Read the full 2024 SBL panel of responses to Anathea Portier-Youngs’s The Prophetic Body here.
Anathea E. Portier-Young’s recent book, The Prophetic Body, impressed me for two reasons. First, Portier-Young does an excellent job of picking up on the momentum created by the material turn in the study of Hebrew Bible religion and the groundwork that has recently been done on materiality, the senses, and embodiment, and she uses this to move the conversation on prophets and prophecy forward in an inspiring, open and adventurous way.[1] Secondly, The Prophetic Body is beautifully written. The argumentation is clear and generous and thoughtful throughout, and Portier-Young has an openness to ambiguity in Hebrew Bible texts, which I find is so important for our understanding of this material, and she is admirably honest and transparent, when she discusses questions that we simply do not know the answers to. I have learned a lot from reading the book, not just about embodiment and mediation in Biblical prophetic literature, but also about writing well.
For this AJR Forum, I have decided to focus on one question which kept resurfacing as I was reading, namely how the prophetic practices that Portier-Young analyzes in the book fit into religious practices in the Hebrew Bible more generally. This question is fundamental to our understanding of prophecy as a socio-religious phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible, and it is a good illustration of how The Prophetic Body invites its reader to re-think texts and concepts that otherwise seemed ‘settled’ and well-known. With this question, I am interested in where the prophet as a practitioner and (sometimes) ritual expert fits into the overall landscape of Hebrew Bible religious practitioners and practices. Portier-Young’s working definition of biblical prophecy is broad (p. 250), and she has what she calls an “integrative understanding” of biblical prophecy (p. 251). Along these lines, Portier-Young classifies prophetic practices as mediation, sometimes specifically prophetic mediation (p. 31). This broad and inclusive approach to prophecy allows Portier-Young to work thematically and across literary genres, and I do find it both justified and helpful, considering the investigation she undertakes. She also makes it clear that her analysis focuses on textual representations of prophetic practices and concepts and not on an attempt at a historical reconstruction of actual practices (pp. 49-50). Again, a framework that is both helpful and reasonable. At the same time, however, I would also have found it helpful to know more about how Portier-Young understands and defines mediation as a religious, and sometimes ritual, practice and how prophetic mediation relates to other kinds of mediation in biblical literature.
I have two examples to illustrate my point here. In her chapter 3, “God’s Surrogate (Exodus 3-4)”, Portier-Young describes how Moses becomes an embodiment of the encounter between deity and people. I found this embodied reading of the commissioning narrative of Moses in Exodus 3-4 insightful, but I also kept thinking, how does Moses’ embodied mediation relate to the role of the priest(s) as mediator(s)? Priests also navigate divine presence, its dangers and potentials, they also represent the people in front of the divine, they also perform communication and participation and representation of both the human and the divine through their bodies and gestures, and they are also set apart etc. Are these similarities an illustration of Moses’ almost proto-priestly role in Exodus, or is that interpretation too simple? It seems to me that Portier-Young’s approach to prophecy may help us to conceptually map the practices, roles, and functions of priests and prophets respectively and to achieve a much better understanding of the redundancies, overlaps, and uniqueness of the ways in which these two kinds of religious and ritual experts are conceptualized.
