Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
of Jesus because of their messianic significance. According to the conventions of first-century exegesis—conventions based on a belief in the theological unity of Scripture—they can be interpreted as messianic prophecies in light of Ps. 45, which celebrates the wedding of God’s anointed king” (The Bridegroom Messiah, 4). See also Cambe, “L’influence du Cantique des Cantiques”; Hengel, “The Interpretation of the Wine Miracle at Cana,” 101–2; Feuillet, Le Mystère de l’amour divin dans la théologie johannique, 231. For approaches similar to McWhirter’s—with the drawback, however, of devoting only a few pages to the topic—see Baril, The Feminine Face of the People of God, 92–97; Schneiders, Written That You May Believe. In her approach to Jesus’ messianic status, McWhirter is particularly indebted to Juel’s Messianic Exegesis.
125. McWhirter, The Bridegroom Messiah, 4, 11; Baril, The Feminine Face of the People of God, 93.
126. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 49.
127. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, 1402.
128. See Chavasse, The Bride of Christ.
129. See Collins, Mark, 198–99.
130. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, 100.
131. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 90. Regarding the bride-chamber, Pitre directs attention to Psalm 19:4–5 and Tobit 6:15–17.
132. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 300; cited in Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 91–92.
133. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 252; cited in Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 94.
134. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 103.
135. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 112.
136. See Brown, The Gospel According to John, 949–52.
137. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 113.
138. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 115.
139. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 117.
140. See Fehribach, The Women in the Life of the Bridegroom. More generally, Fehribach’s feminist perspective differs from Pitre’s.
141. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 121.
142. Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 123.
143. The two quotations come from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, cited in Jesus the Bridegroom, 137.
144. In Sexual and Marital Metaphors, Moughtin-Mumby affirms “the inability of the prophetic texts to reverse their own negative sexual and marital metaphorical language,” despite their clear attempts to do so and, somewhat more hopefully, “their astonishing tendency to undermine themselves, unravelling their own assumptions and rhetoric, leaving themselves all but impotent” (274–75). In her view, positive meaning emerges from these texts only when the women are viewed as (often strong, resistant, ungeneralizable) individuals, as for example when we recognize that the figure of the prostitute takes “on an astonishing range of different guises in the prophetic text, repeatedly liaising with different literary frames to breed a striking variety of associations, including animal instinct, ruthless entrepreneurship, absurdity, nymphomania, cultic defilement, lust, misunderstanding, the desire for control, and uncontrollability, to name just a few” (Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 275–76).
145. Baumann, Love and Violence, 195. See also Sanderson, “Nahum,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, 217–21, at 221: “To involve God in an image of sexual violence is, in a profound way, somehow to justify it and thereby to sanction it for human males who are for any reason angry with a woman.” For historical background to Nahum’s “presentation of the Judean/Assyrian crisis” and the manner in which Nahum’s feminized Nineveh is the object of Yahweh’s sexual shaming and abuse, see Chapman, The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, 103–10.
146. Baumann, Love and Violence, 195. Baumann directs attention to Franzmann, “The City as Woman.”
147. I am employing an unpublished translation by Sr. Albert-Marie Surmanski, of Jerome’s Commentarium in Naum, with thanks to Surmanski for the privilege of using her work.
148. Jerome, Commentarium in Naum.
149. Jerome, Commentarium in Naum.
150. By contrast, see the remarks of J. Cheryl Exum: “In describing God’s treatment of his wayward wife, the prophets rely upon a rhetorical strategy that encourages the audience to identify and sympathize with a male-identified deity. This is the privileged point of view, the ‘I’ that condemns the ‘you,’ the other, whose view is not represented. . . . When readers privilege the deity, which most readers of the Bible still do, they are forced into accepting this position, for to resist would be tantamount to challenging divine authority. This is the position taken almost without exception by biblical commentators, who, until recently, have been almost without exception male. Typically these commentators either ignore the difficulties posed by this divine sexual abuse or reinscribe the gender ideology of the biblical texts; usually they do both in their ceaseless efforts to justify God” (Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 114–15). She cites Wolff, Hosea, 34, 38, 44; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 248–49. Exum goes on to argue, “The contributors to The Women’s Bible Commentary show the difference reading as a woman makes. The authors of the entries on the prophetic books all wrestle with the implications of biblical violence against women and struggle to find ways of dealing with it. . . . What distinguishes their work from that of their male counterparts is their recognition of divine sexual violence as a problem and their honesty about it. One looks in vain in the standard commentaries for responses like these to the violence against women in the prophetic corpus” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 117–18, referring to The Women’s Bible Commentary).
151. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 175.
152. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 177.
153. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 179.