In this chapter, i examine the representation of mental disability in biblical texts, with reference to non-Israelite West Asian materials. The technical vocabulary of mental disability used in biblical texts, although poorly understood, constitutes a major source of evidence for mental disability in the Hebrew Bible, and is therefore examined in some detail. As in the previous chapters, the strategies of stigmatization and marginalization deployed by the authors of biblical and other West Asian texts are identified and analyzed. Like “defective” and non-“defective” physical disabilities, mental disability is represented in biblical and related literature as a stigmatized condition frequently leading to the marginalization of affected persons. It is cast as a covenantal curse in Deut 28:28–29, 33–34, and understood in 1 Sam 16:14 as a token of Yhwh's rejection of Saul as king. The mentally disabled are subject to the contempt of others (e.g., 1 Sam 21:15–16 [Eng. 14–15]; 2 Kgs 9:11), and devalued characteristics such as weakness, vulnerability, dependence, and ignorance are associated with them, just as they are with “defective” persons and others with physical disabilities. Mentally disabled persons are associated with persons with physical disabilities (including “defects” [mûmîm]) and (sometimes) with others in a number of biblical and cuneiform texts, suggesting the presence of one or more implicit shared classification schemas that I attempt to identify and analyze.

DEFINING MENTAL DISABILITY AND IDENTIFYING IT IN TEXTS

Mental disability is not easily defined, even in our own contemporary Western context.