Holy Tongues

Investigates how Jewish and Christian thinkers in Late Antiquity imbued speech with physical, emotional, and spiritual presence.

Every auditory moment, from the routine to the spectacular, exposed listeners to a litany of sounds that had a profound impact upon their sense of the world. Ancient Jewish and Christian writers capitalized on that experiential baseline to render a temporal world overflowing with speech that could be at turns enlivening or deadly. Holy Tongues offers a detailed inquiry into how various Jewish and Christian authors conceptualized the presence of words: how words caught and released people in various religious contexts and environments. This book takes seriously the discourses attested in a wide range of late ancient sources that their world was brimming with highly charged, often conspicuous, often weighty speech. In contrast to the evanescent quality so reflexively assigned to speech in antiquity and our own day stands the claim that the living voice more deeply connects with and adheres to the listener. Oral words have substantial presence that is captured in various states of bodily and spiritual experience. Insofar as spoken words were treated by Jews and Christians in antiquity as both interactive and interacting, they were no different in kind from the contents of a reliquary, the books of a library, or the implements used to conduct a ritual. Utterances may have seemed more elusive than objects that were readily visible, but they stabilized a deep bond to the holy through their engagement with and manipulation of the senses. Speaking released a force into the world, which, with the aid of the ears, mouths, and minds, worked tirelessly to reproduce itself.