Tanakh

July 24, 2024July 24, 2024

Holding Biblical Scholars (and Spiritual Leaders) Accountable: On Rape and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible

It was another morning with scholars of Tanakh (what academics call the Hebrew Bible). I was reading the work of a sober scholar, or so it seemed, when I came across these two sentences:

“While David remains in exile outside of Jerusalem, Absalom sleeps with his father’s concubines as an expression of royal authority. He performs this act to show all Israel he is in charge in place of his father.”

Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

David leaves Jerusalem with “a small nation of thousands,” as another sober scholar, J.P. Fokkelman, puts it. David takes “all the people,” all his servants and followers, all the Cherethites, the Pelethites, and the Gittites (2 Sam. 15:17-8). Even children are part of the king’s entourage (2 Sam. 15:22).

He also decides to leave ten of his “secondary wives” in Jerusalem, charged with the obligation to “protect” the palace (2 Sam. 15:16). When a king commands, you must obey. Unlike David, and his enormous retinue, these women may not flee from an invading army.

Absalom rapes each one of them. On the roof where David once ogled Bathsheba. In public, before all of his men (2 Sam. 16: 20-22).

Absalom sleeps with his father’s concubines?

The words scholars choose are important.

I tried to explain why, in my article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, “Taking Biblical Authors at Their Word: On Scholarly Ethics, Sexual Violence, and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible.” In it, I attempt to analyze why scholars avoid using the terms rape and rape culture. Here are some of their arguments:

We must understand the world biblical authors describe on their terms, in “historical context.” This is the way things were “back then.”
Biblical authors do not understand taking a woman as a violent act but rather as a male right, one only limited by the rights of other men. Their legal world excludes rape because they have no concept of the same.
There is no “lexical equivalent” in biblical Hebrew to the word rape. One cannot use a modern term to describe the ancient texts. (A side note: never mind the fact that scholars have been using the term “marriage” in their discussions of biblical texts for millennia, despite the fact that there is no “lexical equivalent” to be found here, either.)

Here are some of my arguments:

Are any ideologies which justify or rationalize oppression, enslavement, sexual assault, or wholesale destruction, off bounds to interrogation? Simply reproducing toxic ideas is an act of collusion.
Denying a woman power of any kind of consent is a defining feature of rape culture.
Likewise, the very lack of a specific term for rape is evidence of a rape culture par excellence, not of its absence. Not having a name for sexual assault ensures that it cannot be challenged.

Of all the things I have written, this piece may remain the most important to me personally. I wrote about the ethical project we engage in as scholars. I spoke to our obligations. We must hold academics to account; they must be able to interrogate biblical literature and call out the many ways in which it has contributed to toxic hegemonic masculine systems.

Feminist research is about resisting and naming what is wrong. It is about giving every victim of sexual harassment and sexual assault their due. Whether they exist in the pages of our Bibles or in the offices next to ours, whether they are next to us or across the globe, whether they belong to our time or some other, their suffering and their pain may not be ignored.

Thiede, Barbara. 2024. “Taking Biblical Authors at Their Word: On Scholarly Ethics, Sexual Violence, and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal of Biblical Literature 143.2: 185–205. DOI: 10.15699/jbl.1432.2024.1.

* Thanks to Erik Henning Thiede who told me back in 2024: “You have to write this thing.”

June 16, 2024June 16, 2024

Sinai, Tanakh, and the Teaching of Humility

It was our last service before Shavuot. We spoke about Sinai moments. Then I asked my husband, Ralf, to pick up one end of the tallit; I took the other.

We raised the tallit above our heads. Outstretched above us was a soft silk sky of teal blue shot through with lines of sapphire. A gold border shimmered on each side. The colors of sunset and morning sky and the dark of night rippled overhead.

Folks gathered beneath our chuppah. It was very quiet. Each person was praying.

Thus, each soul was singing.

Later, a congregant wrote to me: “I couldn’t help but bring to mind our Sinai moment underneath the beautiful tallit… I will carry that memory with me for the rest of the year, and beyond!”

There is nothing so real as the certainty of spiritual wholeness. It is a thing that cannot be described without tripping over the inadequacy of words.

I live for these moments however impossible it is to describe them. Time does not seem to pass; I am inhabiting a space that is singular. It will never come in that form again.

That was Friday night.

On Sunday morning, I sat at my desk and wrote about Hannah.

Rabbis, ministers, and scholars praise Hannah for her faithful prayers. They laud YHVH for granting her a miracle in the form of her son Samuel.

