from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Theology from the University of Oxford.
She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Exile, Incorporated: The Body in the Book of Ezekiel, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Exile, Incorporated occurs in the middle of Chapter 4 and begins a new section entitled “The Unfaithful Wife, the Unnatural Mother.” The section begins: “While the woman in Ezekiel 16 is made to look the part of Yhwh’s wife, her behaviour once married is not fitting for her new social role. The text begins to list Yhwh’s accusations against her.” There follows a quote from Ezekiel 16:15-19 in my translation. This part of the Old Testament text shows that the woman, who has married the god Yhwh in Ezekiel’s metaphorical story, immediately begins to behave promiscuously. She uses the clothes, jewellery, perfume, and food Yhwh gave her as wedding gifts to make, adorn, and offer to statues of other gods. The text goes on to accuse her of promiscuity with Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and other foreigners (Ezek 16:25-26, 28-29). Yhwh condemns the woman’s behaviour by saying that she is more sinful than a sex worker. Whereas a sex worker’s activities can be explained by her need for money, Yhwh’s wife pays other men to persuade them to sleep with her.Learn more about Exile, Incorporated at the Oxford University Press website.
This page of Exile, Incorporated does not provide an especially good insight into my book. Page 99 is mostly taken up by primary text, the relevance of which for the book’s argument is only unpacked in the following pages. I could imagine that anyone beginning to read the book at this page would find it inaccessible and put it back down again!
However, the initial sentence of page 99 does reflect one of the book’s core premises: that identity is something constantly created and maintained via the practices and experiences of the body. Being ascribed a certain identity, whether at birth or later on, is not enough to maintain that identity unquestionably throughout life. In the case of the metaphor in Ezekiel 16 featured on page 99, a woman becomes a high-status wife through her marriage to a deity, but she loses that status via her sexual promiscuity. My book goes on to discuss how the woman also fails to act as any normal kind of mother, since she slaughters her own children. In Ezekiel’s metaphor, the woman represents Jerusalem, and her promiscuity and child sacrifice represent the people’s worship of gods other than Yhwh and forming of alliances with foreign nations. Ezekiel seeks to demonstrate that, just as a woman loses her identity as a wife because of her unfaithfulness, Jerusalem loses its identity as Yhwh’s special city due to its disloyalty.
This is all part of the main argument of Exile, Incorporated: that the book of Ezekiel seeks to portray the Judeans who went into exile to Babylonia in the sixth century BCE as the continuation of Yhwh’s people. By undermining Jerusalem and the Judeans who remained there, Ezekiel can demonstrate that it is the Judeans in Babylonia who are the true people of Yhwh. But these exiled Judeans cannot rely on their special group identity, either. According to the book of Ezekiel, they must continually enact this identity via their bodies; for example, by conducting circumcision, observing Sabbaths and feast days, and leaving ritual activities up to the priesthood. Ezekiel’s metaphor about the unfaithful wife also acts as a cautionary tale regarding sexual liaisons with foreigners. In these ways, I argue that the book of Ezekiel advocates that the Judeans in Babylonia “incorporate” their specifically exilic Judean identity into their everyday behaviours and experiences.
--Marshal Zeringue
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