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  • Reading Women's Stories: Female Characters in the Hebrew Bible
  • Nehama Aschkenasy
Reading Women's Stories: Female Characters in the Hebrew Bible, by John Petersen. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. 226 pp. $22.00.

It was T. S. Eliot who said that any new work brings about a re-ordering and re-aligning of all works that preceded it. It is doubtful that John Petersen's Reading Women's Stories: Female Characters in the Hebrew Bible will have the same impact on the heavily trodden and ever proliferating field of the study of women in the Bible. Perhaps to make up for the lack of original insight or method, Petersen has taken upon himself to provide a summary of the abundant scholarly field, displaying his vast reading on the subject matter as well as his enthusiasm for it.

The early feminist interpreters of the Hebrew Bible in our own times have shuttled between the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Mieke Bal and Esther Fuchs may be good examples) which attribute gender-politics agenda to any texts originating in the male community, and the "hermeneutics of reconciliation" (Phyllis Trible and her followers) which attempt to balance the feminist scholars' built-in admiration for the sacred text with their painful realization that the female voice is suppressed in it. The former engages in retrojection, reading the contemporary feminist anger and combativeness into the ancient texts and seeing conspiratorial, and often misogynistic, purposes in any given text dealing with women or referring to matters of gender. The latter seeks to uncover the feminine voice under the male-intoned narratives and locate those instances where the female is brought to center stage in a sympathetic light, either openly or subtly.

While not displaying any agenda of combativeness or a need to reconcile, Petersen has actually borrowed reading techniques and structural approaches from both camps. He quotes profusely from Bal, yet exhibits none of her deep-seated suspicions or intent to uncover authorial violence against the female. His book focuses on three biblical texts, the tale of Hannah, the Song of Deborah, and the story of Judah and Tamar. His method, a close textual analysis which assumes a well-defined and recoverable meaning in the written text, may sound old-fashioned, but is quite refreshing in today's post-modern claims of the inherent impossibility of locating a defined meaning in text. His [End Page 165] goal is to reconstruct, rather than deconstruct, the biblical tales, as he is re-reading and re-telling them. He sees the terseness of the biblical narrative style and what he calls its "reticence" as an opportunity to delve into the meaning of the text. In his reading of the tale of Hannah, he follows the "uncovering" of her character with the aid of critical tools he has adopted from Alter and Sternberg. He is wrong, by the way, in claiming that only one recent scholar has recognized the opening of l Samuel as the story of Hannah and not just a preamble to the life of a great man, Samuel. In his analysis of the Song of Deborah he follows the shifting among a variety of points of view, and in his reading of the Judah and Tamar episode he examines plotting devices which help redeem the patriarch.

Without offering the excitement of novelty, Petersen's book, nevertheless, makes for a pleasant and enjoyable reading as it synthesizes some of the earlier readings of these dramatic stories.

Nehama Aschkenasy
Center for Judaic & Middle Eastern Studies
University of Connecticut Stamford
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