But those accolades are misplaced. It is YHVH who inflicts barrenness on Hannah, and for no reason. She has done nothing wrong; there is no punishment befitting some imagined failing. How many readers notice how long Hannah endures divinely induced infertility? Hannah must endure the taunts of Elkanah’s other wife, Penina, who reminds Hannah that YHVH has closed her womb. Year after dreadful year (1 Samuel 1:6-7).

YHVH does nothing. There is no communication. There is no explanation. Each year, Hannah weeps. Each year she fasts. There is no answer, no divine response. YHVH reacts only when she vows that if she is given a (male) child, she will return him to serve YHVH.

Perhaps this was YHVH’s plan all along? Perhaps this was a way to find a surrogate mother for a child YYHVH could take for his own, train for his own, and control on his own. For that is what happens to Samuel, who is forced to leave his family as a child. The repeated use of hiphil forms make clear that Hannah “causes” the child to be brought to Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:24).

To erase difficult texts only inflicts a second erasure. I can’t do it. Those readers who know what it is to be taunted and tormented, abused in body and soul — those readers would know me for a fraud.

There is no way to contend with the cruelty and violence of our own time with honesty and clarity while simultaneously privileging sacred texts and shielding them from accountability. The ethics we claim we bring to the present cannot be discarded when we address the past.

Sometimes, I inhabit that silence within which I sing. I know that space is inspired by Jewish practice, by Jewish experience, and by Jewish inheritance. Sometimes, I live inside the texts – biblical or rabbinic. They demand that I am honest and true – even to what is painful therein.

Both locations teach humility because neither space can be ignored.

I cannot pretend that all is well because I know it can’t be. That is arrogance, an arrogance that harms those who suffer. Nor can I authorize an uncritical belief in the sanctity of texts that valorize cruelty, or rewrite them to erase what hurts. That, too, would be arrogant; that, too, only harms.

I stand below the sky, which is the greatest chuppah. It makes us all small things, but, I hope, honest ones.

January 9, 2023January 9, 2023

Seeing the White in Their Eyes

I hope that my reading of Ruth will function as a form of learning that will enable Native people both to understand more thoroughly how biblical interpretation has impacted us, and to assert our own perspectives more strongly.

Laura E. Donaldson, “The Sign of Oprah: Reading Ruth Through Native Eyes.”

Recently, I read the work of a white female feminist biblical scholar on 1 Samuel 25. In the text, David uses the most courtly language imaginable in, it appears, a bit of extortion. Nabal, a wealthy farmer, is about to celebrate a sheepshearing. David suggests to Nabal that, but for him and his men, his shepherds would have nothing to sheer and suggests a payoff for their services (1 Sam. 25:6-8).

Nabal, whose very name means “fool,” is not so willing. He openly insults David (10-11), who, in turn, gathers 400 armed men to confront the ungrateful farmer (25:13). For good measure, David curses Nabal, too, threatening him and his line with wholesale extermination (25:22).

Enter Nabal’s wife, Abigail, who saves the household (though not her husband) by making obeisance to David (18, 23-31). She loads herself down with bread, wine, meat, and baked delicacies. She delivers the goods to David, along with some pretty fulsome flattery (25: 18-31). In the end, Nabal is conveniently struck dead, and Abigail becomes another of David’s wives (37-40).

The scholar in question seeks to point out Abigail’s limited opportunities and choices, so she points out that Israelite wives shared experiences of physical subjugation with enslaved people. Indeed, even as a wealthy farmer’s wife, Abigail must navigate a violent hegemonic masculine system. Biblical law does not offer women “human rights” but largely focuses on organizing male access to female bodies. A woman is always under the control of some man. Indeed, wives and enslaved women are often grouped together, and women are also referred to alongside a man’s material possessions (Exodus 20:14, for example). Wives and enslaved women are both physically dominated and controlled by men. This is a condition they have in common, she explains.

Her explanation serves to justify using a particular text as a jumping off point for her discussion of the biblical Abigail. This text was written by Hannah Crafts, a formerly enslaved woman. In it, Crafts describes how she must constantly attune herself to the moods of her mistress and master. Living in violence forces her to accommodate and assimilate, to propitiate and placate. Those are her survival skills. They do not always succeed in protecting her from her owners’ violent tendencies.

The scholar assumes, as far as I can tell, that when her readers confront the texts of a formerly enslaved Black woman, they will better understand Abigail’s situation. She, too, so her argument, had to navigate the violent potential of male power figures.

