The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry 1032248351, 9781032248356

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The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry

This book discusses 20th- and 21st-centuries’ literary retellings of biblical texts, focusing on how fiction and poetry fill the extant narrative gaps present in the often-sparse biblical accounts and align the narratives with theological and/or cultural expectations of modern interpreting communities. The chapters, written by an international group of scholars, explore biblical retellings in a variety of modern languages, ranging from Korean and Chinese to Hebrew and Arabic. Most of the contributions deal with retellings of the narrative books (Genesis, Exodus, Judges, Ruth, 1–2 Samuel, Daniel), but a few are devoted to prophetic (Hosea) and poetic (Psalms) ones. Another set of articles looks beyond specific biblical books and instead analyses how the Bible has been retold in different literary genres (Children and YA literature, sci-fi and fantasy, Christian Inspiration fiction) and in modern political discourse (North and South Korea). All the chapters further highlight how literary retellings of the Bible form twoway movements. They reveal the often-subversive quality of literary retellings: retellings not only emphasise those nuances in the biblical texts that create unease but also problematise their standpoint and question their moral and theological message. The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry is suitable for students and scholars of biblical studies working on intertextuality and reception history. It is also of interest to those working on comparative literature, particularly with regards to the Hebrew Bible in popular culture and literature. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer is Professor in Old Testament Exegesis at ALT School of Theology, Sweden, and Research Associate at the Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Scripture, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has published several monographs and edited volumes on Isaiah and Zechariah, a receptionhistorical commentary on Jonah (Jonah through the Centuries, 2021), as well as a monograph devoted to Jonathan in modern literature (In Search of Jonathan, 2022).

The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry

Edited by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

First published 2025 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia, 1969- editor Title: The Hebrew bible in contemporary fiction and poetry / edited by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024050470 (print) | LCCN 2024050471 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032248356 hardback | ISBN 9781032248363 paperback | ISBN 9781003280347 ebook Subjects: LCSH: Bible–In literature | Bible and literature | Literature, Modern–20th century–History and criticism | Literature, Modern–21st century–History and criticism | LCGFT: Literary criticism | Essays Classification: LCC PN56.B5 H43 2025 (print) | LCC PN56.B5 (ebook) | DDC 809.3/938221–dc23/eng/20250224 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024050470 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024050471 ISBN: 978-1-032-24835-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-24836-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28034-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003280347 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Introduction

viii x 1

LENA-SOFIA TIEMEYER

1 The Flood Narrative in Feminist and Queer Perspectives

11

DENAE DYCK

2 Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales: Reading the Sodom Narrative in Genesis with Its Retelling Stories

26

SOO KIM SWEENEY

3 She Chose to Turn: Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness in Contemporary Literature

45

KATHERINE LOW

4 Sad and Beautiful: Sarah’s Laughter in Itzik Manger and Other Modern Poetry

58

ZOHAR HADROMI-ALLOUCHE

5 ‘Ah gots daughtuh, an’ she gots daughtuh’: Hagar and Her Offspring in Three Reincarnations of Her Biblical Original

81

KATHRYN WALLS

6 Seeing, Connection, and Visibility in Margaret Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales

94

JO CARRUTHERS



vi Contents

7 Seeing Red: The Elision of Gender-Based Violence in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent

107

CAROLINE BLYTH

8 ‘The Sire, to Whom I Must Make Love’: Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature

122

ERIC ZIOLKOWSKI

9 Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature

143

BRADLEY C. GREGORY

10 Moses as a Leader in Twentieth-Century Literature

157

STUART LASINE

11 From Passion to Politics in the Literary Reception of Samson

175

BRIAN BRITT

12 A Different Kind of Harvest: Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth

189

MARY F. BREWER

13 Bathsheba: Innocent Victim or Cunning Schemer?

206

HUGH PYPER

14 Reimagining Abishag: Retelling Her Story

218

THEA GOMELAURI

15 Reception of Daniel in Novels

234

JASON M. SILVERMAN

16 Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner: Examining Literary Retellings of Hosea 1–3

254

KIRSI COBB

17 Singing Scripture: On the Reception of Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship Lyrics

270

DAVID DAVAGE

18 Of Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters: Retellings of Biblical Stories in Children’s and Young Adult Literature INA DÖTTINGER

293

Contents  vii

19 Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction

313

MARIAN KELSEY

20 Retellings and Political Discourse

331

KYU SEOP KIM

21 The Bible in Inspirational Fiction: The Case of Bathsheba CERI DEOSUN

348

Abbreviations

AB Anchor Bible AGaJU Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums Anglophonia Anglophonia/Caliban: French Journal of English Studies AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament ARIEL ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature BibInt Biblical Interpretation BINS Biblical Interpretation Series BJRLM Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester BN Biblische Notizen BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft CBR Currents in Biblical Research CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CLeO Classica et Orientalia EBR  Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. Edited by Christine Helmer, Steven L. McKenzie, Thomas Römer, Jens Schröter, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric Ziolkowski. De Gruyter. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1080​/2222582X​.2019​.158519​4. EJT European Journal of Theology EncJud  Encyclopaedia Judaica. Second Edition. Edited by Fred Skolnik. Thomson Gale, 2007. FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament FCB Feminist Companion to the Bible HBM Hebrew Bible Monographs IEJ Israel Exploration Journal JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JBR Journal of the Bible and Its Reception JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies JFA Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts JLS Journal of Literary Studies JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 

