In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (review)

96 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 BOOK REVIEWS In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth, by Tikva Frymer-Kensky. New York: The Free Press, 1992. 292 pp. $24.95. Tikva Frymer-Kensky is an Assyriologist with impeccable academic standards and full mastery of the primary Near Eastern materials in all the pertinent ancient languages. She also possesses the vision and the intellectual curiosity to use this rich historical evidence in an exploration of gender and sexuality in Mesopotamia and ancient Israel. The fortunate result is this remarkable book, which reliably and thoughtfully investigates biblical and post-biblical views of gender and theology against the backdrop of the goddesses and cosmologies of Sumer and Mesopotamia. In Part I, "The World of the Goddesses," Frymer-Kensky examines the goddesses of the ancient Sumerian pantheons. The Sumerian construct of multiple deities who balance one another in an interplay of power and natural forces allows for goddesses' Significant roles as wives, mothers, advisers, champions ofdomestic arts, lovers, warriors, and guardians of the essential arts of civilization. But over the course of the centuries and millennia there is a steady and increasing trend toward the marginalization of the female deities in the pantheons and of their importance in the world order, and a usurpation of their functions and realms by male deities. Part II, "In the Absence ofGoddesses: Biblical Transformations," is the longest and central part of this work. Here Frymer-Kensky contrasts Sumerian pantheism with Biblical monotheism-one god who brought the people ofIsrael out of slavery in Egypt, who controls all the natural forces of the universe that answer all Israel's physical needs, and to whom all loyalty is due. Now only one deity controls the rain and the Wind, love and war, human reproduction and the healing arts. With this merging of all essential human needs in one god, the conceptualization of the natural and human worlds-and of the male and female aspects of these worldsundergoes a fundamental and radical transformation. One result of this transformation, Frymer-Kensky argues, is the increasing importance that biblical monotheism places on human initiative and responsibility in the creation and maintenance of civilization. Book Reviews 97 Although the Israelite god has taken into himself all the aspects elsewhere and previously held by several male and female deities, he remains male and his interaction with Israel is defined by gender. Thus the metaphor of God and Israel as husband and wife becomes the construct by which Israel (or at least its prophets) understands its relationship with its god. This "marriage" is not, however, an ideal, equal partnership. It is, Frymer-Kensky shows, "intense and emotional [and] a nightmare ofdomination in a punitive relationship" (p. 144). Frymer-Kensky concludes that the immediacy and emotionality o~ this metaphor is a logical and perhaps necessary result of biblical monotheism: because there is no intermediary between God and the people, their relationship must be intense and personal . As powerful as is the marital metaphor, it is not the only one by which Israel understands its relationship to its god. The parent-child relationship also conceptualizes the relationship; in which God is also the (mostly male) parent who punishes and comforts, who advises, commands, and nurtures the child Israel. In this new, peculiarly Israelite, monotheism, the overwhelming maleness of God as sovereign, husband, and father acts as dominant and dominating partner with Israel as vassal, wife, and child. Still, Israel retains necessary vestiges of the female as powerful intercessor. Frymer-Kensky recalls the matriarch Rachel lamenting "Israel's fate and interceding on Israel's behalf; Zion, the essence of Jerusalem, as the female personification of Israel; Wisdom (in the Book of Proverbs), who was created at the very beginning of time, not God's rival but his Witness, and essentially a literary figure; and the Sabbath bride as Israel's queen. Yet always these female figures are marginal and secondary in Israelite religion and later Judaism. In Part III, "Sex and Gender: The Unfinished Agenda," Frymer-Kensky moves from her investigations of gender to draw some sweeping conclusions about sex and sexuality. The sexual aspects of Near Eastern religious experience...