Read the full 2024 SBL panel of responses to Anathea Portier-Youngs’s The Prophetic Body here.
The Prophetic Body is sure to become a go-to monograph on the application of both embodiment and affect theories to prophetic material. Portier-Young has produced a book that engages the interdisciplinary roots of these approaches while remaining reader friendly. She negotiates the thin line between jargony theorization and over-simplified popularization. The scope of the research never distracts from the application to biblical texts, and the review of previous scholarship traces the trajectory of scholarship upon which she builds without becoming tedious or tendentious.
Rather than summarize a book that should be read, this essay focuses on two particular trajectories that kept arising in my own dialogue with the book. As a scholar of prophetic collections and non-narrative material, I am most interested in the ways the collections use oracular speech as embodied affect. For me, analyzing the embodiment of Elijah in Kings has much more in common with the embodiment of the various characters in that scroll than it does with a collection like Zephaniah or Habakkuk. I therefore kept asking myself, first, how does the preservation of this material as oral delivery add to its meaning? Secondly, I found myself wondering, whose body are we talking about? Turning to Ezekiel, for example, is it a fictional body? Is it the author’s body? Is it the audience’s body? And what is the relationship between those three?
Collections of Prophetic Public Performance
Outside of the book of Jonah, the bulk of material in the prophetic collections aims to preserve traditions about prophetic public performances. To be sure, there are narrative elements especially in the three major prophetic collections, which can also be found scattered in some of the shorter prophetic books. Call narratives, for example, are so named because they have a narrative rhetorical purpose. Descriptions of symbolic acts also have a narrative element since the text describes a meaningful use of the prophetic body. Even descriptions of muteness in Ezekiel are more narrative than prophetic speech. Portier-Young is spot on when she notes scholarship’s historical obsession with prophecy as speech, but to what extent are the narratives about prophetic bodies simply replacing one type of speech (prophetic oracles) for another (narrative stories about prophets)? These are texts where the prophet is an embodied character. Her aim to trace the negotiation of identity among prophet, people, and God play out across these kinds of texts. What do we miss, though, when Jonah becomes the prime playing field for prophetic embodiment and affect? In what follows, I will focus on the book of Ezekiel, which has clear marks of scribal shaping and yet, which forefronts embodied orality over narrative framing.
The book of Ezekiel has many of the standard tropes found in prophetic collections. Thea discusses its call narrative and vision reports, scribal elements that provide rhetorical structure for this particular collection. I think about scribal framing as a reader’s guide to the prophetic material. The core materials that Ezekiel’s body mediates, however, are words, words with various contextual elements. Thea correctly notes the musical element of some prophetic orality. The book itself reveals that the Ezekiel traditions were viewed as the product of a singer (33:32-33) and not the utterances of a prophet. While the book expressly names some speeches as dirges, the textualized audience views him as a singer of “love” songs. This tiny notice leaves me wondering, what does the scribe presume about an audience’s imaginative engagement with this material? Were prophets primarily a good show? Were they spoken word activists? Were they installations of performance art? What role does the loss of temple space as the book’s setting unmoor Ezekiel as prophet from ritual contexts of prophetic activity? Or were they just figures of the past, like mages in a game of Skyrim or a wizard adjacent to King Arthur’s court? Do these texts have any correspondence with the intended audience’s lived experience or are they only markers of traditional lore?
What makes Ezekiel’s orality in the book so purposefully oxymoronic is his divinely ordered muteness, a characteristic evident not just in the longer call narrative 3:26-27 but reinforced in the opening of the mouth in 24:27, as Thea points out. Are the scribes winking at the audience, saying, yes, we know you have never heard these traditions before? We made them up! Or are they saying, you know this song? Ezekiel sang it. Or did the preservation of Ezekiel traditions include the reality that these words had not been heeded, saying in effect that Ezekiel might as well have been mute? When this is related to embodiment, the text seems to reveal its own pantomime. The prophet, whose mouth is saying these words, did not actually speak, and, even if he did, he was not actually heard. His body negates prophecy as an embodied phenomenon.
Yet the book proceeds to present prophetic oracles as acts of a prophetic body. They are embodied speech, song, joke, allegory, performed by a historical human, whose oral performance remains primary while its scribal preservation secondary. This fact invites the reader to listen to the words through the body of this prophetic persona. This is even more obvious when we remember that these collections were not read silently. They were meant to be secondarily vocalized, either through verbatim reading, or through a performer who has some agency in its actualization.
These dual layers or primary and secondary speaker, which are always present in these texts, remind us that every “reading” or “performance” is an act of embodied interpretation. The register of the voice, the pace of the wording, the presence or absence of music, the bodily movements that would accompany the words all engage the whole body as participating in the meaning of the text. In these settings, that meaning is one that presumes an embodied audience present during the delivery who will be affected by the performance. Like a piece of visual art that has no social meaning until it is viewed by human eyeballs, these texts would not have served as sites of memory or contributors to second temple identity without an embodied audience.
The Interplay of Human and Non-human in Oracles: A Test Case
In order to initiate an exploration into the embodiment presuppositions of prophetic oracles, I have chosen two prophetic oral performances that engage images of non-human embodiment: Tyre as a merchant ship in Ezekiel 27 and eating in Ezekiel 39. Each of these texts deliberately utilizes verbal iconography of bodies as essential vehicles for the subject of their enacted prophetic discourses. All three not only use images of bodies as part of their message; they also aim to have a bodily effect on their target audiences.
