How should the human body be treated? Should bodies be slaughtered, starved, tortured, sold, and shot in the streets? Whose bodies should be treated in these ways and whose protected from harm? Who has the right to seek redress in cases of abuse and who is seen as fit for dehumanization? This book addresses these very questions, examining materials from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, ancient Near Eastern literature, and contemporary American society. In the first book-length work on personhood in ancient Israel, the author reveals widespread intersections between violence and personhood in both this society and the wider region. Relations of domination and subordination were so important to the culture and social organization of ancient Israel that these relations too often determined the boundaries of personhood itself. Rather than being fixed, personhood was malleable—it could be and was violently erased in many social contexts. The book exposes a violence–personhood–masculinity nexus in which domination allowed those in control to animalize and brutalize the bodies of subordinates. Perhaps even more noteworthy, the author argues that in particular social contexts in the contemporary “Western” world, this same nexus operates, holding devastating consequences for particular social groups. If the violence of Abu Ghraib calls to mind that of Ashurbanipal, this is no accident but is instead because both arise from of a certain construction of personhood that could not exist without violence.

This article contends that biblical scholarship on impurity has often been concerned with attempting to find one symbolic system underlying Israelite purity constructions. This tendency is clear in the work of Mary Douglas and Jacob Milgrom, but even in more recent scholarship the tendency to treat the diverse body of texts discussing impurity as a ‘system’ has continued. Even recent attempts to place all of these texts into two or more categories of impurity have had to force biblical texts to fit categories that supposedly encompass all of the Hebrew Bible. This article presents various important inconsistencies among the purity constructions of different biblical texts in order to demonstrate that these constructions are not in fact ‘systematic’. There is no ‘system of Israelite impurity’. Moreover, in positing such a system, scholars have displayed assumptions and utilized methods that are at odds with those of contemporary ritual studies. This article argues instead for an embodied approach to studying Israelite purity constructions that moves beyond Cartesian dichotomies and seeks to contextualize the evidence from different biblical texts, treating differences between texts not as obstacles but as analytical opportunities.

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Recent psychological research on post-traumatic stress disorder ( p t s d ) has demon strated that one of the most common symptoms of the disorder is heightened or even uncontrollable anger. In the past decade, various works in biblical studies have assessed the effects of trauma on the ancient Israelites and on the texts of the Hebrew Bible, but these have not fully explored either the connection between anger and p t s d or that between anger in the Hebrew Bible and Israelite trauma. This article seeks to demon strate the close relationship between trauma and rage, and argues that biblical authors often locate their own traumatized rage in the figure of Yahweh. The emotional response of Yahweh toward the Israelites is frequently presented as one of rage, blame, and con tempt -a trio of socially distancing emotions. This depiction of Yahweh results in a "theology of distance" wherein Yahweh's furious emotionality negates the sympathy of audiences toward the traumatized Israelites. Keywords trauma -biblical prophecy -exilic literature -psychological approaches to the Hebrew BibleFor Sarah Hammond, whose death stirred such rage within me.

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