Boer states that -
The key issue for this paper is the role of writing in both the production of and instabilities in prophetic masculinity. I draw upon three sources: the work of Lévi-Strauss concerning the 'writing experiment', Christina Petterson's exploration of the role of writing in constructing the ruling class in colonial Greenland, and some of my older work concerning the auto-referentiality of references to writing and scribal activity in the Hebrew Bible. Armed with these theoretical strings, the paper has two phases – what may be called 'organising the sausage-fest' and 'too many dicks at the writing desk'. The first concerns the production of masculinity, the second its problems.And so on, for another 14 pages.
So, in the initial sausage-fest I argue that the subtle and over-riding process of producing masculinity in the prophetic books is through the representation of the act of writing – what may be called the act of the spermatic spluttering pen(ise)s. In attributing writing to the writing prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel), rather than merely 'recording' what they said and did, the scribes write themselves into the story. Not only do scribe and prophet merge into one, with the written and writing prophet acting as a cipher for the scribe, but the scribe easily slips into the zone of absolute power, one in which even God obeys his dictates. No wimps here, no effeminate and weakly scribes (contra Boyarin); writing is the means of constructing a very male ruling class.
However, no hegemony is ever complete, able to rest at peace in its power. In order to examine the way the scribal act of masculine production runs into trouble, I focus upon the anomalies of this constructed coterie of ruling males, especially the way the all-powerful role of prophetic scribal activity becomes masturbatory. Both the story of 'Jeremiah the bejerked' and the narrative of Ezekiel's auto-fellatio reveal the absurdity of the extraordinary claims made by the scribal prophet who constructs the world itself, let alone its masculine class structure in which he is supreme. In fact, we fold back to the fundamental creation story of Egypt, in which Atum-Ra masturbates into his fist and thereby creates the world.
In Ezekiel, chapter nine, verses 2-3 and 11 we find an extraordinarily curious phrase: weqeseth hasofer bemotnayw. Commentators are not keen to make much of it, usually rendering it as something like 'a writing case at his side', or perhaps 'a writing kit at his loins'. Let us take a moment to see what it actually means, for it will become a key marker for my argument concerning masculinity in prophetic texts.
As for Ezekiel 9, qeseth is one of those Ezekelian hapax legomena, to which commentators a little too rapidly attribute the meaning of – perhaps – a writing case or inkpot or tablet, albeit with the flimsiest of evidence. It may be worth asking why commentators make nothing of this text, preferring a neutral sense for a hapax legomenon like qeseth, when in other cases – such as the explicit texts of Ezekiel 16 and 22-23 – the overwhelmingly male coterie of biblical scholars is all too ready to espy in hapax legomenae references to women’s genitals. Is it because the sexualising the textual bodies of women is a way of objectifying and thereby disempowering them, while the textual bodies of men must not be so treated? If so, then my reading is an explicit attempt to sexualise, objectify and thereby disempower textual male bodies. So, in light of what follows, I suggest that here we have a tool, or more specifically a stylus of the one who follows. And he is the sofer, simply a scribe, one who writes texts and does things with numbers; the word is the qal present participle of the verbs fr, to write and number. Qeseth sofer is then the tool of the writer, the scribal stylus.
But what about bemotnayw? The preposition be is obvious, but let us stay with its basic sense of 'on' or even 'in'. And motnayw is the masculine singular possessive of motnayim. Note the dual form, for that will soon become important. Motnayim is supposed, according to lexica, to designate the muscles binding the abdomen to the lower limbs – abs, as we might call them in our parlance. In this respect, it is a parallel term to halatsayim, the section of the body between the ribs and the hip bones.
But there is one curious, usually unexplained feature of both terms, hinted at in the brilliant older translation as 'loins': both words end in the rare dual form. As any student of introductory Hebrew knows, two classes ofdual forms remain, one less obvious (waters, heavens, Egypt, Jerusalem), the other far more obvious, for they refer to natural pairs relating to the body: eyes, ears, hands, feet, lips, hands (but also shoes, horns and wings). A question springs forth: why are the terms usually rendered loins or abs in the dual form? We are, I would suggest, in the realm of testicles, nuts, the family jewels. Indeed, one cannot help wondering whether the Bible is engaged emphatic overkill, for not only do we have the rare dual form for halatsayim and motnayim, but we also have two terms that mean the same thing – as the parallelism in Isa 11:5 shows all too well. Is this a case of naming each of the twins with a name that evokes its brother, like tweedledum and tweedledee, or frick and frack?