Ezekiel 27, one of the laments in the book, describes Judah’s proximate Other, Tyre, in terms of the built space of a ship. The image captures the corporate nature of the metaphor. This is not a description of an individual, like the Prince in Eden in chapter 28, nor even a metaphor of a homogenous collective, like a vine representing Judah in Ezekiel 17. This is a complex metaphor with various interlocking pieces. The lament begins with praise for its subject. It does so by homing in on the composite nature of the ship, which is the literal vehicle for this extended metaphor. The song commences with the description of the ship’s various woods, identified not just by the type of wood, but also designating the wood’s place of origin. It weaves in various other physical elements of the ship, such as the linen of its sails and the ivory inlay on the ship’s deck. Further tendrils in this weave are the multi-ethnic identities of those working on the ship, benefiting from its trade. Each human mentioned has both a different function and a different origin. The result is a picture of Tyre as an enriched cosmopolitan corporate body.
The description of the ship’s body is followed by images of its function in vv. 12-24. Again, the function extends the communal nature of the singular ship out to include its trading partners, clarifying that this is no warship. It is a welcome merchant ship. The tangible metaphor of the ship embodies Tyre’s meaning for Judah, the economically successful neighbor who had everything Judah wanted but could not attain. Yet for all this, the ship sinks; the collective body of Tyre dies.
The dirge ends with the description of Tyre’s death, here described as a sunken ship, overladen with its own success in vv. 25-36. Keeping with the metaphor, the agent of its death is not a military ship, but the forces of nature: east wind and storm. This does not mean that the wind is not a metaphor for Assyria and Babylon. But it does depict Tyre’s economic destruction as a fated experience triggered by the burden of their own success.
The text expects that the intended audience literally hears this piece of music. As music with a recognizable social function of mourning, a function communicated by its aural elements, the music expects to elicit certain emotions, such as sadness, anger, or melancholy. The utilization of this embodied art genre allows the scribe and the secondary performer to play with the meaning that the form itself conveys. It can become ironic or subversive poetry that uses the outer embodiment of grief to elicit human emotions such as vindication or justified delight at another’s misfortune.
Animal bodies also contribute to embodied messages in the prophetic corpus. When those animals become anthropomorphized, then the human body becomes non-human beast. One prophetic performance that demonstrates this is Ezekiel 39. In verses 17-20, God completes the purification of the battlefield on which Gog dies by feeding human corpses to carrion birds and scavenger animals. The common trope of vultures feeding on dead bodies in Assyrian reliefs becomes a tableau of a sacrificial feeding of roadkill consumers by the deity through whose agency they had been slaughtered. These verses twice identify the bodies as sacrificial victims. Twice more, the text explicitly states that these animals drink the victims’ blood. The intertwining of elevated sacrificial language and an image of disgust, at least if performed by the human audience, adds to the affective purpose of these verses, a purpose which includes confusion and dislocation. Again, the passage does not indicate how this material would have been actualized by a secondary performer. The language reads as prose, and the images suggest some attempt at drawing a picture with words.
The verses that follow suggest that this is an imagined recollection of a future event. The feast is an image of satiation, but the following verses reinforce the fact that these animals are not metaphors for the human audience. They are embodiments of a blood-thirsty deity. In other words, they are the ultimate non-human. The correct affect for this peak behind the divine curtain for the human audience is that of shame which is Ezekiel's prime prerequisite for any hope in the future.
These two brief examinations demonstrate how prophetic oracles are essential elements of the prophetic body’s depiction in prophetic collections. Although the prophets’ actual bodies are rarely mentioned, the act of performance necessitates that prophetic performance is necessarily an embodied act, and that the audience engagement is one that goes beyond intellectual cognition and reaches into social and emotional intelligence as well.
WHOSE BODY/WHOSE NEUROTRANSMITTERS?
As I have written these descriptions, however, I remain conflicted about whose embodiment we are talking about with prophetic collections. I do not accept that we are describing the embodiment of historical people identified as prophets. These figures function as characters in their texts. So, if they are characters who may or may not replicate the experiences of a tangible historical person, then do they have a body? Are their imagined or projected bodies actual bodies that can be psychoanalyzed or engaged as if they were human? Is a character’s fictional embodiment part of its function as avatar for the audience? I think Portier-Young is correct that the bodily elements of these prophets elicit empathy or transferred experience. I do think we feel the scratches on Ezekiel’s body as he crawls through a wall, but how do we distinguish between a historical person who has crawled through the dirt and the experience of a character whose whole experience is part of a virtual vision? For me, references to the body are rhetorical strategies to encourage the audience to identify with the text’s avatar.
When we read an avatar-less passage, such as Joel 1 or Isaiah 66, for example, then whose body are we talking about? The text is the product of the embodied activities of a scribe whose actions take on semantic value from their context. Are the scribes writing of their own volition? Are they writing for a patron? For temple personnel, etc.? Unfortunately, it is this context about which we have little information. In fact, it is the absence of the scribal bodies in these texts that make the texts so transferable. When talking about prophetic collections, then, to what extent should we be discussing the deliberate erasure of the body who produced the text? What does it mean to have the most tangible body involved in the prophetic collections, as the one that is erased? For me, it means that when we enter into a prophetic collection, we participate in a suspension of disbelief. We knowingly and meaningfully enter a virtual world where visions are real, bodies perform impossible acts, and God becomes the agent of sacrifice rather than its recipient. We do indeed have much more work to do, and I thank Thea for propelling us along this path.