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Book Review: Abschriften and Scribal Habits

to the construction of body and gender. She adopts ‘a close reading...underpinned by gender studies, semantics, discourse analysis, translation studies and ritual studies’ and begins by setting out the nature of her project. A detailed exegesis of Leviticus 12 is presented in her second chapter and of Leviticus 15 in chapter three. Thereafter, convinced of the utopian nature of Leviticus, she incorporates a range of complementary methods into her discussion. The exegetical chapters each begin with a translation of the Hebrew text, together with footnotes relating to textual issues. This is followed by a discussion, phrase-by-phrase, of what the text means with some emphasis on concepts of body and gender, matters that were much neglected by earlier scholarship. In each case the chapter is completed by a translation of and further discussion of the LXX rendering. No doubt there will be exegetes, especially among those who would want a pre-exilic date for Leviticus, who will take issue with some of her observations, although I find her observations in this respect much to the point. The chapters that follow set out ‘to investigate the use of the terms designating the gendered body and bodily processes from Leviticus 12 and 15 in other biblical texts’. In chapter four it is argued that the Hebrew term for flesh/body is ‘a central as well as gender-neutral (or non-gendered) anthropological concept’, before entering into a lengthy discussion of circumcision that considers numerous aspects of the practise, which ‘appears only in some literary layers’ and only became constitutive of Israelite identity in exilic or post-exilic times. Ultimately this ‘physical marker of religious and political difference’, despite the gender-neutral use of the term signifying body, ‘sets a seal on the differentiation of the sexes’. In chapter five (‘Bodily Fluids’), ErbeleKüster shows that a single term is used to signify genital discharges of both genders, although that has been obscured by ‘sex-specific translations’ such as ‘male mucosal discharge’ and ‘menstrual blood flow’. Moreover, the texts discussed in this chapter outline ‘a physiology of bodily fluids’ that despite drawing ‘boundaries between the sexes’ nonetheless ‘establishes an analogy between male and female genital secretions’. In chapter six (‘Menstruation’) she argues that the term niddah in Lev. 12 and 15 should not be assimilated with impurity—such assimilation is based on Ezekiel 36 rather than these texts—and that there is no proof for the isolation of women during or consequent to menstruation in First or Second Temple Times. She rightly resists connotations of birth or menstruation with sickness, although her favoured term ‘destabilization’ seems somewhat awkward and imprecise. Chapter seven (‘The Cultic Perspective’) focuses on the notions of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’, which should be understood in relation to ‘holiness’, and she discusses impurity in terms of ‘cultic disability’, purity in terms of ‘cultic ability’. Erbele-Küster concludes (chapter eight) by arguing that Leviticus constitutes ‘not a ritual text but a text for reading’ and, as literature, account should be taken of its fictional, ‘utopian, eschatological character’. In the absence of a temple and its cult, in exilic times and in the diaspora, purity and holiness are realized ‘in the textualized practice of the body’ in order to assure the community’s survival. On the whole there is much here to appreciate, and much to wrestle with. There are observations aplenty to debate, some perhaps to resist and others to build upon. While some arguments may require strengthening or modification, such as the argument that the texts were written to replace ritual practice with reading, it would not be safe for anyone working in the area to ignore the book.