Totalizing Description in Biblical Literature: From Literary Device to Self Boundary

• In Event: Re-reading the Self: Reflection's Dynamics (Biblical/Rabbinic)

Abstract

In this paper I draw connections between a literary device found in biblical and para-biblical literature and ancient conceptions of the self and its boundaries. A number of biblical texts—particularly poetic texts—demonstrate an affinity for description that aims at encompassing the whole. Usually this literary device surfaces as a head-to-toe praise of bodies (for example, Song 4:1-7). Totalizing descriptions not only praise a body’s success, they can also lament a body’s failure. These descriptions—not limited to physical human bodies, but also to bodies of mythical creatures, deities, the cosmos, and bodies of knowledge—frequently conclude in a statement of totality, either of the subject of the description itself or in comparison to others. In this paper, I focus on the totalizing description of the city of Tyre in Ezekiel 27, and how in the total description of this city’s success and subsequent failure, we can observe an underlying concept of the self, its boundaries, and relationships with others. In the context of Ezekiel, Tyre’s failure is related to the body politic of the nation, forming an early articulation of a widespread Western political theology.

Author

• Jacqueline Vayntrub, Yale Divinity School