In this richly evidenced, detailed, and stimulating work, Anathea Portier-Young examines texts on biblical prophecy by rooting the phenomenon in its mediation through bodies, including the prophetic body, the divine body, and even the bodies of those hearing or reading the prophecies. This is the first of a trilogy of books, with a plan for Volume Two to address “embodied prophecy” and Volume Three “embodied reception.” Her working definition of prophecy is helpfully broad: “mediation proper to personae designated as or widely understood to be prophets within the corpora of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament” . . . and “in their history of reception and modern study” (Portier-Young 2024, 30). The project is infused with her characteristic attention to methodology, which is strengthened further by the diverse perspectives of minoritized scholars, consistent with her overarching argument that embodiments influence how we process information and communicate our insights.
The book is a valuable addition to studies on prophecy as well as to the religious experience in antiquity, employing a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on bodily processes that inform the textual articulation of religious experience as “diverse forms of mediation” (Portier-Young 2024, 250, 80, 121). Without overstating her access to religious experience in antiquity, Portier-Young skillfully uses the lens of prophets’ bodies to examine a broad range of topics in the context of biblical prophecy, including: ritual, emotion, mobility, immobility, sensory perception, sensory overload, ritual askesis and incubation, including fasting, weeping, prayer, being in a sacred space, and possession. Her work therefore functions as an important corrective to an intellectual history that has repeatedly ignored and/or denigrated the central role of bodies in biblical prophetic texts.
I have no serious critiques of the present volume, although I do have some minor wishes. One wish is for a more focused approach in the discussions of particular prophetic figures (the discussion of the prophet Moses ranges across several chapters and themes) and another is to include even more women’s bodies in the context of prophecy. However, these are preferences rather than complaints, and thus for the remainder of this essay I wish to engage in an enthusiastic nudge for Portier-Young to continue to explore in subsequent volumes a theme that I consider to be one of most original insights of the book. This is the claim that the divine is sometimes represented in biblical prophetic as embodied, whether a parallel fashion with the prophetic body, or as a reciprocal intertwining with the dynamically transforming prophetic body (esp. Portier-Young 2024, 57-58).
In chapter three, for instance, Portier-Young insightfully observes: “Moses’ embodied encounter with an embodied God sets the stage for his embodied mediation between God and people. The deity he encounters hears, moves, sees, speaks, and acts in ways that are responsive to the people’s suffering: [as] this deity is also dangerous and wholly other, Moses’ body will thus mediate between deity and people” (italics added for emphasis, Portier-Young 2024, 57-58). Building on Seely’s argument that the divine hand in Exodus is a metaphor of God’s actions in human history (Portier-Young 2024, 61; Seely 2004, 38), Portier-Young asserts that Moses’ hand, described in Exodus 3 and 4 as withered with scale disease and then made whole in (4:6–7), stands in for the hand of God in history. She keenly observes that Moses is described as “leading” his hand in and out of his cloak in its alternatively leprous and whole states, using two hiphil verbs that Exodus also uses for God and Moses leading the people out of Egypt: הבא (4:6) and (יוצאָהּ (4:6,7. The verb יוצאָה in particular is used in Exodus to describe Moses leading the people (Exodus 6:6, 7, 13, 26–27; etc.) and to God leading the people out of Egypt (Exodus 7:5; 12:17, 42, 51; 13:3, 9, 14, 16; 16:6; 18:1; etc.) (Portier-Young 2024, 66).