But when a white scholar uses the experience of people of color who have been historically subjugated, colonized, and oppressed (and still are) to try and help explain Tanakh, there is another kind of violence at work, and that is the violence of appropriation.

It needs to be said: any white person – whether scholar or spiritual leader or any other person of power – who uses the trauma of people of color to elucidate the very literature that regularly served to justify their enslavement and oppression is perpetuating trauma.

White people cannot read through indigenous eyes. They cannot read through enslaved ones.

Scholars and spiritual leaders have the task of making these biblical texts real for their readers. They need to interrogate the texts and challenge the violence they contain rather than normalize it. But if they are white, they need to do that work without reinscribing the exploitation of people of color. That means seeing the white in their own eyes.

December 7, 2021December 7, 2021

The Leviathan: On Laughter, Wildness, and Justice

There is a midrash about Tevet time, one that tells a curious story about a curious creature who shows up in Tanakh: the Leviathan.

Some scholars believe that the Leviathan’s name comes from the Hebrew root lamed-vav-hey to mean to twine, or join. Wreathed, twisted in folds, the Leviathan is a mysterious creature, like the Tahom we find in Genesis. Both tahom and the leviathan were understood in medieval times as two sides to a chaos coin, female and male respectively.

These two creatures had forerunners. Tahom’s ancestress was Tiammat, the deity whom Marduk defeated in a gory battle that ended in dividing her body to create the world and the heavens above. The leviathan is a descendent of a Ugaritic sea monster, servant to the sea god Yammu (you can find that sea god showing up in Jewish texts as Prince Yam).

Sea monsters are big in ancient Near Eastern mythology. Mostly, they are pictured in cosmic sea battles as the embodiment of turmoil, upheaval, and confusion. Their opponents, whether a god or some kind of heroic figure, represent order.

And in Tanakh? Of course, there are scenes of YHVH doing battle with the Leviathan, fighting and destroying the creature with aplomb (Isaiah 27:1; Psalm 74:14). And yet, Yhwh is described as the Leviathan’s creator, too.

In one vision, though, the Leviathan is not an enemy, but a companion to YHVH. In Psalm 104:26 the narrator tells the deity: “There go the ships,” he says, “and the Leviathan that You formed to sport with.” And the word he chooses for “sport” or “play” here should make us smile. Sachak, samech-chet-kuf, is a kind of twin to a word we know very well, tzachak, tzaddi-chet-kuf, the root that is the source of Isaac’s name. The words are related not only in sound, but in meaning: they are both associated with laughter.

Another place we see sachak is in Proverbs 8:30, when Lady Wisdom announces that she herself was there at the start of all creation, together with YHVH. He rejoiced in her, she says; she was his delight; she laughed before him.

God, apparently needs laughter and wildness together. The Leviathan is just that, a creature that twines and turns, that folds and unites.

A midrash:

God created in the sea big fish and little fish. The size of the biggest fish was one hundred parsangs, two hundred, three hundred, even four hundred. If it was not for God’s merciful tikkun, the big ones would have eaten the smaller ones. What tikkun did God make? God created the Leviathan. On every first of Tevet, Leviathan would rear his head and make himself great and snort in the water and stir it up, and the fear of him would fall on all the fishes in the sea. If this were not so, the small could not stand before the great.

The Leviathan roars and snorts to make sure that the large fish will back off, so that they won’t eat too many smaller fish—without this roar, all the fish in the ocean would consume one another. The Leviathan offers us a wild force of nature that acts to balance the forces of nature.

So where could we go with this creature, a creature that seems to represent uncertainty and confusion, a creature of chaos who brings order into the teeming seas, a creature who makes God laugh?

We are all dealing with a world of chaos, a world in which big fish eat little fish, a world in which justice seems elusive and a compassionate order a dream.

At the darkest time of the year, do we need the roar of the Leviathan to stir us up, to remember that we, too, must do battle for righteousness, for justice, for a world of compassion? And in order to keep ourselves sane, to make sure we do not despair, should we, must we remember to give space for play and for laughter?

Is Purim not around the corner?

November 23, 2021November 23, 2021

Vayeishev: When Men Bond (and Others Pay the Price)

Vayeishev is a parsha that details the violence of brothers against a sibling they reject. Their rejection is sexually fraught as are their actions, from stripping Joseph naked to selling them* into slavery. Joseph’s body was never Joseph’s. It belonged to Jacob’s sons. Jacob’s sons owned Joseph, and they sold Joseph. Others were given the power to repeat their crimes.

In the midst of the Joseph story is a chapter that is not about Joseph at all, but about Judah. Genesis 38 tells a story of Judah and the men he hangs out with, the men he sires, and the men he orders around.

