Read the full 2024 SBL panel of responses to Anathea Portier-Youngs’s The Prophetic Body here.
Anathea E. Portier-Young’s The Prophetic Body is a tour de force, a work sure to have significant ramifications for how Hebrew Bible prophets, prophecy, their reception, and their impact on ancient audiences will be received. In naming and identifying the logocentricity of how prophecy has been viewed, Portier-Young makes the case that Hebrew Bible prophecy has been overdetermined by logocentricity, proposing a way forward in understanding prophecy that is not purely oriented toward words and thus their meanings. Nonetheless, she does not call for the abandonment of the “word” in understanding prophecy. Instead, she demonstrates through ten thoroughly exegetical and methodologically dense chapters how word and body are intertwined. Utilising what she calls an interdisciplinary methodology, I would suggest that Portier Young’s adeptness at multiple methodologies spanning multiple fields is more like sorting through Hermione Granger’s undetectable Extension-Charmed bag (Harry Potter). Some of these methodologies are narratology, affect theory, disability studies, gender criticism, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and cultural theory. Startingly, Portier-Young does so engagingly and accessibly, inviting readers to come along with her on the journey. And it truly does feel like a journey: of discovery and of what happens when these various methods meet—and meld with—the traditional methods of the field. This review moves in two parts. First, I briefly summarise the book. Second, I offer brief thoughts regarding how this work might be read decolonially in conversation with my own interests.
This summary is merely meant to whet the appetite and is by no means extensive. The Prophetic Body is separated into four parts. The first section, “An Embodied Paradigm” is composed of two chapters and explores the implications of logocentric models of biblical prophecy, before moving to proposing what an alternative model of analysis focusing on embodiment might look like: in essence, re-embodying Hebrew Bible prophecy. Part II, “Called in the Flesh,” zeroes in on four prophetic call/commissioning narratives, specifically Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Here, Portier-Young demonstrates careful attention to the text and its ancient context even while demonstrating that the divine-prophet encounter is not only embodied, but that embodiment is crucial to the empowering of the prophet’s divine mediation but also forms how this mediation takes place between the Divine and the community. Part III, “Transformations,” examines what happens to the prophetic body when it is Othered, cast into the liminal spaces between divine and human realm in the stories of Moses and Miriam, as well as “three sets of transformative embodied practices and religious experience connected with the role of prophet, namely askesis, incubation, and ecstasy.”[1] The latter focuses on Moses again, but this time, the “portrayals of [his] withdrawal and ascent to Mt. Sinai, fasting, and abstention from water in Exod 19, 24, 34, and Deut 9” as part of his ascetic practice.[2] Incubation is brought forward in the stories of Hannah and Samuel, while Ezekiel is revisited again along with 1 Sam 10 and 19 and Num 24 to map a “connection between possession and ecstasy . . . [which] may result in oracles, visions, and supernatural transport and may produce experiences of physical, and/or psychic distress that both accompany and embody the liminality of ecstatic experience.”[3] The final section, Part IV, “(E)Motion and Affect,” examines the prophetic body as not static, but dynamic, bringing in dimensions of mobility and immobility as well as affect and their impacts on the role of the prophet. Chapter 8 examines how prophetic locomotion (or lack thereof) is crucial to the prophetic mediation and mission, while Chapters 9 and 10 explores the different refractions of prophetic affect in the books of Jonah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. This work, in sum, is an engaged investigation of how embodiment might be theorised with respect to the prophetic material.
From here, I move to the second part, to reflect how a decolonial reading of The Prophetic Body might be operationalised, given my own interests in anti-/post/decolonial readings of prophetic literature.[4] To begin, please permit a misquote of Marshall McLuhan: “The body is the message,” as in, Portier-Young’s call is to consider that the body is the medium by which its presence, actions, and words are vital to the prophetic vocation (though certainly McLuhan’s medium is embodied as he writes of media as ‘excarnation’ in its extensions of the human body across space, for example).[5] The interpretation of that body, Portier-Young recognises, is deeply formed by the Western European, North Atlantic enterprise. Moving away from those formations and towards a project of existence-and-as-life, and-as-knowledge, Portier-Young’s work attempts to unravel what might be called coloniality of knowledge which orients both geopolitical designs and body-political subjectivities (e.g., senses, emotions, cosmo-vivencias), especially as she delineates that even within the Hebrew Bible corpus, the prophetic experience is not monolithic or hegemonic, but rather should be taken of their own accord and within the local scope and emergence. The reader is invited into the individual experience—locality: rather than an assertion of the totality of the known, and rather than buying into the logics of the knowing subject and the known object. This is best seen in Portier-Young’s examination of the four call/commissioning narratives, where Moses’ third person narrative creates distance in setting Moses as unique and perhaps as a privileged and archetypal mediator. In contrast, Portier-Young rightly highlights the experiences of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, whose first-person retelling brings about a sense of immediacy and pulls the audience in so that they experience the call/commissioning in their own bodies. What is asserted in both is the importance of embodiment as subjectivity, where the prophet’s body becomes the subject by which things are known, rather than the object by which things can be asserted.
