Showing Seeing in Susanna: The Virtue of the Text

The story of Susanna in the longer Greek versions of the biblical book of Daniel has come to be regarded as a "text of terror" within the Septuagint: some recent critics classify the book as pornography, offering the reader a chance to spy on Susanna directly through the lenses of her violators. But the tools of narratology show that in fact the text's storytelling mechanisms work differently: in particular, the revision of Theodotion reorders the story and syntax to resist the voyeuristic perspective of the earlier Old Greek version. Further, there is a much more complicated overlapping of visual fields in the Susanna-tale than a monolithic, one-directional male gaze: Greek theatrical conventions, ancient optics, and modern theory converge to expose an intricate map of what happens to whom when seeing takes place in Susanna.