Here, too, there is rejection and sexual violence. Here, too, male characters plan together and bond over sexual experience and violent behaviors.

In my recently published book Male Friendship, Homosociality, and Women in the Hebrew Bible: Malignant Fraternities, I make the case that shared sexual experience is a pivotal part of male homosocial relationships in the Hebrew Bible. Male characters may not be having sex with each other, but sex with women creates bonding opportunities, ways to maintain alliances and to establish status and rank.

When Judah leaves his brothers behind, he turns to Hirah, the Adullamite (Genesis 38:1). Immediately, in the verse following, Judah sights the wife he wants — notably, right in Hirah’s locale. He takes her (yes, that is biblical texts articulates marriage) and sires three sons in quick succession. As his sons grow up, it becomes clear that Hirah and Judah have remained close friends. It is Hirah who, after the death of Judah’s wife, is part of his decision to end his mourning. They decide to enjoy themselves together. Judah is single and ready to mingle.

They travel together to a sheepshearing, a pastoral festival. As I write in Malignant Fraternities: “It is a time to have fun, break boundaries, play tricks, an even plot murder. During a sheepshearing, Jacob surreptitiously escapes from Laban (Genesis 31); David acquires a new wife—Abigail—from a foolish husband who is inclined to heavy drinking (1 Samuel 25); Tamar disguises herself to induce her father-in-law to have sex with her and impregnate her (Genesis 38); and Absalom deceptively invites Amnon, his half-brother and heir to the throne, to festivities where his death will be arranged (2 Samuel 13).”

We forget that Hirah and Judah were traveling together when we read Genesis 38. We forget that Hirah was around or nearby when Judah crassly bargains for the use of Tamar’s body. He certainly knows the results of the negotiations, for Judah sends Hirah to redeem his pledges to Tamar. And it is Hirah who does everything he can to make sure that what has happened between Judah and Tamar remains secret (and that involves some complex and fancy dancing on his part that is revealed in the Hebrew nomenclature he uses for Tamar).

Two men shared interactions that had to do with sexual gratification. One had the actual gratification. Perhaps the other experienced it vicariously. But both were part and parcel of the negotiation and the attempt at controlling the consequences. It is an ancient version of the news we were subject to when we discovered how Donald Trump sent Michael Cohen to negotiate the silence of the women he slept with.

The story ends with an apparent redemptive moment for Tamar, when Judah cedes her right to make sure that he performed the levirate. But Tamar’s body, like Joseph’s, was never her own.

She was taken by Judah to be a wife for his first son, Er. When that son died, she was given to Judah’s second son, Onan. He, in turn, did his best to protect his own share of the inheritance, “spilling his seed.” This happens not once, but repeatedly.

When Onan dies, Judah refuses to free Tamar, casting her as a man-killer and exiling her to her father’s house. In the end, Tamar makes sure Judah himself performs the levirate by selling her body to him. He orders her burned alive when he learns she is pregnant. She escapes his sentence, bears twin sons, and disappears from the narrative, her body having served its purpose: to ensure Judah’s lineage.

Male characters plan, plot, and bond over the sexual use, misuse, and abuse of others in this story.

It is an old story. And sadly, a familiar one.

The use of the plural pronoun is deliberate; Joseph’s gender identity does not fall on one side or the other of a simple binary.

September 15, 2020September 15, 2020

Seeing in the Dark

My childhood was mostly spent in the dark. People said things each day, each hour, that featured a disconcerting disassociation with truth. There was so much gaslighting it is a wonder we all didn’t go up in flames.

To live in confusion, surrounded by lies and fabrication, evil deeds and coverups, is to live in the dark. There is only one way out: to name what hides in the black, to describe it in all its awful detail, to insist on dragging it into the light so that it may be seen for what it is. A dark world is given its power by fear and by silence.

I have spent my adult life as a teacher and writer naming what I see in the dark: every historical field I worked and wrote about — from the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the silver mines of Potosí to the merciless marketing of the Shoah in literature, film, and even memorial sites — was another effort to reveal that which can destroy life, honor, and memory.

I came to biblical studies late in my life. The texts we call sacred mean the world to me — they are rich and real. And they are as limited and flawed as we are. We may not imagine ourselves safe from their deficits, for they constrict and even harm us. To name those deficits is as important as naming what can inspire us. We may laud the transformative words of psalms attributed to King David; we may not avoid passages describing his unmitigated, wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants of Canaan. “When David attacked a region, he would leave no man or woman alive; he would take flocks, herds, asses, camels, and clothing” (1 Sam. 27:9).

