Reading 'rape' in the Hebrew bible: A consideration of language

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 279-299

  Gravett, Sandie ^a  

^a APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949844649     PISSN: 03090892     EISSN: 14766728     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030908920402800303     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 8. One of the most noticeable lacks in this definition is that of no consistent prohibition against marital rape in the United States. This omission illustrates some common cultural assumptions about rape held only 15 years ago; many states have subsequently changed these laws.
2. Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, '"You May Enjoy the Spoil of Your Enemies": Rape as a Biblical Metaphor for War', Semeia 61 (1993), pp. 59-78 (62).
3. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, 'Virginity in the Bible', in Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson and Tikva Frymer-Kensky (eds.), Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East ( JSOTSup, 242; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 79-96 (87).
4. Lyn Bechtel, 'What if Dinah is Not Raped?', JSOT 62 (1994), pp. 19-36 (27).
5. Frymer-Kensky, 'Virginity in the Bible', p. 87.
6. As Bechtel notes, 'the story invites two opposing interpretations' (Lyn Bechtel, 'Dinah', in Carol Meyers [ed.], Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and in the New Testament [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000], pp. 69-71 [69]).
7. Bechtel ('What if Dinah is Not Raped?', p. 29) goes so far as to argue that while Shechem professes love for Dinah (v. 3), 'sociological studies reveal rapists feel hostility and hatred toward their victims, not love' and there is 'no apology for a rape or a suggestion of force or hostile intentions. Instead the text stresses that these are honorable men.' The acceptance of a universal motivation for rape, the viewpoint that the narrator accurately portrays the feelings and motivations of the characters, and the failure to account for the deceptive dialogue of men labeled honorable (see Gen. 34.9-10, 21-23) all serve to raise questions about this reading.
8. (Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament [trans. Margaret Kohl; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974], p. 167).
9. Quote of Jessica Benjamin from Karen L. Bloomquist, 'Sexual Violence: Patriarchy's Offense and Defense', in Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (eds.), Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1989), pp. 62-69 (62-63).
10. As Fewell and Gunn note, 'We have here yet another instance where women's experience has been rewritten - fictionalized and idealized from an androcentric point of view. We may follow the narrator's lead, but not without regard for his limited viewpoint. On the subject of rape, this narrator can never be wholly reliable' (Danna Nolan Fewell and David L. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Story of the Bible's First Story [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993], p. 82).
11. Edward Ullendorff, The Bawdy Bible (Oxford: Oxford Center for Postgraduate Studies, 1978), p. 435.
12. Harold C. Washington, '"Lest He Die in the Battle and Another Man Take Her": Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Laws of Deuteronomy 20-22', in Matthews, Levinson and Frymer-Kensky (eds.), Gender and Law, pp. 185-213 (208).
13. See, for example, Driver and Gray in the ICC: Samuel Rollins Driver and George Buchanan Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job (ICC; 2 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), I, pp. 255-56.
14. Although Habel does not draw the same conclusions, his reading is basically the same (Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job: A Commentary [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985], pp. 413, 415).
15. By contrast, Pope emends the text to read 'my cord they loose' and attributes the action to Job's human tormenters (Marvin H. Pope, Job [AB, 15; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965], pp. 217, 220-21).
16. Habel, Job, p. 415.
17. Ullendorff, The Bawdy Bible, p. 436.
18. Carol L. and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9-14 (AB, 25C; New York: Double-day, 1993), p. 414.
19. William L. Holladay, Jeremiah, I (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p. 414: 'The noun means "skirt" (Isa. 6.1; "his skirts filled the temple"); here it is evidently a euphemism for the genitals... The noun is literally "heel", but again "your heels" is clearly euphemistic, like "feet" in Isa. 6.2 and elsewhere'.
20. Kathleen M. O'Connor, 'Jeremiah', in Carol A. Newsome and Sharon H. Ringe (eds.), The Women's Bible Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 169-77 (172).
21. Renita J. Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 12.
22. J.J.M. Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p. 124.
23. James L. Crenshaw, A Whirlpool of Torment (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 39.
24. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 226.
25. Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, p. 226.
26. Delbert R. Hillers, Lamentations (AB, 7A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), p. 99.
27. Douglas Robinson, The Translator's Turn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 210.
28. Edwin M. Good, In Turns of Tempest: A Reading of Job (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 20.
29. Robinson, The Translator's Turn, pp. 17-18.
30. Walter Harrelson, 'What Translation Is', available online at Religious Studies News/SBL Edition (July 2002) 〈www.sbl-site.org/Newsletter/07_2002/ HarrelsonP. html〉.
31. Esther Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman (JSOTSup, 310; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), p. 12.
32. Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative, p. 34.