[D]isability seldom has been explored as a condition or experience in its own right; disability’s psychological and bodily variations have been used to metaphorize nearly every social conflict outside its own ignoble predicament in culture.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation’, in The Body and Physical Difference:
Discourses on Disability
[The prophet in Isa 42:18–19] carries the metaphor to the point of absurdity when he calls the people ‘a blind servant’ and ‘a deaf messenger’. To begin the scene like this is to be sure of the listeners’ attention. A blind servant is useless, a deaf messenger ineligible. Everyone must realize that from his or her own experience.
Klaus Baltzer, Deutero-Isaiah: A Commentary on Isaiah 40–55
Recently, biblical scholars have shown an increased interest in how ancient Near Eastern literature, including the Hebrew Bible, uses disability as an analytic tool for social and political organization and interpretation, similar to gender or ethnicity.1 Informed by the burgeoning field of disability studies, this scholarship demonstrates that when we discuss disability, we usually imply more than a medical diagnosis or objective description of a particular physical or cognitive trait. Thus, we should pay close attention to the particular language or contexts that a given passage uses to discuss disability.
This chapter examines a variety of methodological issues that will influence our study of the servant throughout this book. First, we consider how our concept of disability may change according to the particular type of language we use to approach this subject. We discuss different models for disability used within disability studies, including the medical, social, and cultural models. Second, we explore various factors involved in how we determine what counts as a disability beyond a medical definition, including age, legal standing, injury, and metaphorical uses. This chapter helps explain what we mean when we refer to the servant as a figure with disabilities throughout this book.
Biblical Hebrew has no word equivalent to the English word ‘disability’. The Hebrew word mum, usually translated as ‘blemish’ in the NRSV, refers to many conditions that we may consider a disability, such as blindness or lameness (cf. Lev 21:16–23). Yet mum does not cover every trait that we may consider a disability. The Bible does not use the word mum for conditions such as deafness, muteness, or skin anomalies, even though these conditions are sometimes paired with other conditions that qualify as a mum (e.g. the pairing of ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’ in Lev 19:14; Isa 29:18; 35:5; 43:8).2 Nevertheless, this does not mean that the concept of disability would not have made sense to people in ancient Israel. As Rebecca Raphael observes, biblical Hebrew does not have a word equivalent to the English word ‘religion’ either. Yet studies of ancient Israelite religion abound within biblical scholarship.3 Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible frequently groups together words for certain physical traits such as ‘lame’, ‘blind’, or ‘deaf’ (Exod 4:11; 2 Sam 5:8; Jer 31:8; Mal 1:8). This grouping suggests that ancient Israelites did not understand these particular conditions as isolated occurrences, but as belonging to a larger conceptual category.4 Exactly what qualifies as markers of this category, however, could change. For example, not every culture would necessarily understand cerebral palsy and anorexia as belonging to a common conceptual category. Understandings of the concept of disability may differ according to their particular social and cultural location. Medical model of disability. Different understandings of disability according to location do not factor into what some disability scholars refer to as the ‘medical model’ of disability. This model understands disability as an anomalous condition isolated in an individual’s body and in need of diagnosis and correction or cure. The medical model approaches disability as exclusively a medical condition that must be cured by doctors or overcome by the individual through lifestyle changes. It positions disability as a pathological condition even in cases when, as with attempts to pathologize certain races, genders, or sexual orientations, no solid scientific or medical basis exists to do so.5 In many ways, the focus on a cure or correction uncritically reflects and reinforces the immense social pressure to pass cosmetically as able-bodied regardless of whether this is the healthiest choice for the individual. This focus overlooks the fact that, although a disease may result in a disability, a healthy person with a disability is not an oxymoron.6
Adherents to the medical model may consider social factors as aiding in the diagnosis of a disability but not as contributing to the definition of disability. The medical model portrays disability as the result of an anomalous body unrelated to a society’s political, educational, religious, architectural, and other structures. Thus, when persons with disabilities appear to navigate these structures like able-bodied people do, we often congratulate them for ‘overcoming’ their disability as if the difficulty lay solely in the individual body and not at all in their experience of society’s larger structures. Yet we would not claim that racism, homophobia, or sexism operates on the individual level alone and has nothing to do with larger social and political structures. It would seem absurd to argue that we could resolve these issues if individuals could just overcome their minority status and act like a white, heterosexual man. Instead, or at least ideally, we critically examine the social and political structures that contribute to racism, homophobia, and sexism. Unfortunately, we rarely do this with disability.
Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible rarely discusses disability within a medical context that aims to diagnose a particular condition based on symptoms appearing in an individual body. While certain extant Babylonian and Assyrian ‘diagnostic texts’ approach disability as a medical issue,7 the Hebrew Bible tends to discuss disability as a social, political, cultic, sexual, moral, theological, or military issue, to name just a few examples.
Social model of disability. In contrast to the medical model’s definition of disability, the ‘social model’ of disability distinguishes between ‘impairments’ and ‘disabilities’. The social model enjoys popularity among disability scholars working primarily in the social sciences in the United Kingdom.8 According to this model, the term ‘impairment’ describes a particular physical, emotional, or cognitive trait that results in the inability of the mind or body to function as expected. Although a person may acquire impairments through a disease or illness, impairments are not necessarily related to a disease. Since impairments can also result from an injury or a congenital condition; they do not necessarily represent pathological or contagious conditions.
Distinct from impairment, the social model defines the term ‘disability’ as socially created discrimination against people with impairments. For example, a wheelchair user’s restricted mobility may not result from his or her impairment alone but also from a lack of access ramps into some buildings. Likewise, diminished eyesight or hearing in young people qualifies as an impairment. Yet, as Lennard Davis observes, we tend not to understand eyeglasses as a marker of disability among young people, whereas visible hearing aids often mark a young person as a person with a disability.9 In this sense, the label of disability does not come from any intrinsic property of the impairment itself. Rather, it comes from the perceived frequency or rarity of the impairment within a particular society. Such designations probably tell us more about our social norms than they do about an individual’s body. Defining disability as a social construction does not mean advocates of this model resist advances in medicine or support technology. After all, deciding what counts as an impairment requires the diagnostic work usually associated with the medical model.10 Instead, distinguishing between disability and impairment implies that, as with race or sexual orientation, we should not confuse impairment with pathology.
The social model has received criticism, however, because it defines disability primarily as a social construction. Critics of the social model emphasize that disability is a real, lived social experience that describes how many people with impairments experience the world. Disability is not simply an abstract concept of discrimination that has no concrete point of contact with the limitations of individuals’ actual bodies. Jenny Morris notes ‘a tendency within the Social Model of disability to deny the experience of our own bodies, insisting that our physical differences and restrictions are entirely socially created’.11 For example, while it is a contributing factor, social discrimination is not the only factor that restricts a wheelchair user’s mobility. The provision of access ramps does not mean that a wheelchair user can now walk. Likewise, despite the social meanings that we assign to eyeglasses or hearing aids, this does not suggest that visual or hearing impairments are entirely social constructions that do not actually exist in the individual body. In this sense, disability differs from racism, sexism, or homophobia in that we cannot identify the restrictions that disable people as prohibitions against otherwise able-bodied persons.12
Furthermore, certain factors blur the line between impairment and disability. If we define impairment as a trait that inhibits the mind or body from functioning as expected, we assume a set of socially determined expectations for how minds or bodies should function. In that sense, impairments are defined partially by some socially accepted notion of reasonable expectations. Moreover, we could ask whether conditions such as anorexia qualify as impairments or disabilities. With anorexia, it seems hard to distinguish neatly between the products of an individual’s particular biological condition and (internalized) socially constructed discrimination.13
This difficulty increases when we try to draw a neat line between impairment and disability in ancient Near Eastern cultures because we have very limited understandings of or access to either the biological conditions of individuals or their larger social norms. In many cases, we can only make an educated guess regarding the particular impairment described in an ancient Near Eastern text or the types of meanings such cultures assigned to these particular impairments. Often, we cannot pinpoint an impairment precisely enough to separate it from any accompanying social discrimination. Nevertheless, we do not have to diagnose an impairment precisely in order to identify ancient Near Eastern descriptions of the social experience of persons with impairments. Likewise, we can identify these descriptions without completely understanding the process of disability’s social construction reflected in these descriptions.