Recently, I joked with my ALEPH seminary students that the book I am currently writing — Male Friendship, Homosociality, and Women in the Hebrew Bible: Malignant Fraternities — is not a book I imagine many of my Jewish Renewal colleagues wanting to read. That book will not offer wise advice or well-crafted and stirring interpretations of beautiful and, yes, inspiring texts. This book is about the dark, and about naming things and making things visible that hide there.

Emily Stern, one of the students in my class, later wrote to me: “It is this very love of looking at the hard stuff, of bringing ourselves to a text that does not even appear to include us, to shun us even, and NOT sweeping the ugly or complicated things under the rug, that is one true nature of love— ‘I love you too much to ignore this and not try to work through it. To bring myself truly to this honestly,’ to not be too tired to do this work, or to do it despite being tired…”

Emily wrote that such work was an act of praise, a praise of God.

I had thought, all these years, that I was drawn to study what terrified me because I believed that I could master fear that way. Emily recast my life’s work for me: Was naming things in the dark, the things that threatened life, my way to learn what I needed to do to protect life? And was that learning an act of praise and thanks to God for helping me have the will to do that work?

We are living in a dark world. In some parts of our country the skies are orange and gray and our people cannot breathe. In others, storms are coming at accelerated speed. Our planet burns and bakes and boils and we continue, each day, to witness those in power lying so obviously, so provably that the lies are not so much shocking as surreal. The destruction of life, of honor, of memory is in the click-baiting headlines that frighten us as they draw us in.

How can we praise God? By naming what we see in the dark.

May we enter this New Year with courage and strength. May we find conviction and clarity to insist on naming what we must reject and calling forth that which we need to create life, to live love.

You put a new song into my mouth:
Praise to You, our God.
(from Psalm 40, translation Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi)

November 24, 2019November 24, 2019

Naming Gender-Based Violence to Stop Gender-Based Violence

In honor of the annual international campaign, 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.

The texts of Tanakh were written with male hands, redacted by male minds, transmitted for the benefit of men by men. For almost two millennia, scriptural commentary in both church and synagogue has been almost entirely male, written with male hands, redacted by male minds, and transmitted for the benefit of men by men.

We cannot respond to texts of terror we find in this male corpus with the cliché that “times were different then.” The times, where cisgendered male power is concerned, are not as different as we might wish. Moreover, if we refuse to judge texts of gender-based violence we abrogate our moral responsibility – we give those texts either our approval, our excuses, or our indifference.

I’ve been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the texts of Tanakh for almost fifteen years. For the past few years I’ve taught for the ALEPH Ordination Program, where I was ordained as a rabbi in 2011. All my courses address issues of gender, power, and class. I am currently writing a book for Routledge Press in which I address the ways in which male homosociality and male friendship in Tanakh are dependent on the use (and abuse) of women and women’s bodies.

It is painful work. I write and teach about texts engendered by rape cultures while working in a rape culture. At least one in five of my transgender, genderqueer, and nonconforming students will be sexually assaulted during their college careers. One out of every four female students will be the victim of sexual assault.

For over two millennia, the Bible’s male texts, male commentary, and male scholarship have licensed the power and control of cisgendered men. College and seminary courses still feature syllabi dominated by male authors and reflecting male concerns. Song of Songs, for example, is still taught as an exquisite, transcendent love story. Cisgendered men profit from such a reading. Such readings describe a mythical sexual equality between the female protagonist and her lover despite the fact that the male partner is often absent and appears and disappears in ways that should concern its readers.

My students ask: Is the female protagonist being portrayed as an obsessed woman who can think of nothing else than a man who is manipulating her? When she calls for her lover, he does not answer. When she goes to look for him, she is stripped and beaten by the city’s watchmen (5: 6-7). Is the Song of Songs a cisgendered man’s fantasy of a sexually accessible woman, a fantasy in which such a woman is brutally punished for her sexual initiative (again)?

How do we deal with a long tradition of cisgendered male fears explaining away cisgendered male violence in the textual tradition? In 2 Samuel 13, Amnon, King David’s eldest son and heir to the throne, is described as sick with “love” for his half-sister Tamar. With the collusion and aide of his cousin, Jonadab, he sets a trap for Tamar and rapes her. After he rapes her, Amnon’s lust turns to loathing.

