ABSTRACT
Questions concerning divine identity are leading into questions concerning strangeness, otherness. The line between self and not-self, identity and the other, begins to blur even as some try desperately to sharpen it. In this part the focus on Scripture and the politics of identity becomes much more explicit. How are the body politic and individual political bodies constructed or deconstructed, shored up or shattered, in or by biblical literature and its divine speaking subject? How by its readers-whether a sixth-century B.C.E. Ezra or an early twentieth-century C.E.Freud? What possible relationships are there between nationalism, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and Scripture? Of course, these discussions continually harken back to the previous discussions, because in biblical literature the political corpus is a theological corpus, and vice versa. At the same time, Scripture is not univocal (does not simply say one thing) when it comes to either body of concerns, and so the relation between the two is anything but simple or unproblematic.
