The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and "Sexuality" in the Hebrew Bible (review)

144 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and "Sexuality" in the Hebrew Bible, by Athalya Brenner. Biblical Interpretation Series, Vol. 26. Leiden, New York and Kobo: Brill, 1997. 190 pp. $72.50 hardcover. Feminist readers ofthe Hebrew Bible have long been divided over whether the Hebrew Bible affIrms gender equality (if not socially, then at least ontologically) and offers positive views offemale sexuality, or whether it assumes gender asymmetry and locates female sexuality as a symbol for "otherness," danger, and chaos. Athalya Brenner's recent book The Intercourse ofKnowledge: On Gendering Desire and "Sexuality" in the Hebrew Bible offers a forceful contribution to the latter perspective by attending to the ways that the Hebrew Bible constructs and genders human sexuality and sexual desire. As the book's title, The Intercourse of Knowledge, suggests, the theme of knowledge (sexual and epistomological) and the reciprocities (or lack thereof) of who knows and who is known is key to the argument she develops. By and large in the Hebrew Bible, Brenner argues, it is men who "know" women, and women who are "known"; it is men who are the active agents of love and desire, and it is women who are the passive recipients ofsuch agency. In short, it is men alone who possess sexuality (understood as the "autonomous potential for socio-sexual behaviours motivated by desire" [po 178]). And because "sexuality is a requisite for constructing gender," Brenner comes to the somewhat startling argument that in the Hebrew Bible, there is only one gender-male. Her argument proceeds through a linguistic analysis of biblical terms for desire, sex, and gendered physiology, to a consideration ofideologies and technologies related to procreation and contraception, to an analysis of socio-religious codes relating to incest and other acts of sexual transgression, and finally, to reflections on biblical "pornoprophetics," that is, the graphic, female sexual imagery offered up in the "marriage" metaphors of Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Throughout this somewhat eclectic array of topics, Brenner fmds a common thread: that biblical women are represented as much more "pre-sexual" than men, as fundamentally biological rather than cultural beings, whose nakedness can be legitimately exposed and exploited, in contrast to biblical males, whose sexual organs are inviolate and hidden, both in the text and in the language. This contrast between women as biological creatures who lack sexuality and males as cultural agents who possess sexuality, is illustrated, for example, in Brenner's linguistic analysis of the biblical terms for male and female. The posited derivation of neqebiih ("female") from the verb niiqah-"to pierce"-suggests to Brenner connotations of female as "hole," "opening," or "orifice." Femaleness is marked by a physiological feature, and is coded as a passive receptacle, an orifice waiting to be filled. Ziikiir ("male"), by contrast, is derived from the verb ziikar-"to remember"suggesting that the male is the carrier ofmemory and social continuity; maleness is thus Book Reviews 145 linked to culture and social agency. Males then are a gender, products ofand producers ofculture, whereas women are but a sex, defmable by a decisive physical characteristic. This negating of female humanity reaches its fullest expression, Brenner argues, in biblical depictions of Israel as a harlot who is stripped naked and sexually violated in punishment for her "sins"; in these "pornoprophetic" texts, the male prophetic voice and intended male audience "assume the right to undress the female and to drive knowledge into her gazed-at being, while they remain safely protected by layers of clothing and self-righteousness" (p. 171). Brenner's analysis ofbiblical sexuality is informed by recent arguments about the subordination ofsexuality to structures ofsocial power in the ancient world. As Daniel Boyarin puts it, "there was no autonomous realm of'sexuality' within classical cultures at all; desire and pleasure were inextricably bound up with the relations ofpower and domination that structured the entire society.... The world was divided into the screwers-all male-and the screwed-both male and female" (Boyarin, cited in Brenner, p. 4). Sexual desire, sexual pleasure, and therefore, sexuality itself, were the prerogative of the "screwer" class. Brenner does a brilliant job in making a case for similar...