Minding and Mending the Gap

1. Introduction

"Though power has always been Delilah's aphrodisiac," writes Ann Spangler, the Philistines "tempted her with something even more seductive—cold hard cash."¹ And with that cash in hand, Spangler explains, Delilah betrays Samson. In Wicked Women of the Bible, Spangler recites (an embellished) version of Delilah's story in a chapter entitled "A Wicked Girlfriend." Out of its twenty chapters, nine feature female characters from the so-called Deuteronomistic History: Rahab, Deborah and Jael, Hannah and Peninnah, Michal, Abigail, the Medium of Endor, Bathsheba, and Jezebel. This list reflects what biblical readers have long noted—the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings include many stories of women, both named and unnamed.² Moreover, Spangler follows an interpretive thread that runs throughout the world in front of these books: some of these women, like Delilah and Jezebel, are evil or wicked; others, women like Deborah, Hannah, and Abigail, are good (as in "wicked good" or "wicked smart").³

However, as others have noted, such binarizing tendencies distort these stories of women, which are often far less clear about whether they can easily be catalogued as "good" or "wicked." Even in the received text, sometimes framed by later editors to alert readers to how they should evaluate the ancient Israelites, the time period more broadly, or specific characters (e.g., "In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes"; "He did what was evil in the sight of the lord, walking in the way of Jeroboam and in the sin that he caused Israel to commit," etc.), the stories of many of these women are laced with lacunae. For example, in Judg 16:4–6, which we saw Spangler describe above, we read:

After this [Samson] fell in love with a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. The lords of the Philistines came to her and said to her, "Coax him, and find out what makes his strength so great, and how we may overpower him, so that we may bind him in order to subdue him; and we will each give you eleven hundred pieces of silver." So Delilah said to Samson, "Please tell me what makes your strength so great, and how you could be bound, so that one could subdue you."

(NRSV)

In these three verses, the events appear to take place quickly: Samson falls in love with a woman named Delilah, the Philistines come to her with a demand and promise money, and she asks Samson for his secret. We are not told how Delilah feels, whether the Philistines give her the "cold hard cash," or anything about Delilah's motivation, much less that "power has always been Delilah's aphrodisiac." As we will see in more detail below, these elements—along with others—are filled in by later readers.

The three books reviewed here—Mary Ann Taylor and Christiana de Groot's Women of War, Women of Woe: Joshua and Judges through the Eyes of Nineteenth Century Female Biblical Interpreters, Ginny Brewer Boydston's Good Queen Mothers, Bad Queen Mothers: The Theological Presentation of the Queen Mother in 1 and 2 Kings, and Caroline Blyth's Reimagining Delilah's Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction—each ask their readers, implicitly or explicitly, to "mind the gaps" in biblical texts and/or in their interpretive and reception histories, especially with an eye toward the binarization of female characters.^4...