A Gold Ring in a Swine’s Snout (Prov 11:22)

This chapter explores jewellery in the Hebrew Bible in light of the material evidence from the ancient Levant. I consider the function of jewellery in biblical texts, focused upon how these objects modify and ritualize the body. The ability of jewellery to index personhood is utilized in order to explore and unpack the use of jewellery in votive offerings. Moving beyond these insights, I then turn to the recovery of amulets inscribed with biblical passages—the earliest written evidence for biblical literature. As amulets, these objects served an apotropaic, ritual function. In biblical texts, we see this in action in the production of the golden calf, which is made from the jewellery of the Israelites. Such items therefore provide access to dimensions of personal religion and religious worship carried out outside of the official sphere. But by making sure that jewellery was utilized in the furnishing of the Temple, the biblical writers circumscribe this personal piety, making it compliant to the larger dominant model of the official Temple cult.

Conclusion

The conclusion brings together the threads of the preceding chapters in order to demonstrate the major insight of the book, namely, that for the biblical authors personhood was negotiated in relation to the body and bodily objects. These insights have far-reaching implications for how we understand ancient conceptions of the body, the person, and relationships. On the one hand, dress is essential to the articulation and construction of identity, and this is also the case in the modern world. On the other, the multi-material aspect to ancient bodies is very different from modern Western ontologies. Ancient constructions of dress and the body are thus like and at the same time quite unlike our own. These constructions animate and inform biblical literature, and so are essential to properly understand and unpack the Hebrew Bible.

She Painted Her Eyes and Looked Out of the Window (2 Kgs 9:30)

Evidence for the production and application of perfumed oil and cosmetics is found throughout the ancient world. In contrast to the wider ancient Near East, where both men and women utilize cosmetics, in the Hebrew Bible cosmetics were associated with women in general—and with a certain type of woman in particular. Cosmetics are connected with immoral behaviour and deviant sexual practices. Yet certain biblical texts feature a female character applying perfumed oils without censure. This chapter considers these women and their application of perfumed oils in the books of Esther and Ruth from the Hebrew Bible, and the book of Judith and the story of Susanna from the Greek Bible. Turning from perfume to eye kohl, I then explore Jezebel’s application of eye pigment in the books of Kings. Examining evidence from the wider ancient world, we can uncover dimensions of how the painted eye communicated status and identity, anxiety and power, with implications for the relationship between self and other in the world of the Hebrew Bible.

Introduction

This is a book about clothing and adornment in the world that gave rise to the Hebrew Bible. On the one hand, then, this is a book concerned with material culture: with the various garments and items of adornment that we read about in the pages of the Bible, or with the material remains of objects such as jewellery and cosmetic cases that have been recovered from the ancient Levant....

Spread the Hem of Your Cloak over Me (Ruth 3:9)

In the world of the biblical authors, there was no semiotic distinction between body and soul according to Western philosophical conceptions. Instead, the body was thought to index personhood. The physical body, encompassing skin, nails, and hair, functioned as a complex boundary of the self. Since clothing was worn directly upon the physical body, it was understood as a manifestation of that boundary, and as such it was thought to take on or encode the personhood of the wearer. Clothing’s potential to index personhood meant that it could be utilized in order to transfer ethnicity or royal status from one individual to another, or even to sever the relationship between an individual from his or her family group. After exploring clothing and the body in ancient Near Eastern literature, I turn to the Hebrew Bible, where we will see that these insights are essential in order to properly comprehend and unpack the function of clothing in certain biblical texts. Clothing’s potential to index abstract conceptions of the self animates and informs these texts, with implications for understanding the complex relationship between the body and the self in the biblical world.

Holy Garments for Glory and for Beauty (Exod 28:2)

In this chapter, I explore the function of dress in its wider social context, informed by anthropological and sociological approaches to the body. I consider the role of clothing as a disguise in the stories of Pughat, from the Ugaritic epic of Aqhat, and Tamar, from the book of Genesis. These stories reveal the gendered dimensions of clothing. At the same time, as something which can be changed at will, clothing allows these female characters to adopt and discard various personas, and in so doing to affect a change in their social status and positioning. Moving from female bodies to male bodies, I then consider the dress of the High Priest prescribed by the book of Exodus. The elaborate and ornate clothing worn by the High Priest manifests his liturgical power. But beyond this, these garments are what mark individuals as priests, granting them privileged access to the divine. We will see that clothing is central to the construction of identity—and the articulation of power.

He Will Wash His Garments in Wine (Gen 49:11)

This chapter takes its starting point from the notion that, for the biblical authors, clothing and jewellery symbolically encoded the personhood of its wearer. These items could thus manifest and modify the body in ritual contexts. As such, the manipulation and destruction of clothing items in the ritual context took on a heavy symbolic value. After the ritual use of textiles in the wider ancient Near East is explored, this insight is shown to explicate a number of the more difficult references to clothing in biblical literature. Moreover, since the production of textiles was gendered in the ancient world, this special function of clothing provided women with agency in ritual and religious settings. In these texts, textiles afford women with the means to become experts in rituals associated with life and death. These references therefore attest to the use of clothing and textiles in an important but largely unacknowledged aspect of female ritual expertise.