Abstract
The scholarship on the representation of shame in the Hebrew Bible has tended to elucidate shame in terms of its sociological processes and effect or its psychological profile. While representatives of both approaches take measures to situate the study of shame in the Hebrew Bible against the backdrop of its ancient Near Eastern contexts, many studies assume that shame in the biblical tradition resembles in some measure the subjective experience of self-conscious emotion that defines shame in the modern West. The assumption of an emotion-centered shame rests upon a further assumption of a universal conception of the self that is reflected in modern Western ideas of interiority and subjectivity. This study joins recent biblical scholarship that problematizes the imposition of familiar notions of interiority and emotion onto the biblical text by offering alternative readings of so-called “shame” in the Hebrew Bible. Employing insights from embodied cognition and practice theory of emotion, this study analyzes biblical passages that deploy five primary biblical Hebrew roots identified by scholars as denoting shame (*bwš, *klm, *ḥpr II, *ḥrp II, and *qly/qll). The research aims to uncover how shame was understood in ancient Israel apart from modern subjective notions. By analyzing a broad sampling of relevant passages, this study finds that “shame” in the Hebrew Bible is more about embodied experiences of material devastation, enactments of defeat or diminishment, and impositions of power than internal emotional states.