Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
World.
174. Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3.
175. Baumann, Love and Violence, 72; see Huehnergard, “Biblical Notes.”
176. Baumann, Love and Violence, 75; see Podella, Das Lichtkleid JHWHs.
177. Baumann, Love and Violence, 78.
178. Baumann, Love and Violence, 79.
179. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 159. She adds, “Indeed, as Lyn Brechtel argues, in such a group-oriented culture (as opposed to an individual-oriented culture such as the modern West), the very notion of salvation is intimately tied up with the meaning of woman and sex” (Woman’s Body, 159; referring to Brechtel, “What If Dinah Is Not Raped?”). Keefe concludes, “When feminist (and other) readers look at the inscription of female sexuality in the book of Hosea and see the female body only as an individual body sexually constrained by the powers of patriarchy, they overlook the corporate and corporeal dimensions of human meaning which were constitutive of the fabric of life in ancient Israel and which are at work in Hosea’s imagery. This limitation in interpretive vision may be traced to the indebtedness of feminist theory to the world-view of the Enlightenment with its inscription of the body as an object and possession of the autonomous and rational self. For feminist theory, embodiment has to do with individual bodies, and its thinking about the body is primarily concerned with the systems of ideology and power by which these individual bodies are signified and constrained. The female body then means the individual body, which occupies one of two subject positions: either liberated or oppressed (sexually and socially) within the structures of patriarchy. But in Hos. 1–2 one finds an imagination of the female body as a sign for the body social; this symbol needs to be read within the context of a world-view in which corporate rather than individual meanings of the human and human embodiment are primary” (Keefe, Woman’s Body, 160).
180. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 178. Keefe here is criticizing the viewpoint of Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism. As Keefe says, “The presence of menstrual taboos alone in ancient Israel is not sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that this was a misogynistic culture. One could, instead, argue on the basis of abundant textual clues that the primary association of woman’s body in ancient Israel was not with pollution or death, but with fertility, lineage continuity and life” (Woman’s Body, 178–79). Here Keefe is responding to the position of Bal, Lethal Love. Keefe finds Bal’s position to be overly one-sided. In this regard, Keefe agrees with Biale, Eros and the Jews. Keefe is not denying the reality of “patriarchal determinants of biblical texts” (Woman’s Body, 184).
181. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 184. Admittedly, says Keefe, “The possibility that woman’s body could have a symbolically positive and central location as a sign for the social body in ancient Israel does not easily occur to the modern reader, whose access to the text is filtered through some 2500 years of intensifying misogyny within which woman comes to signify the temptation to sin, the threat of chaos, and all that which is ‘other’ to the realm of the sacred” (Woman’s Body, 184). In my view, the connection of woman’s body (preeminently Mary) with the social body of the Catholic Church fits with Keefe’s analysis of Israel’s scriptural texts, and indicates that the past 2,500 years are more complex—though certainly not lacking in misogyny among some misguided Jews and Catholics. Regarding the ancient Near East, Keefe directs attention to Springborg, Royal Persons.
182. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 210. In the book of Hosea, as Keefe observes, “the condition and fate of the nation are figured in graphic images of maternal bereavement, the loss of female fertility, and the death of mothers” (Woman’s Body, 210). She adds that these “graphic images are certainly rooted in the realities of war which eagerly claims women and children as victims (see also 2 Kgs 8.12; 15.16; Amos 1.13). But more so, as a metonym for the devastation of war, the slaughter of children and mothers and especially, the slitting open of pregnant women, bespeak the more far-reaching corporate consequences of Assyrian invasion: the end of Israel. Mothers with their children figure the nation as a whole, such that their destruction is the nation’s. . . . Israel is a woman in Hosea’s metaphor not simply because women are wives, whose conjugal obligations to their husbands in patriarchal society are analogous to the demands of a jealous god, but because women are mothers, whose procreativity functions symbolically as a locus of intergenerational continuity, and hence of national identity. . . . The woman of fornications represents at once the wayward people and the land itself, the land then serving as a congruent metaphor of the corporate body. The identity between the woman and the fertile land is suggested again in Hos. 2, when the husband’s threat to strip his wife naked fades into images of drought and desolation upon the land” (Woman’s Body, 211–12, 214; cf. 216–17). Keefe’s conclusion is important: “In Hos. 1–2, the female body, the body politic and the fertile land intertwine in a dense symbolic complex that yields no unambiguous correspondences, but which evokes the reality of the contemporary situation as one of betrayal, bloodshed and ‘adulterous’ political and commercial liaisons. . . . Although the metaphor is predicated upon the legitimacy of patriarchal control of female sexuality, there is a depth dimension in this symbolism of woman that exceeds those determinations” (Woman’s Body, 217).
183. See Weems, “Gomer,” 100; cited in Baumann, Love and Violence, 99. See also Weems’s Battered Love, a book frequently referenced by Baumann. In addition, see Setel, “Prophets and Pornography”; as well as Thistlethwaite, “Every Two Minutes,”; Shields, “Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23”; Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 109–10. Exum describes Ezekiel 23 as “the most pornographic example of divine violence,” where “the male author seems to take pleasure in picturing the sexual attentions pressed upon them by ‘desirable young men’ (vv. 12, 23): the handling of their breasts and their defilement by their lovers’ lust. He betrays a fascination with sexual prowess and an envy of other (foreign) men’s endowment, fantasizing his rivals with penises the size of asses’ penises and ejaculations like those of stallions” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 109; cf. 124–25). See also Brenner, “Pornoprophetics Revisited”; Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes, On Gendering Texts, 167–95; Brenner, “Women’s Traditions Problematized.”
184. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122; cf. 126–27, where she celebrates Jerusalem’s insistence upon autonomy vis-à-vis this abusive god. On the positive side, Exum appreciates that male readers (that is, the majority of the intended hearers and readers) would have recognized themselves as “personified Israel” and therefore would have experienced being “placed in the subject position of women and, worse, of harlotrous, defiled, and sexually humiliated women” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 123). However, the effect is somewhat bleaker when viewed as a whole, as seen in Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, 161 (quoted by Exum in Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 123n62).
185. See also Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,” 111. Regarding Jeremiah 2–3, she grants the offensiveness of the abusive imagery, but adds that the offensive passages “might even have been meant to be offensive from the beginning. . . . The implied—male—audience is supposed to be offended, emasculated by an imagery that turns them into wayward, nymphomaniacal, unfaithful women. This is how the metaphor is supposed to work by the implied author in a patriarchal society, based on honor and shame. The implied—male—audience is supposed to understand the message that God is still in control, but also that their God is