This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (review)

The Society of Biblical Literature's Semeia Studies series has always featured new topics and methods in biblical studies. The editors of this volume assembled thirteen articles that address disability in biblical, ancient Near Eastern, and Greco-Roman documents. As a field of the humanities, disability studies examines physical, emotional, and cognitive impairments in the context of social practices and values. A key distinction of the field, noted in the editors' introduction, is that between medical and social models of disability. Those working in the medical model focus on the impairment of individual bodies and seek cures, whereas those working in the social model examine the interactions between bodily variety and constructed environments. The latter model draws attention to social practices (e.g., building design and communication conventions) that exclude those with impaired bodies. This collection addresses both models and thus should be of interest both for the history of medicine in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean and also for the social and religious beliefs and practices surrounding various impairments.

The first section, "Rethinking Disabilities in Ancient Texts," contains five articles on broad topics, including ancient Mesopotamian myths, Greco-Roman myths and social practices, and the intersection of gender and disability in ancient Egyptian art and Hebrew biblical literature. Four of these contributors, Neal Walls, Nicole Kelley, Carole Fontaine, and Thomas Hentrich, all employ primary literary and material data to discuss the terminology of disability and the social ideologies surrounding it. The fifth author in this set, Hector Avalos, proposes sensory criticism as a systematic approach to the biblical literature. Sensory criticism addresses how a culture defines the senses and prefers one over the others. This approach would help determine how disabling, or not disabling, a given physical impairment would be. The idea shows promise beyond biblical studies.

The second section, "Biblical Texts and Disability Studies," contains articles focused on specific portions of the Bible. Kerry Wynn provides a positive reading of Isaac's blindness and Jacob's limp in the patriarchal legends of Genesis. Jeremy Schipper demonstrates how disability can function as a narrative device: he relates disabled figures to key transition points in Israelite political life. The prophetic books are represented in Sarah Melcher's contribution, which analyzes disability in metaphors of healing and moral corruption. She also suggests a disability-liberation interpretation of the prophets. Two articles deal with New Testament material. Holly Joan Toensing places the story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5: 1–20) in dialogue with the experience of contemporary persons with direct experience of mental illness. Her moving interpretation gives full voice to contemporary experience while maintaining the narrative's historical context. Finally, Martin Albl gives a careful examination of ability and disability terms in Paul's letters, arguing that Paul reverses his society's valuation of disability. All of these articles are useful to the historian of medical terminology and taxonomy; yet their greatest value lies in their sensitivity to social attitudes surrounding various disabilities.

The final section contains three essays that respond to the previous ten. Janet Lees demonstrates an ethnographic method of studying how disabled persons interpret the Bible. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call for a more systematic critical stance toward biblical categories and ideology. In the closing article, Bruce Birch commends the emergence of disability perspectives in biblical scholarship. Although this section may be of more interest to biblical scholars and literary critics than to historians of ancient medicine, it amplifies a feature of the volume that should be of interest to medical sociologists. Authoritative religious texts often play an important role in how people experience and interpret their bodies; for the scholar interested in this angle, the articles by Toensing and Lees should be particularly valuable.