Abbreviations  ix JSOTS LHBOTS NICOT OBT OLA OTL Relegere RevBib SAAS SAJL SBL SBLAIL SBLWAW SJOT STDJ TynBul TBN TWAS ZAW

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Library of Hebrew Studies/ Old Testament Studies New International Commentary on the Old Testament Overtures to Biblical Theology Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta Old Testament Library Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception Revue Biblique State Archives of Assyria Studies Studies in American Jewish Literature Society of Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature: Ancient Israel and its Literature Society of Biblical Literature: Writings from the Ancient World Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Tyndale Bulletin Themes in Biblical Narrative Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

Contributors

Caroline Blyth is a reader and editor based in New Zealand. Her monographs and co-edited volumes consider biblical reception history (Reimagining Delilah’s Afterlives as Femme Fatale, 2017; The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama, 2018; Routledge Companion to Eve, 2023) and rape culture (The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34, 2010; Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion, 2018; Rape Culture, Purity Culture, and Coercive Control in Teen Girl Bibles, 2021). Mary F. Brewer is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, UK, where she teaches English and American Studies and Liberal Arts. She has published widely on the representation of social facets of identity in literature and drama, including how religious identities interface with race-gender constructs. Her most recent monograph, The Bible and Modern British Drama: 1930 to the Present (Routledge, 2021), explores the adaptation of Hebrew and New Testament Bible stories for the stage. Brian Britt is Professor in Religion and Cultural Theory at Virginia Tech, USA. His books include Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text (T&T Clark 2004) and Biblical Curses and the Displacement of Tradition (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Moses. Jo Carruthers is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. She has published monographs and edited volumes in the areas of literature and biblical reception, literature and religion, and literature and aesthetics, including a reception-historical commentary on Esther (Esther Through the Centuries, 2008) and a follow-up discussion of Esther’s aesthetic afterlives at the festival of Purim and beyond (The Politics of Purim, 2020). Kirsi Cobb is Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Cliff College in Derbyshire, UK, and co-founder of the Bible, Gender and Church Research Centre, with Dr Holly Morse (The University of Manchester). Kirsi has recently published on gender and sexual violence in Hosea (in The Oxford Handbook of Hosea, 2024) as well as a more in-depth reading of Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love (in Narrating Rape, 2024).



Contributors  xi David Davage (formerly Willgren) is Associate Professor in Old Testament Exegesis at ALT School of Theology, Sweden, and Research Associate at the Department of Old and New Testament Studies, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. He has published two monographs (The Formation of the Book of Psalms, 2016, and How Isaiah Became an Author, 2022) and edited volumes on the Psalms and Isaiah (Song, Prayer, Scripture, 2025). Ceri Deosun is currently working towards her PhD with Trinity College Bristol, UK, researching romance retellings of the story of King David. She is Research Associate with the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence. She is an Anglican priest working as a Curate in the Church of England. Denae Dyck is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. She is the author of Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2024). Her articles on literature and religion have appeared in journals including Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, European Romantic Review, and Christianity and Literature. Ina Döttinger is Head of a foundation, the Evangelische Schulstiftung in der EKD, serving protestant schools in Germany. She did her DPhil in Oxford and has worked in matters of education, in particular with regard to inclusive schools, for more than 15 years. Publications as editor and author include Inklusion: Damit sie gelingen kann (2019) and Die Umsetzung schulischer Inklusion nach der UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention in den deutschen Bundesländern (2021). Bradley C. Gregory is Associate Professor of Old Testament at the Catholic University of America, Washington, USA. He is the author of Like an Everlasting Signet Ring (2010) and The Theology and Spirituality of the Psalms of Ascents (2022), as well as the co-editor of the New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (2023). He is currently working on a two-volume work on the reception history of Genesis. Thea Gomelauri is Associate Faculty Member of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. She is multi-award-winning Director of the Oxford Interfaith Forum, and authored The Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry, (Oxford, 2023). Her recent publication is ‘The Georgian Manuscript and Ecclesiastical Tradition’ in a multi-lingual volume by Agaiby, L. (Ed). First in the Desert: St. Paul the Hermit in Text and Tradition, (Brill,2024). Zohar Hadromi-Allouche is Assistant Professor in Classical Islamic Religious Thought and Dialogue at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is the co/editor of several interdisciplinary volumes in the fields of liminality and interreligious intertextuality (including Betwixt and Between Liminality and Marginality, 2023; Scriptural Sexuality, forthcoming 2025). Her research examines the literary construction of prophetic, demonic, or feminine characters, such as Eve, in the reception history of the Bible and the Qur’an.

