Full Description
The book is organized by genre of biblical literature. First, the priestly literature articulates a binary concept of disability as impure and passive, i.e. as 'other' to the pure, holy, and active. By contrast, in the prophetic literature and the Psalms, images of disability structure communication among God, prophets, leaders, and people. Here, disability does not simply mean impurity; its valuation depends on its possessor. Wisdom literature and narrative present figures (e.g. Job, Mephibosheth) whose innate or acquired disabilities are nevertheless placed, and not simply as impurities, within cosmic and social order. Although priestly literature seems anomalous, all strata of biblical literature use disability imagery not primarily to represent disabled persons, but mainly to represent the power of Israel's God. Physical norms and disability thus play a pervasive and previously neglected role in biblical categories of holy/unholy, pure/impure, election/rejection, and God/idols.
This book provides a literary critical method focused on representation in the canonical form of the text allows a comprehensive view of how images of disability operate in relation to major concepts, and also provides a foundation for studies in the history of interpretation. All discussion of biblical passages and books draw on existing historical studies as a necessary precondition for understanding.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Introduction: Disability Studies within Biblical Studies
What is Disability Studies?
Impairment and Disability in the Hebrew Bible and in Biblical Studies
Method and Overview of the Project
Chapter 2 Categories: Disability Contra the Holy and the Real
Disability Contra What? The Construction of a Priestly Ideal
True Gods and Disabled Idols: Deuteronomic Bodily Polemics
Disability as Categorical Alterity
Chapter 3 Figures: Disability as Aesthetic Device
Narrative Prosthesis in Genesis
Job and Aesthetic Transcendence
Disability as Aesthetic Feature
Chapter 4 Rhetoric: The Sensory Structure of Divine-Human Communication
Evoked Potential: The Disabled Body in the Psalms
No Soundness in It: Disability as Media in Isaiah
Excursus on Disability in Other Prophetic Books
Disability as Communication Nexus
Chapter 5 Limping on Two Opinions: Disability as Constitutive Element and Critical Mode
Disability, Power, Holiness, Election
Interpretive Prosthesis
Bibliography