Cultural model of disability. Rather than defining disability as socially constructed discrimination against persons with impairments, we define the term ‘disability’ in this book as the social experience of persons with certain impairments. This definition of disability reflects the influence of the ‘cultural model’ of disability, which has gained popularity among many North American disability scholars working primarily in the humanities.14 How an individual or community, regardless of whether they self-identify as disabled, articulates or narrates these social experiences depends on the type(s) of language that they use. As suggested earlier, when we discuss disability we may use a combination of social, political, medical, sexual, religious, scientific, athletic, legal, environmental, cartoonish, and military language, to name just a few examples.
As we will find in the following chapter, Isaiah 53 does not diagnose the servant’s impairments. Rather than describing the servant’s disability as an abnormal medical condition in need of diagnosis and treatment, Isaiah 53 describes the servant’s social and political experience of living with impairments. In this sense, it is appropriate to refer to the servant as a figure with disabilities based on our ‘cultural model’ definition. We must study carefully the depiction of this experience of disability in order to understand the nature of the servant’s so-called suffering.
Focusing on disability as a social experience has important implications for how we study disability in the Hebrew Bible. First, it reminds us that the medical model is not always the dominant model for conceptualizing disability. This holds true not only in the contemporary industrialized world, but even more so within the world of ancient Near Eastern literature. As Raphael suggests, theological frameworks or discourses rather than medical ones denominate understandings of disability in the Hebrew Bible.15 We will discover in the next chapter that Raphael’s suggestion helps us understand how Isaiah 53 approaches disability. Yet a tendency exists in biblical scholarship to assume that the medical model popular within the contemporary industrialized world represents the normative and universal meaning of disability.16 Many scholars assume that Isaiah 53 does not depict the servant as a figure with disabilities because the text does not offer a precise medical diagnosis of his condition. Yet this assumption understands disability only through a medical model that biblical texts rarely use.
Second, analysing how we articulate disability entails analysing how we articulate able-bodiedness instead of assuming that able-bodiedness represents the unstated natural order of things. In questioning the (false) dichotomy between disability as abnormal and able-bodied as normal, this approach foregrounds another important assumption that many of us bring to reading the Hebrew Bible. Since the Hebrew Bible does not describe the vast majority of characters physically, we tend to imagine these characters as able-bodied by default. Yet, if by normal we mean the majority or typical, we should note that the most commonly described types of bodies in the Hebrew Bible are those that do not function as expected due to age, injuries, diseases, or other impairments.17
For some, that the Hebrew Bible includes descriptions of disability implies that otherwise undescribed characters are able-bodied, assuming that able-bodied represents the body’s normal state of existence. Robert McRuer comments on this tendency when he notes that while ‘homosexuality and disability clearly share a pathologized past… Able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.’18 Yet, like disability, ‘able-bodied’ is a marker of bodily difference and not the default normal state of human existence from which disability deviates.19
In fact, we spend most of the early and later years of a ‘normal’ life cycle without what we usually understand as able-bodied capabilities. Martha Nussbaum observes, ‘As the life span increases, the relative independence that many people sometimes enjoy looks more and more like a temporary condition… Even in our prime, many of us encounter shorter or longer periods of extreme dependency on others—after surgery or a severe injury, or during a period of depression or acute mental stress.’20 The aging process of a person who would otherwise identify himself or herself as able-bodied creates problems for the notion that disability represents an abnormal state. To emphasize this point, some disability scholars and activists refer to people who identify themselves as non-disabled as TABS, which stands for ‘temporarily able-bodied’.21 In this sense, the line between disability and able-bodied is not absolute and obvious. A variety of factors beyond a person’s biological condition influences how we distinguish between disability and able-bodied.