Portier-Young also considers fully whether Moses’ protestations that he is “not a man of words” and is “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (4:10; cf. 6:12, 30) refers to a disability (perhaps stuttering). She also notes that God claims control over the condition, stating: “Who gives a human a mouth? Or who makes [someone] mute or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (4:11; Portier-Young 2024, 69-71). She then shows how God appears in intimate proximity to Moses’ mouth, stating “I will be with your mouth and I will teach you what to speak” (4:12) and giving Aaron to Moses as another “mouth” (4:16). Next, Portier-Young explores how Moses’ hand and mouth are integrated when he later swings his staff while singing (Exod. 15, Deut. 32), in an act of “sensorimotor integration” that neuroscientists have observed would facilitate speech fluency in a person with a stuttering disability (Portier-Young 2024, 71; Leon-Sarmiento, Paez, and Hallett 2013). She argues that to act successfully as prophet, Moses must continuously attune his body to his environment through “a creative process of trial and error, and practice” (Portier-Young 2024, 72, also 71) that “involves somatic integration across multiple domains: sensory, motor, rhythm, and speech” (Portier-Young 2024, 72).
This careful attention to the prophetic body thus opens up surprising new layers of interpretation in the text, and I would like to hear even more about how descriptions of the divine body intertwine with Moses’ bodily capacities and experiences (and also with those of other prophets). If, as she claims, Moses’s hand and mouth acts as a surrogate for God’s hand and God’s voice, what exactly is being implied when the presence of divinity shines forth (from קרן) from Moses’ face (Exod. 34:6, 30, 35), especially after God had just told Moses, “No one can see my face and live” (Exod. 33:20)? In subsequent volumes, I would welcome Portier-Young exploring even more precisely what is entailed by the divine body and by the prophet as a “surrogate”: Is the divine body simply symbolically mirrored in descriptions of the prophetic body, or are these entwined together in a meaningful sense? Is the divine body itself transformed in lockstep with the dynamically unfolding prophetic body, in a sort of divine-prophetic dance? What are the limits of such divine embodiment in or with the prophet, if any?
If Portier-Young explores this theme in future volumes, it will require her to continue to challenge the bias toward mind-body dualism so deeply rooted in the history of Western European intellectualism. I urge her to not only contend with scholarship that exhibits a deeply engrained hostility towards considerations of divine embodiment in biblical texts, but also to consider the biases against animism that appear in biblical studies. For instance, as Walker-Jones has noted, the Psalms speak of God as “father” just three times (Pss. 68:5; 89:26; 103:13) while references to God as Rock occur twenty times (Pss. 18:2 [2x], 31, 46; 19:14; 28:1; 31:2, 3; 42:9; 62:2, 6, 7; 71:3; 78:35; 89:26; 92:15; 94:22; 95:1; 144:1, 2; Walker Jones 2008, 95), yet most biblical commentators automatically interpret the image of God as “father” more literally and “Rock” more metaphorically. However, given that plenty of indigenous religions view particular rocks and mountains as specially infused with divine presence, we should at least consider the possibility that a similar view obtains for ancient Israelite texts, many of which stem from an agrarian society possessing profound ecological intimacy. Such openness could well change our reading of texts such as Deuteronomy 32:18, in which Moses tells Israel, “Rock, who bore you, you neglected; you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Walker-Jones 2008, 98).
Reading an embodied and animistic divine in biblical prophetic texts challenges the very foundations of religious studies, which were long predicated on making “animism” a dirty word. In the Victorian age, E.B. Tylor posited that cultural evolution proceeds from animism or “primitive culture” to polytheism to monotheism and eventually to science (Tylor 1871). Even when Durkheim fetishized animism in more glowing terms, he viewed it as the “elementary form of religion” that naively and primitively conceives of the divine as totemic animal principles (Durkheim 1915). Far earlier, Greek and Roman philosophical traditions that denigrated both the body and material world also permeated the theology of the Early Christian Church Fathers such Irenaeus, who insisted that God is “all mind, all spirit, all thought, all intelligence, all reason” (Ag. Heresies 2.13.3), or Clement of Alexandria, who identified God as “spirit . . . properly substance, incorporeal, and uncircumscribed,” adding “And that is incorporeal which does not consist of a body” (On Providence; see e.g. Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians).
