The Bible in Contemporary Israeli Literature: Text and Place in Zeruya Shalev's Husband and Wife and Michal Govrin's Snapshots

Zeruya Shalev's Husband and Wife and Michal Govrin's Snapshots offer two distinct literary responses to Anita Shapira's polemical question: "Is there a way to restore the Bible to the focus of Hebrew Culture?" In both novels, the authors try to find a place for the Bible in a contemporary Israeli context: Shalev makes the Bible part of the local, intimate life of her protagonist and Govrin breaks the Bible's dominance over the Talmud and of the primacy of sovereignty over mobility, and in so doing gives legitimacy to different narratives of place. Both authors search for feminine models in order to move away from the Zionist association of the Bible with the land. Furthermore, both authors advance, or at least allow for, a reading of these feminine models as metaphors for a larger, collective identity, which not only reflects personal, private conflicts but also reacts to the changes that Zionist ideology has undergone in Jewish thought.