Scholars have overlooked the role that disability plays within Hellenistic Jewish literature. This article looks to fill this gap by analyzing the role of disability in Philo’s Life of Moses, 4 Maccabees, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Testament of Job. The essay looks specifically at the interrelationship between masculinity and disability in these documents and the strategies employed within each narrative to repair the disabled male body within them. Each narrative, I argue, employs a unique strategy for restoring the disabled male body. Philo reinterprets Moses’ claim of impaired speech as an indication of his modesty. The writer of 4 Maccabees metaphorically repairs the crumbled bodies of its martyrs by casting them as representational athletes of virtue. Repentance eradicates disablement in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. The Testament of Job provides its hero with a magical prosthesis that restores his body to its previous condition. In demonstrating how these four strategies play out in each narrative, I lay out a methodology for unearthing the able-bodied bias underlying many of our biblical and extra-biblical texts.
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David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 49.
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 53.
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 53.
See, for instance, Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 159.
Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 131–159.
Brent Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” JECS 4 (Fall 1996), pp. 269–312 (280); Stephen D. Moore and Janice Capel Anderson, “Taking it Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees,” JBL 117 (1998), pp. 249–273.
Matthew Kueffler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender, Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 27–28. At the same time, some Greeks and Romans also held that anger was a defining aspect of masculinity (Christopher Faraone, “Thumos as Masculine Ideal and Social Pathology in Greek Magical Spells,” in Susanna Morton Braund and Glenn Most [eds.], Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen [Yale Classical Studies 32; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003], pp. 144–162).
Saul Olyan, Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Significance of Ritual and Social Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), p. 68.
Katherine Low, “Implications Surrounding Girding the Loins in Light of Gender, Body, and Power,” JSOT 36 (2011), pp. 3–30 (23).
Katherine Low, “Implications Surrounding Girding the Loins in Light of Gender, Body, and Power,” JSOT 36 (2011), p. 23.
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Scholars have overlooked the role that disability plays within Hellenistic Jewish literature. This article looks to fill this gap by analyzing the role of disability in Philo’s Life of Moses, 4 Maccabees, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Testament of Job. The essay looks specifically at the interrelationship between masculinity and disability in these documents and the strategies employed within each narrative to repair the disabled male body within them. Each narrative, I argue, employs a unique strategy for restoring the disabled male body. Philo reinterprets Moses’ claim of impaired speech as an indication of his modesty. The writer of 4 Maccabees metaphorically repairs the crumbled bodies of its martyrs by casting them as representational athletes of virtue. Repentance eradicates disablement in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. The Testament of Job provides its hero with a magical prosthesis that restores his body to its previous condition. In demonstrating how these four strategies play out in each narrative, I lay out a methodology for unearthing the able-bodied bias underlying many of our biblical and extra-biblical texts.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 875 | 51 | 8 |
Full Text Views | 199 | 1 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 74 | 6 | 0 |