What occurs to me, then, is that the extension of these ontological—and thus epistemological, by Portier-Young’s logos-decentering—claims to interrogate the prophetic body is to understand the prophetic body as part and parcel of the matrix of coloniality, a subjectivity compacted by the pressures of empire(s). By coloniality, I mean as broadly defined as the colonial matrix of power and the logic(s) of oppression and exploitation by empire.[6] These are the longstanding power structures that are the consequence of colonialism but extend beyond colonial institutions, impacting interpersonal relations, culture, labour, and knowledge production.[7] Coloniality survives colonialism: “It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday.”[8] These are largely distinguished as coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being—the latter of which makes “primary reference to the lived experience of colonisation and its impact on language,” which is the embodied experience of language.[9]
In consideration of this, I propose looking at two examples: first, Portier-Young’s examination of the unattributed laments in Jer 4:8, 4:19-21, and 8:18-21 and its possible application in another part of the book of Jeremiah, the Confessions. Second is the chapter, “Becoming Other,” where the liminality of both Moses and Miriam’s experiences are highlighted. Turning first to the unattributed laments, Portier-Young’s examination points out the omission of dialogue tags, highlighting the way in which “the discourse of these passages weaves together the affective practices and performances of people, place, prophet, and God, portraying a complex web of identification and inter-affectivity.”[10] They “articulate a responsive, circulating sorrow . . . [constructing] solidarity and connection even in the face of rupture and loss.”[11] Here, the work of transpacific scholar Jinah Kim is helpful. Kim proposes that postcolonial grief shapes how bodies move and the way they connect (or do not) with others in a way that imperial powers see as a threat and as something to be managed.[12] Further, in theorising about postcolonial grief, the post- is not to indicate the dimensions of the colonial are in a state of a temporal after, but rather an “altered state of colonialism where colonial domination lives on.”[13] Framed this way, expressed sorrow, mourning, and melancholia become part of the renegotiation of memory and whose narratives are to be believed—whether empire or one’s own local narrative—in the search for identity and thus, resistance.[14] Another example of this, I suggest, can be seen in the Confessions. While a larger examination is not possible here, one place in which the “complex web of identification and inter-affectivity” and its consequences can be most easily identified is in the first Confession, particularly in Jer 12:4. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Boase, “land” and “people” in Jer 11 are seen to function synonymously: “the intentional destruction of place functions as a multivalent act, destroying the actual means of human survival and disrupting the cultural and psychological attachments to place.”[15] While some may conclude this land-people relationship is merely the reflections of a traumatised people, for whom “a ruined landscape touches into their own interior devastation, giving voice and ownership to experience,”[16] I suggest that, in conversation with both Portier-Young and Kim, another possibility is that the land can be considered an animate subject.[17] The land is personified: “How long will the land mourn?” (12:4). To mourn (אבל) might otherwise be translated “to dry up,” in parallel with the next colon, where the vegetation withers (יבש)—where one could theorise that the act of mourning is the drying up and the withering of what ought to grow on the land. Moreover, the wickedness of those who live in it are responsible for the “sweeping away of animals and birds,” which is a reversal of the creation narratives found in Genesis where humans are given the responsibility of stewarding creation. Whether the land shapes human agency or whether it is an agent in and of itself, the prophet-poet’s fate and those of his kinfolk are intricately and intrinsically tied to the land’s fate, leading to further questions to human obligation and responsibility as well as relation to the land.