A major complication with analysing the ways that a text articulates disability as a social experience is determining whether certain language and imagery represents disability or some other state or condition. Deciding what counts as disability remains difficult enough in some contemporary literature, but even more so when the text comes from a very different time and culture. In the following sections, we examine some of the factors that complicate a textual study of disability. In the process, we address several issues that obscure the servant’s status as disabled and allow readers to imagine him as able-bodied more by default than by textual evidence.
Defining disability according to age. We rarely determine whether a person has a disability by a medical diagnosis alone. We also consider our social expectations for a person of his or her age. If a person uses a walking stick in his or her sixties or seventies, we might consider the walking stick as a sign of advanced age, a natural point in the aging process. If another person uses an identical walking stick in his or her twenties or thirties, we might consider the same walking stick as a sign of disability, an anomaly within the expected life cycle. Often, we measure a cognitive impairment in adulthood through a comparison with an able-bodied child. We may say that he or she has the cognitive capacity of an (able-bodied) six-year-old. In a 2008 book, Tobin Siebers noted that there are nearly 50 million people with disabilities in the United States. Yet he observed that this number does not include ‘the elderly, many of whom cannot climb stairs or open doors with ease, nor children, whose physical and mental abilities fit uncomfortably in the adult world. The disabled represent a minority that potentially includes anyone at anytime.’22 Whether we consider a person disabled depends largely on the point in life and how suddenly he or she acquires an impairment. If an impairment develops slowly over a long period of time, we might consider it a natural by-product of aging. On the other hand, if one acquires it rapidly through an accident or injury, we might consider the same impairment a disability.23
In the Hebrew Bible, infertility, or barrenness, provides a prime example of the complicated relationship between age and disability. Infertility is the most frequently discussed disability affecting women in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Gen 11:30; 16:2; 20:18; 25:21; 29:31; Exod 23:26; Deut 7:14; Judg 13:2–3; 1 Sam 1:5).24 A number of ancient Near Eastern texts, such as the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninmah (COS 1.159: 518) or a rabbinic commentary on Isaac’s birth in Gen 21:2 (Gen. Rab. 53:8), include infertility within their discussions of other disabilities such as blindness, lameness, or certain cognitive disabilities.25 These texts suggest that infertility qualified as a disability in those cultures.
The Hebrew Bible describes infertility more as a social experience than a biological anomaly.26 For example, 1 Sam 1:2–20 focuses on Hannah’s experience of infertility. Since Peninnah, Hannah’s sister wife, had many children, she ‘used to provoke Hannah severely, to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb. So it went on year by year; as often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat’ (vv. 5–6). The following verses portray this social dynamic as making Hannah’s ‘heart sad’ (v. 8), she is ‘deeply distressed’ (v. 10), in a state of ‘misery’ (v. 11) and ‘deeply troubled’ (v. 15). We should note that none of these descriptions are inherent properties of infertility as a medical condition. The passage describes her experience of infertility and not the causes of her infertility. It describes her infertility not as an impairment alone but as a disability. Like 1 Samuel 1, we will find that Isaiah 53 focuses more on the servant’s social and political experience of impairments than on the specific nature of the impairments themselves.
Hannah’s experience as depicted in this passage would explain why we could label her as disabled by our cultural model definition. Nevertheless, this passage does not explain how the characters in the story would have induced her infertility. They would probably not identify her as infertile as a result of biological cause or medical examination. She would not have undergone medical tests at a fertility clinic as we might do in a contemporary industrialized society. Although the text provides a theological reason for her condition, namely that the LORD closed her womb (1 Sam 1:5–6; cf. Gen 16:2; 20:18), it does not explain explicitly how the characters would have realized that she was infertile. Assuming she had intercourse on a routine basis, they would have had to induce her divinely caused infertility from the amount of time that passed without conception. In this sense, her age would have played a large role in determining her infertility. While the Hebrew Bible does not usually mention the age of an infertile woman, Gen 18:11 reports that, ‘Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing’ (NIV). Cases of infertility in the Hebrew Bible highlight the fact that certain biblical characters did not qualify as disabled because of a medical diagnosis or a clear intrinsic difference from able-bodied characters. Rather, disability could be determined by social expectations for a person of a particular age.
