Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape

Abstract

The introduction sets up the book’s conceptual and methodological parameters by laying out two intersecting avenues of inquiry. First, it establishes the link between the biblical account of the flight from Sodom and the ethical conundrums the Sodom legacy bequeaths to hospitality theory. Second, it argues for a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife – traditionally the exemplar of moral obduracy and female unruliness -- as an ethically provocative figural mediator between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “flesh” and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of dispossession before the “face” of the Other. Through this critical lens, chapter overviews show the far-ranging impact – across millennia and a wide variety of art forms – of Lot’s wife’s legacy as a mutable figure of reparative witnessing and ethical resilience.

In the Beginning and Still Today: Recent Publications on Genesis

“…The final grouping within the Histories of Interpretation and Textual Transmission category consists of works that use interpretations of scholars over time to make a point about a particular text. Included here are the volumes published by Allert (2018); Boehm (2016); Hadromi-Allouche (2017); Gallagher (2017); German (2016); Greenblatt (2017); Levenson (2016); Presley (2015); and Wright (2015). The volumes cover a wide range of texts and include scholars from the humanities writ large, though not necessarily specialists in the Bible or even religion.…”

“…Two volumes focus more on artistic than textual interpretations. Both Gallagher’s Sodomscapes (2017) and Hadromi-Allouche’s Fallen Animals: Art, Religion, Literature (2017) focus on art history to unpack how the biblical texts were received in various time periods including today. While biblical scholars have, in the past, incorporated and focused on various visual images of biblical scenes, typically the biblical text is unpacked first in its biblical context.…”