xii Contributors Marian Kelsey is Teaching Associate in Hebrew Bible at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has published on inner-biblical allusions in Ruth and Jonah and on the reception history of episodes from Genesis and the prophets. Kyu Seop Kim is Associate Professor of New Testament at Asian Center for Theological Studies and Mission, South Korea. He earned his PhD from the University of Aberdeen and specialises in New Testament letters and papyrology. He has published The Firstborn Son in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (2019) and is currently working on monographs on Hebrews and Pauline letters. Stuart Lasine is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Wichita State University, Kansas, USA. He is the author of Knowing Kings: Knowledge, Power and Narcissism in the Hebrew Bible, 2001; Weighing Hearts: Character, Judgment, and the Ethics of Reading the Bible, 2012; Jonah and the Human Condition, 2020; and Divine Envy, Jealousy, and Vengefulness in Ancient Israel and Greece, 2023. Katherine Low is Professor of Religious Studies and Chaplain at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, USA. She is the author of The Bible, Gender, and Reception History: The Case of Job’s Wife (Bloomsbury, 2013). Along with publishing numerous articles on reception history and gender in biblical studies, she has also worked on religious themes in popular culture. As a chaplain in higher education, she engages in interfaith leadership and development. Hugh S. Pyper is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Interpretation at the University of Sheffield, UK. He has written widely on the Bible and literature, children’s Bibles and the use of the Bible in colonial and anticolonial ideologies. His books include David as Reader (1996), An Unsuitable Book: The Bible as Scandalous Text (2005), and The Unchained Bible: Cultural Appropriations of Biblical Texts (2012). Jason M. Silverman is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has written and co-edited several books on the Persian contexts of Second Temple Jewish literature as well as several articles on the reception history of such literature. Soo Kim Sweeney is Adjunct Professor of the Hebrew Bible at Claremont School of Theology, Los Angeles, USA. Her research focuses on discourse analysis, social applications, and theatrical practices to engage with the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘so-what’ questions of the biblical text in contemporary contexts. She coedited Theology of the Hebrew Bible, Volume 2: Texts, Readers, and Their Worlds (SBL, 2024). Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer is Professor in Old Testament Exegesis at ALT School of Theology, Sweden, and Research Associate at the Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Scripture, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has published several monographs and edited volumes on Isaiah and Zechariah, a

Contributors  xiii reception-historical commentary on Jonah (Jonah through the Centuries, 2021), as well as a monograph devoted to Jonathan in modern literature (In Search of Jonathan, 2022). Kathryn Walls is Professor Emerita at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the Invisible Church (Manchester, 2013) and Editor (with Marguerite Stobo) of William Baspoole’s The Pilgrime (Renaissance English Text Society, 2008), a seventeenth-century adaptation of the Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode – itself a translation of the seminal fourteenth-century allegory by Guillaume de Deguileville. Eric Ziolkowski is the Helen H. P. Manson Professor of Bible in the Religious Studies Department at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. The author of numerous books, articles, and book chapters in the comparative study of religion and literature, he is also main editor of reception for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter: 2009–) and general editor of Bloomsbury Publishing’s six-volume Cultural History of Western Myth (in preparation).

Introduction Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

For the last 2,500 years, the books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament have been a constant source of inspiration. As Holy Scripture for Jews and Christians, these books have been used (and some may say misused) as an authority for how to live a pious life in accordance with God’s will. At the same time, they are also part of the world’s literary treasure. The biblical stories take their rightful place alongside the Gilgamesh Epic, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, to name but a few comparable pieces of ancient literature. Throughout history, artists and authors alike have identified with the biblical characters and reused the biblical stories to express their own thoughts. This reuse has often resulted in new literary creations that are here labelled ‘retellings’, namely, literature that offers new versions of a given biblical text. These versions may enhance certain aspects of the text and neglect or even omit others, and they may recontextualise and even subvert its message. Furthermore, they often shift the perspective from one character to another and opt to give a voice to characters that are marginalised in the biblical text. This practice of reuse began in the Hebrew Bible itself. The book of Chronicles constitutes in many respects a retelling of the material in 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings, as it endeavours to align the stories of these books to fit its own overarching theology. This type of ideological retelling continued to flourish throughout the Second Temple Period. The so-called genre ‘rewritten Bible’ aimed to revise and modify already existing biblical books. The Book of Jubilee, for instance, is written as an interpretation of Genesis. The Hellenistic Jewish sermon On Jonah is another example of a text that rewrites, extends, and interprets a biblical book (Jonah). In other cases, such as the novella Joseph and Asenath, the rewriting fills perceived narrative gaps and gives a voice to otherwise silent biblical characters. The practice of retelling the biblical stories continued in rabbinical Judaism, expressed through the genre of midrash. In a way similar to the modern practice of writing ‘fan fiction’, the different midrashim delve into the feelings and motivations of their favourite biblical characters, give them backstories, and explore ‘what happened afterwards’. To a lesser extent, the same happened in Christian sermons, where preachers turned the biblical characters into models to emulate. The goals of the retellings are twofold: to update the biblical stories to enable them to speak to new audiences and to encourage the same audiences to identify with and learn from the biblical characters. Through retellings, we are invited anew DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-1

