The Nose Knows: Bodily Knowing in Isaiah 11.3

Abstract

While some recent studies have enlarged our knowledge of the olfactory world of ancient Israel, exploration of the relative value of olfaction as a means of knowing has been largely neglected. Isaiah 11.3 is a passage modern exegetes have reconstructed or expurgated because its literal sense has the Messiah discerning good from evil by smell: an impossibility to the Enlightenment model of reality. But recent anthropology informs us of extraordinary olfactory discernment in African religion and the Islamic world. A brief history of exegesis confirms that Jewish commentators accepted an olfactory Messiah, but interpretation since the mid-nineteenth century, and even more prominently in the twentieth, has sought to reconstruct a hypothetical ‘original’ text, evidencing a modern ocularcentric bias.