Please join us at 5pm on Monday, April 1st in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Jesse Noily

MA, Divinity School

“Your Dew is the Dew of Morning”
Rabbinic Eschatology and the Erotics of Resurrection

Despite the theological and social centrality of the belief in bodily resurrection to Jewish life beginning in late antiquity, the precise mechanism of resurrection as represented in the Hebrew Bible was ambiguous enough to allow for much rabbinic speculation. The present paper takes as its subject a specific tradition which explained resurrection principally through an erotic interpretation of Isaiah 26:19: “For Your dew is like the dew of morning [or: light, herbs], You make the earth cast out the spirits of the dead.” Finding exegetical precedent in late antique documents like the Babylonian Talmud and the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, this tradition suggests a euphemistic reading of “dew” [טל ] as the semen of God which serves to impregnate the earth and revive the bodies buried therein. Combining agricultural imagery with a heteroerotic metaphysics, the rabbis who endorsed this reading envisioned the resurrection of the dead as an outcome of God’s passionate romance and copulation with the world.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: eschatology): Noily-Your Dew [Draft 2.25]