Certainly, just like disability, what one society considers elderly might differ considerably from what another society considers elderly. The language and images that the art and literature of a particular culture associates with the aging process may not be universally recognized across all cultures. In fact, one of the difficulties for biblical scholars in studying disability is determining whether ancient audiences would have associated particular motifs with disabilities or advanced age. Would certain images have represented disability or old age or both for these audiences? For example, 1 Kgs 1:1 states, ‘King David was old and advanced in years; and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm.’ We could ask if this verse depicts David primarily as elderly or disabled. Along similar lines, Isaac (Gen 27:1), Jacob (Gen 48:10), Eli (1 Sam 4:15), and Ahijah (1 Kgs 14:4) all have visual impairments in old age.27 Ancient audiences may have considered visual impairments as a natural and expected by-product of the aging process and therefore understood the imagery as indicating advanced age instead of disability. After all, none of these passages imply that these characters experienced any social discrimination due to their visual impairment.28 Moreover, the number of euphemisms for blindness in ancient Near Eastern texts may suggest that it was a frequent, even ‘normal’, experience in those cultures.29 Retaining one’s eyesight late in life may have represented the exception rather than the rule. Deuteronomy 34:7 depicts Moses’ keen eyesight at the time of his death at age 120 as extraordinary.30 The cultural distance between modern biblical scholars and the ancient Near East makes it difficult to determine what language and images would have counted as disability imagery for ancient audiences.
Legal definitions of disability. The relationship between disability and age may not seem very important for our study of Isaiah 53. After all, the passage provides no indication of the imagined age of the servant. It focuses much more on the servant’s relationship to a larger community. If his description contains a social component, we could consider whether the passage depicts the servant’s disability in legal terms. Nevertheless, we still must consider age even if we define disability according to the law rather than medicine. In the United States, part of the legal definition of ‘disability’ according to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) includes ‘a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual’.31 One of the ‘major life activities’ that the ADA focuses on is employment. The United States’ economic system places a high value on employment since it plays an important role in the country’s financial structures.
Yet a medical or biological definition of what it means to be a living human being does not include employment. We would not speak of employment as a ‘major life activity’ as we would speak of breathing as a major life activity. Unlike breathing, we do not expect to engage in employment our entire lives. Ideally, small children should not have to find employment and a person should retire by at least his or her seventies or eighties. We expect employment to be a ‘major life activity’ roughly between a person’s twenties and sixties in our society. Thus, if a person uses a walking stick and this limits the type of job that he or she can perform during his or her twenties through sixties, we might consider this person disabled. If he or she uses a walking stick after the age in which employment is socially expected of him or her as a ‘major life activity’, then the walking stick may not signify a disability as much as his or her ‘normal’ elderly status.
Appealing to a legal definition of disability, however, may not help us understand what would have counted as a disability in ancient Near Eastern contexts.32 To our knowledge, no extant legal code from the Bible or other ancient Near Eastern literature provides a legal definition of disability. At most, we have a few statements that provide very general protections for people with disabilities. For example, Lev 19:14 states, ‘You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind.’ Deuteronomy 27:18 declares, ‘Cursed be anyone who misleads a blind person on the road.’ Likewise, in chapter 25 of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, one reads, ‘Do not laugh at a blind man, Nor tease a dwarf, Nor cause hardship for the lame.’33 An Assyrian text mentions the practice of giving bread to the deaf.34 Nonetheless, these examples hardly suggest that persons with disabilities enjoyed a protected legal status or that people in the ancient Near East ever conceived of persons with disabilities as a legally defined group that deserved special protections.
Defining disabilities versus injuries. The writing style in the Hebrew Bible is extremely terse. For example, Genesis 1 narrates the creation of the entire heavens and earth in just thirty-one verses with minimal physical description. Regarding physical descriptions of specific characters, the Hebrew Bible may describe them as hairy (Gen 27:11), fat (Judg 3:17), tall (1 Sam 9:2; 16:7; 17:4–7), beautiful (1 Sam 16:12; 17:42; Prov 11:22; Song 1:8; 2:10, 13; 5:9; 6:1), and so on, but such occasional descriptions lack sufficient detail to assist us in picturing a biblical character’s appearance. This writing style suggests that when the text mentions a disability it does not intend to aid us in diagnosing the condition (unlike other ancient Near Eastern diagnostic texts35). Thus, it becomes very difficult to determine whether certain descriptions signal an acquired disability or a temporary injury.
