In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities (review)

In Scripture is a work of Biblical literary scholarship that examines major texts of the Hebrew Bible using the lens of gender studies. Lefkovitz treats high points of the biblical gender canon beginning with Genesis, ending with Ruth, and encompassing almost every major biblical woman and a number of the men as well. The Patriarchs and Joseph are singled out for their own chapters, although each chapter also deals with a wide range of subject matter beyond its title characters. She views these stories as "foundation texts in the development of sexual identities as we know them," both universally in the West and particularly for Jews, since they have "over time, marked embodied humanity and the body's desires with specifically Jewish ethnic shadings" (p. 3).

Lefkovitz has created a work that is at least as multi-faceted as the biblical narratives she parses. The ostensible aim is to read the Bible as creating various topos for contemporary sexual roles. The book reads like an insightful, anarchic free association with many innovative readings. The strongest thematic connections include those which have been made in other places, such as the Bible's insistence on God's control over human fertility, but here read specifically in terms of the creation, maintenance, and breakdown of gender roles. Women become the instruments of God's will in building a Jewish people that eschews primogeniture, creating the stereotypes of the interfering Jewish mother and the cowed, effeminate Jewish son. Sometimes this son's feminized nature even makes him the literary twin of a female character, as in the case Lefkovitz makes for Joseph and Dinah being presented as uniquely vulnerable to non-Jewish assault. Chapters on Jacob's stolen birthright ruse as an act of performing a false masculinity, and the Book of Ruth as the crowning restatement and neutralization of biblical gender themes, are particularly successful.

Whether Lefkovitz's readings will strike the reader as reasonable or not will determine the book's reception. Fewer ideas and more prooftexts of them per chapter could certainly have helped. Readings whiz around at terrific speed, and the reader is hard-pressed to keep up. Sometimes the arguments read like a performance before a class: a set of questions strung together to show students what might possibly be drawn from a text. More explication of each reading might have been helpful as well. A literary study entitled "The Decline of the Spiritual Man in the Modern Era," for instance, comprises only two paragraphs (p. 94).

The book switches between descriptive and prescriptive modes, as when Lefkovitz turns from literary to theological in the chapter on Miriam: "I submit that this reading is congenial to Judaism and Jewish theology" (p. 108). The lovely reading of Ruth as a recasting and resolution of earlier, negative models of gender is persuasive in large part because it seems to be prescriptive in some way. In the end Lefkovitz is both castigating and celebrating these modern "misreadings." Because of this her "take-home" points can sometimes be vague. When she writes that "a variety of Jewish masculine differences may indeed have empowered and distinguished the Jewish man, but ambivalently, and at a cost to his sexual (self ) image" (p. 97), the context is unclear. Although her examples indicate she is talking about the Bible, the sentence is a rejoinder to Daniel Boyarin, who is talking about men in the Talmud, and both also treat contemporary images of masculinity. "The Jewish man" is just too wide a referent. Also missing is the question: to what end is the Bible presenting these visions of gender? If they are meant to be culturally regulating, why all the ambivalence and slippages? Are they simply inherent in the activity of gender creation, as Judith Butler would argue? The Bible is presented as a grounding text which nevertheless presents only very shifting notions of identity. Its status as a multi-vocal literary work explains some...