Jacqueline Vayntrub, "Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible" (Yale UP, 2026)

August 23, 2026

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5 min read

In the Book of Jonah, the reluctant prophet finally prays from inside the fish—and what comes out is a pastiche of borrowed psalms, a "big mac of clichés" that the fish finds so disgusting it vomits him out. That reading, argues Jacqueline Vayntrub, only makes sense once you stop treating biblical speech as a transparent window into a speaker’s inner life and start treating it as a material object produced by a body, affecting other bodies, and persisting across time.

Vayntrub is associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale, and her new book Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale UP, 2026) reframes how we understand what the biblical authors thought they were doing when they made speech and wrote texts. The book was a decade in the making, originally conceived as a study of biblical poetry. But Vayntrub realized that the Western categories of "poetry" versus "prose"—with their baggage about rhythm, prosody, and literary value inherited from Aristotle—don't map onto the ancient context. So she shifted to studying "biblical speech making": every instance of represented speech in the text, from brief discourse to extended songs.

Speech as a thing, not a copy

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What you'll learn

1 (02:04) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Amir Engel welcomes Jacqueline Vayntrub to discuss her book *Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible* (Yale UP, 2026).
2 (03:35) **How the Book Came About** - Vayntrub explains the book’s origin as a delayed proposal on biblical poetry that evolved into a study of biblical speech-making.
3 (06:49) **The Core Argument: Speech as Material Object** - Vayntrub outlines her thesis that biblical speech performance and texts were understood as material things produced by and affecting human bodies.
4 (10:21) **Ancient vs. Modern Representation** - Vayntrub contrasts the biblical model of representation with the Western intellectual tradition of copies or simulacra.
5 (14:20) **Blasphemy and Idol-Making** - The model of representation is drawn from practices of image-making and idol-making, which can be unsettling when applied to the Bible.
6 (16:00) **Stakes for Reading the Bible** - This framework reframes key scholarly insights about textual attribution and composition.
7 (21:10) **Example: Cain and Abel** - Vayntrub uses the story of Cain and Abel to illustrate speech as a material object that persists through re-embodiment.

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Show Notes

Tune in to this interview about Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale UP, 2026). Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. with honors in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of Chicago. Her research operates at the intersection of biblical philology, poetics, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its own Terms (Routledge 2019), Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2026), as well as the co-author of Hebrew Funerary Inscriptions from Iron Age Judah (Society of Biblical Literature Press, forthcoming). Her current major projects include a commentary on Ecclesiastes for the Old Testament Library series (Westminster John Knox Press), and serving as Project Director for an NEH-funded international collaboration investigating the institutional history and anti-Jewish scaffolding of modern biblical criticism.

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