Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

Abstract

Abstract The bodies of a people encode and continually retell the story of their families, cities, and nations. In the Hebrew Bible, the bodies of notable heroic figures—warriors, kings, and cultural founders—not only communicate values on an individual level but they also bear meaning for the fate of the nation. The patriarch Jacob, who takes on the name of the nation, “Israel,” engages in an intense bodily drama by way of securing the family blessing and passing on his identity to the Tribes of Israel. Judges is a deeply bodily book: left-handed, mutilating and mutilated, long haired, and fractured like the nation itself, its warriors revel in bodies and violence. The David and Saul drama, throughout 1–2 Samuel, repeatedly juxtaposes the bodies of the two kings and sets them on a collision course. Saul’s body continues to act in strange and powerful ways beyond his death, and in the final episodes of Saul’s bone movement and reburial, the last heroic body goes underground. Thus, Israel’s heroic national body rises and falls on the bodies of its heroes, and the Hebrew Bible takes up a profound place in the ancient literary landscape in its treatment of heroic and body themes.