invention of the biblical scholar” (as Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood named their book) was inflected by Romantic dichotomies, orientalist fantasies, Darwinian projections.[4] For Julius Wellhausen, a nineteenth century scholar of Old and New Testament, best known for formulating “the documentary hypothesis,” prophecy served as a marker of religious authenticity. Ezekiel, who he denigrated as a deceitful, weak prophet, became the linchpin in the story of the transformation of ancient Israel from tribal vitality to priestly fossilization. I put Wellhausen, the scholar and historian, into dialogue with German Romantic poets like Goethe and Herder, whose mixed feelings about the civilizing and modern culture of writing, together with a melancholic nostalgia for a pre-modern “oral culture,” continues to influence biblical scholarship’s (mis)understanding of prophecy. At the end of the chapter I “lean into” Wellhausen’s denigration of Ezekiel and scribalism: suggesting that the Ezekiel’s “weak” prophecy, a prophecy of hidden, distorted, and averted faces, draws vitality precisely through its distances from a seeming authenticity.

The third encounter in the book is the kernel from which it began: my attempt to contend with the Zionist texts which shaped me, texts which were part of my own high school curriculum. The return to Ahad Ha’am and Chaim Nachman Bialik, the former an essayist and editor, and the latter modern Hebrew’s “National Poet” – both active at the turn of the twentieth century in Odessa – was familiar and surprising at the same time. These foundational texts of modern Hebrew culture, which centered on the figure of the prophet as the essence of Jewish culture, turned out to be largely based on a Protestant idea of prophecy, which these Jewish writers absorbed through figures like Wellhausen and Thomas Carlyle, even incorporating Carlyle’s ideas about Mohammad into a Zionist ethos. If Ahad Ha’am tried to construct a strong prophetic spirit as an educational tool, his student Bialik paradoxically uses prophetic failure and weakness to goad his audience into a new kind of subjectivity. The chapter ends with a reading of “In the City of Slaughter,” a poem on the Kishinev Pogrom which is both an act of bearing witness and a condemnation of the victims; I continue to think of Bialik’s prophetic entanglement, his confusion of weakness and strength, as a key to the Israeli national psyche.

The afterword of the book is in some sense a user’s manual for poets – how to use the prophetic voice in poetry to “untune” strong prophecy: to block, undermine, and unravel hegemonic powers. I trace a countertradition of weak prophecy in poetry into the twenty-first century which draws on prophetic figures and language established by the Romantics. For poets like Rob Halpern, Hezy Leskly, Yehuda Amichai, Meir Wieseltier, Anne Carson, and M. NourbeSe Philip, prophecy – rather than providing a monumental mode of strength, assurance, and certainty – troubles the present, “defends the dead,” offers a leaky, stuttering, wounded vision of a new language and remade self. For example, in Carson’s “Book of Isaiah,” the prophet begins to lactate the word of God; the possibility of what Carson calls “livelihood” is made possible by the reorganization of the prophetic body and its new porous meeting place with the divine body.

Now that I’ve introduced the book I want to return to these thought-provoking reviews, and the way they’ve helped me see the book in a new light. I’m so glad Karma picked up this image of the nursing prophet in her review – connecting Isaiah’s lactation (as imagined by Anne Carson) to the medieval Jesus who nourished the world with his blood and milk. Generally, her review does a brilliant and hilarious job of mapping out the stakes of my argument, teasing out the ways that writing about prophecy can also become prophecy for the moderns I discuss, as well as infecting my own prose. I was also delighted by her midrash on my own name, which reminded me of the way authors of the ghazal, a form originating in Arabic and Persian poetry, weave a pun about their name into the last couplet of their poem. This device both implicates the author in the poem, as she collapses the distance between the literary “speaker” of the poem and autobiography, and at the same time distances the poet from her poem, as she speaks of herself in the third person. By naming herself this way she detaches from the poem. This seems like a good model for the kind of engagement a scholar should have with her own subject of inquiry.

