This essay is an intellectual history, one of affect theory both within and without biblical
studies, rendered as an ecology of thought. It is an “archive of feelings,” a series of
thematic portraits, and a description of the landscape of the field of biblical studies
through a set of frictions and express discontentments with its legacies, as well as a set
of meaningful encounters under its auspices. That landscape is recounted with a fully
experiential map, intentionally relativizing those more dominant sources and traditional
modes of doing intellectual history. Affect theory and biblical studies, it turns
out, both might be described as implicitly, and ambivalently, theological. But biblical
studies has not only typically refused explicit theologizing, it has also refused explicit
affectivity, and so affect theory presents biblical studies with both its own losses and
new and vital possibilities.