Laura Quick's Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible is a compelling study of how clothing reflects and activates identity in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. In Quick's analysis, adornments are agential symbols of an individual's social role and status. This monograph investigates the means by which bodies were coded in the ancient Levant, and invites us to rethink our interpretations of well-known biblical stories.

The complex relations among personhood, clothing, and the body emerge in chapter 1 (“Dress and the Body”). Quick contends that the imagined porousness of bodies in antiquity meant that adornment could serve as an extracorporeal expression of personhood (27). As part of the “permeable body complex,” clothing reveals and extends the boundaries of the self. As with each chapter, Quick's formulations have consequences for biblical interpretation. Here, Quick argues that clothing participates in the transfer of monarchical and marital status. Quick's formulation of clothing “encod[ing] personhood” raises questions related to the precise contours of “personhood” as well as to the limits of such coding (33). In her discussion of David and Saul's episodic showdown in 1 Samuel 24, Quick argues that David's “cutting the hem of Saul's cloak is a symbolic act with huge significance: Saul is understood to have physically been breached or damaged” (38). This raises the possibility that “to encode,” for Quick, signals the erosion of the distinction between the “merely” symbolic and the physically real. The “heavy symbolism” of clothing, in other words, not only reveals or foretells status changes, it brings them about. Though Quick leaves the somatic effects that David incurs ambiguous—David's action of cutting has “damaged Saul in some way” (38; italics mine)—the implication is that clothing may afford a middle way between sign and activity. David has not quite dismantled Saul's grip on the kingship but he has also not quite not done that either. Later, Quick calls the donning of certain adornments “sign” or “speech” acts, raising the further question of how such performative symbols operate when mediated by written narrative (65, 174).

In chapters 2 (“Dress and Ritual”) and 3 (“Dress and Identity”) clothing participates in adaptations of the body through the invocation of ritual. Drawing upon Akkadian literature, Quick clarifies perplexing moments in the Hebrew Bible (like the reference to Judah's wine-soaked garments in Genesis 49:11) in terms of the ritual acts they invoke and the bodily consequences—protection, absolution, cursing—they incur. Quick argues, moreover, that this connection between clothing and ritual illuminates women's agency in the realm of textile production for cultic practice, particularly in rites of protection, mourning, and interaction with the dead (72). The question of the efficaciousness of apparel resurfaces in the story of Tamar and Amnon (2 Samuel 13). Though Tamar's robes signal her “protected” status, that status is violently disregarded by Amnon. Tamar responds, Quick contends, through the heavily symbolic rending of these very garments. Yet this story also seems to shine a light on the complex relation among human agents and their effective symbols. 2 Samuel 13 invites us to ask: Who is willing—or able—to transgress bodies coded with protection and why? Why do some symbols “work” and others fail? Quick deploys the Ugaritic tale of Aqhat, and the boundary-defying adornment of Pughat in particular, to illustrate the central argument of chapter 3: that dress is a complex means of identity or role-adoption. The compound affordances of clothing also surface in the high priest's clothing, which is perceived as provocative, insofar as it aims to capture divine attention. Quick contends that this garb also obfuscates the priest's body, enabling his role to transfer to another, to represent the Israelites writ large, and to blur the priest's gender. She concludes that this clothing renders the priest's body both whole and open, another generative paradox that such “social skin” affords.Footnote ¹

In chapters 4 (“Jewelry and Personal Religion”) and 5 (“Cosmetics and the Other”), Quick contends that jewelry and cosmetics function like clothing: flagging and modifying identity. Yet Quick notes that piercings differ from the identity modifications wrought by clothing by virtue of their permanence. Piercings are thus implicated in a lasting status change—to slave or wife—at the hands of patriarchal domination. The intercessory aspects of jewelry surface in Quick's discussion of Numbers 6:22–27. The blessing's appearance on the Ketef Hinnom amulets reiterates the body's capacity to be ritually conscripted. These observations enable a rereading of the Golden Calf story (Exodus 32). Quick argues that jewelry is implicated in nonofficial religious practice and sits in the crosshairs of the author's indictment. Quick highlights the signification of cosmetics for female biblical figures, in particular, in chapter 5. These adornments often indicate licit—even salvific—sexual availability (Esther and Judith). Cosmetic oils prove to be a particularly plastic symbol, however: Quick reads Ruth as applying oil not to seduce but to bid for marital protection. Thus, even in the Bible, cosmetics do not always flag the perceived threat of female promiscuity. This argument supports Quick's rereading of Jezebel's eye paint, gaze, and grisly demise in 2 Kings 9:30–37 not primarily as a defeat of the foreign woman as sexually dangerous but as an avatar of a competing deity, and as a bearer of the evil eye.

Throughout the book, readers may wonder what role the mediating written text ought to play in our analysis of ancient adornment. Can textually represented clothes reveal the wearers’ “innermost desires” (175) and why do their messages sometimes misfire? In what sense can narrated or imagined bodies ever be made to “speak” (89)? Should narrative texts be interpreted like other ancient artifacts? In what precise ways might dress—as “sign act” or efficacious code—engage or forge new formulations in the world of performance studies as well as the study of antiquity? The questions that Quick's analysis generates—even those she leaves unanswered—lay the groundwork for further theorization about the limits and possibilities of the body, its wearable symbols, and its disclosure in text.

The book, which will edify both specialists and general readers, also invites us to interrogate the genealogies of gendered discourses in contemporary scholarship and the consistent privileging of those discourses coded as “male.” Because of the innovative rereadings, formulations, and questions this monograph gives rise to, Dress, Adornment, and the Body will shape conversations about the body, ritual, and representation in antiquity for years to come.