Othering and Ombodiment: Intersectional Imaginations in the Old Testament Narratives

Rev. Dr. M. C. Thomas is an ordained priest of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church serving as the Professor and Research Guide in the department of Old Testament Studies.

Situating these valuable reflections on embodiment in the Indian context, Rev. Dr M. C. Thomas provides fresh insights into the "Intersectional" experience of Christians who themselves live as a diverse group of social bodies (embracing differences of race, class, caste, ethnicity and gender) within the larger sub-continent. This contemporary intersectionality is read in dialogue with the historic experiences of ancient Israelite and Judean communities, who left complex testimonies to similar struggles in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. The ancients also speak of violence, imperial imposition, dispossession, forced migration, and utopian national visions- struggles that may seem distant in space and time, but nevertheless available for the present when the Bible is no longer exploited for its colonial possibilities.
Even in Scripture we find that the desperate preservation of an "insider's" identity almost inevitably produces waves of othering- imperial/subaltern, male/female, master/slave, north/south, exiles/ remainees, Israelite/gentile. The very concept of an identity implies a set of distinctions in embodied experience, and the key questions then seem to become whether an identity can be preserved without violence, and indeed, how it is possible to practice a justice that overcomes entrenched patterns of social difference.
Dr Thomas takes up these key questions in his discussion of a broad range of topics in the Hebrew Bible: the denigration of the northern kingdom of Israel, the royal expropriation of land (both by Israelite and foreign kings), prophetic challenges to ethnocentric positions, resistance to imperialism, fragile servanthood, reconciliation and the pursuit of justice as spiritual vocations.

Othering as a social reality seems to be all pervasive and it has evidently been happening everywhere regardless of any socio-cultural and religious contexts. The term, moreover, is widely treated in a derogatory manner. Otherness is taken as a socio-cultural condition and othering is reckoned as a social process in the present work. In this regard, as Rodney Steven Sadler Jr. notes: "The human to other is best described as a universal and rational phenomena for differentiating between groups of people who share cultural traits a legitimate psychological malady which leads people to isolate and alienate entire groups of people based upon perceived group differences. In fact, we acknowledge that the theme othering can be approached from diverse perspectives like art, religion, psychology and the like where the topic is viewed from different theoretical and interpretive frames. Whatever the perspective we adopt, differentiation and discrimination as surviving in the society will obviously be the common factor in all approaches.
It is true that the otherness is reckoned as certain realities of extremities or strangeness that we experience in our social life and community experiences. It may cross the established boundaries and subvert the familiar, accepted and established by the existing norms, which is often considered as liminalities. But, importantly, the question of otherness arises only when we attempt to define ourselves in terms of the other who is not one among us. Moreover, the other and the otherness of the other frequently appear as something that upsets us. Why does the question of otherness arise? It is because of certain alterity within/among us which we do not want either to address or accommodate. Most often, we fear to address such differences where we do not attempt to confront the question of accepting different varieties of alterity. Our constant engagement with multiple alterities in our corporate living demands genuine redefinition as well as reconfiguration of one's own self.