Exposing Ezekiel: Embodied Prophecy in Bialik’s ‘Be-‘ir haharegah’

Hayyim Nachman Bialik’s ‘Be-‘ir haharegah‘ (‘In the City of Slaughter’) remains one of the most powerful literary responses to the Kishinev Pogrom. Bialik, a celebrated Jewish poet, penned it after visiting the Russian city where a mob of two thousand rioters had savaged the city’s Jews on 19 April 1903.¹ Readers of the long narrative poem described the experience of reading every line as a ‘consuming fire’,² igniting a rage that culminated in a growing Jewish consciousness of collective resistance.³

Scholars have recognised the poem’s intertextual use of Ezekiel as contributing to its monumental impact on readers. The poem adopts the structure of the biblical call narrative with its opening command ‘to arise and go to the city of slaughter’ and experience firsthand the remains of the massacre.⁴ Further, throughout the poem the addressee is referenced using Ezekiel’s epithet ‘son of man’. Unlike the hopeful message of restoration in the biblical prophecy, however, Bialik authored a prophecy of rebuke,⁵ encapsulated in the poem’s concluding image as the revived bones of Ezekiel 37 are mockingly subverted into shamefully commodified bones of the dead victims, sold to purchase the pity of other nations.

This article continues the exploration of Bialik’s engagement of Ezekiel in his poem, suggesting that the prophet’s body is represented in similar ways across both texts. The prophet’s body is transfigured into a space where Creator and created meet. From the way the prophet’s body is discussed and represented, we discover the intricacies of these God-prophet encounters. These encounters act as a dramatized tragedy where the poet-prophet is demanded to cede all agency to God and eventually fails to meet divine expectations.

The prophet’s body in ‘Be-‘ir ha-haregah’ and Ezekiel

Endowed with a mission to convey the divine view, the biblical prophet’s life is one ‘facing man’ and ‘being faced by God’.⁶ Consumed by a vocation of prophecy, he inhabits a world in defiance of its Creator, yet has the ‘word of God swooping down on’ him and the ‘divine voice reverberating’ in his ears.⁷ Prophecy is, however, not just a matter of words; it often involves the body. As biblical scholar Rhiannon Graybill observes, ‘The body of the prophet is not simply a vessel that is filled with the prophetic word, or a channel through which prophecy passes. Instead, prophecy is staged on and through the body, and cannot occur without it’.⁸ God’s demands on and interactions with the prophet are thus often expressed through his body. This section examines three ways through which Bialik appropriates Ezekiel’s embodied practice of prophecy that dramatizes the encounter between the prophet and his God.

First, the encounter opens with the divine command for the prophet’s body to be positioned passively and acted upon by the Creator. In ‘Be-‘ir ha-haregah’, the divine voice instructs ‘There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head, / Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay, / The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead’.⁹ The God-figure directs all actions of the prophet’s body as the latter explores the ravaged city. Similarly, the biblical God ‘lifted Ezekiel up’,¹⁰ commanded him to ‘eat [bread] as a barley cake, baking it in their sight on human dung’,¹¹ and ‘take a sharp sword; . . . run it over your head and your beard’.¹² God determines the prophet’s bodily position, dietary restrictions, and physical appearance. Whole-hearted obedience is demanded of the divinely ordained prophet through an expression of his bodily passivity.

Second, the prophet carries out acts of self-confinement and experiences muteness to facilitate his initiation into his vocation. In ‘Be-‘ir ha-haregah’, the prophet is directed to the shed where ‘the Spirit of Anguish’ is imprisoned. After entering the gate, he is to ‘close now the gate behind thee; / Be closed in darkness now, now thine that charnel space’.¹³ Whilst ‘tarrying’ in the shed infused with the anguished spirit, the prophet ‘wilt be one with pain and anguish / And wilt fill up with sorrow’.¹⁴ Besides confining himself physically, the prophet finds his voice locked in the confines of his body. He ‘wouldst proclaim it, speak it out – But thy lips shall not find its utterance’.¹⁵ These symbolic acts mimic those of Ezekiel: Ezekiel is commanded to ‘shut thyself within thy house’ and ‘bands shall be put upon thee, and thou shalt be bound with them, and thou shalt not go out among them’.¹⁶ After which, God ‘will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb and unable to reprove them; for they are a rebellious house’.¹⁷ This divinely mandated self-imprisonment and muteness is confounding; after all, if the prophet’s role is to proclaim the divine message to God’s people, why is he silenced? Hebrew Bible scholar Margaret Odell’s interpretation of Ezekiel is helpful: Observing that Ezekiel is a priest turned prophet,¹⁸ these symbolic acts become initiation ceremonies in which Ezekiel, in a liminal phase, strips away aspects of his priestly identity and ‘accentuates those that would be relevant for his subsequent prophetic role’.¹⁹ These acts include Ezekiel’s consumption of the scroll with God’s judgment on it²⁰ which is followed by a period of confinement and muteness in which he is not allowed to communicate or even be present amongst the people. Together, the consumption and confinement depict Ezekiel as internalising the divine message of judgment, a necessary rite of passage to becoming a divine mouthpiece. The symbolic acts performed by Bialik’s prophet construct a similar image of prophetic efficacy: a figure wholly saturated with the divine message, such that when he finally opens his mouth, he can speak only the words of God.