Second, the monstrosity of the disparate experiences in liminality of both Moses and Miriam is another place where I propose an examination of the coloniality of being might be expressed. Here I bring in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands as an interlocutor with Portier-Young’s chapter, “Becoming Other.”[18] In her work, Anzaldúa explores the liminal space—the Borderlands—between Mexico and the United States, but also in reference to a people for whom these national borders are no longer distinguishable and whose worlds contain multiple sets of cultural expectations to which they are still held. Within the Borderlands, questions of power, gender, and boundaries are brought into stark display, and these questions intersect with those of Portier-Young’s in looking at the “visibly transformed bodies of Moses and Miriam in Exod 34 and Num 12.”[19] Moses and Miriam, in being both bodies that bridge “human and divine realities [become] other. In the process, it is sometimes visibly altered . . . the visibly altered skin of Moses and Miriam conveys divine glory and human shame respectively, making the siblings into monsters who police boundaries between the categories of being.”[20]
In examining the dual textual tradition of Exod 34 of Moses’ transformation, Portier-Young argues that this tradition “produces a prophetic body that is productively ambivalent, made simultaneously godlike and monstrous by [Moses’] proximity and relationship to God.”[21] Taking into consideration both interpretations of either Moses’ transformation as comprising of being horned and/or denoting radiance or glory, Portier-Young notes that the danger of the transformation is two-pronged: first, it is evident that “the danger that inheres in the glorious divine body (cf. Exod 33:20) now adheres to the body of Moses.”[22] Second, Moses’ form is no longer human but “crosses the boundary between human, nonhuman animal, and God,” marking him “categorically other, even monstrous.”[23] In inhabiting this “middle space, epistemologically and bodily,” Portier-Young argues, “Moses simultaneously mediates and protects.”[24] The subsequent action that Moses takes—veiling his visage—is performative of “feminine propriety.”[25] Thus, “his resulting gender identity is accordingly ‘outside of normative masculine embodiment’” and Moses’ “mediatorial persona . . . continually alternates between masculine and feminine gender identities.”[26] In both traditions, Moses “becomes permanently other. In both his form elicits terror . . . Whether shining or horned, Moses is monstrous, simultaneously bridging and reinforcing categories of difference . . . it testifies to his unique and elevated role as mediator between divine and human realms.”[27]
Portier-Young contrasts Moses’ experience with that of Miriam’s in Num 12, noting that where Moses’ transformation and monstrosity elicits fear, Miriam’s elicits shame.[28] In contrast to Moses’ transformation, Miriam’s is one that excludes her from her community and strips her of her prophetic role, as the “visible abjection and exclusion of Miriam’s body prevents her from accessing communal and sacred space, and consequently, from mediating between God and people.”[29] Rather than shining glory or horns, Miriam is afflicted with a skin condition that makes her “both monstrum and monitum, a bodily warning against insubordination.”[30] And where Moses is elevated, Miriam is debased, where her body “symbolically asserts that [Miriam and Aaron’s] challenge to Moses’ sole authority has threatened the accepted order of the social body.”[31] And Aaron’s words further serve to underscore the monstrosity Miriam has now become: “‘one who is dead’, a fetus expelled from its mother’s body with ‘half its flesh eaten’ (Num 12:12) . . . Miriam’s punishment for challenging Moses’ authority renders her as an aborted and decomposing fetus, never born living into the world, unviable, unable to achieve independence as a human agent. She is vulnerable even in the most protected space” of her mother’s womb.[32] Further, Miriam’s voice is silenced, as no “further words of Miriam are recorded in the Hebrew Bible,” with Deut 24:9 further interpreting Miriam’s skin affliction as “admonition, cautioning those who would challenged the authority of God’s intimates or the instruction of God’s priests lest they meet a fate similar to hers . . . . Her embodied warning reinforces structures of hierarchy and authority.”[33] This is not a matter of ritual impurity, but of shame, with the confinement and exclusion from the camp “a social expression of the shame that is marked upon her body.”[34] Miriam’s shame is not only in being excluded, however, but as Portier Young notes, there is also the “the act of spitting in her face,” which acts as a public performance of violation, marking the daughter’s violation of social norms by violating the boundaries of her body in return . . . . threatening to enter and contaminate her orifices, including the organs of speech vital to the work of prophecy and the points of entry for the breath she needs to live. His saliva also coats her skin, making of his excess a barrier, real and symbolic, between her body and the material and social worlds she inhabits.[35]
Portier-Young argues that ultimately this is an act of ritual humiliation designed to produce “social invisibility” and non-recognition, and along with the shame of exclusion, also produces a visible image of Miriam’s ejection from the centre, and thus, severs her connection with God and her claim to be God’s mouthpiece.[36] However, Portier-Young also considers the way in which Miriam’s otherness serves to be an affirmation of others’ prophetic activity, and that Miriam’s transformation serves as a mediating bridge to those who “share her otherness.”[37]
Such an analysis is helpful in considering the ways in which embodiment cannot be separated out from the prophetic. Here, however, I am interested in the questions Portier-Young raises through her analysis of Moses and Miriam in which monstrosity and queerness serve to reinforce existing systems while troubling them. To this, I bring Portier-Young in conversation with Anzaldúa, whose understanding of mestiza, liminality, and queerness, seem to encapsulate both Moses and Miriam’s experiences. In a section addressing what Anzaldúa calls “cultural tyranny,” Anzaldúa writes “Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates . . . Culture is made by those in power—men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them.”[38] Moses’ monstrosity and queerness serves to reinforce and emphasise the rules and laws, setting the boundary between humanity and the divine even as he transgresses the boundary. In thinking about Miriam as the parallel rather than the contrast, if Moses bridges and highlights the category of difference between the human and the divine, then Miriam is the bridge between the human and the polluted. Moses makes the rules and laws; Miriam bears the consequences of demonstrating what happens when the authority by which the rules and laws are contravened. Both are needed for “cultural tyranny”: “humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us). Culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces.”[39] In other words, Moses and Miriam serve as the bounds within which existence is acceptable. Together, Moses and Miriam are the “embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.”[40] While Portier-Young suggests that they are monsters who police the categories of being, I want to propose here that another viable alternative is that in their monstrosity, one becomes a standard by which to live, and the other by which not to live. They enable the parameters by which the community can exist.
