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Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible

Author: Jeremy Schipper

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-04-01

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0567337510

This unique interdisciplinary book uses a fresh approach to explore issues of disability in the Hebrew Bible. It examines how disability functions in the David Story (1 Samuel 16; 1 Kings 2) by paying special attention to Mephibosheth, the only biblical character with a disability as a sustained character trait. The David Story contains some of the Bible's most striking images of disability. Nonetheless, interpreters tend to focus on legal material rather than narratives when studying disability in the Hebrew Bible. Often, they neglect the David Story's complex use of disability. They overlook its use of disability imagery as open to critical interpretation because its stereotypical meanings may seem so commonplace and transparent. Yet recent work in the burgeoning field of disability studies presents disability as a complicated motif that demands more critical engagement than it typically receives. Informed by exciting developments in the field, it argues that the David Story employs disability imagery as a subtle mode of narrating and organizing various ideological positions regarding national identity.

Disability in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Saul M. Olyan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-07-19

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107404984

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Mental and physical disability, ubiquitous in texts of the Hebrew Bible, receive their first thoroughgoing treatment in this monograph. Olyan seeks to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible's particular ideas of what is disabling and their potential social ramifications. Biblical representations of disability and biblical classification schemas - both explicit and implicit - are compared to those of the Hebrew Bible's larger ancient West Asian cultural context, and to those of the later Jewish biblical interpreters who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study will help the reader gain a deeper and more subtle understanding of the ways in which biblical writers constructed hierarchically significant difference and privileged certain groups (e.g., persons with "whole" bodies) over others (e.g., persons with physical "defects"). It also explores how ancient interpreters of the Hebrew Bible such as the Qumran sectarians reproduced and reconfigured earlier biblical notions of disability and earlier classification models for their own contexts and ends.

The Bible and Disability

Author: Sarah J. Melcher

Publisher: SCM Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780334056867

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The Bible and Disability: A Commentary (BDC) is the first comprehensive commentary on the Bible from the perspective of disability. The BDC examines how the Bible constructs or reflects human wholeness, impairment, and disability in all their expressions. Biblical texts do envision the ideal body, but they also present visions of the body that deviate from this ideal, whether physically or through cognitive impairments or mental illness. The BDC engages the full range of these depictions of body and mind, exploring their meaning through close readings and comparative analysis. The BDC enshrines the distinctive interpretive imagination required to span the worlds of biblical studies and disability studies. Each of the fourteen contributors has worked at this intersection; and through their combined expertise, the very best of both biblical studies and disability studies culminates in detailed textual work of description, interpretation, and application to provide a synthetic and synoptic whole. The result is a close reading of the Bible that gives long-overdue attention to the fullness of human identity narrated in the Scriptures.

This Abled Body

Author: Hector Avalos

Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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She opened for jazz great Billie Holiday, shared the set with Marilyn Monroe, and flirted on-screen with Jack Lemmon. In her dream role, Gene Roddenberry beamed her aboard the Starship Enterprise as Yeoman Janice Rand in the original “Star Trek” series. But a terrifying sexual assault on the studio lot and her lifelong feelings of emptiness and isolation would soon combine to turn her starry dream into a nightmare.

Disability and Isaiah's Suffering Servant

Author: Jeremy Schipper

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0191619825

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Although disability imagery is ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, characters with disabilities are not. The presence of the former does not guarantee the presence of the later. While interpreters explain away disabilities in specific characters, they celebrate the rhetorical contributions that disability imagery makes to the literary artistry of biblical prose and poetry, often as a trope to describe the suffering or struggles of a presumably nondisabled person or community. This situation contributes to the appearance (or illusion) of a Hebrew Bible that uses disability as a rich literary trope while disavowing the presence of figures or characters with disabilities. Isaiah 53 provides a wonderful example of this dynamic at work. The "Suffering Servant" figure in Isaiah 53 has captured the imagination of readers since very early in the history of biblical interpretation. Most interpreters understand the servant as an otherwise able bodied person who suffers. By contrast, Jeremy Schipper's study shows that Isaiah 53 describes the servant with language and imagery typically associated with disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature. Informed by recent work in disability studies from across the humanities, it traces both the disappearance of the servant's disability from the interpretative history of Isaiah 53 and the scholarly creation of the able bodied suffering servant.

Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Author: Darla Schumm

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-10-24

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0230339492

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This edited collection of essays examines how religions of the world represent, understand, theologize, theorize and respond to disability and chronic illness. Contributors employ a variety of methodological approaches including ethnography, historical, cultural, or textual analysis, personal narrative, and theological/philosophical investigation.

Biblical Corpora

Author: Rebecca Raphael

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 0567279898

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The book is organized by genre of biblical literature. First, the priestly literature articulates a binary concept of disability as impure and passive, i.e. as 'other' to the pure, holy, and active. By contrast, in the prophetic literature and the Psalms, images of disability structure communication among God, prophets, leaders, and people. Here, disability does not simply mean impurity; its valuation depends on its possessor. Wisdom literature and narrative present figures (e.g. Job, Mephibosheth) whose innate or acquired disabilities are nevertheless placed, and not simply as impurities, within cosmic and social order. Although priestly literature seems anomalous, all strata of biblical literature use disability imagery not primarily to represent disabled persons, but mainly to represent the power of Israel's God. Physical norms and disability thus play a pervasive and previously neglected role in biblical categories of holy/unholy, pure/impure, election/rejection, and God/idols. This book provides a literary critical method focused on representation in the canonical form of the text allows a comprehensive view of how images of disability operate in relation to major concepts, and also provides a foundation for studies in the history of interpretation. All discussion of biblical passages and books draw on existing historical studies as a necessary precondition for understanding.

Prophetic Disability

Author: Sarah J. Melcher

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781481310260

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"At first glance it may seem that the Hebrew prophets offer little resolution on contemporary concerns of inclusivity and defense for persons deemed "other." Bound by their time and culture, the prophets' message seems obscure and irrelevant. However, on closer look, we see that the prophets offer a call to justice for those who are wrongly oppressed and marginalized, those on the fringes of society--the downcast and the disabled. In Prophetic Disability, Sarah Melcher opens our eyes to the prophetic corpus' ongoing theological relevance in the first book-length treatment of disability in the Bible's prophetic literature. Melcher takes a deep exegetical dive into Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, analyzing passages that mention disability explicitly and those that offer complementary relevance. With careful and detailed exegetical work, she shows us the profound relationship between disability and the sovereignty of God, the latter being the dominant theme shaping all other motifs in the prophets. Influenced by the prominent work in disability studies by Tom Shakespeare's critical realism, she sets forth her own method in conversation with rhetorical and literary criticism. Melcher's engagement with these ancient texts is informed throughout by a respect for the context and circumstances that generated the texts relevant to disability, as well as a sensitivity to the lived experiences of people with disabilities. To that end, Prophetic Disability maintains the central theme from Shakespeare: that labels describe, but do not "constitute," disease. Who we are is a reality beyond our distinct experience with disability and impairment. What emerges from Melcher's analysis are ways in which the theological implications arising from the prophetic corpus might guide us toward more ethical practice in our encounters with disabilities." --