Abstract: This study explores the materiality of speech in ancient Hebrew instruction through the lens of Solomon’s legendary excess in the biblical tradition. Solomon’s excessive wealth and wisdom (1 Kgs 5:12, 10:23–25) suggest that his wise words were conceptualized as tangible, numerable speech-objects. Drawing on the language of instruction in Proverbs, which describes words as treasures to be stored, transmitted, and worn as protective amulets, the essay demonstrates an ontology where speech has its own agency and material effects on the body. Ultimately, inscribed text functions as a technology of this material speech, not as an ephemeral record but as an active repository that re-embodies the speaking voice, offering an “epistemological turn” in biblical studies that challenges anachronistic Cartesian dualisms.

Abstract: How did the authors of the Hebrew Bible conceptualize the production of textual objects and their corresponding meaning-making properties? Considering text and its production alongside the broader ancient Levantine context of memorializing and commemorating monuments, I argue that for the biblical authors, texts contained animate presence on the model of the human body as a vessel containing and transmitting speech. I structure my argument in three parts: 1) on metaphors for speech in biblical Hebrew that underscore its ephemerality and need for maintenance in human social groups; 2) on the maintenance and transmission of the voice (and pars pro toto, animate presence) in entities meant to contain it; and 3) that textual objects were meant to be physically experienced by the bodies of others and thereby effect them. Absent a visual representation of the speaker’s body, text employed other strategies to reembody and uphold presence through the invocation of one’s name, one’s reputation and authority to make good on threats, and ultimately, the closest component of one’s own body that can be textually represented: their voice. The argument is one piece of a large project of situating biblical textuality within its broader cultural practices of representation in which texts and objects are meant to have tangible, embodied effects on their audience.

Abstract: The study of gender in antiquity, through the language of its textual products, is not a marginal concern of specialized hermeneutics lying outside the scope of rigorous philology. The very pedagogical tools through which philology is perpetuated—grammars, lexica, wordbooks, commentaries—are determined through particular lenses, dictated by frameworks natural to those who brought them into being and oblivious to other, marginalized perspectives. This collection of essays seeks to widen the philological lens in one particular marginalized area, but also seeks to encourage others to reform philological practices and frameworks from within as well.

Abstract: This article considers the legacy of James Barr’s The Semantics of Biblical Language. Ideally, his criticisms of theology’s use of philology would have been assimilated already into the field. But the kinds of abuses that Barr so clearly identified and critiqued are still commonly found. Barr’s thoroughgoing critique of its specious appropriation for theology has left many justifiably skittish about employing it to any significant effect and has contributed, perhaps, to the sense that ongoing engagement with the original languages of biblical literature is not a necessity and, certainly, not an avenue to creative scholarship. The article concludes with the suggestion that we might move the practice of philology forward in biblical studies by attending more fully to the positionality of its practitioners. In particular, what emerges throughout the study is the dominance of a certain interiorizing language of the self, whereby biblical Hebrew terms are made to conform to a modern dichotomy of mind and body.