We should not assume that ancient Near Eastern audiences would share our assumption that a character’s injury is temporary unless the text informs us otherwise. For example, in one of the rare instances in which the Hebrew Bible describes an injured body following a non-fatal accident, it associates the injury with an acquired disability. According to 2 Sam 4:4, ‘Saul’s son Jonathan had a son who was crippled in his feet. He was five years old… His nurse picked him up and fled; and, in her haste to flee, it happened that he fell and became lame. His name was Mephibosheth.’ Mephibosheth’s accident leads to an acquired disability as the text indicates repeatedly during stories of his adult life (2 Sam 9:3, 13; 19:26).36 Considering the medical technology available at the time, ancient Near Eastern audiences may have associated serious non-fatal injuries with acquired disabilities instead of temporary conditions from which a full recovery was the expected norm (cf. Exod 21:18-19; Code of Hammurabi 206 [ANET, 175]; The Hittite Laws 10 [ANET, 189]).37 Imagining the undescribed body after injury as able-bodied by default may represent a relatively modern reading convention. The description of Mephibosheth may represent the rule rather than the exception in the ancient Near East.
The descriptive economy of biblical prose introduces other complications in distinguishing disability from injury. Often, the text makes only one mention of a character’s impairment. For example, Jacob sustains a hip injury during a wrestling match (Gen 32:25). After Gen 32:31 notes that Jacob limped away because of this injury, there is no further discussion of his hip or mobility.38 Following Genesis 32, Jacob’s body remains undescribed until Gen 48:1–10. In this passage, he loses his health and eyesight in old age, but this might mark Jacob as elderly rather than disabled for many of us. Thus, we have no way to determine if he made a full recovery from his hip injury in Genesis 32. We do not know if his condition signals a temporary injury to an otherwise able-bodied person or a permanent disability.39 An assumption that Jacob recovered because the text does not indicate otherwise presupposes that able-bodied is normal by default. This assumption, however, comes from textual silence rather than textual evidence. Again, we do not know that ancient audiences shared this assumption.
The wide semantic range of certain Hebrew words further complicates matters. For example, the Hebrew Bible uses forms related to the word hlh for a variety of conditions, including temporary and fatal injuries and illnesses, emotional distress, impairments, and disabilities. As with the English word ‘sick’, hlh can refer to anything from a minor cough to lung cancer.40 Isaiah 53 uses forms related to this word repeatedly when describing the servant’s so-called suffering (vv. 3, 4, 10). The NRSV translates Isa 53:10a as ‘it was the will of the LORD to crush the servant with pain (hlh)’. In light of other biblical uses of hlh, we could understand the servant’s ‘pain’ as emotional grief or concern for others (1 Sam 22:8; Amos 6:6), as lovesickness or lust (2 Sam 13:2), as a fatal or near fatal illness (1 Kgs 14:1 and 2 Kgs 20:1 respectively), as a chronic disability or disease (1 Kgs 15:23; 2 Chr 16:12), as wounds sustained through human violence (2 Kgs 8:29), as a severe injury due to an accident (1 Kgs 1:2), as a symbol of iniquity (Isa 33:24), and so on. Working with such vague vocabulary alone, we cannot know whether the text describes the servant as a figure with a disability or an otherwise able-bodied figure who sustains severe if not fatal injuries. Deciding whether the description signals injury or disability makes a big difference in how interpreters have imagined the nature of his so-called suffering. Nevertheless, scholars often opt for injury over disability when interpreting hlh in Isaiah 53. For example, when commenting on Isaiah 53, Roger N. Whybray writes, ‘[Hlh does not] necessarily refer to organic or other naturally caused diseases. [A form of hlh] is used in 2 Kings 1:2 of injuries caused by a fall. [It is] entirely suitable to describe injuries due to ill treatment.’41
Impairments as metaphors. Similar to the word hlh, many words or images used for impairments could signify some condition or circumstance other than the social experience of disability. We can use the English word ‘lame’ to describe a mobility impairment or some failed or ineffective effort or circumstance. Similar to the English word ‘weak’, the Hebrew word dal could describe physical weakness (Gen 41:19) but often refers to undesirable social or economic conditions (Exod 30:15; Lev 14:21; Ruth 3:10). Thus, when a word or phrase could represent a disability, frequently interpreters have the option to decide that it represents some other condition. Often, biblical scholars have exercised this option.
