Be the Sinews: The Hard, Sacred Work of Rehumanization
In a distant land, amid rolling hills of sand, a man saw something that must have seemed impossible. It began with a sound, a rumbling, a rattling, as bones bleached white by the sun began to move, began to roll towards one another. And then tendons, sinews began to snake along those bones, thousands of thick cords of tissue began knitting and knotting this bone to that, fixing them into place. And then flesh began to flow; muscles and fat filled out the form of what was by this point recognizable as a human body. Skin enveloped the blood and guts that lay beneath and then, with a breath, what had been a corpse, a lifeless body, was now a person. Suddenly, there was a living, breathing human being in a place where, just moments before, there hadn’t been.
This isn’t science fiction, although it sounds like the beginning of a zombie apocalypse movie. This scene, this fantastical, visceral scene known as the valley of dry bones, comes straight from the Hebrew Bible. It’s a vision recorded by the prophet Ezekiel. On the surface, I think we can all agree, it’s shocking. Visually, it’s disturbing. And yet, for the prophet Ezekiel, who witnessed it, and for generations of Jews, the valley of dry bones is not a story of horror but of hope — hope that a Jewish nation dismantled and dispersed, ground into the dust, could be rebuilt and reborn.
When I came across this text earlier this summer, it gave me hope too, but of a different kind. Reading Ezekiel’s prophecy in a time of rampant dehumanization, I found here a bold assertion that just as a person’s humanity can be taken, so too can it be returned. After all, those dry bones had once been living human beings. In reanimating them, Ezekiel reversed the process by which they had ceased to be human, by which they had been dehumanized. Here, in this strange scene in our sacred text, is a story of rehumanization.
