Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Constructions of Beauty and Ugliness
- 2 Physical Disabilities Classified as “Defects”
- 3 Physical Disabilities Not Classified as “Defects”
- 4 Mental Disability
- 5 Disability in the Prophetic Utopian Vision
- 6 Nonsomatic Parallels to Bodily Wholeness and “Defect”
- 7 Exegetical Perpetuations, Elaborations, and Transformations: The Case of Qumran
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Biblical and Non-Biblical Citation Index
7 - Exegetical Perpetuations, Elaborations, and Transformations: The Case of Qumran
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Constructions of Beauty and Ugliness
- 2 Physical Disabilities Classified as “Defects”
- 3 Physical Disabilities Not Classified as “Defects”
- 4 Mental Disability
- 5 Disability in the Prophetic Utopian Vision
- 6 Nonsomatic Parallels to Bodily Wholeness and “Defect”
- 7 Exegetical Perpetuations, Elaborations, and Transformations: The Case of Qumran
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Biblical and Non-Biblical Citation Index
Summary
This final chapter explores some of the ways in which disability is represented in Jewish exegetical texts from the period of the Second Temple (515 BCE–70 CE). My specific focus is those texts produced by ancient Jewish biblical interpreters and found among the Dead Sea Scrolls that perpetuate, elaborate on, or transform earlier biblical notions of disability and earlier biblical models of classification. Such an investigation illustrates well the widely evidenced and oft-remarked tendency of ancient interpreters of biblical materials to reconfigure texts in such a way as to infuse new life into them, allowing them to address the needs of later audiences. Biblical materials are reworked to achieve a variety of ends: ambiguous passages are clarified through elaboration, contradictory texts are harmonized, implicit associations are made explicit, and spare narrative is amplified. The common biblical tendency to produce representations of disability that stigmatize and seek to marginalize is also evidenced in ancient Jewish exegetical recastings of or allusions to scriptural passages. In some cases, interpreters produce representations of disability not unlike the representations familiar from earlier biblical texts. In other instances, exegetes offer representations of disability that can only be characterized as more devaluing and potentially marginalizing than the older biblical models from which they draw. Examples of the latter tendency include the casting of blindness as a polluting condition in the Temple Scroll; the direct association of the “deafness” and “blindness” of transgressors with the “Spirit of Wrong” (rûaḥ ʿawlah) in 1QS 4:11; and the proscription on the entry of groups such as the deaf, the mute, and the mentally disabled into the community's assembly according to several texts.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Disability in the Hebrew BibleInterpreting Mental and Physical Differences, pp. 101 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008