Genesis
 
Genesis 1-3 Bibliography:
David Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative , Sheffield 1986
Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible A Feminist Approach ,Harvard 1992
A Feminist Companion to Genesis . Athalya Brenner editor.
Meike Bal "Sexuality Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of Female Character Gen 2-3," The Female Body in Western Culture , 1985
 
Interesting Quotations
 
Augustine "Before the fall, sex was rational and not pleasurable, but due to Eve, it became passionate and pleasurable and this encouraged people to forget God."
 
Tertullian "Woman, you are the devil's gateway. You have led astray one whom the devil would not dare attack directly. It is your fault that the Son of God had to die; you should always go in mourning and in rags ... You destroyed so easily God's image, man."
 
Max Funke (1920), "Are Women Humans?" "Did not a woman cause Adam's fall: did not woman seduce the Angels Barut and Arut; did not a woman incite pious David to the murder of Uriah; did not a woman send chaste Joseph to gaol ... ? And when God drove Adam and Eve out of paradise, he 'called to the man' and asked him 'Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?' -- If God had regarded Eve as a human being, he certainly would have asked her this question as well." Cited by Helen Schüngel-Staumann "On the Creation of Man and Woman in Genesis 1-2: The History and Reception of the Texts Reconsidered" in A Feminist Companion to Genesis, p. 56.
 
 
Genesis 1-3 and the Carnivalesque
 
How are these chapters patriarchal? How are they androcentric?
Do you react differently to P (chapter 1) than to J (chapters 2 and 3)?
What do you make of the word helper? With what does Eve help Adam?
How do you interpret the language of 2:23 and 24? What do these words signify?
Can Eve be exonerated from the traditional charge of being a temptress or of causing the fall?
Can this text be read in a way that negates its androcentrism or its patriarchal assumptions?
 
I have come to believe that Genesis 1-3 is a carnivalization of the prevailing ideologies and human tendencies of the ANE. Where the text does not affirm these ideologies some of them are so powerful that they are imposed on the text by subsequent readers in what Mieke Bal calls a retrospective fallacy. Cf. 1 Tim 2:11-14.
 
In the Carnivalesque narrative:
 
Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the role of the carnivaleque in in literature is a critique of social systems that repress individuals, a critique of the status quo. The carnivalesque aims at showing the truth about the emperor's new clothes.
 
Is the fall a tragedy or a comedy? Is this a story about fatal flaws or about people in the wrong place?
Is the story of God's experimentation with appropriate companions broad comedy?
How is God characterized in the fall narrative?
To what genre do talking animals belong?
Is the account of Adam and Eve's attempt to "pass the buck" humorous?
What does it signify that Eve finds pleasure in what God has proclaimed painful?
What sort of a person knows no sense of shame or modesty?
 
Lyn Bechtels,"Rethinking the Interpretation of Genesis 2.4b-3.24" in A Feminist Companion to Genesis, p. 109 : "These are the important oppositional forces, the knowing good and evil, that the man and woman must become aware of when they begin to mature by eating of the Tree of Mature Knowledge, and begin to experience life as God created it from the beginning. Eating of the Tree of mature Knowledge means learning to discern and accept both poles of the essential binary forces of life, which allows them to relate to life and, most of all, to God on a mature level. As long as commentators perpetuate the idea that limitation, pain, and death are punishment imposed on all of creation for human sin (an extremely ego-centered presumption), human beings will neither accept life as God created it nor accept the Creator. .... Death is presented neutrally, not as punishment, but as part of the natural cycle of unity and separation of life."
 
David Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative (1986), rejects Phyllis Tribles' analysis of the text as a portrait of the ideal equality of the sexes and the inequality that results from the fall. He asks who, in such a patriarchal culture as that form which the Bible arises, would have composed this kind of 'feminist story' and how could it have been received? He asserts that it is surely clear that the primal human is perceived as male. He argues that the structure does not lead to the fall but rather a man's responsibility to till the earth. Woman and snake are essential features in the working out of the man's fate but focus is on man.. Expulsion is not included in list of punishments but occurs anticlimactically to it. Jobling suggest that rather than rejecting the Bible as wholly patriarchal and denying that the Bible is wholly patriarchal, one might accept the Bible as wholly patriarchal but as wholly an effort of a bad conscience to make sense of patriarchy.
Abraham and Sarah: Not a Love Story
 
Esther Fuchs, "Literary Characterizations of Mothers," in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship
Cheryl Exum, "Who's Afraid of the Endangered Ancesstress?" in The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, 1993.
Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach
Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story.
 
"Esther Fuchs, "Sarah's participation in the annunciation type-scene amounts to a troublesome interference. She is not only inferior to Abraham in the literary sense, as a secondary character, but in a moral and spiritual sense, as well." p. 121
 
Sarah's few lines in Genesis tend to reinforce a negative assessment of her character.
 
16:2 "You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go to my hand-maid; it may be that I shall obtain children by her."
 
16:5 "May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave the slave-girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!"
 
18:12 "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure? Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old? ....I did not laugh."
 
21:6 "God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me. Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age."
 
21:10 "Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."
 
In an attempt to restore Sarah's dignity or foster a sense of compassion for her, our reading will focus on the theme of honor and shame.
 