Moses’ speech difficulty in Exodus provides a good example of the scholarly tendency to choose an idiomatic interpretation of impairment language when textual evidence for both an idiomatic and non-idiomatic reading exists. In Exod 4:10, Moses explains that he is not a ‘man of words’ because he is literally ‘heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue’. Many interpreters read this reference to his heavy mouth and tongue as an idiom for general ineloquence rather than a physical disability.42 This interpretation finds support when Moses describes his speech difficulty as a case of ‘uncircumcised lips’ in 6:12 and 6:30. Describing something other than the genitals as ‘uncircumcised’ does not have to refer to a physical impairment. Jeremiah 6:10 connects ‘uncircumcised ears’ with the inability to hear the prophetic word, Lev 26:41 connects an ‘uncircumcised heart’ with iniquity (cf. Jer 9:26; Ezek 44:7, 9), and Lev 19:23 discusses the ‘uncircumcised fruit’ of newly planted trees.
In these other examples, however, the uncircumcised item never symbolizes ineloquence. Furthermore, interpreting Moses’ ‘heaviness of mouth’ as an idiom for ineloquence disregards the use of the phrase ‘if a man’s mouth is heavy…’ in ancient Near Eastern medical texts that offer diagnoses for various impairments.43 It also disregards the repeated appearances of physical impairments in the verses surrounding Exod 4:10. In 4:6–7, Moses contracts a skin anomaly temporarily, and in 4:11, God responds to Moses’ objection that he has a heavy mouth and tongue by asking rhetorically, ‘Who gives a mouth to humans? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?’ Nonetheless, despite the immediate context of 4:10 and the fact that cognate languages use a similar phrase in contexts that describe physical impairments, scholars tend to choose an idiomatic interpretation rather than imagine Moses as having a physical disability.
When the option for reading an impairment as symbolic exists, scholars have found it hard to resist. This holds especially true for Isaiah 40–55 since these chapters use such imagery quite frequently. As Raphael observes, ‘Most of the imagery is metaphorical and not about actual disabled persons. Quite a lot of Isaiah’s blind and deaf people have Normal eyes and ears.’44 Readers of this portion of Isaiah may become accustomed to the use of such imagery to describe presumably able-bodied people. For example, Isa 42:18 commands the deaf to listen and the blind to see but does not suggest a healing of an impaired audience. ‘Listen, you that are deaf; and you that are blind, look up and see! Who is blind but my servant, or deaf like my messenger whom I send? Who is blind like my dedicated one, or blind like the servant of the LORD?’ (Isa 42:18–19). In these verses, the similes involving deafness and blindness and a servant or messenger reinforce a metaphorical interpretation.
By the point that we reach Isaiah 53, we may hardly even stop to consider that the imagery may describe the experience of disability rather than the moral or physical condition of the otherwise able-bodied. For example, John N. Oswalt writes, ‘Was the Servant [in Isaiah 53] literally a sick man?… this does not seem likely. If all the images of suffering are taken literally, we end up with a composite picture that is unintelligible… [Instead, t]he point is that because he does not fit the stereotype of the arm of the Lord he will be treated as though he were ill; he will experience what the ill experience: avoidance.’45 We may take Oswalt’s position as representative of several other scholars.46 This argument assumes that if the poetic imagery in Isaiah 53 does not allow us to envision the disability precisely, then it must be describing something other than disability. This argument shows how quickly scholars can move from the recognition that the disability imagery is not literal to the conclusion that it must not describe a figure with disabilities.
