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
Introduction
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
Whether it be david's feigned “madness” in the presence of his Philistine overlord, Jacob's limping after wrestling with God, legal restrictions on the ritual participation and leadership of priests and others with physical “defects” (Hebrew mûmîm), or the transformation of blind and lame persons into those who can see and walk in prophetic visions of a utopian future, disability is ubiquitous in texts of the Hebrew Bible. Yet, with few exceptions, scholars of the Hebrew Bible have barely acknowledged disability as a subject worthy of serious study. When biblical specialists have discussed disability, it is usually not the focus of investigation, but incidental to the analysis of something else (e.g., priestly or sacrificial law and practice). In contrast, I make the representation of disability itself the focus of my investigation. Acknowledging that disability is our broad (and contested) analytic category – like race, class, sexuality, or gender – but convinced it is a useful analytic focus nonetheless, I seek to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible's particular ideas of what is disabling and the potential social ramifications of those ideas. I consider how biblical ideas of disability relate to notions of disability in the larger ancient West Asian cultural sphere, and also examine some of the ways in which ancient Jewish interpreters of biblical texts perpetuate or reconfigure biblical ideas of disability and biblical models of classification.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Disability in the Hebrew BibleInterpreting Mental and Physical Differences, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008