Saul’s Heroic Bones

Chapter 6 follows a tradition of comparative studies linking Saul with Greek heroic themes and takes up a detailed analysis of Saul’s bone-transferral narratives (1 Samuel 31; 2 Samuel 21) in light of what is known about heroic bone relics and the politics of hero cults in the Iron Age Western Mediterranean. Saul’s status as an Israelite hero is a hitherto underexplored lens through which to investigate the meaning and power of his dead body, and here it is argued that by comparing the biblical account of the transferral of Saul’s bones with classical Greek texts of heroic bone transfer, we are able to see the political import of David’s actions in the Bible more clearly as a “body manipulator” and thus better understand the dynamics of bodily power in this text.

The Iconography of the Heroic Body

Chapter 4 departs from the textually oriented studies in the rest of the book and explores the primary ways in which heroic bodies were iconographically portrayed in Israel’s historical and geographical environments, and more specifically, wherever possible, within the Levant and even Iron Age Israel. Texts describe visual aspects of the world in rich and subtle ways, but images have a distinct story to tell. Images function not as mere decorations but rather convey crucial information about their subjects. Specifically, the bodies of warriors in the common posture with arm raised—the “striking,” “smiting,” or “menacing” posture—come to the fore as the preeminent iconography of the heroic body in Egypt and the Levant, where striking heroic figures become a norm for warrior representations. This interaction with material culture allows glimpses into a lived world that texts obscure or simply cannot address.

Bodies and Heroes

Chapter 1 opens the terms of exploration for the study—defining the “hero” as one who acts at the intersection of warrior, royal, and founding roles. Biblical authors paid significant attention to the bodies of their heroes and saw the heroic body as a primal source of meaning. Moreover, these authors saw bodily features as communicating a message about that character’s story and fate. These heroic bodies eventually tell a story—narrating Israel’s composition as a corporate and national body, then the flourishing of that body in royal exemplars, and then the dissolution of that body. The chapter gives a genealogy of how various scholars have explored the body as a site of interpretation, highlighting the different ways biblical interpreters have engaged with body themes. Other key problems are explored, such as the reticence of ancient authors to describe bodies and problems associated with comparing ancient texts with one another.

Heroic Bodies in Judges

Chapter 3 reads the images of heroic bodies in the book of Judges on a number of levels, organized around an argument by the anthropologist Mary Douglas: “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived.” The two bodies cannot help but be connected, and the “forms it adopts in movement and repose express social pressures in manifold ways.” The ambiguous and severed bodies in Judges serve not merely as entertainment but rather as communicators of social disorder and political strife. Specific analysis focuses on the mutilation of Adoni-Bezek, the bodily confrontation between Ehud and Eglon, Jael’s killing of Sisera, Samson’s hair, and the dismemberment of an unnamed woman.

The Height of Saul and the Beauty of David

Chapter 5 analyzes the bodies of Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David. In the broader landscape of Samuel-Kings, precious few bodies take center stage, truly positioning Saul head and shoulders above the crowd and David as the ideal monarchic body over the short-lived united kingdom. Saul and David participate in a rather complex “body drama” in 1 Samuel that scholars have not yet analyzed with enough depth in its bodily dimensions, especially given the pervasiveness of body themes both explicitly and subtly interwoven throughout the narratives. In this chapter, we continue to see individual bodies reflected back into the corporate body, and vice versa, though for David and Saul the process seems more ambiguous, complicated by the rollercoaster of affairs that characterize the national body through the reigns of both men: moments of strength and unity, undermined, reconciled, undermined again, valorous, cowardly, bold, and hidden.

Conclusion

Chapter 7 summarizes the book as a whole, and offers a series of thoughts about what happens to the “heroic body” after David and Saul. On the most basic level, permeating all of the book’s chapters, we have seen how biblical authors paid explicit and sustained attention to heroic bodies. Israel’s own namesake founder, Jacob/Israel, leads with his body in critical moments. Judges is a deeply bodily book, with characters revelling in bodies and violence. The David and Saul drama juxtaposes the bodies of the two kings, and Saul’s body continues to act in strange and powerful ways beyond his death. Finally, by evoking a comparison with Greek materials, we may consider the shift in post-exilic biblical texts to present us with thinking bodies, lamenting bodies, interpreting bodies, reading bodies, writing bodies, in order to signal a historical transformation and a conceptual change in the way leadership functions.

Jacob

Chapter 2 illustrates how Jacob’s body functions as the most active, visible, and frequently represented body among the ancestors in Genesis 12–50, and it provides analysis for understanding how and why Jacob’s body appears and performs in the way that it does. The chapter offers a tour through Jacob’s body as it appears in the narrative at several critical moments, paradigmatic as his body is for Israel’s experience as a whole and even for some of the specific heroic-bodily themes explored in subsequent chapters of this book. From birth and his early experience with Esau all the way to his final cross-handed blessing, Jacob leads with this body. The story reaches a climax in Genesis 32, when the narrator presents us with the wounded, limping body of the ancestor Jacob at the most loaded possible moment for identifying the body of the founder with the nation of Israel.