Physiology
The human body is treated in scripture as a fashioned, knit, and clothed structure, given by Yahweh and held under his preserving care. Its frame is described as formed from clay and dust and clothed with skin and flesh; its life is portrayed as joined to spirit and soul; and its end is figured both as decay in the dust and as a future spiritual body conformed to Christ. The same anatomical vocabulary that describes a person — joints, bands, members, flesh, bones — also supplies the figurative grammar by which the people of Christ are described as one body.
The Frame Fashioned
The body is described as a hand-fashioned structure, modeled and bound together by Yahweh's own working. Job addresses Yahweh as the maker of his own frame: "Your hands have framed me and fashioned me, together round about" (Job 10:8). The making is figured as clay-work — "Remember, I urge you, that you have fashioned me as clay; and will you bring me into dust again?" (Job 10:9) — and as the curdling of liquid into solid: "Have you not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?" (Job 10:10). The finished body is then described as clothing layered over a frame: "You have clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews" (Job 10:11). The body is not detached from the life it carries; the same fashioning hand grants it life: "You have granted me life and loving-kindness; and your visitation has preserved my spirit" (Job 10:12).
The Psalmist names the same fashioning at the level of the body's hidden formation. "I will give thanks to you; because of your awesome works I am distinguished" (Ps 139:14), "My frame was not hidden from you, when I was made in secret, [and] curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth" (Ps 139:15), and "Your eyes saw me developing from conception; and in your book they were all written, [even] the days that were formed [for me] when as yet there was none of them" (Ps 139:16). The body's frame and its development from conception are exhibited as the object of divine knowledge and ordering.
The Body and the Inner Life
The body is set in working relation to the life it carries. Proverbs joins the inner state to the body's tissues: "A tranquil heart is the life of the flesh; but envy is the rottenness of the bones" (Pr 14:30). The flesh and the bones are the body-loci on which the heart's tranquility or its envy register.
Paul names the body alongside the other components of the person under a single sanctifying horizon: "And may the God of peace himself sanctify you⁺ wholly; and may your⁺ spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1Th 5:23). The body stands with spirit and soul as the object of a triple, entire-preservation, the standard is blamelessness, and the horizon is the coming of the Lord.
The Epistle to Diognetus reaches for the body as an analogical term for the world itself: "But to speak simply: what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world" (Gr 6:1). The likeness between the body-and-its-soul and the world-and-its-Christians is what makes the analogy intelligible.
The Flesh-Surface Under Yahweh's Claim
The body's flesh-surface is treated as Yahweh's protected ground in the Levitical legislation. The general congregation is barred from mourning-cuts and from tattoo-inscription: "You⁺ will not make on your⁺ flesh any cuttings for a soul, nor make on you⁺ any tattoo marks: I am Yahweh" (Le 19:28). The same protection is intensified for the priests, whose head, beard, and skin are all named: "They will not make baldness on their head, neither will they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh" (Le 21:5). The body is exhibited as a covenantally guarded surface; the closing "I am Yahweh" clause grounds the rule in his own claim on the flesh.
The Body as Member and Temple
In the Pauline corpus the human body is described as already organ-level joined to Christ. "Don't you⁺ know that your⁺ bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ, and make them members of a whore? God forbid" (1Co 6:15). The body is named not as a neutral appendage but as a member-of-Christ whose alternative attachments are repudiated.
The same body is figured as a temple in which the Holy Spirit dwells. Of the gathered hearers Paul writes, "Don't you⁺ know that you⁺ are a temple of God, and [that] the Spirit of God dwells in you⁺?" (1Co 3:16); and of the body itself, "Or don't you⁺ know that your⁺ body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you⁺, whom you⁺ have from God? And you⁺ are not your⁺ own" (1Co 6:19). The body is a temple, the indwelling is by the Spirit, and the consequence is that ownership has shifted away from the self.
The Body as Figure for the Body of Christ
The same anatomical vocabulary that describes the human frame supplies the figurative grammar of the people of Christ. To the Ephesians: "from whom all the body being joined and knit together through that which every joint supplies, according to the working in [due] measure of each individual part, makes the increase of the body to the building up of itself in love" (Eph 4:16). To the Colossians the head-and-body relation is named: "and not holding fast the Head, from whom all the body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and bands, increases with the increase of God" (Col 2:19). Joints, bands, and individual parts are the body-vocabulary on which the figure of growth-from-the-Head depends.
The Body's Corruption
The body is named under a vocabulary of decay. Job's friend Eliphaz speaks of those "who stay in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before the moth" (Job 4:19). Job himself calls the pit and the maggot his closest kin: "If I have said to the pit, You are my father; to the maggot, [You are] my mother, and my sister" (Job 17:14). Ecclesiastes draws out the same return at length, in an image-sequence of failing senses, of a silver cord loosed and a golden bowl broken (Ec 12:6), and concludes: "and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it" (Ec 12:7). The body's decay is paired with the spirit's return; the dust-clay material of which the body was fashioned (Job 10:9) is the same dust to which it goes back.
Paul names this corruptibility as a state to be exchanged: "For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this corruptible will have put on incorruption, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory" (1Co 15:53-54).
The Body Called House
The present body is described as an earthly house or tabernacle whose dissolution is set against an eternal building from God. "For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens" (2Co 5:1). The future body is figured as "our habitation which is from heaven": "For truly in this we groan, longing to be clothed on with our habitation which is from heaven" (2Co 5:2). The present groaning and the future clothing-upon are paired; the heavenly habitation is the object of the present yearning.
The Spiritual Body
The body's resurrection-form is named as a spiritual body, set in pair against the natural one. "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual [body]" (1Co 15:44). The pattern is keyed to a heavenly image: "And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we will also bear the image of the heavenly" (1Co 15:49). To the Philippians the future body is conformed to the body of Christ's own glory: "who will fashion anew the body of our humiliation, [that it may be] conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working by which he is able even to subject all things to himself" (Php 3:21). And the manifestation of this glory-body is set parallel to Christ's own appearing: "When Christ will be manifested, [who is] your⁺ life, then you⁺ will also be manifested with him in glory" (Col 3:4).