Body Language by Jacqueline Vayntrub

Body Language by Jacqueline Vayntrub

A revelatory study of embodied voice and its function in biblical texts

Performance, transmission, and corporeality were essential to ancient understandings of textuality. Far more than an aide-mémoire, written text constituted a powerful mechanism for capturing and transmitting embodied vocal presence. In this bold and provocative book, Jacqueline Vayntrub demonstrates how embedded concepts of embodied speechmaking shaped a tradition of aesthetics and interpretation in the Hebrew Bible.

For authors and readers alike, biblical texts functioned as vessels containing voices for posterity, preserving otherwise fleeting moments of performance and transporting audiences into an idealized or stylized past. Through incisive readings of passages from diverse genres and examinations of the social and material dimensions of speech in the ancient Near East, Vayntrub offers a striking reconceptualization of the biblical authors’ understanding of literary craft.

“This remarkable work of scholarship—voices—the ways in which orality, vocal performance, textuality, and biblical speechmaking do not simply engage people, but combine to create and curate personhood itselfThis book will rewire the ways in which scholars hear, and think, and speak about biblical texts.”—Francesca Stavrakopoulou, University of Exeter

“Jacqueline Vayntrub’s Body Language is the first full treatment of the manifold ways in which voice is given voice in the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on texts from every corner of the Bible and cornering every genre, Vayntrub employs sophisticated theory and very close reading, making the case that biblical texts are not only meant to be heard and transmitted but that they are meant to perpetuate their voices, culminating in a written text that embodies voice. Comprehensive and abounding in insight, this is a must-read for any and all who want to understand biblical literature.”—Edward L. Greenstein, Bar-Ilan University

“With deep insight and perceptive ear, Vayntrub’s Body Language unearths a genre-spanning poetics of biblical speech. This groundbreaking study shows that ancient preoccupations with embodied sound reveal forgotten commitments to the bodily force of biblical texts.”—Braxton Shelley, Yale Divinity School

“Fresh and creative, this book upends conventional wisdom about the relationship between text and body by centering performance both within and beyond the text. Body Language will be a key reference point in future studies of embodiment, performance, and poetics.”—Anathea Portier-Young, author of The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature

“It is easy to forget that our understanding of the body is a cultural construct, and that historical perceptions of the body are constructs too. This book, which demonstrates how the Hebrew Bible’s native concept of speechmaking is embodied, social, and material, brings to life biblical text in all its fleshiness and dimensionality.”—Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme, University of Oslo

“By showing us just how much speech in ancient Israel can teach us about being human, Body Language ushers in an exciting, vital conversation within the humanities.”—David Lambert, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 
 

Jacqueline Vayntrub is associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School and author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms. She lives in New Haven, CT.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300230901
ISBN 10	0300230907
Title	Body Language
Author	Jacqueline Vayntrub
Series	The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	2026-08-25
Number of pages	232
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.