Read the full 2024 SBL panel of responses to Anathea Portier-Youngs’s The Prophetic Body here.
I offer enormous thanks to Reed Carlson, Corrine Carvalho, Xenia Chan, Frances Flannery, Anne Gudme, and Martti Nissinen for engaging with The Prophetic Body and mapping intersections and future directions with such characteristic rigor, creativity, and charitable goodwill. I am also deeply grateful to the Co-Executive Editors of AJR, Krista Dalton and Erin Galgay Walsh, for the opportunity to feature The Prophetic Body in this Forum.
I suspect I speak for many when I say that my greatest hope for my research is that it might be generative for others, prompting new questions, providing new tools, and sparking unexpected insight. All our scholarship is conversation. It is a relief, frankly, not to have the last word. This response accordingly makes no attempt to offer definitive answers to the many important questions that have been posed. Some of them I indeed hope to take up in future work. Yet to an even greater extent I hope that you, the reader, will undertake to pursue these lines of inquiry and make them fully your own. Far from the last word, this response is one moment in a conversation that includes each of you. It is, accordingly, also an invitation.
This review forum began its life as an SBL review panel sponsored by two groups: Religious Experience in Antiquity; and Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds. Both groups embrace a phenomenological approach to the study of religion that has been very influential for my own thinking about the body. It was my conversations with members of the Religious Experience in Antiquity group, beginning perhaps a decade ago, that prompted me to explore, in Fran Flannery’s words, “textual articulations of religious experience” as they related to the theme of embodiment in Israelite and Judean prophetic literature.[1] The Prophetic Body drew insights and theoretical perspectives from a wide range of disciplines. It shares this creative, multidisciplinary approach with the Senses, Cultures, and Biblical Worlds unit, which has afforded fruitful models for examining not only the senses but other aspects of bodily experience as well.
In “Towards Divine Embodiment and Biblical Animism,” Flannery calls attention to the ways in which a deity may be understood to be presenced in aspects of the natural environment such as stone and tree, soil and wind.[2] In my ongoing work on embodied reception of biblical prophecy, I have been interested (among other things) in the body’s role in the portrayal of creation’s response to divine presence and absence. In Habakkuk 3, for example, an embodied and living landscape trembles in response to the deity’s presence. Mountains writhe, the sun raises its hands, the moon stands still (3:6, 10–11). The vision report’s attribution of bodily experience to the natural world accompanies its heightened attention to divine and prophetic embodiment.
While this is one way the Hebrew Bible portrays the relationship between the embodiment of the deity, humanity, and the natural world, Flannery draws attention to another, with the burning bush (Exod 3:2–3) offering a signal example of the natural world’s capacity to host divine presence. Flannery highlights in my own analysis a bias toward transcendence over immanence. I receive that corrective gratefully, yet note that the very peculiarity of the vision (prompting Moses to ask why the bush is not succumbing to the expected “natural” process of combustion 3:3) and the distance God commands that he maintain (אַל־תִּקְרַב 3:5) produces in this manifestation of God a tensive pairing of immanence and transcendence: God in the bush is near and distant, simultaneously natural, unnatural, and supernatural. Flannery’s corrective nonetheless presses us to give greater attention to portrayals of divine presence and agency in and through the ordinary and accessible.
