Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible

Jennie Grillo’s chapter on the Susanna narrative opens this collection aimed at understanding how women, both real and symbolic, are connected to questions of Judean identity after the Babylonian exile. For Grillo, Susanna is symbolic, set against the backdrop of the frequent woman-as-city trope in the Hebrew Bible and other ANE cultures. Grillo argues that Susanna’s story is a redemptive reworking of this trope because of Susanna’s ability to triumph over evil corruption by staring down her accusers and not allowing false guilt and shame to defeat her. The story is a polemic of the present against the past that opens up a hopeful path away from exilic shame and trauma toward holy faithfulness in the present. The story thus purifies the typically negative metaphor of the woman-as-city, perhaps as a kind of prophetic fulfillment of texts such as Isa 54’s promise that Zion will forget her shame in exchange for redemption.Danna Fewell presents a socio-narratological analysis of Ruth, arguing that it is a product of postexilic non-Jerusalemites who had remained in the land and were struggling with how to receive returnees from Babylon. Some were likely foreign, like Ruth. Rather than being a neat alternate perspective on foreign wives against Ezra–Nehemiah, Fewell demonstrates Ruth’s layered complexities that open narratological spaces and questions for the postexilic community as they negotiated communal identity. Questions about insiders and outsiders, landowners versus the poor, and so on are explored with enough ambiguity to spark imaginative possibilities for subsistence agrarian communities whose survival depended on shared resources, protection, and inclusion.Lawrence Wills’s contribution tracks the process through which categories of “other” are formed and focuses on this process with the gendered other from the time of Ezra–Nehemiah to the Hasmoneans. Wills’s analysis is guided by 11 theorems that summarize these categorization processes. They highlight how “we” and the “other” are mutually reinforcing, even if done by ignoring similarities, exaggerating differences, not allowing ambiguity of identity, and so on. Wills uses these theorems to analyze the shifting identity language in Ezra–Nehemiah, 2 Maccabees, and Judith. Wills demonstrates that these identity-construction processes are a phenomenon across time and cultures.C. A. Strine uses involuntary/forced migration studies alongside feminist criticism to reread the narratives in Gen 12–36, since families in these chapters meet criteria for involuntarily displaced people. What emerges is a conviction that these narratives should be read through this lens, the outcome of which highlights the significance of women and their unique experiences. Their significance lies in their position to ascertain the trustworthiness of the foreign host and in their capacity to gain financial resources for their families through sex work. This highlights the vulnerabilities of the displaced and how they can “ignore the moral vagaries of female members engaging in sex work” (p. 66). Agreeing with feminist critics, Strine notes how the stories downplay this reality for the preferred emphasis of the male authors on the families’ “ingenuity and self-sufficiency” (p. 66), values precious to involuntary migrants. Strine’s reading highlights the valuable qualities of female involuntary migrants also seen in Sarah and Rebekah.Carolyn Sharp’s theoretically dense chapter outlines methodological challenges for assessing gender perspectives of ancient, “thoroughly androcentric texts” (p. 67). Her reading of Jer 44 proceeds with these challenges in mind, considering its gender dynamics through the twin axes of “body and epistemology” and “memory and dissensus,” because these “lived dimensions of experience” are “highly relevant to gender” (p. 73). Jeremiah 44 becomes a clash between the prophet’s privileged, androcentric knowledge and the Egyptian diaspora community’s embodied memories of their exilic experiences, including, but not limited to, women. The text witnesses to the reality that the singular perspective of the prophet could not erase different ways of knowing and remembering. This points to power dynamics within epistemology and memory, which are deeply embedded in gender constructions and Jer 44’s portrayal of women.Mark Boda uses sociological research on forced migration’s impact on family identity and dynamics as a heuristic lens to understand imagery in Isa 49:14–66:24. Noting the density of family imagery and “the complex and at times shocking nature of the family frame” (p. 82), Boda’s survey reveals a high degree of familial tension and diversity of relational and gender roles (p. 90), illustrated by Jerusalem/Zion, a figure that contains both “stationary and migratory” (p. 96) elements that encapsulate the disequilibrium so common to the migrant experience. The portrayal of God as both father and mother may be better understood if viewed from within the intense familial stress caused by forced migration. Boda concludes that exilic pain was a context that opened new ways of understanding the deity and the community’s relationship to their deity (p. 98).Daniel Smith-Christopher examines Esther through the lens of 20th-century “comfort women” to illuminate tensions within Esther and among its commentators. Surveying the debates about agency, collaborationist survival techniques versus patriotic techniques, and positive versus negative portrayals of diasporic life, Smith-Christopher demonstrates that similar questions are asked about comfort women to understand female sexuality in contexts with layers of oppression, marginalization, war/conquest, and modes of survival. Though he is “far from firm conclusions” (p. 127) about how the Esther narrative functions, he is certain that exegesis of Esther is strengthened by awareness of complexities surrounding comfort women.Holly Morse builds on feminist readings of Ezek 16 and 23 to highlight contextual ethnic tensions and anxieties. Morse suggests that Ezekiel developed a “particular sexual anxiety… over the ethnic threat to Israelite and Judahite identity” (p. 133) caused by threats of intermarriage or ethnically mixed children. While these texts are metaphors, Morse argues that they break out of the purely metaphorical into Ezekiel’s world of real women to exert control over exilic women’s sexuality, using methods akin to modern-day revenge porn and slut shaming. This dynamic helps to explain the specifically male trauma, anxiety, and need to control the sexual behavior of exilic women.This volume will be helpful to those engaging in sociological analysis of the Hebrew Bible, even those whose interest lies outside the exilic time period and questions of gender identity and construction. The essays are methodologically diverse and provide explanations and cautions for what is possible and what should be avoided. There are insights into foundational questions and perspectives, alongside examples of texts read through the proposed frameworks, making a well-rounded, valuable volume.

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