My second example is about ritual mourning, which occurs in several places throughout the book. To me, ritual mourning appears to be a very ‘democratic’ ritual practice in the Hebrew Bible. According to Lev 21, there are some restrictions on mourning the dead for ordinary priests, and the high priest appears forbidden to ritually mourn even his own parents. Apart from these exceptions, anyone regardless of gender and social status can perform mourning for the dead and petitionary mourning.[2] I must admit that I have never thought of ritual mourning and prophecy as particularly related phenomena, and it surprised me how frequently ritual mourning practices are discussed in The Prophetic Body. Portier-Young mentions fasting as petitionary mourning in chapter 6, “Transformative Practice” (p. 134), petitionary mourning in Jonah in chapter 9, “Anger and Tears” (p. 203), and forbidden kinds of mourning in chapters 9 and 10, “Devastation and Wonder.” In this case, my question is why do we need a prophet involved in mourning practices? These are ritual practices, where no mediation or expert representation appears to be necessary, so why are prophetic practices and mourning practices so intertwined? What does that tell us about the place and function of prophetic practices in the overall landscape of Hebrew Bible religious practices, and does it perhaps also tell us something about ritualized mourning in biblical literature? My initial thoughts on this after reading The Prophetic Body are that the connection between prophetic mediation and ritual mourning in some texts may indicate an emphasis on the social-functionalist and collective ‘therapeutic’ aspects of mourning practices, rather than an emphasis on the efficaciousness of ritual mourning.[3] Again, I believe that Portier-Young’s way of approaching biblical prophecy may help us to pose questions that we did not even know we needed answers to.
Lastly, I would like to turn to the concept of prophetic embodied mediation and to prophetic practices as (at least sometimes) ritual practices. The Prophetic Body is full of illuminating analyses of embodied encounters between deity and prophet that result in remarkable, sometimes painful, bodily transformations. See, for instance, Chapter 4, “First-Person”, on the call narratives of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, or Chapter 5, “Becoming Other”, on the bodily transformations of Moses (Exod 34) and Miriam (Num 12). In my own research, I have focused a lot on ritual and materiality, and I have had great benefit from reading the anthropologist Web Keane’s work. In a 2010-study on Neolithic religion at Çatalhöyük, Keane writes that ritual practices, “render available to experience the very absence they invoke.”[4] I have used this in relation to mortuary practices, where strategic interaction with mortuary architecture and objects and places create an experience of presence despite absence.[5] I also find it helpful in relation to ritual practices in sanctuaries. Scenting a space with anointing oil and incense, creates a sensory experience of fragrant divine presence, burning a sacrifice on an alter creates the perception of a divine receiver, veiling and obscuring a sanctuary’s adyton creates a perception of an inhabitant etc.[6] If we think of prophetic mediation in biblical literature, could Keane’s understanding of ritual actions also be a helpful framework for interpreting narratives about prophetic bodily transformations and embodied signs? In these texts, one could argue that the prophet’s body, and the changes and transformations that it suffers, becomes a way to mediate the experience of divine presence in spite of absence.
The Prophetic Body is the first volume in a trilogy, where the second volume will focus on embodied prophecy and the third on embodied reception of biblical prophecy (p. xxiii). I look forward to the next two volumes, and in the meantime I will enjoy rereading parts of the first book and to think about the biblical prophets and their bodies in new and inspiring perspectives.
[1] For the material turn, see Alice Mandell & Jeremy Smoak (2019). The Material Turn in the Study of Israelite Religions: Spaces, Things, and the Body. The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 19. https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs29397.
[2] For more on ritual mourning in the Hebrew Bible, see Saul M. Olyan (2004), Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; Xuang Huong Thi Pham(1999), Mourning in the Ancient Near East and in the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSS 302, Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press.
[3] For social functionalist approaches to ritual, see Catherine Bell, (1997), Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 23-60. For ritual efficacy, see Jørgen Podemann Sørensen (2006). Efficacy. In Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Available From: Brill https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047410775_026 [Accessed 06 March 2025]
[4] Keane, Web (2010). “Marked, absent, habitual: Approaches to Neolithic religion at Çatalhöyük.” In: Hodder I, ed. Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study. Cambridge University Press, 187-219; p. 198.
[5] Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme (2020). Visiting the Dead: Traces of Mortuary Ritual Practices in Roman Palestine. Approaching the Dead: Studies on Mortuary Ritual in the Ancient World, Helsinki, 122-145.
[6] Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme (2024). The Agency of an Altar: A Material Semiotics-Inspired Investigation of the Relationship between Fumigation Altars and Texts about Incense Altars. Die Welt des Orients, (1), 37-53.