Woman Zion, Out of Hand

In this groundbreaking work, Cindy Dawson maps and investigates Woman Zion through texts and time as a premiere example of a body's agency. The personification of the city of Jerusalem in biblical and Early Jewish texts, Woman Zion appears in 30 texts over 800 years, during which time her body undergoes remarkable change. Dawson begins in the preexilic years of Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Jeremiah, descends with Woman Zion to her exilic nadir in Ezekiel and Lamentations, then watches her remarkable rise in Isaiah and the texts of Early Judaism, including 1 Baruch, 4 Ezra, Galatians, and Revelation. Building upon the insight of New Materialism, this study defines agency as the ability to intra-act, to act upon and be acted upon by the world around it. Agency is not limited by something (i.e., "intention" or "will") that someone (i.e., a human) possesses but simply by some ability to enact change, an ability possessed by humans and nonhumans alike. Woman Zion is therefore more than a way for authors to think, more than a mere tool by which those authors assert their agenda and their agency -- her body is in fact an art object, and at that, one with agency. This agency is ontological and furthermore demonstrable, evident in how her body gets out of hand, outlasts her creators, and does things they would never intend her to do. This study therefore provides a new way to track a tradition, without succumbing to the limitations of form criticism and, by definition, its tie to forms that face eventual extinction. Here, Cindy Dawson reformulates a long-time interest of biblical studies, to show how Woman Zion's body becomes the new form.

Cindy Dawson is a lecturer at the University of Houston. Her work focuses on the personification of the city of Jerusalem in biblical and Early Jewish texts.