Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies

Description

Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies explores some of the social, material, and ideological dynamics shaping life and death in both the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel and Judah. Analysing topics ranging from the bodily realities of gestation, subsistence, and death, and embodied performances of gender, power, and status, to the imagined realities of post-mortem and divine existence, the essays in this volume offer exciting new trajectories in our understanding of the ways in which embodiment played out in the societies in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible emerged.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, UK, and the presenter of the BBC2 television miniseries 'The Bible's Buried Secrets'. She has authored and edited a number of books on ancient Israelite and Judahite religion, including King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice (2004), Land of Our Fathers (2010), Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (2010), and God: An Anatomy (2021).

The consistently high quality of analysis across the entire volume is to be commended. This is a helpful contribution to the burgeoning literature on embodiment in biblical studies. * Journal for the Study of the Old Testament * This book throws light on the materiality of life and sociality of death from ten different angles, all related to the body in the Hebrew Bible and its historical milieu. The result is a fascinating kaleidoscope of bodies-dead, alive, and prenatal; human, bestial, and divine; mortal and immortal; disabled and unimpared-constantly marking difference and transformation. The essays reveal what a multitude of meanings emerge from embodied imagination, and how everything that matters in life and death finds a bodily expression. Francesca Stavrakopoulou and her co-writers invite the reader to take a fresh look at fleshly realities and their implications. * MARTTI NISSINEN, University of Helsinki, Finland * The focus on bodies in life and death in this volume, which prioritizes the sociality of bodies in research, is innovative and helpful. With high quality essays from worldleading scholars, established researchers, and exciting new academics who are just emerging in the field, these explorations contribute to the fascinating, and ever growing, dialogue in Biblical research on the significance of the body. This stimulating volume is a very promising addition to this excellent and much-needed series. * KATHERINE E. SOUTHWOOD, University of Oxford, UK * Life and Death gathers together various reflections upon ancient Israelite bodies: the bodies of men and women, children and the elderly, the unborn and the dead, the disabled and the divine - even the bodies of animals. Still, the contributors, although in many ways as diverse as the bodies they study (men and women from Europe and the Americas, newly minted Ph.D.s and retired professors), all share a conviction that the body is a vehicle through which identity is constructed and communicated, yet constantly renegotiated. What results is a creative, compelling collection whose proverbial "sum" is far greater than its various "parts." * SUSAN ACKERMAN, Dartmouth College, USA *