Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman, and: Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCIII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2003) 639-642 Esther Fuchs. Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 310. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Pp. 244. Claudia V. Camp. Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making ofthe Bible. Gender, Culture, Theory 9; Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 320. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Pp. 372. Esther Fuchs' highly readable Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative. Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman explicates the ways in which the male authors and narrators of the Hebrew Bible depict women in ways that reinforce their understanding of the proper ordering of human life. By means of a thoroughgoing literary analysis of a sequence of biblical stories, Fuchs isolates and unpacks the narrative maneuvers that serve these purposes, which depict female characters as less-than-ideal humans in many subtle ways, that is, as ideal women, who from a patriarchal perspective are always less than men. The introductory chapter delimits the range, scope, and methodology that Fuchs employs. A wide range of stories about women characters are analyzed by close readings from several perspectives. Chapter 2, on the objective fallacy of contemporary biblical criticism, shows the cultural imperialism of male thought in the Hebrew Bible, and in much of the secondary literature, where the norms of "right" living are no more than male norms "in disguise." Resistant readers, such as feminist readers or even "equalist" readers, are not envisaged by those masculinist authors/narrators, only docile , accepting readers who agree with the authors' construct of the symbolic universe as rightly male-dominated. Female characters enter the texts as part of male characters' stories: the existence of perplexing gaps in their stories provides evidence that they have no stories of their own. Fuchs illustrates, and to my mind proves, her thesis by examining the stories of raped virgins, maidens at wells, brides, wouldbe brides, wives, sisters, daughters, and would-be mothers (of sons, ideally), namely Dinah, Rebekah, Ruth, Tamar and Tamar, Sarah, Rachel, and Zipphorah . She admirably shows how these female characters are treated as the actual and symbolic property of males, in that their bodies and their reproductive powers are under the control and at the disposal of males, of whom the deity is the most powerful; he is as well their most partisan supporter . Any sons born are born to the men. Male concerns and anxieties are never voiced aloud; they are displaced onto the concerns, words, and actions of women characters. In the narrative 640THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW world, fertility is solely a female anxiety; men are mere victims of their wives' barrenness. Similarly men are constructed as the true victims of the rape of their sisters or daughters; they are the dishonored ones and they seek retribution. Fuchs's book will be useful to a wide range of readers, because it can be read equally as separate chapters and sections that treat particular stories and associated secondary literature or as an engaging book that surveys and discusses current scholarship on key stories about female characters in the Hebrew Bible. Fuchs's presentation of her evidence is faultless and unrelenting ; the reader arrives at her conclusions along with the author. Camp's Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible discusses many of the same Bible stories as Fuchs, but with a wider methodological range. She also discusses a much larger selection of Hebrew Bible texts, both as stories and as blocks of text. Few books of the Hebrew Bible are left undiscussed; significant parts of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, Proverbs , Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are given thorough scrutiny. Reading her book, therefore, demands deep concentration from the reader, an encyclopedic knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, and familiarity with a spectrum of critical methods: literary, narratological, feminist, historical-critical, and anthropological, along with the ability to move between synchronic and diachronic approaches to the text. Moreover, in her own highly detailed and thorough exegesis, she engages with current scholarship on each of...