Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
see Dempsey, “The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16.” Dempsey recognizes that “imagery and metaphors relating to women are used to communicate to Ezekiel’s audience and to the text’s (re)readers an ethical message: God will not tolerate injustice” (“The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 72), but she emphasizes that “Yhwh in his anger said and did some despicable things to Jerusalem as her husband. Although Yhwh is willing to forgive and restore the covenant with Jerusalem, despite the fact that there is no mention of remorse on Jerusalem’s part, it seems a bit presumptuous on Yhwh’s part to assume that Jerusalem would take him back. After all, he has been verbally and physically abusive to her” (“The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 76).
155. See Sheridan, Language for God in Patristic Tradition, 42.
156. Similarly, Exum states, “The fact that this is metaphorical violence does not make it less criminal. Indeed, it is extremely injurious: because God is the subject, we—that is, female as well as male readers—are expected to sympathize with the divine perspective against the (personified) woman. . . . Sexual violence of which God is the perpetrator and the nation personified as a woman is the object, along with its destructive implications for gender relations, is there. It cannot be dismissed by claiming that it is only ‘metaphorical’, as if metaphor were some kind of container from which meaning can be extracted, or as if gender relations inscribed on a metaphorical level are somehow less problematic than on a literal level” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 101–2; 119). I see her point, though I do think that the fact that it is metaphorical makes it less problematic. She draws attention to such studies as Gordon and Washington, “Rape as a Military Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible”; Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel; and Ellwood, Batter My Heart. For metaphor’s destructive potential, see also Bal, “Metaphors He Lives By.” See also, for Bal’s broader project, her Lethal Love.
157. Baumann, Love and Violence, 223. Alice A. Keefe surveys a number of feminist readings of Hosea, and she criticizes these readings for assuming the correctness of the standard scholarly view that interprets Hosea as attacking the Canaanite fertility religions. Against the standard feminist scholarship on Hosea, she denies that Hosea “is misogynistic literature which assumes and depends upon a view of female sexuality as something intrinsically negative” (Keefe, Woman’s Body, 154). After all, “the redeemed Israel is still a woman” in Hosea (Woman’s Body, 154). Indeed, she observes that “in a social context [such as ancient Israel] where the individual is not the primary locus of human meaning and value, body, sex and gender will carry meanings which are quite distinct from our own and the equations most central to feminist analysis will not necessarily hold” (Woman’s Body, 158). Furthermore, by contrast to modern understanding of sex and sexuality as a private matter, “In a kinship-based society, sexual reproduction, material production and the maintenance of social power constitute intersecting and coordinate dimensions of a unitary sphere of cultural activity. . . . Rather than sex and the society signifying two separate spheres of human activity, in biblical literature, sexual activity carries profoundly social and political meanings” (Woman’s Body, 159).
158. Baumann, Love and Violence, 223. For a less condemnatory perspective, in dialogue with Baumann and others, see Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’.”
159. Bauer, Gender in the Book of Jeremiah, 116. Bauer warns that “the pull of a long interpretive tradition that sides with the voice(s) of prophet/YHWH against the people/Israel, that sides in most instances with the male against the female, surrounds emerging [feminist] counter-readings. It continuously threatens their erasure, as textual and intertextual levels diverge. It is contemporary feminist and womanist voices that have been critical of dualistic patterns confining women. Yet not so Jeremiah. Israel of the past is remembered as ‘bride’ being ‘holy’ to YHWH (Jer. 2:2–3), or promised to be ‘Maiden Israel’, dancing in the future (Jer. 31:4). By contrast, the people of the Jeremianic present are accused of acting as a promiscuous woman of uncontrollable sexuality, defiled and defiling (e.g., Jer. 2:20–22, 23–25, 33–34; 3:1, 2–3, 6–10, 19–20), while at the same time rape, a crime of uncontrolled sexual violation, is presented as ‘justified’ (e.g., 13:20–27). It is contemporary female voices that call for the embracing of ambiguities. Not so Jeremiah. . . . It is contemporary (fe)male voices that search for fluidity of gender, transgression of traditional gender roles, and flexibility of identities, and hear the male prophet speak in a female voice. Not so Jeremiah” (Gender in the Book of Jeremiah, 162–63). It seems to me that the main point of Jeremiah about sin and redemption has been lost here.
160. Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 262; cf. 265. He directs attention to Wettstein, “God’s Struggles.”
161. Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 251.
162. Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 249. See Davies, Double Standards in Isaiah, 133. For an opposed viewpoint, discussed appreciatively and at length by Barton, see Lindström, God and the Origin of Evil. Barton comments that “[t]here is considerable controversy about the idea of Yahweh as the source of evil. . . . Lindström would say that though Yahweh is presented as the source of punishment and destruction for the wicked (which may include Israel), to call these things ‘evil’ is to beg the question: precisely because they are sent by a good God they are not seen as evil by the Old Testament writers, but as good” (Ethics in Ancient Israel, 257). After pointing out that Lindström’s book is weakened by the fact that he only deals with passages where the language of “good” and “evil” occurs, Barton concludes that “I believe Lindström is right to argue that the general tenor of the Old Testament is to stress the justice of Yahweh, and to seek to reduce elements of arbitrariness in human experience of the divine. This seems to be the case even in works that evidently arose out of the experience of disaster, such as Lamentations” (Ethics in Ancient Israel, 260).
163. Baumann, Love and Violence, ix.
164. Baumann, Love and Violence, ix.
165. Baumann, Love and Violence, x.
166. See Morrow, “Pornography and Penance,” 62–84.
167. Baumann, Love and Violence, 2.
168. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122.
169. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122.
170. Carroll, “Desire Under the Terebinths,” 288.
171. Carroll, “Desire Under the Terebinths,” 106. For various contemporary approaches to biblical metaphor and to metaphor more broadly, see for example O’Brien, Challenging Prophetic Metaphor; Foreman, Animal Metaphors and the People of Israel, 4–29; van Dijk-Hemmes, “The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech”; Kittay, Metaphor; Donoghue, Metaphor; and the essays by numerous notable scholars in Sacks, ed., On Metaphor.
172. Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,” 105.