Third, the prophet’s body, through enacting the message of destruction, becomes a ‘site of suffering’.²¹ In ‘Be-‘ir ha-haregah’, by ‘touch[ing] with thy hand the cushion stained’, the prophet is transported across time into the past, the very moment of slaughter when the women were raped, whilst ‘Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peer from the cracks’.²² Here he is presented as not merely interpreting past events. Instead, he is transplanted and his movements mimic those of the victims, reenacting their bodily state during the slaughter as his own ‘feet in feather sink, and stumble / On wreckage doubly wrecked’.²³ The prophet staggers and then shifts ‘Unto the attic mount, upon thy feet and hands’,²⁴ completing a downward trajectory of fallen, wounded and eventually dead bodies. Similarly, Ezekiel is to ‘lie thou upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it’.²⁵ This act of physical immobility for three hundred and ninety days reveals the impending siege upon Jerusalem. In both texts, the prophet serves as God’s instrument for communicating impending judgment, yet he does so only by participating in that very judgment, embodying it in his own flesh.²⁶ Such a paradox lies at the very heart of the prophetic role of the divinely-ordained transmitter, a necessary price to pay for his access to prophetic foreknowledge.

An ending of despair

Graybill has noted Ezekiel’s deference in comparison to other prophetic figures.²⁷ Jeremiah frequently speaks about his anguish over the prophetic vision while Jonah remains dissatisfied with the vocation God assigned for him. Apart from one protest against God’s command for him to eat food baked over human faeces,²⁸ Ezekiel displays unwavering prophetic obedience. As such, Ezekiel can be viewed as a ‘microphone’ or ‘mouthpiece of God’, an effective conduit through which God’s message reaches His people.

Correspondingly, we do not get much of the prophet’s voice in response to God in Bialik’s poem. Instead, the poem is dominated by one voice throughout, although the audience it is addressing seems to diverge.²⁹ Most of the poem could be read as structurally similar to Ezekiel’s commission narrative, where the prophet’s body is surrendered in the divine encounter to be appropriated for the God-figure’s use. Yet little progress is made in this God-prophet partnership; instead, God repeatedly reminds Bialik’s prophet to sustain his agony (’I will make hard thy heart’),³⁰ with repeated calls to obey His directions in bodily expression and action (’Now wherefore dost thou weep, O son of man?’).³¹ The overall effect is one of frustration at a prophet failing to meet divine expectations. Instances when the speaker seems to be addressing a wider audience than the prophet alone, such as ’my children’ and ’ye shamed of the earth’,³² come across as the God-figure’s impatience with his prophet and his desire to communicate unmediated to his people.

The poem’s dismal ending coheres with the portrayal of the prophet as failing to live up to God’s characterization of his divinely-appointed messenger. Disappointed, God dismisses the prophet’s ‘impotent rage’ and drives him from the city into the wilderness, to ‘send thy bitter cry into the storm’.³³

Conclusion

Shall it be also read,
The Book of Lamentations?
It is a preacher mounts the pulpit now. He opens his mouth,
he stutters, stammers. Hark
The empty verses from his speaking flow.³⁴

By invoking ancient prophetic vocations, primarily Ezekiel’s, Bialik places his poem within the biblical tradition of witnessing and rebuke. Yet the poem departs from Ezekiel significantly. Where Ezekiel speaks with an assurance of divine purpose and future restoration, Bialik exposes the limits of prophetic speech and its ‘empty verses’ that sound too weak and vapid to express the horrors of modern catastrophe. Bialik instead grounds the poem’s message of wrath and lamentation in the somewhat familiar image of the prophetic body. His adaptation of Ezekiel conveys how the disturbing, unsettling positions of prophets’ bodies can deliver a message more powerfully than verbalised verses. For Bialik then, the prophetic body is not an instrument functioning within God’s redemptive economy, but a site where divine benevolence and cruelty, destruction and renewal remain suspended in unresolved tension.