Harvard Divinity School, Swartz Hall, James Room
Hebrew Bible Research Workshop: “The Entanglement of Bodies and Texts in the Hebrew Bible” | Jacqueline Vayntrub, Ph.D.
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How did the authors of the Hebrew Bible conceptualize the production of textual objects and their corresponding meaning-making properties?Considering text and its production alongside the broader ancient Levantine context of memorializing and commemorating monuments, I argue that for the biblical authors, texts contained animate presence on the model of the human body as a vessel containing and transmitting speech. Specifically, I will identify intersecting metaphors for speech in biblical Hebrew that underscore its ephemerality and need for maintenance in human social groups; how the voice is maintained and transmitted in entities meant to contain it; and finally, that textual objects were meant to be physically experienced by the bodies of others and thereby effect them.
Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (Routledge, 2019) and numerous articles in leading journals and edited volumes. Her next book, Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible is forthcoming in Yale University Press in the Anchor Bible Reference Library Series.