Flannery further asks if only humans may be prophetic mediators, or if such prophetic mediation may be proper to other agents as well. An obvious example is the prophetic text itself, and I will return to this in responding to Corri Carvalho’s remarks. My ongoing work on prophetic embodiment has led me to query the relation between the prophetic body and “vibrant matter,” including the sacred and profane spaces the prophet occupies and the objects prophet and people use and interact with in acts of prophecy.[3] Recognizing the agency of things and nonhuman beings in relation to religious experience and practice prompts us to broaden our attention from mediating actors like prophets to also consider the roles and functions of nonhuman mediators and media. One burgeoning area of study addresses ways material objects may make present absent persons, including the deity, as well as communities, relationships, and more.[4] Such study reminds us that attention to embodiment participates in a broader material turn within the study of religion, religious experience, and sacred texts.[5]
Martti Nissinen’s work is a fundamental point of reference for any study of ancient prophecy. His own attention to embodiment has been critical in paving the way for scholars like myself to continue and extend that work. His decades-long insistence, moreover, that the phenomenon of prophecy must be studied across a fuller range of ancient cultural settings reminds us that biblical prophecy did not emerge in a cultural vacuum. Nissinen’s analysis in this forum of prophetic embodiment in selected Mari letters intersects with some of my work in progress (for the book Embodied Prophecy), helpfully highlighting avenues for study and points of contact I had not considered. One focus of Embodied Prophecy is to propose a model for analyzing prophetic “symbolic actions” or “sign acts” that helps us to more adequately perceive not only the semiotic character of such actions but also their efficacious, performative, and relational character (it is in this section of the book that I examine ARM 26 16 in detail). Nissinen’s analysis of the prophet–as-sign in FM 6 45 and FM 14 emphasizes precisely these characteristics, as ritual interaction with the prophet’s mantic body produces transformative effects in the household and even the body of the king.
The subject of food and eating/drinking is likewise very important for prophetic embodiment, and is likewise a topic I turn to in Embodied Prophecy, making Nissinen’s observations and insights here especially welcome. In the deuterocanonical Bel and the Dragon, the prophet Habakkuk provides stew and bread to Daniel in a den of lions (Bel 1:31–39). Stories of prophets’ receiving sustenance in 1 and 2 Kings (1 Kgs 17:4–6, 13; 18:4, 13; 19:5–9; 2 Kgs 4:8) highlight both the vulnerability that can accompany the role of prophet and the human and divine networks in and through which their missions are sustained. Nissinen highlights, moreover, instances in which care and feeding of the prophetic body may impinge directly on deity and cultus.
In a variety of biblical narratives, prophets also provide sustenance to others. Samuel’s meal for Saul ritualizes and initiates processes of political and social change (1 Sam 9:22–24). Numerous other stories portray prophets’ providing safe food and water (Exod 15:25, 17:6; 1 Kgs 17:16; 2 Kgs 2:19–22, 4:1–8, 38–44). These acts of provision mediate divine, material care for the day-to-day life of the people, including bodily health and water-and-food security, while simultaneously strengthening communal bonds. The interweaving of stories of prophets’ being sustained and sustaining others reveals both a metonymic and mediatory relationship between the sustenance of prophet and people. Nissinen’s framing of these activities in relation to prophetic bodily well-being and his observation of links in the Mari letters between prophetic and divine bodily well-being suggests several further avenues for research.
Xenia Chan recognizes in The Prophetic Body an emphasis on critiquing colonial frames for interpreting biblical prophetic literature, bringing with it the possibility that a reembodied reading can also be a decolonial reading. But Chan pushes us further to recognize the ways in which biblical portrayals of prophetic bodies – and prophetic speech – are themselves shaped by experiences and conditions of coloniality even as they may portray or urge prophetic resistance to those same hegemonic colonial powers. I was unfamiliar with Jinah Kim’s work on postcolonial grief, and find this framework incredibly helpful.[6] It is a fair critique that my analysis of prophetic affect in chapters 9 and 10 of the Prophetic Body was not especially attentive to broader dynamics of imperial power and coloniality within the text, an observation that seems surprising even to me in light of my earlier and ongoing work on empire and resistance in Hellenistic Jewish literature.[7] Chan’s suggestion to explore negotiations of identity, power, and postcoloniality through attention to bodily practices of grief in the prophetic literature offers me new conversation partners – including Chan herself – for that ongoing work, reminding me just how important it is that we do this work in conversation. Chan’s insights also suggest new questions that I am eager to pursue as I continue work on subsequent volumes of this project on prophetic embodiment.
