Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences

Mental and physical disability, ubiquitous in texts of the Hebrew Bible, receive their first thoroughgoing treatment in this monograph. Olyan seeks to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible’s particular ideas of what is disabling and their potential social ramifications. Biblical representations of disability and biblical classification schemas – both explicit and implicit – are compared to those of the Hebrew Bible’s larger ancient West Asian cultural context, and to those of the later Jewish biblic...