The Hebrew root for “hatred” (sinn-nun-aleph) is used no less than four times in a single verse. We read: Then Amnon hated her, a great hatred indeed; the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the lust he had felt for her (13:15). Where does such a hatred come from? The rabbis explain: the reason Amnon hated Tamar after he raped her was because she had tied her pubic hair around his sexual organ during the rape and castrated him (BT, Tractate Sanhedrin 21a).

Despite decades of feminist scholarship, despite the addition of masculinity studies and the brilliant work being done by scholars of Queer studies, we have yet to fully articulate the dangers of biblical texts written by men, interpreted by men, and dominated by men. Biblical texts describe rape cultures. Their violence goes unnamed in countless social, political, educational, and religious settings; thus, in turn, these texts and much of their commentary continues to support rape cultures.

Texts of gender-based violence are part of our inheritance. Their gender-based violence must be named, revealed, and condemned if we are to create the world we long to see: One in which sexual violence against any human being is made fully impossible.

July 20, 2017

Patriarchy Shmachiarchy — Let’s Re-dress Ancient Israel

Why do we keep assuming that Ancient Israel was a “patriarchal” society when it wasn’t?

Despite the evidence demonstrating how problematic the term “patriarchy” is, my university students employ it about as frequently as they do the expression “Old Testament.” Both slip from the tongue with aplomb.

It’s obvious why “Old Testament” is a problematic term, given the odor of supersessionism attached to it. But, you may be asking, why do we need to banish the term patriarchy from our discourse about Ancient Israel?

In Greek, patriarchy means the “rule of the father.” We generally tend to use patriarchy to describe an entire society organized around excluding women from positions of power.

Men did have a great deal of power in the ancient world. But, as a number of scholars have pointed out in recent decades, they did not have the absolute rule the term patriarchy presumes. Male power may have been a legal construct, not a sociological reality. Roman law failed to mention any absolute authority of men over their wives. Elite Roman women managed both households and property. The women of Greece and Rome took part in public religious activities and acted as religious leaders in mainstream public cults and cultic activities.

What about Ancient Israel? Most Israelites lived an agricultural and pastoral existence in which women played a major role. Women were, among other things, responsible for food processing, textile production, and creating household implements. They were commodity producers. As managers of households, they likely allocated resources and tasks. We can tell from the position and number of weaving, grain-grinding, and other implements found at archeological sites that women worked in groups. How much family and village planning went on during the work? Women would be able and willing to negotiate connections, marriages, and sharing of resources when needed. That’s not private work – that’s public – even “political.”

In Tanakh, female characters are not wholly without access to power. The Shunnamite (2 Kings 4:8-37; 8:1-6) takes charge of inviting and housing a prophet, demands said prophet’s intervention when her son’s life is at risk without her husband’s help or involvement, moves her family out of town when drought threatens their survival, and negotiates their reentry and reacquisition of their land by talking over her situation with the king himself.

Women of Tanakh functioned as professional musicians and mourners, temple seamstresses, circle dancers, judges, prophets, and necromancers. They negotiated, argued, and formed clever plans and daring maneuvers. They are depicted as strategic thinkers in stories that demonstrate, time and time again, that they were hardly understood – even by the male elite authors who wrote their narratives – as either inferior or subordinate. While we do have difficult stories of male control (Dinah) and terrible narratives of outright brutality against women (the Levite’s Concubine and the hundreds of women kidnapped, raped and killed after her death), biblical women were not – per se — either voiceless or powerless.

Archeologist and biblical scholar Carol Meyers has suggested we consider the term “heterarchy” for Ancient Israel. A heterarchy is a society in which different power structures exist at the same time. Hierarchies are at work, and these are not fixed, but shift and change. Is Sarah the one in control when it comes to her slave, Hagar? Is Abraham’s servant in charge when it comes to negotiating a wife for his master’s son, Isaac? Class is important, as is ethnicity, and we need to keep these things in mind as we read: servants, slaves, and non-Israelites are part of our stories and play different roles at different times.

No scholar is likely to claim that there was gender equality in Ancient Israel’s society. But when we think about that society, we need to think in terms that transcend the binaries of male and female. We need to see that there are nuances to be noted – ones that will give us a richer appreciation of the complexity of our narratives. Who had power or control in this society did not depend on a fixed, unalterable rule of male control.

Ancient Israel was not a patriarchy.

February 21, 2012February 21, 2012

Visioning the Godly in True Blue

Studying Torah begins and ends with a sweet realization: These texts reveal new truths at each reading. The ancient authors of Torah knew that creating multiple possible realities was the very purpose of storytelling.