2  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry into the biblical world and motivated to relate to the biblical characters as fellow human beings. Their dilemmas become examples for what may happen in our own lives, and their joys, trials, and tribulations become experiences that we may share. At the same time, retellings are by nature often subversive. By extending the storylines, providing backstories to the character, and giving marginalised characters a voice, the focus of the narratives changes. As a result, retellings frequently cause the reader to discover new things in the biblical texts and prompt new questions to ask of them. After reading a retelling, we may see the biblical characters with new eyes and understand their choices from new perspectives. As we begin to look at a given story through a different person’s eyes, we may become critical of the character that we are accustomed to regarding as the hero. Alternatively, we may receive a new sense of compassion for people that we have hitherto disregarded, because the retelling explains their behaviour in new and insightful ways. In many respects, modern literary retellings work in same way as earlier midrashim. Authors fill textual gaps, alter the perspective, and empower marginalised characters. They also use the biblical characters to discuss their own dilemmas: by identifying with a biblical character, they are afforded the possibility to express their own feelings. At the same time, the retelling authors add fresh perspectives to the biblical text by highlighting extant details and bringing a text’s complexity and inherent ambiguity into sharper focus. Finally, as they probe the characters’ actions and motives, they problematise the text’s overt message. The dialogue between the biblical text and a retelling is thus a two-way road, where the Bible and the retelling inform one another. In the present volume, scholars—coming from different parts of the world—are invited to explore the intersection between the Bible and literature. Together, they demonstrate that knowledge of the Bible often enhances our understanding and appreciation of modern literature; yet modern literature may equally well increase our understanding of the biblical texts. Genesis contains some of the most poignant pieces of storytelling in the Bible. It is therefore to be fully expected that it has generated a wealth of retellings. It is furthermore reasonable that no fewer than nine authors deal with this material. They investigate how this text has been retold, problematised, and made applicable to our own contemporary world. They also highlight the often difficult and, in a few cases, completely unacceptable values that these biblical narratives seemingly support. Focus is brought to bear on God’s decision to destroy first the world and then Sodom and Gomorrah, how Sarah and Hagar deal with childlessness, childbirth, and having to share the same man, and how the siblings Dinah, Judah, and Joseph survive their often very hard lives. Denae Dyck explores four retellings that reconceptualise the flood narrative from feminist and queer perspectives: Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters, Anne Provoost’s Die Arkvaarders (In the Shadow of the Ark), and Sarah Blake’s Namaah. One factor that unites these varied retellings is the desire to give a voice to those characters that are silent in the biblical text. Another, related aim is to combat the exclusivism encoded in the biblical account and allow for a more pluralistic message. All these retellings,

Introduction  3 each in their own way, challenge the Bible’s often patriarchal and hierarchical ideologies that regulate and control sexuality and set up barriers to determine who is saved (in the ark) and who is not. Together, these four novels show that the biblical account can all too easily dissolve into a story of wrath, condemnation, and exclusion, yet they can also shift the centre of gravity from judgement towards mercy and inclusion. The narrative in the Genesis 19 story raises many questions regarding the characters’ behaviour. Why, for example, is Abraham content to stop his bargaining on behalf of the righteous rather than attempt to save sinful Sodom? Further, why does Lot’s wife look back? Soo Kim Sweeney explores how three retellings try to answer these questions. Bertolt Brecht’s German parable play, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, subverts the biblical narrative, as it concludes that the gods have made it impossible to be good. Seungwoo Lee’s Korean short story ‘소돔의 하룻밤 (Sodomui Harusbam) Sodom’s One Night’ portrays a Lot who is oblivious to the danger that he and his city are in. Lot alone is righteous, but he dreams of helping his fellow citizens to find redemption, only to be turned into a laughingstock. Finally, Leopoldo Lugones’s Spanish short story ‘La Estatua de Sal’ explores the reasons behind Lot’s wife’s decision to look back. Does she need to witness the destruction so that she, in turn, can bear witness to it? In a companion piece, Katherine Low zooms in on the question of why Lot’s wife looks back. In dialogue with four poems by Anna Akhmatova, Margaret Kaufman, Carlos Martínez Rivas, and Natalie Diaz, as well as a short novel by Rosalind Chase, Low demonstrates how they all align the experience of Lot’s wife with their own cultural and political situations. They further contrast Lot with his wife. While Lot, the pious person who thinks God is right to wipe out a whole community, is able to walk away from the destruction, unharmed and seemingly uncaring, Lot’s wife dies because she cares for her community. Many of these authors interpret the wife’s refusal to turn away, and her decision to stay and witness the destruction as acts of solidarity and resilience. They further detect a contrast in the two characters’ biblical and literary afterlives. Several of these four poets highlight that while Lot survives and goes on to do despicable things (with his daughters), Lot’s wife ends her life with an expression of love for her lost community, the home she will never return to, and her friends and neighbours who will be dead by the morrow. Zohar Hadromi-Allouche looks at the portrayal of Sarah and her laughter in (mainly) Jewish poetry of the twentieth century. In the first part of the chapter, she highlights how these modern, poetic retellings build on, yet also subvert, many of the themes found in early rabbinic literature. They reuse the biblical and rabbinic texts to express their emotions regarding modern conflicts and trauma. For example, Sarah’s plight—as she realises that Abraham has taken her son—often becomes a metaphor for all those mothers whose children have died in wars. Hadromi-Allouche’s chapter is centred around the theme of Sarah’s laughter, as an expression of her feelings towards Hagar, Abraham, and impending motherhood. The focus is on Itzik Manger’s many poems about Sarah found in his Chumash poems. In the second part of the chapter, Hadromi-Allouche demonstrates how Manger portrays Sarah as a round, complete, and composite character, who craves

