Most readers do not realize that Hebrew biblical literature is filled with meaningful flesh. Male characters especially are often surprisingly embodied: Jeremiah’s womb, Moses’ stutter, Isaac’s eyes, Esau’s hairy red skin, Jacob’s loose loins, Joseph’s lovely form, Elijah’s enchanted bones, Elisha’s double portion of breath, David’s entangled flesh, Isaiah’s nude body, Mordechai’s maternal sustenance, and the androgyny of the first human formed from the ground in Genesis 2.  

In general, biblical bodies are made of clay and can shift between hardened and malleable forms, leading to vivid body descriptions about the often hard states of internal body parts and diverse fluxes that soften fleshes, like the fluvial spirits that can saturate the body with emotion-charged airs breathed by God into human nostrils. During illness, a body may be trapped, hunted, impaled, or caught up in a net. A sick body risks shattering, leaking, or sinking back into the potter’s clay pit, a return to the shaded muck and grey dust of “everyman’s“ Netherworld. Meanwhile, warriors cross-dress, windstorms induce altered mental states, land menstruates, Mt Zion lactates, uncovered blood screams to heaven, and God, who so frequently has a body, may or may not be able to bend the ear.  

The body language of Hebrew Scriptures is largely hidden from modern view —translated into the disembodied language of English-speaking cultures or dismissed as relics of quirky old-fashioned idioms (like Job’s “skin of my teeth”). But what might it mean for modern readers to recover the Bible’s forgotten body parts, idioms, and cultures?   

The forgotten body of biblical translation is (dare I say) a deeply important issue today. First, I have noticed that educated professionals in fields as diverse as psychology, medicine, and law are publishing essays on biblical literature in influential media and sometimes even in their field’s disciplinary journals.

Second, religious readers are unlikely to learn about the forgotten bodies of biblical translation. This is especially true for Christians. Few Christian leaders learn biblical languages as part of their formation or training. Most Protestant denominations have eradicated the language requirements for ordination. And while more and more evangelical seminaries teach biblical languages, students only learn enough of a biblical language to use dictionaries, often specialized theological dictionaries. In other words, the evangelical leaders who know biblical langauges do not know enough of linguistics and philology to critically engage the translation paradigms of their teachers. Meanwhile, general readers of faith are met with 100s of niche-marketed English versions of the Bible, a market-driven trend in Bible publishing that exploded in the last 30 years. And finally, the internet delivers up language-based arguments of highly varied quality usually about specific “hot button” biblical verses.

Modern readers need to know that Hebrew biblical literature reflects distinctive body cultures which English translations almost entirely fail to convey. From ancient physiognomic omens to plural medical cultures, from etiologies of illness to corporeal assemblages, the forgotten bodies of biblical translation have implications for issues as diverse as “biblical” psychiatry, concepts of legal persons, the history of monotheism, theologies of human sexuality, and theories about writing the Hebrew Bible.

Public and religious audiences alike need readable, insightful, relevant, and (dare I say, again) expert writing on the forgotten bodies in the Hebrew Bible’s ancient corpora.