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11 A Queer Womanist Midrashic Reading of Numbers 25:1-18 Wil Gafney What makes an interpretation feminist?1 A feminist interpretation is one in which gender forms a, if not the, critical lens through which the object—text, artifact, performance, culture, and so on—is interpreted. The gender lens is a multifocal tool, so gender as an interpretive medium includes gendering disclosed in and constructed by the text, artifact, performance, or culture being interpreted and the gender configurations and implications of those configurations of the interpreter. Does “feminist interpretation” refer to the method or the hermeneutical lens one uses, or does it refer to both? A feminist interpretation is not a single method or hermeneutical lens. Feminist interpretation employs and deploys a variety of methodologies and lenses in addition to the gender lens. None of the literary, social, cultural, or religious texts, artifacts, or performances that we interpret is one-dimensional; neither are their interpreters one-dimensional. Given the diversity of feminist scholarship in biblical studies, is it possible or desirable to speak of a single feminist method? It is possible to speak of a feminist method, but I believe it is the height of arrogance to speak of a singular feminist method. These questions framed our discussion at the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion section at the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2011, and the initial, simple answers we gave trouble me, because they do not get at what I mean and understand by feminist or womanist interpretation. I have wrestled with these and similar questions in conversation with wonderful students, teachers, colleagues, congregants, and editors. Finally, it dawned on me: the difficulty I was having articulating what I mean by feminist and womanist interpretation was similar to the difficulty my aunt had when I asked 189 her for one of my grandmother’s recipes. She couldn’t tell me how to make the dish, but she could show me. But I wasn’t there. She had to make the dish herself and then reverse-engineer it because neither she nor my grandmother wrote their recipes down. They just cooked. Perhaps the hermeneutical equivalent of reverse engineering a recipe is praxis. Praxis is most simply the practice of an art or skill; in divinity school, I learned that praxis is best supplemented with reflection that leads to more praxis in an action-reflection cycle. So to respond more deeply to the framing questions, I would like to borrow from the methodology of Katie Geneva Canon and offer a vignette modeling of a womanist and feminist methodology in my praxis repertoire. (Dr. Canon regularly frames her public lectures and academic presentations with vignettes as a womanist discursive practice.) I call it womanist midrash, combining the deployment of the African American sanctified imagination as a womanist and feminist interpretive lens with the broader tradition of rabbinic and postrabbinic tradition of midrash. While Israel was dwelling in Shittim, the people began to have unsanctioned-intimate-relationships [liznot] with the women of Moab. And the (Moabite) women invited the (Israelite) people to the sacrifices of the God of the (Moabite) women, and the people ate and bowed down to the God of the (Moabite) women. (Num. 25:1-2)2 Numbers 25 extends the previous Torah portrayals of foreign women as dangerously seductive to a new realm. The people, ha‘am—an inclusive term that includes women and men—began to “whore” with Moabite women (see the Fox [1995] and GSJPS translations of liznot). The use of “people” suggests a large group between “some” and “all.” (Num. 25:9 offers a possible tally of at least twenty-four thousand.) Adults, categorized by the ability to be sexually active, are indicated here. The Israelites are regularly accused of prostituting themselves with other gods or their intermediaries in the scriptures, for example, in Lev. 17:7; 20:6; Deut. 31:6; and Ezekiel 16 and 23. Worship of other deities is regularly characterized as adultery and prostitution, for example, in Jer. 5:7; Hos. 4:14; 1 Chron. 5:25. The charge of prostitution, from z-n-h Qal, can mean sex for money or worship of other deities or intermarriage with nonIsraelite peoples. This last is accompanied by the presumption that intermarriage will lead the Israelite spouse to non-Israelite worship; interestingly, the canon does not presume authorized Israelite worship will draw outsiders into its fold. Yet all intermarriages are characterized as whoring; Yosef (Joseph),3 Moshe (Moses...

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