Against such arguments, we should note that biblical poetry rarely describes any physical appearance literally. For example, the poetry of the Song of Songs describes a beautiful woman as follows: ‘Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved. Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil’ (4:1b–3).47 As Oswalt observes regarding Isaiah 53, if we take all the images of beauty in this passage literally we end up with a composite picture that is unintelligible. Nonetheless, few, if any, readers would conclude that this passage must not describe a beautiful woman simply because it describes her beauty with fruit and animal comparisons instead of a more literal image.
In poetry, we recognize descriptions of beauty without precise, clinical, language. Likewise, we should not deny the presence of disability because the poetry lacks precise, clinical, language. That approach assumes a medical model that understands disability through our ability to diagnose it. Yet the medical model ranks among the least poetic approaches to disability. It is hardly an appropriate model for analysing disability imagery in biblical poetry. Instead ancient Near Eastern poetry often uses a composite picture to depict disease or disability. For example, the narrator in the Mesopotamian ‘Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’ describes his illness or disability as follows: ‘[Demons] churned up my bowels, they tw [isted] my entrails(?), Coughing and hacking infected my lungs, They infected(?) my limbs, made my flesh pasty… Paralysis has fallen upon my flesh. Stiffness has seized my arms, Debility has fallen upon my loins’ (COS 1.153: 489).48 This composite picture becomes unintelligible only if we use it for primarily diagnostic purposes.
Oswalt does not approach ‘illness’ through a medical model alone. Although probably unintentionally, he acknowledges that Isaiah 53 uses imagery of ‘illness’ to depict a social experience (‘avoidance’). Similarly, William L. Holladay writes that the last half of v. 3 ‘repeats the theme of rejection, for people treat [the servant] as if he were a leper (read Lev. 13:45–46 on this matter)’.49 Although Holladay does not discuss the possibility that the servant may have a disability, he connects the description in v. 3 to the social experience of a person with a skin anomaly. Likewise, Isaiah 53 concentrates on the servant’s experience of disability in terms of his social interactions. The servant endures oppression and isolation from the community. In this sense, our passage constructs disability closer to the social or cultural models than to the medical model.
Moreover, both Oswalt and Holladay imply that the passage appropriates certain social experiences of those who are ill or have a disability to articulate the social experience of the presumably able-bodied servant. Oswalt argues that the servant was not a ‘sick man’. Holladay’s use of ‘as if he were a leper’ implies that the passage compares the servant’s experience to that of a person with a skin anomaly without suggesting that the servant himself has a skin anomaly. In other words, the passage recruits one group’s experience of oppression to serve as a metaphor for the experience of another group, but denies the text describes a member of the first group. Interpreting the imagery of disability as a literary trope to describe the presumably able-bodied contributes to the erasure of figures and characters with disabilities from the biblical record.
All description, including the poetry of Isaiah 53, is metaphorical on some level. The presence of metaphor in the disability imagery of our passage does not signal the absence of disability in the servant’s description. Throughout this book, we will find that there is not a convincing reason to interpret the imagery in Isaiah 53 as primarily describing something other than an experience of disability. Appeals to the metaphorical quality of this passage are no exception. Nevertheless, many interpreters assume that the poetic use of disability imagery in the description of the servant must describe something other than a figure with disabilities. This assumption ignores the fact that poetic descriptions of figures with disabilities appear in the subsequent chapters: an infertile woman in Isaiah 54 and a eunuch in Isaiah 56. We should not dismiss the idea that Isaiah 53 describes a figure with disabilities simply because the language is poetic rather than precise and clinical. If Psalms 6, 38, 41, or ‘The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’ provide any indication, poetry serves as a common means of describing disease and disability in ancient Near Eastern literature.
Regarding disability and the Hebrew Bible, scholars have not spent nearly as much time considering what counts as disability imagery in relation to age or injury as they have developing the symbolic potential of disability as a literary trope for the experiences of the able-bodied. Moreover, scholars have spent so much energy looking for symbolic clues for the servant’s identity that we assume too quickly that the imagery, including the physical descriptions, must symbolize something other than disability. As we will find throughout this book, this situation has had a significant impact on how interpreters have imagined the servant in Isaiah 53.