Disability and Isaiah's Suffering Servant

by Schipper, Jeremy

• ISBN13: 9780199594863
• ISBN10: 0199594864
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-09-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Although disability imagery is ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, characters with disabilities are not. The presence of the former does not guarantee the presence of the later. While interpreters explain away disabilities in specific characters, they celebrate the rhetorical contributions that disability imagery makes to the literary artistry of biblical prose and poetry, often as a trope to describe the suffering or struggles of a presumably nondisabled person or community. This situation contributes to the appearance (or illusion) of a Hebrew Bible that uses disability as a rich literary trope while disavowing the presence of figures or characters with disabilities. Isaiah 53 provides a wonderful example of this dynamic at work. The "Suffering Servant" figure in Isaiah 53 has captured the imagination of readers since very early in the history of biblical interpretation. Most interpreters understand the servant as an otherwise able bodied person who suffers. By contrast, Jeremy Schipper's study shows that Isaiah 53 describes the servant with language and imagery typically associated with disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature. Informed by recent work in disability studies from across the humanities, it traces both the disappearance of the servant's disability from the interpretative history of Isaiah 53 and the scholarly creation of the able bodied suffering servant.

Author Biography

Jeremy Schipper is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Temple University, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
Introduction: Disabling Progress in Suffering Servant Scholarship	p. 1
A translation of Isaiah 53 (52:13-53:12)	p. 3
The figures in Isaiah 53	p. 4
Sources and structure of Isaiah 53	p. 6
The suffering servant and the cultural history of disability	p. 7
Overview of forthcoming chapters	p. 10
Disabling Methodology in Hebrew Bible Studies	p. 13
Defining disability according to various models	p. 14
What counts as disability imagery?	p. 20
Conclusions	p. 30
The Servant as a Figure with Disabilities	p. 31
Bernhard Duhm, the servant songs, and the servant with disabilities	p. 32
The servant's disability as a social experience	p. 36
Was an able-bodied servant injured?	p. 42
Was an able-bodied servant killed?	p. 45
Did an able-bodied servant recover?	p. 49
Was the servant an able-bodied prisoner?	p. 55
Conclusions	p. 69
The Servant as Scriptural Sufferer	p. 60
Disability imagery lost in translation	p. 61
Disability imagery lost in typology	p. 71
Conclusion: the invention of the able-bodied	p. 80
suffering servant	p. 83
The Servant as Historical or Collective Sufferer	p. 83
Identifying the servant through disability	p. 84
The servant as messiah	p. 89
The servant as king	p. 91
The servant as prophet	p. 93
The servant as a collective reference	p. 99
Conclusions	p. 106
Conclusion: The Servant as Able-Bodied Passer	p. 107
Brave new worlds without disabilities	p. 108
Democratizing the servant or appropriating disability?	p. 109
The servant's afterlife: creative reapplying or passing?	p. 110
Notes	p. 113
Works Cite	p. 143
Index to Biblical and Other Ancient Text	p. 157
General Index	p. 166
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