Second, I am intrigued by the fear engendered by Moses and Miriam. Anzaldúa writes, “The female, by virtue of creating entities of flesh and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die) . . . is feared. Because . . . women is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected . . . Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s recognised nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast.[41] In following Portier-Young’s lead, Moses is queered—being both male and female—and Miriam is female. On one hand, Moses is protected. He takes on non-human, animal attributes (horns) and yet, the protection manifested for him draws him closer to the divine. Miriam is a different story: she is “closer to the undivine,” and her transformation does nothing to queer her gendered experience. Even in her monstrosity, Miriam remains Woman, and her monstrosity reinforces man’s Shadow-Beast. She remains firmly in the cultural norms of the gender binary, just as Moses does, albeit with opposite consequences.
Finally, I want to explore what it might meant for Moses and Miriam to be “half and half.”[42] Anzaldúa expands on what it means to be “half and half”: “there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift.”[43] In thinking about monstrosity as gift, I am intrigued by the possibility that the reception of Miriam’s stories does not support that she is forever silenced. Rather, that subsequent communities recognised that the Borderlands enabled Miriam’s gift, and moreover, includes Anzaldúa’s queer possibilities beyond the liminal space of the divine and human realms.[44]
Thus, the invitation Portier-Young puts forward in writing this important volume extends to decolonial readings of the Hebrew Bible prophetic corpus. The task ahead in repairing the violence done by the dualistic mind/body hierarchy—and especially the notion of some bodies and their worth as superior/inferior—is not simply an individual task, but a communal one. Indeed, the notion of text as embodied creates not only new avenues of research but also a deep responsibility to the communities who hold these texts as sacred. I began this review with a reference to Harry Potter, and I would like to close with a reference to magic. The possibilities for me in embodiment that Portier-Young invites us to bring Hebrew Bible prophecy back into a magical world—one that unravels objectification and begins to reconstitute land and community as enfleshed together.
Xenia L. Chan
Augustana University
[1] Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), xxvi.
[2] Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body, xxvi.
[3] Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body, xxvi–xxvii.
[4] Xenia L. Chan, “‘My Mother Is My Grave’: A Transpacific Sinophone Archive of Horror in Jeremiah’s Confessions” (unpublished manuscript, 5 May 2025), PDF.
[5] See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London & New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
[6] Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking,” CR 21 (2007): 162.
[7] Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” CS 21 (2007): 243.
[8] Maldonado-Torres, “Coloniality of Being,” 243.
[9] Maldonado-Torres, “Coloniality of Being,” 242.
[10] Anathea Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 219.
[11] Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body, 225.
[12] Jinah Kim, Postcolonial Grief, 28.
[13] Kim, Postcolonial Grief, 13.
[14] Kim, Postcolonial Grief, 10.
[15] Elizabeth Boase, “Desolate Land/Desolate People in Jeremiah and Lamentations,” in Ecological Aspects of War: Engagements with Biblical Texts, eds. Anne Elvey, Keith Dyer, with Deborah Guess (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 97.
[16] Mary E. Mills, “Jeremiah’s Deathscapes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jeremiah, eds. Louis Stulman and Edward Silver (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2021), 414.
[17] Xenia L. Chan, “My Mother Is My Grave,” 68.
[18] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).
[19] Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body, 103.
[20] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 116.
[21] Portier-Young, The Prophetic Body, 104.
[22] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 106.
[23] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 107.
[24] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 108.
[25] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 108.
[26] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 108.
[27] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 117.
[28] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 110.
[29] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 110.
[30] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 112, emphasis original.
[31] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 112.
[32] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 112.
[33] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 112.
[34] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 113.
[35] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 114.
[36] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 114–15.
[37] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 116–17.
[38] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 16.
[39] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 17.
[40] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 19.
[41] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 17.
[42] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 19.
[43] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 19.
[44] Portier-Young, Prophetic Body, 116; Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 19.