4  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry for a child and aches because of what she sees as Abraham’s betrayal of her. Yet Sarah’s laughter continues to be suppressed in both Manger’s poetry and its later musical adaptations. The chapter concludes by considering possible reasons for this ongoing suppression of Sarah’s laughter. In a companion piece, Kathryn Walls explores the depiction of Hagar in dialogue with Dubose Heyward’s book Mamba’s Daughters, Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, and Amal Al Jubouri’s verse sequence Hagar Before/ After the Occupation. While none of these works has the retelling of the biblical story as their main aim, the echoes of Genesis reverberate throughout all of them. They interact not only with the biblical text but also with later (negative) Christian assessments, exemplified in Galatians 4, and (positive) Islamic ones, where Hagar is an Egyptian princess, Abraham’s wife, and mother of his legitimate heir Ishmael. These three retellings share certain characteristics. First, none of them mentions Ishmael, despite his pivotal role in the biblical story. Instead, all three replace him with a daughter. Second, all three elaborate on Hagar’s status as ‘the other’: as an African-American descendant of slaves, as a reticent elderly woman, and as a dissident in an oppressive post-revolutionary Iraq. Hagar is turned into a heroine with whom the reader can identify, yet she also remains the ambiguous victim of the original story in Genesis. Continuing in part with Sarah and Hagar, Jo Carruthers looks more generally at the Hebrew Bible handmaid narratives, but also more specifically at how Margaret Atwood interacts with them in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments. The biblical character of Hagar, who exclaims in Gen 16:13 that ‘she has been seen’ by God, stands at the centre of the discussion. Carruthers explores how seeing in Atwood’s novels capture the dual meaning of the concept: to be seen has not only the positive connotations of being noted and appreciated but also the negative ones of being kept under surveillance and judged for any real or imagined misdemeanour. She also discusses the idea of ‘hypervisibility’ and how being seen can simultaneously mean to be unseen: what people see is merely the outer, visible layer, while the person themselves is ignored and/or is able to hide in plain sight. From a different angle, Carruthers investigates the ways in which the different women—the handmaids in the Bible and the handmaids in Atwood’s fiction—react to the patriarchal and authoritarian structures that govern their respective societies by either internalising their value systems or defying them in covert manners. The next three chapters are devoted to three of Jacob’s children: Dinah, Judah, and Joseph. Like Jo Carruthers, Caroline Blyth explores a single retelling, namely, The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant. This widely read book offers a fictional account of Genesis 29–50, told from the perspective of Jacob’s daughter Dinah (Gen 34). In biblical scholarship, much ink has been spilt on whether Dinah is portrayed as being raped (cf. Caroline Blyth, The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34: Interpreting Dinah’s Silence) or having consensual sex, as advocated by Anita Diamant. Blyth’s chapter offers a scathing criticism of Diamant’s book, with a focus on its wilful omission of gender-based violence encountered by not only the characters in Genesis but also the characters in The Red Tent. Diamant’s fictionalised account

