The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible (review)

THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, XCII,Nos. 1-2 (July-October, 2001)210-215 GAIL CORRINGTON STREETE,The Strange Woman:Power and Sex in the Bible. Louisville: WestminsterJohn Knox Press, 1997. Pp. x + 219. In her introductionthe authorexplains that the issue addressedby this book is the following: The problemfor the male authorsof the biblical texts (the origins of the book of Ruth in women'soral narrativesare still a matterof dispute ), whether they belong to the Tanakh,1the Apocrypha, or the New Testament,is not female sexuality per se. That women do have sexual desires and experience sexual pleasure is not denied and at times is shown to be appropriate,if directed to an appropriatemale, a husbandfor the virgin daughteror wife, a masterfor the slave girl, a client for the prostitute.Whenregulated,directed,andcontrolledby male authorities (husbands, fathers, elders), female sexuality, like women themselves, is a male possession that enhances male power, and thus is not a threatto male heterosexual hegemony in the way that "deviant"female sexuality is. (pp. 17-18) On p. 19 the author explains what, in her opinion, both Judaism and Christianityin their sharedandunsharedsacredScripturesmean by "deviant female sexuality": Such descriptionsof female behavior as "harlotry"or "adultery"are applied in the biblical texts, not only to actual sexual behaviorbut to any independentfemale behavior that denies or rejects male control or that seeks its own power or autonomy. Moreover, Streete explains why her examination in the sacred canonical and deuterocanonicaltexts of Judaism and Christianityof what she calls "deviant female sexuality,"defined as "any independent female behavior that ... seeks autonomy"should be of interest to readerson the threshold of the 21st centuryCE: Between the idealized "good woman"Wisdom of Proverbs and the monstrouslyevil GreatWhoreof Revelation is a borderlandinhabited 1Onwomen authorsof variouspartsof HebrewScripturesee S. Goitein, "Woman as Creators of Biblical Genres,"translatedfrom the Hebrew by Michael Carasik, Prooftexts8 (1988) 1-33; on thefemaleauthorof Song see Andr6LaCocque,Romance She Wrote:A HermeneuticalEssay on Song of Songs (Harrisburg,1998); specific passages which the editors of the biblical books themselves attributeto poetesses includeEx 15:21;Judges5; 1 Sam 1:10-11; 2:1-10. STREETE, THE STRANGEWOMAN-GRUBER 211 by the StrangeWoman,the transgressorandtricksters,the Adulteress and Adventuress who is beyond any but her own control. It is her story that illuminates those of her sisters-and our own. Thereinlies its enduringpower. (p. 19) At two points Streete records with a truly poetic gift matters of great worth to students of Christianity.The first of these points is her brilliant exposition of the hiddenmeaningsof the narrativeof Jesus'encounterwith the unnamed Samaritan woman (John 4). She shows how a thorough knowledge of the narrativesof Genesis, the EarlyProphets,andEzekiel 23 is necessary to appreciateproperlythis New Testamentnarrative. Streeteagain waxes poetic when, inspiredby CarlaRicci's classic, Mary Magdalene and Many Others: Women Who Followed Jesus, trans. Paul Burns (Minneapolis, 1994), she lists by name and briefly describes the autonomous women who followed Jesus of Nazareth (pp. 122-124). For a moment one senses thatStreetehas fallen in love with her subjectand that her subject is Holy Scripture.Her enthusiastic presentationof redeeming features of the New Testament continues with her enumeration of the women who play active and importantroles in Acts and in the Pauline epistles (pp. 124-126). Unfortunately,her brief excursus on the important role that women played in emerging Christianity(and, as she admits, following Bernadette Brooten2 and Ross S. Kraemer,3the Judaism of the early Centuries CE) iS too short, but in Chapter5 she continues with the following corollaryof her thesis: Thus, in its final form, the canon of the ChristianBible (Septuagint andNew Testament)reflectedthe interestsandconcerns of this literate male clerical elite. (p. 121) Typical of the generally negative attitudeto the totality of Jewish and ChristianScriptureis ChapterTwo, in which the authorpraises the unsung heroines of the narrativesof the so-called Early Prophets(Joshua,Judges, Samuel, and Kings). In Streete'sreading, these heroines have been unduly maligned by the male authorsof Hebrew Scripture.Of Jezebel, who instigated Ahab'smurderof Naboth and the appropriationof his vineyard, and who herself (as Streeteadmitson p. 63) "busies herself with killing off the prophets of YHWH (1 Kgs 17:8-24) and persecuting Elijah," Streete writes: The paradigmaticevil foreign queen, whose name is...