Exile, Incorporated: The Body in the Book of Ezekiel

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Synopsis
Exile, Incorporated: The Body in the Book of Ezekiel demonstrates how the book of Ezekiel makes rhetorical use of the human body to construct an exile-centred Judean identity. This focus on the body is inextricable from the book's setting in the Judean exile to Babylonia during the sixth-century BCE. In such a context of upheaval, all that the displaced group reliably retains are their bodies. Even so, the material surroundings of those bodies change completely, calling into question previously accepted ways of being. Author Rosanne Liebermann reveals how the book of Ezekiel holds acute awareness of this situation, evoking bodily practices and embodied experiences that serve to construct a Judean identity based on existence outside of the land of Judah. This identity excludes both non-Judeans as well as the Judeans who remained in Judah. The book of Ezekiel achieves this exclusion via descriptions of bodily practices--including circumcision, dress, and the observance of a cultic calendar--that distinguish its constructed in-group of exiled Judeans from outsiders. Ezekiel also evokes the embodied emotion of disgust regarding the bodies of those with "outsider" practices, which in turn encourages the practice of segregation and endogamy within the in-group. Focusing on the bodies depicted in the book of Ezekiel also highlights how the text presents hierarchies within the exilic Judean group, which itself contains bodies differentiated by gender and priestly or non-priestly descent. Reading the text in this way reveals how the book of Ezekiel constructs a model of a variegated community able to embody a Judean identity that not only survived but was based on life outside of the land of Judah.
Copyright:
N/A

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780197690864
Related ISBNs:
9780197690857, 9780197690840, 9780197690857, 9780197690840
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
N/A
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Religion and Spirituality, Education
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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