Literary Monumentality and the Question of Ekphrasis in the Hebrew Bible

In many passages of the Hebrew Bible, one encounters vivid and carefully constructed descriptions of places, objects, cities, and bodies. These passages do more than decorate a narrative—they actively shape a reader’s sense of space, scale, and material presence. When read through the lens of monumentality, such descriptions can be understood as techniques for rendering texts themselves “monumental.” Their words bring to life inscriptions, narratives, prophetic visions, and other textual entities and give them authority and a sense of permanence analogous to physical structures. Similarly, the phenomenon of ekphrasis—the rhetorical strategy of describing visual objects or sensory environments in textual spaces—offers a framework for understanding how biblical authors mediated material realities through language and through grammatical and literary strategies. These techniques are pervasive in the biblical text, and they reveal a scribal interest in reconstituting the spatial, architectural, and ritual features of their own ancient communities to further different rhetorical aims.