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3 Israel and Judah Paired sisters married to a single husband appear in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel as part of the prophet’s depiction of Israel as God’s promiscuous wife. Scholars credit the eighth-century prophet Hosea for introducing the marriage metaphor into prophetic literature when he compares his relationship with his own unfaithful wife Gomer to God’s relationship with Israel.1 Subsequent prophets develop the metaphor. Piecing together the prophetic texts that evoke the marriage metaphor, scholars like Gerlinde Baumann construct a narrative for Israel as God’s wife that extends from youth through adulthood and that reflects the stages of her marriage to God.2 At first, God loves Israel.3 Lustful Israel challenges that love when she pursues other lovers.4 Enraged, God brutally punishes Israel and divorces her.5 Having administered justice, God then reconciles with Israel and renews his covenant with her.6 Although Hosea is the first to evoke the metaphor, most scholars do not locate its origin in Hosea’s troubled marriage. Scholars like Gale Yee attribute the development of the metaphor to social and political changes in ancient Israel’s society. Yee suggests that Hosea responds to Israel’s increased engagement with foreign powers during the eighth century when it shifted from a native-tributary mode of production to a foreign-tributary mode. Hosea, Yee posits, constructed an effective rhetoric that castigates any political, social, and religious engagement with foreign powers.7 Others, like Alice A. Keefe and Christl M. Maier, situate the metaphor within a long history that associates land with women and women’s bodies with the body politic.8 For Keefe, women’s bodies in the Bible represent the social body. A violated woman like Dinah or a promiscuous woman like Gomer represent social chaos and signify Israel’s vulnerable, if not breached, society.9 Given the sexual nature of the marriage metaphor, recent scholarship has focused on its rhetorical impact—ancient and contemporary.10 Explicit images of a female Israel spreading her legs for everyone who passes by and of 53 masturbating with gold phallic images11 raises the question of whether these passages should be considered pornographic.12 This identification may seem anachronistic and unnecessarily provocative, but it focuses attention on the craft of these passages and on their intended audience. In this reading, the marriage metaphor is carefully constructed to elicit a strong response from the prophets’ audience. As Yee observes, the prophets address an audience of elite males and use the marriage metaphor as a provocative way to shame their audience into reform by calling them loose women. Yee thinks the marriage metaphor in Hosea “feminizes” the ruling male elite and symbolically castrates them, thereby deterring them from engaging with foreigners.13 Prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel introduce and develop a unique element within the metaphor of Israel as God’s wife. Jeremiah 3:6-11, Ezek 16:44-63, and Ezekiel 23 portray Israel and Judah (and in the case of Ezekiel 16, Sodom as well) as sexually promiscuous sisters, married to God. Although married to God, these paired sisters pursue other lovers and are violently punished by God. Given that Israel and Judah are two distinct kingdoms that share, to some degree, a national and religious identity, the introduction of sisters into the marriage metaphor may seem logical and not particularly innovative.14 It makes sense in the context of the marriage metaphor that two kingdoms would mean two wives for God. This certainly would have been a natural image during Hosea’s lifetime when the Northern Kingdom still stood. Yet by the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Israel had long ago fallen to Assyria, and Judah alone faced the threat of Babylon.15 Therefore, I contend, these prophets chose to evoke the memory of Israel and chose to portray Israel and Judah as sisters—as opposed to two unrelated wives. Jeremiah and Ezekiel’s choice to portray Israel and Judah as sisters confirms that sisters are dangerous yet powerful figures. In the paired sister stories already studied, we have seen the narrative power of sisters, who destabilize their natal households and work to remove rival patriarchs from the narrative to strengthen the position of the Bible’s designated patriarchs. In Jeremiah and Ezekiel, we see the rhetorical power of sisters, who can be evoked to persuade Israel to change its sinful behavior. These sisters are a core part of what Mary E. Shields calls the prophets’ “subversive discourse,” designed to...

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