The Prophetic Body

Abstract Biblical prophecy involves more than words: it is always also embodied. After assessing the implications and origins of a logocentric model of biblical prophecy, this book proposes an alternative, embodied paradigm of analysis that draws insights from disciplines ranging from cognitive neuroscience to anthropology. The body’s vital and necessary role in prophetic mediation emerges through analysis of portrayals of prophets’ embodied religious experience and practice in diverse texts from the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. Prophetic call narratives reveal a correspondence between embodied encounter with God and embodied mission to God’s people and a programmatic synergy of word and body. First-person narratives facilitate audience transport in ways that extend the embodiment of prophetic mediation through text to audience. Visible transformations of the prophetic body mark it as other, even monstrous, reflecting a liminal position between heaven and earth, life and death. Ascetic practice and religious ecstasy make the prophet’s body a mediating bridge. They also hold power to shape social realities. Prophetic mobility similarly links God and people across time and space. A different kind of movement, affect and emotion, likewise proves central to prophetic mediation. The prophetic body becomes a locus of interembodiment and node of circulating affect between God, people, and place. The body of the prophet is not accidental but rather vital and necessary to the prophet’s mediating role. The prophet’s embodied religious experience, transformations, mobility, and affect are both means (how mediation occurs) and objects (part of what is mediated) of prophetic mediation.