Chan compellingly brings the work of queer and cultural theorist and chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa to bear on analysis of Miriam’s liminality. It might be said that all biblical prophets are nepantla, to use Anzaldúa’s term, in between, or in the middle.[8] This place in the middle is, as etymology would suggest, precisely where any mediator must stand. Moses and Miriam both occupy the borderland between God and human in a way that locates them on the margins of their own human communities. They are both also nepantla in their hybrid identities as members of a displaced and enslaved people who leave the place of their birth to journey through the physical borderlands of the Reed sea and Sinai wilderness. But Chan brilliantly calls attention to the further, distinctively embodied otherness proper to Miriam’s sex and gender, crucially highlighting the marginalization, othering, and even, as here in Num 12, monsterization, of female bodies, including female prophetic bodies, within the prophetic corpus.
Anne Gudme asks important questions about prophet as practitioner and ritual expert. She rightly asks for more detail about my working definition and understanding of religious mediation, particularly as we find it in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. The Latin etymology invoked above is a key to my understanding. The mediator occupies a position between deity (or other spiritual forces) and nondeity (including people, nonhuman beings, other entities in the terrestrial realm, encompassing all that would be called, in theological terms “creation”). They occupy this position in order to be a channel, a point of contact, a bridge between parties and realms. Modes, forms, and content of mediation vary considerably depending in part but not solely on the specific type of mediator, be it prophet, priest, king, medium, judge, angel, or, as Flannery reminds us, fish, rock, soil, or tree. In The Prophetic Body I focus on prophetic mediation, but I note parallels, for example, between prophetic mediation and angelic mediation; or between the ways that prophets mediate and the ways that prophetic texts do.
In The Prophetic Body, I draw on the work of Birgit Meyer, who states that mediation gives “sensational form” to “spiritual power.”[9] We can add to “spiritual power” mediations of presence (highlighted by Gudme), relationship, affect, knowledge, and more. While Meyer’s formulation cited here does not provide a full definition, it names an important component of mediation, particularly as it relates to embodiment. Such sensational form, for Meyer, can include physical objects (such as a scroll) or a person.[10] It can also refer to “relatively fixed, authorized modes of invoking [e.g., through ritual] and organizing modes of access to the transcendental, thereby creating and sustaining links between religious practitioners in the context of particular religious organizations.”[11]
Meyer’s understanding of mediation’s sensational forms helps bring into focus key aspects of the overlap between prophetic and priestly mediation highlighted by Gudme. The partnership between Moses and Aaron makes this overlap particularly visible, as does the priestly character, roles, and functions of prophetic figures such as Samuel and Ezekiel. Looked at separately, each type of mediator may be said to have a distinctive domain or purview; they also have differing techniques and means of mediating. At the same time, the diverse types of mediators portrayed in biblical tradition also have a great deal in common, both in terms of what they mediate, how they do so, and why the body matters to this work of mediation. These commonalities contribute to the coalescing of several of these roles in certain later messianic figures (for example), not least including the multiple mediating roles of prophet, priest, king, and judge credited to Jesus and the angelomorphic qualities predicated of him.[12] As we consider what is distinctive to each type of mediator, key questions emerge around bodily practice and bodily relationships. These include (but are certainly not limited to) the relationship of each type of mediator to space, place, and mobility; their interactions with other types of bodies (human, divine, animal, living/dead, etc.); their degree of dis/identification with the divine body and other human bodies; and their modes of preparation for contact with the deity.
Focusing on collections of oracular speech in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and The Book of the Twelve, Corrine Carvalho highlights prophecy’s performative dimensions, posing important questions about the role of the body in the acts of oral performance (both speech and song) that are described or implied by the text and enacted in its reading.[13] Carvalho rightly points to the multiplicity of bodies entailed in such performances: the body of a prophet, the prophet’s narrated or implied audiences, the body of the writer or compiler, the bodies constructed in and by the oracle, the body of the performer who reads the oracle aloud, the bodies of later audiences, and so on. Carvalho’s richly embodied analysis of Ezekiel 27 and 39 illuminates affective dimensions of prophetic oracles that describe not the prophet’s body, but the collective social body, bodies of animals, corpses, and even the body of a ship.