In the Ancient Near Eastern treatment of these concepts, honor tends to be a male principle. Women bring honor to their families or husbands, but it does not accrue directly to them. Similarly, they are not dishonored by violations of their person by men. Any respect a woman receives accrues to her by virtue of her relationship to a man. A woman who is a patriarch's wife should be accorded respect. Women can be shamed by their own failures to fulfill the conventions of their society and bring shame to men by violating those standards.
 
Before the law, the patriarch is the law. Modern readers must then ask whether social conventions or the voice of the patriarch have greater authority in a woman's life. If she is asked to violate a social convention or her own sense of integrity by the patriarch or by her husband, whose voice does she heed?
 
If we examine the story of Lamech, we can see that competing ideologies place the women in a Catch 22.
 
Honor and shame criticism tends to focus upon the prevailing concepts of honor and shame that inform the text at the time of its composition. A feminist hermeneutic adds a feminist critique by asking if a woman's sense of honor and shame is masked by the prevailing patriarchal and androcentric ideologies. Moreover, a feminist hermeneutic looks for dissident voices in the text that perhaps condemn the prevailing ideologies.
 
Key Texts:
 
The unusual genealogy in Genesis 11:27-30 prepares us for the revelation of Sarah's double relationship to Abraham as his wife and half-sister.
 
The story of Abram and Sarai in Egypt (12:10-20) becomes more comprehensible. If Abram thinks of Sarai as his sister, he does not risk being dishonored by not protecting her chastity.
From the perspective of the ideological system, Sarai brings honor to Abram by obeying him.
From the perspective of a woman can we say what Sarai would feel?
 
Note: this episode is the initial source of Abram's wealth.
 
The birth of Ishmael fulfills the letter of God's promise in 15:4 but not Sarai's intent. Her appeal in 16:5 is an appeal to the honor code of a patriarchal society, but Abram ignores it.
 
When God informs Abraham that Sarai shall be the mother of the son, Abraham falls on his face an laughs and asks God to make Ishmael the son of the promise (o that Ishmael might live in your sight!). (17:12-22) Abraham's behavior in responding to God's command that all males be circumcised suggests that publicly Abraham treats Ishmael as his heir. (17:23-27)
 
In the annunciation scene in which Sarah is apprised of God's plan, her reaction suggests that she has not been privy to God's promise. Her words may imply that she and Abraham have not been cohabitating. (18:12)
 
When Abraham represents Sarah as his wife at Gerar, he compromises her chastity once again, but on this occasion he should not be operating under the ambiguity that saved his face in Egypt.
Abimelech's words to Sarah are extraordinary, for he seems to attend to the fact that Sarah could be held responsible for bringing shame to the men. True to custom, her chastity is treated as a Abraham's possession. (20:16)
 
When Isaac is born, Sarah's words are telling, "Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?" (21:6) A woman's status is dependent upon whether she produces male children.
 
When we turn to the scene in which Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be cast out (21:8-14), Sarah's motivation becomes apparent. At issue is who will inherit. As long as Ishmael is present he seems to be the heir to Abraham's fortune.
 
Ishmael resides in Paran.
Abraham resides in the land of the Philistines.
 
Although Sarah is not in view in the story of the Akedah (the binding of Isaac; 22:1-19), certain elements of the story pertain to her status. Given what has occurred up to this point, Abraham's motives for fulfilling God's request come into question. God, not Abraham, identifies Isaac as the only son. After God stays Abraham's hand, Abraham moves to Beer sheba. When Sarah dies (23:2) she is at Kiriath-arba (Hebron). Abraham goes to mourn her according to custom and buys property to bury her so that "I may bury my dead out of my sight." The repetition in the ensuing scene is strange. Why is Abraham so insistent about the purpose of the purchase when Ephron seems unconcerned.
 
At the time of his marriage Isaac had been dwelling in Beer-lahai-roi (between Kadesh and Bered; site of Hagar's annunciation scene) and has moved to the Negeb and is dwelling in his mother's tent.
 
Abraham remarries and has six more sons. (25:1-6)
When Abraham dies Isaac and Ishmael bury him in the cave of Machpeha with Sarah (25:9).
Ishmael has not been out of Abraham's life all these years.
 
The ambiguity of Sarah's status as Abraham's wife or half-sister, complicates the way that the honor code functions in this story and leaves her vulnerable.
 
 
Narratology: Deceptive Women or Creative Women?
 
Many of the women of the biblical narrative resort to deceptions in order to achieve their goals. This is not surprising when one takes into account that patriarchal power structures rob them of a voice or direct access to power. By employing the strategies of narratology, by looking at the signs and signs systems in the text, by treating the text as a fabric that takes it shape and pattern from the tension of the weave of warp and weft, by asking who sees what, who says what, who attributes what meaning to a particular sign and what system of meaning does that invoke, the material in the Bible that previously pointed to the conclusion that women are deceptive, manipulative creatures becomes what Meike Bal describes as a "site of the tensions" we want to study (Lethal Love, p. 5).
 
The principle source for our analysis may be found in the following articles:
 
Nelly Furman, "His Story versus Her Story: Male Genealogy and Female Strategy in the Jacob Cycle" (107-116) and Esther Fuchs, "Who is Hiding the Truth? Deceptive Women and Biblical Androcentrism" (137-144) in Feminist Perspectives in Biblical Scholarship.
 
Stories: Rebekah and Jacob (Gen 27); Joseph and Potifar's Wife (Gen 39); Tamar and Judah (Gen 38)