Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible by Laura Quick (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible by Laura Quick Laura Carlson Hasler Laura Quick. Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 185 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000131 Laura Quick's Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible is a compelling study of how clothing reflects and activates identity in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. In Quick's analysis, adornments are agential symbols of an individual's social role and status. This monograph investigates [End Page 433] the means by which bodies were coded in the ancient Levant, and invites us to rethink our interpretations of well-known biblical stories. The complex relations among personhood, clothing, and the body emerge in chapter 1 ("Dress and the Body"). Quick contends that the imagined porousness of bodies in antiquity meant that adornment could serve as an extracorporeal expression of personhood (27). As part of the "permeable body complex," clothing reveals and extends the boundaries of the self. As with each chapter, Quick's formulations have consequences for biblical interpretation. Here, Quick argues that clothing participates in the transfer of monarchical and marital status. Quick's formulation of clothing "encod[ing] personhood" raises questions related to the precise contours of "personhood" as well as to the limits of such coding (33). In her discussion of David and Saul's episodic showdown in 1 Samuel 24, Quick argues that David's "cutting the hem of Saul's cloak is a symbolic act with huge significance: Saul is understood to have physically been breached or damaged" (38). This raises the possibility that "to encode," for Quick, signals the erosion of the distinction between the "merely" symbolic and the physically real. The "heavy symbolism" of clothing, in other words, not only reveals or foretells status changes, it brings them about. Though Quick leaves the somatic effects that David incurs ambiguous—David's action of cutting has "damaged Saul in some way" (38; italics mine)—the implication is that clothing may afford a middle way between sign and activity. David has not quite dismantled Saul's grip on the kingship but he has also not quite not done that either. Later, Quick calls the donning of certain adornments "sign" or "speech" acts, raising the further question of how such performative symbols operate when mediated by written narrative (65, 174). In chapters 2 ("Dress and Ritual") and 3 ("Dress and Identity") clothing participates in adaptations of the body through the invocation of ritual. Drawing upon Akkadian literature, Quick clarifies perplexing moments in the Hebrew Bible (like the reference to Judah's wine-soaked garments in Genesis 49:11) in terms of the ritual acts they invoke and the bodily consequences—protection, absolution, cursing—they incur. Quick argues, moreover, that this connection between clothing and ritual illuminates women's agency in the realm of textile production for cultic practice, particularly in rites of protection, mourning, and interaction with the dead (72). The question of the efficaciousness of apparel resurfaces in the story of Tamar and Amnon (2 Samuel 13). Though Tamar's robes signal her "protected" status, that status is violently disregarded by Amnon. Tamar responds, Quick contends, through the heavily symbolic rending of these very garments. Yet this story also seems to shine a light on the complex relation among human agents and their effective symbols. 2 Samuel 13 invites us to ask: Who is willing—or able—to transgress bodies coded with protection and why? Why do some symbols "work" and others fail? Quick deploys the Ugaritic tale of Aqhat, and the boundary-defying adornment of Pughat in particular, to illustrate the central argument of chapter 3: that dress is a complex means of identity or role-adoption. The compound affordances of clothing also surface in the high priest's clothing, which is perceived as provocative, insofar as it aims to capture divine attention. Quick contends that this garb also obfuscates the priest's body, enabling his role to transfer to another, to represent the Israelites writ large, and to blur the priest's gender. She concludes [End Page 434] that this clothing renders the priest's body both whole and...