Review of Roland Boer, The Earthy Nature of the Bible: Fleshly Readings of Sex, Masculinity and Carnality, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Have you ever asked yourselves: what can the holiday of a workaholic Calvinist be like? Here is one among many answers possible: he writes a book of “fleshly readings” of the Bible in order to explicate “how crude it really is and indeed can be.” Roland Boer’s “The Earthy Nature of the Bible” is research in a territory, into which a few writers have ventured thus far. It is an innovative, sometimes even shocking, display of unorthodox practices of biblical hermeneutics, such as: “discussion of terms for testicles, of the pervasive but futile spermatic spluttering pen(is) of the prophets; engagements with the sexuality of flora and fauna; hooker hermeneutics, fairy queens and anal dildos; Jeremiah the masturbator, Ezekiel the autofellating prophet; prophetic hygrophilia; and the bestial and necrophiliac practices of the Hittites” (1). The scandalous matter and the language of perversion conceal the fact that it is a case of a sound and conceptually holistic project whose very aim is to scandalize and provoke the inveterate traditions of biblical scholarship. It is accomplished in a broad interdisciplinary space where biblical, cultural and gender studies—just to name some of the main areas of knowledge— are crossing paths. The interpretation of biblical texts takes place along the methodological lines of three “materialist” theories: psychoanalysis, Marxism and ecocriticism (materialism of the psyche, materialism of history, materialism of nature). The landmarks of theoretical authority are Freud and Lacan, with the extension of Slavoj Žižek; Claude Levy-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri and Antonio Gramsci. Yet the all-pervading methodological assumption is that of Marxism, a frame of knowledge, which “is ingrained so deeply in my thought,” Boer admits, “that it shows up in the fabric of almost every sentence” (2).