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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 1999

Our Bodies, Our Bibles

Our bodies and our biblical interpretations seem to be involved in a long-running, secret affair. The implications may be both liberating and scandalous.

By Ronald S. Hendel

Do our bodies have anything to do with how we interpret the Bible? Does our body image affect our religious beliefs? At first glance, the idea seems bizarre. What, after all, does Baywatch—or Weight Watchers—have to do with King David? When we read or study the Bible, we feel disembodied, spiritually intent on the words and images of the text, only occasionally distracted by our bodies when our back aches or our stomach growls. Our bodies and the Bible seem worlds apart. And yet, when we look closely, biblical interpretation may be more “embodied” than we think. In a […]

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Endnotes

1.

Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994).

2.

Boyarin, Carnal Israel, p. 34.

3.

See R.H. Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S.L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), p. 22.

4.

Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983).