Last week, our congregational Torah study group occupied itself with Parsha Mishpatim, which includes the famed Book of the Covenant. The Book of the Covenant, so scholars, likely began as a separate law code which was later integrated into a larger narrative composed by several different writers.

Personally, I think we’d be better off naming our writers “schools,” since the respective strands of text were themselves subject to internal revision before they were all redacted and re-redacted in later centuries. But scholars are notoriously wedded to their terminology. Hence, they call them the J,E,P, and D-writers, nodding in the general direction of a fifth R-writer for “redactor.” In this case, the E-writer (I’d say E-school) is given credit for assimilating the Book of the Covenant into the E-narrative in Torah.

Has everyone fallen asleep?

Please don’t. The fact that ancient Israelites wrote and retained different versions of certain stories (Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 are the paradigmatic example) is proof positive that there was no one authoritative account for all Israelites even in the old days. Some of Torah even “corrects” other parts. Example? Just check out the way the pashal lamb is, according to Exodus 12:9, to be roasted. The same pashal lamb is to be boiled, according to Deuteronomy 16:7. Chronicles 35:13 offers an ingenious resolution to the apparent dichotomy: The lamb should be roasted after being boiled. The Chronicler was bothered by discrepancies in the two earlier accounts and reconciled them with a brand-new recipe.

Our ancient forbears preserved variant traditions even when they contradicted each other. That fact grants us the right to our multiple interpretations: Torah is a flowing, changing, living thing because both then and now the people of that book understood their narratives, their law codes, and their ideas to be subject to change.

That, I believe, is a very good thing. It has all sorts of wonderful implications. We can (and have) put women in the rabbinate. We can (and have) included GLBT Jews as members of our clergy. We can…

Well. The study group spent some quality time looking at the laws of the Book of the Covenant. We discussed how the law code aimed to protect property, land, and justice. Ancient Israelites were warned not to accede to a majority opinion rather than tell the truth. If required to give testimony, they were reminded neither to favor the wealthy nor the poor. There’s a lot in Parsha Mishpatim that can make Jewish folk proud of their ancestors.

There’s a lot to struggle with, too, just as ancient Israelites must have done. Take the literal possibilities of “an eye for an eye” (Ex. 21: 23-4). There is no example in Tanakh of this law being applied, which strongly suggests that our ancestors didn’t take this passage literally even way back then. Still, my Torah study group sadly noted the ways Exodus 22:17, “You shall not allow a witch to live” was used in later centuries to justify persecution and murder on a grand scale – in some time periods, against Jews.

At the end of our time together, I asked everyone to look again at the final passage of the parsha. Moses, the text tells us, ascends the mountain together with Aaron and his two sons, and seventy elders. There they see the God of Israel, under whose feet is the likeness of a lapis lazuli stone surface, the very image of the sky in clarity and purity. Miraculously, God did not raise God’s hand against the all-too-human beings who dared appear where divinity could be seen. Instead, the Torah tells us: “They beheld God and they ate and drank” (Exodus 24:11).

Most English translations of this passage do not do the Hebrew justice. The verb used here for “seeing” is formed from the root chet-zayin-hey. Khazah does not mean, simply, “see.” It implies visioning. A khozeh is a seer. A khazon is a vision. Those who were on that mountain visioned God, envisioned God, or had a vision of God.

Afterwards, they ate and drank.

I asked our study group to recall a time when they experienced Godness of some sort, to re-imagine a moment of divinity so powerful it simultaneously commandeered and sustained everything around them, including themselves.

We are mere mortals, despite (or perhaps because) of our dreams. Must visionary experience inevitably give way to the everyday realm of assiyah, of doing? Must we eat and drink to remind ourselves of our mortality after an encounter with immortality, after entering the realm of atzilut?

Or did those who beheld God take in the vision by drinking in the experience, by nourishing themselves with the divine so that they could be changed utterly, body and soul?

God’s feet, the text says, rested on a foundation of sapphire. Sapir recalls, for the Hebrew reader, a word made of the same essential letters: Samech-pey-reish is a root used for “counting,” “relating,” and “writing.” A sofer is a scribe. A sefer is written text, a book. The linguistic presence of these near homonyms in my mind made me ask the others: Was God standing on our story, on the narratives we have revered and struggled with for centuries? The Tanakh is, after all, the foundation on which we build and rebuild our understanding of Godness.

So we ended our discussion where we began: The Book of the Covenant, the law, the Torah, the Tanakh – it is sourced in many voices, many readings, many possibilities. What is godly stands, in significant measure, on that fact.

