Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible

3. The Prostitute as Icon of the Ironic Gaze

The figure of the prostitute is prominent in several striking narratives in the Hebrew Bible, and metaphorical constructions of female sexuality in terms having to do with prostitution animate the diction of the biblical prophets. Ironic reversals abound in the prose stories and prophetic oracles that deal with the figure of the prostitute directly. Irony also suffuses texts that hint more obliquely at gendered dynamics of power and economic bartering for sex, whether explicit or implicit, narratologically “actual” or metaphorical. Cultural reference to prostitutes offered biblical authors rich possibilities for exploring the charged and paradoxical relationships between anonymity and intimacy, power and vulnerability . The prostitute as dramatic character provides an important metaphor for biblical writers interested in telling stories of risk, sin, exposure , the transgression of social boundaries, and accountability. This chapter will analyze the intricate ironies at play in biblical stories of five women who are characterized—three openly, two more subtly —as prostitutes: Tamar, Rahab, Jael, Gomer, and Ruth. All of these ironies involve metadiscursive reflection on points of intersection between cultures or ethnic groups. In every biblical story considered here, 3 The Prostitute as Icon of the Ironic Gaze The Prostitute as Icon of the Ironic Gaze 85 the figure of the prostitute (or pseudo-prostitute) carries in her body and in the implied risks and pleasures of her sexuality the boundaries being scripted or transgressed for the Israelite community in the narrative . To look closely at the figures of these prostitutes is to read a multivalent symbol-text in which story and counter-story unfold in the same moment. The constructed figure of the prostitute is a powerful icon for the ironic gazes of authors and hermeneuts alike. Before engaging the stories of these biblical women, it will be important to lay some groundwork with an exploration of key theoretical notions concerning the ways in which biblical texts rely on constructions of women’s sexuality for their meaning-making. In this, I will attend to sexuality theorist Elizabeth Grosz and gender theorist Judith Butler as I engage leading Hebrew Bible scholars who have analyzed issues of women and sexuality in antiquity.1 Gender roles, understandings of corporeality, and norms for sexual behavior are constructed socially by individuals and groups (most visibly by those who produce literature, art, and laws), according to social and political criteria that have to do with the authorizing of power relationships in interpersonal, domestic, and public spheres. Understanding how women’s and men’s bodies and agency are constructed is of crucial importance for appreciating the narratives of body and sexuality that we find in biblical texts treating prostitution.2 In literature that represents communal or individual identity by means of appeal to the erotic, the possibilities for reinforcing, nuancing, or subverting audience expectations regarding sexual agency constitute rich sources of narratological power. The play of the constructed body through many different levels of signification is articulated well by Elizabeth Grosz: The body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production, or constitution. The body is not opposed to culture, a resistant throwback to a natural past; it is itself a cultural, the cultural product. . . . The body is neither —while also being both—the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctive or learned, genetically or environmentally determined. In the face of social constructivism, the body’s tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be invoked; but in opposition to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism it is the body as cultural product that must be stressed. This indeterminable position enables it to be used as a particularly powerful strategic term to upset the frameworks by which these binary pairs are considered.3 86 Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible The presence of women’s bodies in biblical narrative and poetry is freighted indeed, for all of the reasons cited above concerning social boundaries and sources of power in identity construction. Embodied women characters stand out as implicit sources of conflict with masculine notions of self, community, and God. One simple but potent reason is that women are rare in biblical literature. The protagonists in biblical stories and the speakers in biblical poetic discourse are constructed as almost all male, at least in those texts in which gender identity can be determined as a feature of characterization or narratorial voice. As Alice Bach writes: [B]iblical narratives are written...