Introduction  5 of the biblical narrative ultimately serves to condone its inherent patriarchal values rather than questioning them. In Blyth’s own words, it renders patriarchy and misogyny ‘more palatable for contemporary readers’. Eric Ziolkowski turns to Judah, Dinah’s brother, and explores his interaction with Tamar (Gen 38). Given Judah’s role as progenitor of King David and later also Jesus, Judah has a prominent role not only in Genesis but also in its Jewish and Christian afterlives. Ziolkowski discusses the portrayal of Judah in Izak Goller’s Judah and Tamar, Gertrud Kolmar’s ‘Thamar und Juda’, and Joy Sikorski and Michael Silversher’s recent novel Tamar of the Terebinths: A Novel, and contrasts them with the classic depiction of him in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. The key question concerns the portrayal of Judah and Tamar’s relationship: is it love or lust on Judah’s part, or does Tamar have all the agency as she seeks to procure a son? Further, looking at the incident through the lens of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, is it a matter of seduction or rape, and does Judah know, deep in his heart, that when he visits the prostitute, he is really having sex with his daughter-in-law? Finally, Bradley C. Gregory investigates the portrayals of Joseph with a focus on his time as Egypt’s vizier. Beginning with Henry Lawson’s ‘Joseph’s Dreams and Reuben’s Brethren: A Recital in Six Chapters’, Gregory discusses Lawson’s acerbic evaluation of Joseph’s economic plan for Egypt which, in his words, is nothing but a deplorable capitalisation of people starving to death. The biblical hero is turned into a hypocritical, selfish tyrant. In contrast, Louis Napoleon Parker’s pageant play Joseph and His Brethren tones down Joseph’s less than laudable characteristics while making him more manly, more pious, and more serene. At the same time, it also adds drama and tragedy, as exemplified in the description of Joseph’s relationship with his brothers. Finally, Thomas Mann, in his classic tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, highlights Joseph’s magnanimous treatment of his brothers. In his ability to forgive, Mann makes him a type for Christ. Turning to Exodus, the story and character of Moses stands out. In his chapter about Moses, Stuart Lasine highlights how three literary works, Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses: Man of the Mountain, Freud’s The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion, and Thomas Mann’s novella, The Tables of the Law, read the biblical narrative with suspicion and transform it into a commentary that speaks to their own contemporaries. They all cast doubts on Moses ethnicity—maybe he really is the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and thus not fully ‘Jewish’?—and they problematise his leadership of Israel. At one end of the spectrum, Hurston’s Moses dreams of a time of more equal opportunities and how he sees himself as a freedom fighter who gives the Israelites the right to self-determination. At the other end, Freud’s Moses sees himself as an ‘enlightened despot’ who forces Israel to adhere to his version of Yhwh-worship for their own good. In a similar manner, Mann’s Moses creates a hot-tempered Moses who more often than not looks down on the Israelites. In all three cases, Moses is held responsible for the creation of the people of Israel, for better or for worse. Continuing with the book of Judges, Brian Britt explores the characterisation of Samson in three selected retellings. Samson, a larger-than-life character—combining

6  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry physical strength and weakness and mental cleverness and foolishness—offers an ideal arena for literary retellings. He is both a boundary-crossing and boundaryinhabiting figure, whose intense passion and inner emotional turmoil capture the imagination. Britt shows how Samson has been used to serve a range of modern political and religious purposes. In African-American literature, for example, there is a strong focus on Samson’s last act of destruction of Dagon’s temple (Judg 17:28–31), as Samson is made to serve as a symbol of the struggle against slavery: he is a freedom fighter who struggles for justice and self-determination. In contrast, many early Zionist novelists betray a more uneasy relationship with Samson, as exemplified by Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Samson the Nazirite. In this novel, Samson functions, at one and the same time, as a symbol of elite military units and the fear of the consequences of exaggerated military violence. Looking more closely at the book of Ruth, Mary F. Brewer begins with a brief discussion of the character of Ruth in the Bible and in later traditional retellings. Even though the book is centred around two female characters, Brewer notes the strong trend in much Jewish interpretation to use Ruth, both the character and the book, in ways that reinforce hetero-patriarchal gender roles. Boaz is the male subject who saves Ruth, the female object. Turning to modern literature, Brewer discusses how Eva Etzioni-Halevy, writing from a Jewish perspective in The Garden of Ruth (2006), Tessa Afshar, writing from a Christian perspective in In the Field of Grace (2014), and Marlene van Niekerk, writing from a post-colonial viewpoint in Agaat (2004), retell the story about Ruth and either challenge or uphold its patriarchal values. In particular, how do they deal with the dual notions of otherness and female sexuality? Ruth, being a Moabite, is a foreigner whose sexuality is considered deviant (cf. Gen 19). Brewer further explores how the character of Ruth often becomes the handmaid of the author’s overarching religious goals. Afshar’s retelling, for example, often reveals more about the Christian values of her intended readership than the biblical character herself. Two chapters explore retellings based on 1–2 Samuel. Hugh Pyper’s chapter about Bathsheba (see also Deosun) looks broadly across literary genres. His focus is on the dual roles of fiction: by extending the narrative and filling the narrative gaps, the story loses the openness and ambiguity that characterises the biblical version. Notably, the biblical Bathsheba may be understood as both innocent victim and cunning schemer, depending on whether we foreground her behaviour as described in 2 Samuel 11–12 or as in 1 Kings 1. In contrast, the Bathsheba of a given retelling must be either or. The only alternative is to give her a developing arc, where her character goes from being the naïve woman of 2 Samuel 11–12 to the fully fledged politician of 1 Kings 1. To explore these questions, Pyper traces Bathsheba’s character in four novels: Marek Halter’s Bethsabée ou L’Éloge de l’adultère; Torgny Lindgren’s Bat Seba; Allan Massie’s King David: A Novel; and Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord. Thea Gomelauri’s chapter deals with another woman at King David’s court, namely, Abishag, the woman who is given the task of warming the bed of the elderly king. Gomelauri notes that Abishag is defined as a sokhenet, a hapax legomenon. The uncertainty of the translation means that Abishag can be whatever we readers