Raffi’s review of The Poetics of Prophecy functioned as a bracingly “clear mirror” (aspaklaria me’ira), to borrow Karma’s term, for the argument of the book, showing how the seeming opposition presented in modern literary criticism (and modernity more generally) between ancient, sacred prophecy, and its secular modern rendering are actually two currents in post-Enlightenment culture: first, the scholarly attempt to fix an idealized mode of “strong” prophecy, and a poetic countertradition drawn to the failures, fissures, and weaknesses of the biblical prophetic texts. I especially appreciate the way he shows how this “positing of an ancient source that is dogmatic, muscularly masculine, and assertively authoritative is one of modernity’s favorite alibis for its own violence,” as this further draws out the stakes of my argument in this dark season of alibis for violence.

I also value the traces of my obsession with Lowth and the politics of parallelism in Raffi’s dazzling take on Spenser’s parallelism, in his 2023 essay “On the Politics of Parallelism Biblical Allusions in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” which recast and deepen my argument about the levelling or smoothing work modernity does on the biblical text.[5] At the risk of explaining the joke, Raffi’s prose draws beautifully on Isaiah 40:4, which in the KJV reads: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.” In response to this levelling work we can look to Blake, who gives us a kind of anti-levelling motto in his “Proverbs of Hell”: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”

I want to end by responding to Yael’s powerful extension of my theoretical work into a discussion of a rabbinic homily on the “Song of the Sea.” In this homily, praise for God, the divine warrior who saves the Israelites by parting the Red Sea and drowning the pursuing Egyptian chariots, is intertwined with a melancholic distance from the moment of victory, an acknowledgement of muteness, rather than military strength. The homily’s interweaving of lament and praise gestures toward a more universal poetics: Robert Hass (in A Little Book on Form) remarks that there is but a thin membrane between the ode and the elegy, between songs of praise and songs of grief and lament.[6] At times, when writing the book, I got lost in this dialectic of strength and weakness, praise and lament. Am I trying, I asked myself, to say that victory songs are melancholic or that songs of lament are consoling and even triumphant?

Yael describes my descriptions of weak prophecy not only as textual features, but as alternative modes of knowing. I want to return to this idea, to consider how Yael “knows” my book, and how her piece has reflected the “Song of Sea” back to me as a kind map to the unconscious of The Poetics of Prophecy.  “The Song of the Sea” appears in the book, in the first chapter, simply to demonstrate stichography in the Leningrad Codex. That is, I do not give much attention to the content of the text. At this point, I use it to try to explain how Masoretic scribes recognized a text as poetry, and how the recognition of the poetry of prophetic texts from Isaiah and Jeremiah, for example, occurred much later, and was a much more modern, contested phenomenon. That is the extent of my “conscious” discussion of this biblical text. However, as my friend Jessie Bonn pointed out to me at the book’s first launch, this biblical text has a compelling visual echo in the afterword, in the reproduction of a page from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, a poetic retelling or untelling of a horrific episode in the long and dark history of the Middle Passage. [7]In this page, words are broken up, rearranged on the page in seemingly haphazard shapes; words are broken open with ceasuras of the white paper.

Both “The Song of the Sea” and Zong! texts are songs of water, of sea and ocean, and ­take up space differently than prose on the page, as if to reproduce the back and forth motion of the waves, the lack of steady ground. The white spaces on the page can be spaces both of death and breath. Both are texts of drowning, the Egyptian enemies, their horses and chariots, and the African slaves, who were thrown overboard the slave ship in an insurance scam. Somehow, I believe, through this unconscious visual echo, these enemies and victims meet in God’s lament to the angels, (though perhaps this lament is addressed to all of us who sing victory songs): “my creations are drowning in the sea, and you are singing song?” (Megillah 10b) I hope that this way of knowing, a way of the uncertainty and loss of the sea, rather than the certainty of land, can permeate our texts and our thinking in these days of killing.

Yosefa Raz is an Associate Professor at the University of Haifa, and currently a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 

[1] Erin Runions, “Critical Biblical Studies is Here to Stay: Erin Runions Responds to Essays on The

Babylon Complex,” The Bible & Critical Theory II, no. 2 (2015): 97–105, https://bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol11-no2-2015/vol-11-no-2-2015-critical-biblical-studies-is-here-to-stay/

[2] Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2012), 49.

[3] M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!, as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 172.

[4] Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011).

[5] Magarik, Raphael. “On the Politics of Parallelism: Biblical Allusions in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” Prooftexts 40, no. 1 (2023): 59-84. https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/ptx.2023.a899249.

[6] Hass, Robert. A Little Book on Form. (Ecco, 2017),

[7] M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!