Biblical Blaspheming

Yvonne Sherwood is Professor of Bible, Religion and Culture at the University of Glasgow. She is author of A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Derrida's Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida (2004); The Prostitute and the Prophet (2004) and, with Stephen Moore, of The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (2011). She is co-editor of Sanctified Aggression: Legacies of Biblical and Post-Biblical Vocabularies of Violence (with Jonneke Bekkenkamp, 2003) and, with Kevin Hart, of Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (2004).

'[Sherwood] takes the reader on dizzying excursions through religious studies, biblical studies, postmodern theory, midrash, and straight history, barely pausing to allow us to take a breath. She is truly interdisciplinary in that she enables the different disciplines in her intellectual purview to jar and combine. Above all, it is a work of pleasure, both of writing and of reading.' Review of Biblical Literature

• Preface; Part I. The Persistence of Blasphemy: 1. The persistence of blasphemy: the Bible as a public edifice in the secular state; Part II. Biblical Exhibitions/Biblical Exhibitionism: 2. The exquisite fruit-corpse and the surrealist works of God; 3. Prophetic scatology: prophecy and the art of sensation; Part III. Inappropriate Involvement in the Biblical Text: 4. A recently discovered letter from Isaac to Abraham (annotated); 5. Passion-binding-passion: sacrifice, masochism and the subject; Part IV. Beyond 'the Bible as Literature': 6. 'Not with a bang but a whimper': shrunken apocalypses in Ecclesiastes 12.1–8 and twentieth-century modernism; 7. The fear of loss inherent in writing: Jeremiah 36 as the tedious self-narration of a highly self-conscious scroll with Mark Brummitt; 8. John Donne and the Baroque prophets; Part V. Theo-politics, Authority and the Bible: 9. On the genesis of the alliance between the Bible and rights; 10. Binding-unbinding: pre-critical 'critique' in pre-modern Jewish, Christian and Islamic responses to the 'sacrifice' of Abraham/Ibrahim's son.