SBL Review Panel for Anathea Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body: Emodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature
Co-Sponsored by the Religious Experience in Antiquity and Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds Program Units of the Society of Biblical Literature
November 23, 2024
Book Summary
“Modern biblical scholarship predominantly conceives of prophecy as a verbal phenomenon” (pg. xxi).
Portier-Young argues this on the first page of her introduction to The Prophetic Body and labels this tendency the “logocentric bias” of our field. It is a voice from this perspective, both in the history of scholarship and today, that functions as her principal interlocutor in The Prophetic Body. She suggests that the logocentric bias has conventionally treated the materiality of prophetic bodies—that is, their experiences, emotions, sensations, sufferings, disabilities, and sexualities—as accidental to the prophetic corpus. To counterbalance this perspective, Portier-Young prescribes a reassessment of longstanding categories. Here is the thesis in her words:
Biblical prophecy is a thoroughly embodied phenomenon whose contours emerge most clearly in the complex interplay of embodied experience, affect, inter/action, and reception. In this understanding, word and body are not to be examined as separate categories, but as intertwined and synergistic (pg. xxii).
With this, Portier-Young embarks on a broad survey of prophetic figures and literature in the Hebrew Bible, exposing the logocentric bias and directing readers to the ways that prophetic bodies work together with prophetic words to communicate the prophetic message. Portier-Young thus paints a portrait of “the prophetic body as a node of intersection and mediating bridge between God and human, heaven and earth” (pg. xxii).
Once one realizes what Portier-Young has set out to do, they realize it is a massive project. Accordingly, The Prophetic Body is the first of a planned trilogy of books on the theme “Prophecy in the Body” (pg. xxii). Consequently, a few important issues—notably gender and sexuality—are noticeably missing in this first book. Portier-Young states, however, that this is because she intends to give them separate and extended attention in later volumes.
The Prophetic Body is divided into four parts. Part 1 is called “An Embodied Paradigm.” In these two chapters, Portier-Young further defines the contours of the logocentric bias and traces its imprints on a diachronic trajectory from ancient philosophical roots and New Testament reception of Israelite and early Jewish prophetic traditions, through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, European colonial expansion, and modern industrial capitalism. Portier-Young positions her work as a counterbalance to this interpretive gravitational pull. In particular, she sees her three-book Prophecy in the Body project as identifying a through line in several recent related strands of scholarship on the biblical prophets, including research on gender, trauma, performance theory, affect theory, and religious experience. Portier-Young's work is thus also in part a synthesizing project, demonstrating the implications of how a scholarly field has changed after a generation of research.
In part 2 of the book, “Called in the Flesh,” Portier-Young examines the bodily experiences of prophetic call narratives, focusing on Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. She argues that:
the prophet’s experience of bodily encounter and transformation enables and prepares the prophet to mediate between an embodied God and an embodied people (pg. 56).
The emphasis on Moses’s hand and mouth in Exodus portray Moses’s body as a surrogate for the divine body. Both Moses and Ezekiel are portrayed as disabled prophets, the former with a preexisting condition that God does not alter, thus physically demarcating the prophet as separate from his people. Ezekiel, in contrast, is disabled by his encounter with God either permanently or temporarily, enduring ecstatic and traumatic experiences that leave him physically transformed and ill. Further, the first-person narrations of Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s call stories mediate the experience of God’s presence for readers and hearers, thereby experiencing through the prophets’ bodies their own inter-embodiment with the deity.
Part 3 of the book, “Transformations,” examines specific bodily phenomena described in the prophetic literature, including: disease, luminescence, incubation, askesis, and ecstasy. This, for me, was the most interesting part of the book because it is here where Portier-Young makes the compelling case that the literary presentation of the prophets’ bodily experiences were determinative in shaping the meaning of their messages. Portier-Young describes these transformations as cultivated practices and rallies pertinent comparative evidence from studies on Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs), neurobiology, psychology, anthropology, and the study of religion.
In the last part of the book, “(E)Motion and Affect,” Portier-Young turns to two aspects of prophecy which are sometimes treated as accidental to the phenomenon but that she argues are essential and constitutive: transportation and emotion. Prophets like Moses, Balaam, and Jonah move in more conventional, if still extraordinary ways, while others, like Elijah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk, move supernaturally, thereby catalyzing the movements of entire peoples, sometimes mirroring the movements of Israel’s God. Portier-Young also maps some of the complex intersubjectivities portrayed in biblical prophetic literature, demonstrating how transformations of the prophets’ bodies and vivid descriptions of their experiences mold their message. Such profound pathos invites their audiences into participation with the prophetic experience and “construct solidarity and connection even in the face of rupture and loss” (pg. 225).
In the concluding chapter, Portier-Young surveys the ground that she has covered so far. She explains that
My burden, then, has not been to call attention to aspects of prophecy that no one has noticed before. Rather, I have sought to move these aspects of prophecy to the center of analysis, where, alongside the prophetic word, the prophetic body may also be recognized as a crucial and integral component of prophecy itself (p. 249).
In this chapter, she also sets her agenda for the next books, which are likely to focus on “more detailed investigation of a) biblical representations of embodied prophecy and b) biblical prophecy’s embodied reception” (pg. 255)