Searching for a Woman's Voice: Review Essay

86 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 SEARCHING FOR A WOMAN'S VOICE: REVIEW ESSAY by Sara Mandell Department of Religious Studies University of South Florida On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible, by Athalya Brenner and Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993. 211 pp. $115.00. On Gendering Texts is an important but problematic and poorly presented contribution to the growing study of the representation of women in Hebrew Scriptures. The work is divided into a Foreword by Mieke Bal, an Introduction by Brenner and van Dijk-I-Iemmes, four lengthy essays each of which is subdivided into two or more sections, a brief Afterword, References and Bibliography, and Index of Ancient Sources. In the Foreword, Mieke Bal suggests that scholars are preoccupied with Source and Redaction Criticism and that they have ignored or trivialized women's contribution to the Bible (p. ix). Bal dismisses conventional non-feminist scholarship by praising Brenner and van DijkHemmes for paying attention to problems ofgender rather "than worrying about unprovable historical authors" (p. ix). The pejorative attitude toward such basic exegetical tools as Redaction and Source Criticism sets the tone for the entire work. After giving a short history of the development of their collaborative effort, Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes devote the remainder of the Introduction to considerations of methodology and scope, along with synopses of the work's constituent segments. They are concerned with differentiating between texts composed by women, "Textuality attributed to ... women," and the "possibility of defining ... authoritative ... women's voices" (p. 6, italics Brenner and van-Dijk-I-Iemmes's), even when they are merely "echoes" that have been "contextualized into male discourse" (p. 7). Review Essay: Searching for a Woman's Voice 87 The study of orality and literacy, which are not mutually exclusive, is pertinent to their attempt to investigate whether there are "women's texts" in the Bible (pp. 2-3). But since women's traditions were mainly oral and primarily collaborative efforts (p. 4), the authors allege that they are obfuscated or even obliterated, and their "female character" is destroyed or misconstrued in the biblical traditions (p. 5). And since the gendering of the texts is dependent on the reader's gender, many biblical texts must be deemed to be "dual-gendered" (pp. 8-9). Part I, "Traces of Women's Texts in the Hebrew Bible," by Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, is a lengthy essay. Van Dijk-Hemmes begins her study by describing the work of others who contend that the Hebrew Bible was composed by males and has its origin in a male-controlled and -oriented society (p. 17); and that evidence for the life of the Children of Israel can only be extracted from the text with extreme caution (p. 17). She does not acknowledge any variation in the attitude of the society/societies formed by the Children of Israel vis-a-vis the role of women, although we know that the earliest poetic texts in the Hebrew Bible are from the 13th-12th centuries BCE, the earliest prose narrative is 10th century BCE, and the latest texts of any type are 2nd century BCE. But normative and sectarian changes are always relevant to a proper understanding of the sociological and anthropological constructs that underlie the gendering of any text. Despite the rejection of Source and Redaction criticism that seems basic to all segments of On Gendering Texts, van Dijk-Hemmes does accept some postulates of Form Criticism. She presumes that "most of the biblical writings are products of a tradition that has, more or less, undergone a lengthy period of written transmission, but originated in the oral process." Therefore she deems it legitimate to seek women's voices that had been obliterated in the course of transmission (p. 19). Her premise is invalid precisely because not all texts have an underlying orality. Van Dijk-Hemmes discusses the relevance of seeking females who wrote texts. She notes that even when women author texts, their writings may reflect an "androcentric mind-set" due to socialization in a maleoriented culture (p. 21). She discusses models used to seek women's culture and texts in male-oriented...