Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Mutilating enemies' bodies was a common wartime practice in the ancient Near East. One finds in Mesopotamian and Egyptian art many examples of the mutilation of enemies by both these powers, and the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha, too, attest the widespread nature of the practice.1 According to biblical narratives, the Israelites both experienced said mutilation and practiced it against others, sometimes even against other Israelites when the fighting was not against a foreign group but internal. At first glance, these narratives are striking merely for their brutality, but when one looks further, it becomes apparent that violently altering the bodies of one's enemies was not a random act of sadistic aggression in ancient Israel but was in fact one that functioned in certain striking and important ways. One of these was that mutilation signaled a newly established power dynamic between the victim and the aggressor. Another, as we shall see, was that mutilation served to bring shame upon the victim and their community by associating the victim with a lower-status group and/or by effecting an actual status change in the victim.2 I. "MUTILATION" AND "SHAME" DEFINED Before moving to an examination of biblical texts that describe the practice of mutilating enemies, two key terms merit definition. The first of these is the word "mutilation" itself. This term, as I define it, refers to a negatively constructed somatic alteration. As the phrase "negatively constructed" should imply, conceptions of what qualifies as a mutilation vary from society to society. For example, what an American would consider mutilating is not necessarily what a Pacific Islander or a Nepalese tribesman would consider mutilating; such a construction is dependent on one's social and cultural norms. Even within a single culture, however, what would be considered normative behavior for one individual is not necessarily what would be considered acceptable for another, for a society's notions of normativity are often contingent on the age, and especially the gender, of the individual.3 Because constructions of mutilation vary in these ways, this treatment will not be limited to particular acts that we as Americans, or as modern Westerners perhaps, see as mutilating or disfiguring,4 but will instead treat those physical changes which the biblical texts themselves construct as such. The second part of the above definition, that mutilations are "somatic alterations," refers to the fact that a mutilation is always a result of some physical change, whether by removal of some part of the body, by marking the body, or by manipulating parts of the body. The word mutilation, then, is not synonymous with the word "blemish" in my usage, though both refer to negatively constructed physical attributes, for the word "blemish" (or "defect") signifies any somatic deviation. Thus, blemishes may be congenital (being born with one eye, for example); they may develop over time (e.g., a skin disease); or they may be caused by an external agent. Mutilations, on the other hand, are always brought about by an external agent or force. They are created; they do not merely arise or spontaneously appear, as a blemish could. To put the matter succinctly: all mutilations are blemishes, but not all blemishes are mutilations. The second term that requires definition is the word "shame." Much ink has been spilled by anthropologists and psychologists alike in attempting to define what shame is exactly and in contesting the definitions of others.5 In the past decade various biblicists have also devoted energy to applying these definitions to the Hebrew Bible.6 This treatment, like some of those by the latter group of scholars, will not focus on the theoretical issues surrounding the study of shame but will center instead on describing shame in specific contexts in ancient Israel as it relates to mutilation. …