Carvalho further calls attention to the felt absence of scribal bodies, even those scribal bodies we might call prophetic. In a text like Joel, for example, there is no explicit detail prompting us to imagine the body of the author. Commenting on such “deliberate erasure of the body who produced the text” (Carvalho, “Whose Body Is It Anyway?”), philosopher Drew Leder writes, “the human body effaces itself in the use of language … Written language … brings with it a surplus detachment.”[14] For Leder and Carvalho, it is this detachment from one body that enables attachment to a plurality of others, across boundaries not only of space but also time and culture. The body of the scroll is then a different kind of prophetic body again, mediating across eras, modalities, and more.
Carvalho compares the text’s capacity to facilitate identification with a prophetic avatar with modern technologies of virtual reality. Studies of virtual reality have shown that human brains (and with them, bodies) distinguish between experiences of the “virtual” and the “real” based not primarily or solely on contextual cues but on “subjective [sensory] signal strength.”[15] In some ways similar to the first-person vision reports I consider in The Prophetic Body, affectively charged and vivid, sensory-rich oracular poetry has the capacity to generate “strong signals” that transform imagery into perception and prompt correspondingly higher levels of somatic engagement and identification. Ongoing work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience will undoubtedly continue to deepen our understanding of embodiment in processes of prophetic and textual mediation.
Carvalho’s observation regarding the invisible bodies of biblical scribes brings with it the reminder that the structures, pressures, and practices of our scholarly life frequently cause us to detach from our own bodily experience. May conversations such as these prompt experiences of embodied connection, even across digital spaces, and help us to recover a bodily awareness so often buried beneath reams of paper. May we be mindful of the care and feeding not only of the prophet (and sometimes the deity), but also of the scholar, the student, the writer, and the reader. Have a snack. Stretch. Take a walk. May this bodily awareness shape the questions we bring to our research and renew us for that work.
[1] Frances Flannery, with Nicolae Roddy, Colleen Shantz, and Rodney A. Werline, “Introduction: Religious Experience, Past and Present,” Experientia, vol. 1, Inquiry into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Frances Flannery, Colleen Shantz, and Rodney A. Werline (SBLSymS 40; Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 1–10, 2.
[2] On stone as embodiment of the deity, see Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49–54.
[3] The phrase “vibrant matter” is from Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010). I examine the agency of material objects in Daniel in a forthcoming article, “Ambiguous Materials: Empire, Resistance, and the Agency of Things in the Book of Daniel,” HeBAI (forthcoming).
[4] On presencing media, see the important recent study of Daniel O. McClellan, YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach (Ancient Near East Monographs 29; Society of Biblical Literature, 2022).
[5] See, e.g., Brittany Wilson, “God’s Body and the Material Turn: Divine (Im)Materiality in Biblical Theophanies,” HTR 117, no. 3 (2024): 607–30; A. Mandell and J. Smoak, “The Material Turn in the Study of Israelite Religions: Spaces, Things, and the Body,” JHebS 19 (2019): 1–42.
[6] Jinah Kim, Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019).
[7] Especially Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2011).
[8] Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “Nepantla is the Nahuatl word for an in-between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity.” Gloria Anzaldúa, “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera,” in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Analouise Keating (Duke University Press, 2015), 56.
[9] Birgit Meyer, Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics, and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2006), 15–16.
[10] On the person of Moses as iconic medium for divine presence and agency, see Amy L. Balogh, Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019). I was unaware of this book when I wrote The Prophetic Body and it deserves a shoutout here!
[11] Meyer, Religious Sensations, 8. See discussion in Anathea Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature (Oxford Unviersity Press, 2024), 43–44.
[12] Among others, see the work of Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence (Brill, 1998).
[13] Jacqueline Vayntrub, Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2025) similarly highlights performativity and voice as crucial to the embodied character of prophetic poetry.
[14] Drew Leder, The Absent Body (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 122–3.
[15] Nadine Dijkstra and Stephen M. Fleming, “Subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination,” Nature Communications 14, 1627 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37322-1