However, it may be anachronistic to read such anti-materialist, anti-animist, and anti-body assumptions backwards into the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament automatically. Portier-Young’s instincts are already open to the possibilities of reading divinity as not only embodied in the prophetic body, but also in the rest of the environment. Consider her description of Moses’ call at the burning bush:
In removing this covering from his feet, Moses would enable direct contact with a medium through which divine power could more safely be channeled, from flame to bush, through the bush’s roots into soil, from soil to Moses’ feet, and from his feet throughout the remainder of his body. Divine self-disclosure follows upon this commanded act of grounding, suggesting that Moses’ grounded state prepares him for the next stage of his commissioning. (Portier-Young 2024, 60)
To me, this portrait of a divine presence that can suffuse material substances, such as plants, soil, and prophetic feet, is a convincing and refreshing reading of the burning bush episode in Exodus 3. I would welcome Portier-Young employing a similar lens to explore the concept of “divine embodiment” throughout the sweep of Exodus, exploring divine theophanies that manifest God as a pillar of light by night, a presence passing by Moses on the mountain, or horns of light that emanate from Moses himself (Exod. 34:29; Portier-Young 2024, 107). However, it is not entirely clear to me whether she is always comfortable with the possibility of an animistic divine as the embodied divine, since she sometimes also exhibits a reflex toward asserting God’s transcendence, limitless disembodiment, and incorruptibility. For instance, undergirding her reading of the burning bush episode is the assumption that “this deity is also dangerous and wholly other” (e.g. Portier-Young 2024, 57-58, 103), which is why Moses must mediate God’s presence to the people. I would ask her to consider prophetic texts that envision divine embodiment in nonhuman forms, such as in the whirlwind that whisks away Eliahu (2 Kings 2), the sacred coal that is so hot that the flaming seraph must still use tongs to touch it to Isaiah’s lips (Isa. 6:6), or even the fish who swallows Jonah to convey the divine will to the prophet (Jonah 1:17-2:10). Must the prophetic bodily mediator always be limited to the anthropomorphic body of a prophet? Can it also, in addition, be found in the flaming bush, soil, wind, coal, or a fish?
I sincerely thank Portier-Young for her brilliant and valuable contribution, which is partly performing a prophetic mediation itself by helping to upend centuries of power structures that construct spirit and intellect as lofty, and bodies and materiality as base. Her keen analysis of biblical prophecy stands as a challenge to the “story of mind-body dualism” that decenters “the privileging of the Word in the West,” which has too often limited scholarship to a “logocentric model of biblical prophecy” centered on the prophetic “Word of the Lord” (Portier-Young 2024, 29). Portier-Young boldly reminds us of the “costs” of limiting ourselves to theologies of mind-body dualism, since the denigration of the body shapes, justifies, and perpetuates real power structures that disempower women, children, indigenous persons, differently abled persons, and differently embodied persons (Portier-Young 2024, 150, 250). I would humbly add that anti-body and anti-animist theologies have similarly disempowered non-human animals and the rest of the environment, which some biblical prophetic texts may also see as embodying the divine presence and conveying the prophetic message.
Frances Flannery is Emerita Professor of Religion at James Madison University.
Works Cited
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by J.W. Swain. Macmillan, 1915.
Junior, Nyasha and Jeremy Schipper. “Disability Studies and the Bible.” New Meanings for Ancient Texts: Recent Approaches to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications, edited by Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner. Westminster John Knox, 2013. Pp. 21-37.
Leon-Sarmiento, Fidias E., Edwin Paez, and Mark Hallett. “Nature and Nurture in Stuttering: A Systematic Review on the Case of Moses.” Neurological Sciences 34, no. 2 (2013): 231–237.
Portier-Young, Anathea E. The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Scripture. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Seely, David. “The Image of the Hand of God in the Book of Exodus.” In God’s Word for Our World. Vol. 1. Biblical Studies in Honor of Simon John De Vries, edited by Deborah L. Ellens et al. LHBOTS 388. T&T Clark International, 2004. Pp. 38–54.
Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches {sic!} into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. John Murray, 1871.
Walker-Jones, Arthur. “Honey from the Rock: the Contribution of God as Rock to an Ecological Hermeneutic.” In Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics. Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2008. Pp. 91-102.