The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature

Biblical prophecy involves more than words: it is always also embodied. After assessing the prevalence, implications, and origins of a logocentric model of biblical prophecy, Anathea E. Portier-Young proposes an alternative, embodied paradigm of analysis that draws insights from disciplines ranging from cognitive neuroscience to anthropology.

Portier-Young provides a new, embodied paradigm of analysis for biblical prophecy, offering tools for academics and students to study a wide range of texts with new emphasis on the body. If offers a broadly-based account of prophetic embodiment. The author first assesses the prevalence, implications, and origins of a logocentric model of biblical prophecy, then proposes an alternative, embodied, and interdisciplinary paradigm. She argues that embodied religious experience and affect are not merely antecedent or coincidental to prophetic mediation but are both means (how mediation occurs) and objects (part of what is mediated).

While Portier-Young’s primary aim is to intervene in how biblical scholars understand and talk about prophecy, it has broader implications for how we map the relationships between spoken and written word(s) on one hand and body and praxis on the other. The author provides a game-changing reframing of prophecy that not only changes how we read biblical texts but also funds and energizes our understanding of prophetic witness in the contemporary world.

Anathea E. Portier-Young is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Duke University Divinity School. She earned a B.A. in Classics (Greek) at Yale University and M.A. in Biblical Languages at Graduate Theological Union / Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) from Duke University. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (2011) and co-editor of Scripture and Social Justice: Catholic and Ecumenical Essays (2018). Her research focuses on biblical prophetic and apocalyptic literature and early Jewish apocalypses and novellas.