The Bible and the Arts of Making

The Bible and the Arts of Making draws on interdisciplinary work in philosophy, anthropology, and the arts to demonstrate how profoundly human creativity shapes the biblical imagination. In contrast to studies that focus primarily on God as maker, it foregrounds the deep concern of ancient writers with humans as makers. In this book Elaine James attends not only to objects, but to the acts, processes, and experiences of producing them. The book shifts attention from familiar debates about the Bible's specialized rhetoric against images toward the ubiquitous processes of making that permeate many biblical corpora. Through studies of Jeremiah, the Yahwist's creation stories, the Tabernacle texts of Exodus, poems about statues in Isaiah, the musings of Ecclesiastes, and evidence for women's creativity in the Psalms, James argues that making is not just about finished objects, but about experiences and processes that unfold in time. And though the texts privilege male voices, these studies also show how women's work is part of a constellation of ephemeral arts whose evanescence is part of their aesthetics. Human creativity transforms the material world in ways that can be life-affirming and aesthetic, even as they carry the potential to unmake the world. The Bible and the Arts of Making is a major contribution to studies of aesthetics, art, and creation in and beyond the Hebrew Bible.