Introduction  7 want her to be, ranging from a lowly slave girl who is sexually abused to a queenly administrator of the royal household. Gomelauri investigates how six poems describe Abishag. Abishag appears as the title character in Jacob Glatstein’s poem ‘Abishag’, yet the real leading character is David. In contrast, Jacob Fichman, in his poem ‘Abishag’, makes her into a self-focused character who misses the simple pleasures of life. Yet again, Leon Titche’s poetic piece Abishag’s Lament describes Abishag as being trapped in a cage and dreaming of freedom, while Robert Frost’s poem ‘Provide, Provide’ uses the ambiguous biblical story of Abishag to emphasise the transitory nature of beauty and riches. Finally, whereas Louise Glück poem ‘Abishag’ offers a tacit criticism of patriarchy, Ruth Whitman makes Abishag into King David’s equal, who serves as his conversation partner. The next three chapters are based on the book of Daniel, the book of Hosea, and the book of Psalms. They turn out to be more of a challenge, given the dearth of retellings associated with these books and the concomitant scarcity of literary characters. Jason M. Silverman’s chapter focuses on three novels, Shlomo Kalo’s The Chosen, Mesu Andrews’s Of Fire and Lions, and Joseph R. Chambers’s Nebuchadnezzar, the Head of Gold. Silverman highlights the stark paucity of engagement with biblical scholarship and the insights of Assyriology in these works of fiction. On the one hand, contrary to the prevalent scholarly consensus, all three novels presume not only that most of the books of the Hebrew Bible were written by the middle of the sixth century bce, but also that people commonly had access to these written works. On the other hand, while all the novels testify to some limited awareness of the political life and religious beliefs in the Ancient Near East—mostly gleaned from biblical sources—there is significantly less knowledge of material artefacts. For example, despite the novels being set in Babylon, there is no mention of the iconic Ištar Gate. There is also confusion as to what languages people spoke in Babylon and an almost complete lack of knowledge of actual distances between places, the practical aspects of religious rituals, the kind of food that people ate and drank, family formations, etc. Kirsi Cobb’s contribution explores the portraits of Gomer in modern literature, with a focus on her marriage to Hosea. Her three chosen literary retellings are Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love, a relatively typical example of so-called evangelical Inspirational Fiction, The Prophet’s Wife, written by the conservative Jewish-American Rabbi Milton Steinberg, and ‘Gimpel the Fool’, written by the Jewish Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Cobb evaluates how these three retellings create a range of different Gomer(s): while Singer’s Gomer stands closest to the biblical ‘promiscuous woman’, Steinberg’s Gomer is a woman trapped in a patriarchal society, and Rivers’s Gomer is a victim of sexual exploitation. Cobb questions, given these portraits of Gomer, whether there can be a happy ending for Gomer, despite being ‘forgiven’ for what Hosea sees as her sin. Cobb also highlights how these retellings force the reader to confront the question of the grey area between love and abuse in Hosea’s actions towards Gomer. Finally, David Davage’s chapter investigates the ‘rewritings’ of Psalms 1, 16 and 42 in three projects belonging to protestant evangelical communities. The explicit

