Scholars love to claim that the Hebrew Bible had no clear notion of “the body.” This claim, however, fails to see how in English too the word “body” might pickup different meanings. Sometimes “body” means the entire physique, but other times we use the word to exclude the head and limbs. Likewise we can find a “body” in the street and still tell the police that there was “nobody” there at the time… Nonetheless, despite a body of evidence, we are quite sure that WE have a perfectly clear notion about what a body is. There is no reason in the world to allow for less in the Ancient Israelite mind. Moreover, these same researchers have failed to identify the fundamental biblical concept of the physique as a combination of the skeletal bone-frame and the soft tissue body, etzem and basar. This notion—which we learned in the previous post—is perfectly consistent across the entire canon.
The trickiest cases, for my reading of basar, concern verses where it is food. We have no notion of eating the “bodies” of animals, only their “meat” (or “flesh”). The many verses about basar as foodstuff have, therefore, skewed our reading of the term and prevented us from reading it as “body,” across the board. In truth, however, our modern notion about hamburgers not being bodystuff is arbitrary. Read, for instance, STEP FOUR from a New York Times article (July 1986) about how to cook squid:
“Rinse the body and tentacles well. You can now cook the body and tentacles as they are or, if preferred, slice the body into rings for deep-frying or sautéing.”
Well, if you can cook the body of a squid then you can cook the body of a cow... It is only convention that makes the idea seem weird. In fact, even in some verses that concern basar as foodstuff, translating the word as “body,” rather that the accepted “flesh,” makes perfect sense. Just remember how the ancients cooked and ate their meat, without the benefit of processed packaging. The following verse should easily illustrate the point:
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Allow me to reiterate. In many verses using “meat” for basar would be more than acceptable (try it, for instance, in the pig verse above). Rarely, it’s even unavoidable. What I care about are the non foodstuff verses—which we will return to, with vigor, next week. In order to redeem them, however, from the clutches of “flesh” we must see how, for the ancients, “meat” was a superfluous notion: eating flesh was no different than eating bodies, or body parts, or bodystuff… they would hardly understand the modern distinction. Indeed, ask yourself the following: Are we ourselves perfectly at ease calling a serving of broiled cow-brain, or goose liver, or bone marrow, or tong, or ox testicles, or frog legs, “flesh”? With these, doesn’t it feel much more like eating body-parts? Even regarding muscle-tissue, we speak of “eating ribs” (a body part) and not rib-meat. Well, in antiquity “shoulder roast” felt quite the same.
It helps to understand also that the biblical word for eating is of a mauling plus devouring nature: A sword can “eat” a body, as does leprosy—just like fire “eats” wood. It is in the same sense that eating devours the body of an animal. The following basar verse refers to the Israelites devouring quail, but the picture is the same:
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So here are a few more verses, within the context of feeding, which, in addition to “flesh,” can also be read quite beautifully with “body” standing for basar:
· “Within three more days Pharaoh… will hang you on a tree, and the birds will eat your body off you” (Genesis 40:19)
· “[the Passover lamb] is to be eaten in a single house; you are not to take any of the body outside of the house, nor are you to break any bone in it” (Exodus 12:46)
· “you shall not eat any prey body in the field; you shall throw it to the dogs” (Exodus 22:30)
· “And their body shall be yours, as the wave-breast and as the right thigh…” (Numbers 18:18)
· “And on the tables was the body of the offering” (Ezekiel 40:43)
So next time you pickup hamburgers from the supermarket—think dead bodystuff... J If nothing else, you might feel an esthetic dissonance in slapping on it a slice of cheese, made from a mother’s fountain of life.
Bon-appétit,
Ethan
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