December 20, 2011

A Holly Jolly… Hanukkah?

I made a terrible mistake last week in my Hebrew Bible class.

The course is actually called “Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.” “Old Testament” comes first because most of our students have never heard of the “Hebrew Bible.” The latter is a respectable academic effort to avoid sectarian bias in naming biblical scriptures. Calling the Jewish scriptures the “Old Testament” assumes said scriptures existed only to give rise to the New Testament. For Jews, this is a pretty perilous proposition. It makes them grind their teeth.

Jews call their texts the Tanakh, an acronym for Torah-Neviim-Ketuvim. The Torah includes the Five Books of Moishe. These, in turn, are also known as the Chumash, Hebrew for “five” and/or the Pentateuch, which is Greek for the same. Neviim is Hebrew for “prophets” and Ketuvim is Hebrew for “writings.” The former includes prophetic texts and histories like Joshua, Judges, and Kings. The latter includes, among other writings, Psalms, Proverbs, the books of Esther and Ruth, Lamentations, and Job.

Academic types call all this stuff of ancient times the Hebrew Bible because the vast majority of the texts are written in Hebrew. A very small portion is written in Aramaic, which can look and act like Hebrew, but isn’t. The name “Hebrew Bible” is neutral. It makes no sectarian statement. It has no religious connotations.

Religious connotations, as I tell my students, are inadmissible in a secular classroom. “This class,” my syllabus reads, “assumes a scholarly attitude to religious beliefs and texts. We will look at religion scientifically as a historical phenomenon. We are not here to talk about personal beliefs, or to make moral judgments about the text. This is not the setting to deal with our own views on God or spirituality; the setting for that is a nice, comfy chair with some good coffee, and maybe a Danish.”

Or a bialy.

But, hey, I was in a silly mood last week. It was our last day. The students were about to take a final exam in which, among other things, they would have to explain intertextuality at work in Numbers 22 and Genesis 22. (That meant comparing the seer Balaam, who converses with his donkey, to Abraham, who doesn’t seem able to talk to his own son.)

I decided to let down my hair.

“Let’s sing some Christmas carols while we wait for everyone to get here,” I suggested brightly. “How about ‘Winter Wonderland’?”

You would have thought I had announced that the final was going to cover Sumerian hymns, insist on intimate knowledge of Ugaritic, and test knowledge of ancient Persian governance. There was a loud and raucous outcry. There was an “Occupy UNC-Charlotte” spirit adrift in the room. The peasants were revolting.

“Whoa,” I said. “Wassup? I was just trying to bring a little seasonable cheer into the room.”

I teach many students who have to work their way through college. A good many informed me in no uncertain terms that they had been forced to listen to Christmas carols since Halloween as they bagged motley plastic goods. They were mortally, thoroughly sick of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Little Drummer Boy.”

Some may have heard “Silver Bells” as many as fifty times in less than six weeks.

They threatened to gag, upchuck, or make rude noises if I so much as jingled a bell or decked the hall.

I demurred, of course. The room assigned for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible last semester is already dark and dank. It has no windows. The artificial light, as Shakespeare would have said, sucketh. We had studied in a version of Sheol all semester long, the gray and wretched place everyone lands after death according to Hebrew Bible. It doesn’t matter if you were naughty or nice in life – that’s where you go when you kick off. It’s like a nursing home with tenure.

Had said students done as threatened, the next group to trudge in would be met with gory smells and sights unbecoming to the student body. Any of them.

Sadly, I handed them their final exams. I watched them stress and worry, gnash their brows and furrow their teeth.

I mightily resisted the temptation to cheer them up by dreaming about a white Christmas – a song written by a Jew, by the by. I did not conjure up the image of old Frosty, who could have been Jewish. (He reminds me a lot of my Uncle Max – incessantly cheerful, that man and oy, the shnoz). I most certainly did not think of Scrooge. He evokes terrible associations and clichés about, well, Jews.

Instead, very softly – very softly indeed, I hummed a song that could not possibly offend anyone.

“I have a little dreidel. I made it out of clay…”

P.S. Chag sameach to clay-handling readers!

P.P.S. A list of my Top Ten Christmas Songs Written or Composed by Jews is provided for general edification below, as is a link to explanatory materials.

Silver Bells
Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
Winter Wonderland
I’ll be Home for Christmas
Let it Snow
White Christmas
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
A Holly Jolly Christmas
Sleigh Ride

http://www.interfaithfamily.com/arts_and_entertainment/popular_culture/The_Jews_Who_Wrote_Christmas_Songs.shtml