8  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry aim of these ‘rewritings’ is to render the canonical text faithfully, yet as Davage shows, they often align the psalmic material with the theology of the respective rewriting communities. Davage highlights four specific areas of alignment: praise, community, forgiveness, and proof-texting. First, although the Psalms themselves allow for protest in response to hardship, the retellings stress that the correct response is praise, regardless of human feelings. Second, psalms are rephrased to fit a communal musical setting. Third, psalms are understood as part of a person’s confession of sins and the subsequent divine pardon. Finally, the content of the psalms is conflated with other biblical texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, with the result that the original Psalm loses its distinct character. The final four chapters deal with more overarching topics, with a focus on genres of biblical retellings. What happens when the Bible is rewritten in order to speak to children or to fit into the science-fiction genre? Further, how does the biblical text fare when it is transformed to serve the purposes of politics or, indeed, the Church? Ina Döttinger analyses a wide range of biblical retellings for children and young adults. She identifies three different strategies whereby the retelling authors deal with the biblical texts. First, through ‘reimaginings’, the retelling transports the readers into the biblical story world to contextualise it and thus enable readers to better understand it. Second, in ‘modernised retellings’, the biblical story is reconceptualised into modern times, where characters—who resemble the biblical characters—both challenge and define the boundaries of the original story. They either act in accordance with their prototype or choose different paths. Readers are thus confronted with alternative stories that force them to evaluate and thus either accept or reject the values of the biblical Vorlage. In a similar manner, the books in the third category, ‘fantastical retellings’, preserve what the author perceived to be the main points of the biblical story but transform them, both in terms of time and place, again in order to criticize or affirm them. Marian Kelsey explores the use of the Bible in fantasy/sci-fi books. She notes a tendency to focus on three questions that all concern the creation: how did the world begin; how will it end; and how does humanity fit in the middle? The novels dealing with the beginning naturally interact with the material in Genesis 2–3, and often feature characters that resemble Adam and Eve. Humanity, as we know it now, is mortal, but could there have been a time where humanity might have chosen immortality, yet decided instead to embrace the ability to die? Further, to what extent are eating the fruit, sexual maturity, and leaving Eden necessities for human life as we know it? The novels dealing with the end share many of the same questions. Many fantasy/sci-fi books are aligned with the Hebrew Bible in that they speak of new beginnings rather than annihilation. Further, leaving Eden is not only death but also a new beginning, and the Flood marks not only the end of humanity but also its continuity, albeit under new circumstances. Finally, several books wonder what it would have meant to have continued living in Eden. Can humanity, again as we know it, really flourish in an eternal and non-changing world? Alternatively, is humanity forever living a life in exile, dislocated from the life that it should have lived?

Introduction  9 Kyu Seop Kim, drawing from Korean contemporary literature, investigates how retellings of the Bible can be used in political discourse. Kim considers literature from three periods. First, writers use terms and motifs from the stories of Jacob and Moses to express the period of Japanese occupation (1910–1945) and the ensuing experience of exile. Moon Ik-hwan’s poem ‘Death of Moses’, for example, reuses the Meribah incident (Num 20:1–10) and the death of Moses (Deut 34:5–7). In this poem, the struggles faced by the Korean people are mapped onto Moses’ struggles to lead his people. Second, authors use the imagery of the story of Cain and Abel (Gen 4) to explore the division between North and South Korea, as exemplified by Hwang Soon-Won’s novel The Descendants of Cain. In a similar manner, Koh Jung-hee’s poems retell the stories of Abel (Gen 4) and Abishag (1 Kgs 1:1–4) to express the Korean people, in the north and in the south, as a suffering community. Finally, Kim Ae-ran’s short story ‘Goliath in the Water’ mixes the motifs of David’s fight against Goliath (1 Sam 17) with the flood narrative (Gen 6–9) to denote the capitalist order in Korea after democratisation. Finally, Ceri Deosun explores the way that biblical characters are depicted in Inspiration Romance literature, written by and for women identifying with the American Evangelical subculture. Using Bathsheba as a case study, Deosun explores how the values of the subculture shape the way biblical narratives are retold. She begins by defining the genre, over against both secular Romance literature and non-biblical Inspiration literature. On the one hand, the authors need to adhere to the biblical content; on the other hand, that obligation frees them to include themes, such as sexual violence, that are not normally part of the Romance genre. Deosun interacts with four evangelical Romance novels, David and Bathsheba by Roberta Kells Dorr; Unspoken by Francine Rivers; Bathsheba by Jill Eileen Smith; and Bathsheba: Reluctant Beauty by Angela Elwell Hunt. To provide perspective, she contrasts them with Torgny Lindgren’s novel Bathsheba. Deosun identifies the interpretative trajectories with regard to motives and characterisation and discusses how these decisions resonate with contemporary evangelical values and help turn the biblical characters into role models for (evangelical) women today. The Bible and Fiction: Further Reading Alter, Robert. Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 2000. Boitani, Piero. The Bible and Its Rewriting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Boyarin, Daniel. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Breed, Brennan W. ‘Nomadology of the Bible: A Processual Approach to Biblical Reception History’. BibInt 1 (2012), pp. 299–320. Conway, Colleen M. Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael: A Cultural History of a Biblical Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Cushing Stahlberg, Lesleigh. Sustaining Fictions: Intertextuality, Midrash, Translation, and the Literary Afterlife of the Bible. LHBOTS 486. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Fisch, Harold. New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1998.

10  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Kreitzer, Larry J. Pauline Images in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow. Biblical Seminar 81. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Swindell, Anthony C. How Contemporary Novelists Rewrite Stories from the Bible: The Interpretation of Scripture in Literature. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. Swindell, Anthony C. Reforging the Bible: More Biblical Stories and their Literary Reception. The Bible in the Modern World 58. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014. Swindell, Anthony C. Going to Extremes in Biblical Rewritings: Radical Literary Retellings of Biblical Tropes. Studies of the Bible and Its Reception 22. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023. Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia. In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan between the Bible and Modern Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia. ‘Reception Exegesis: How Literary Retellings Can Shed New Light on a Biblical Text and its Interpretations’. In Hannah M. Strømmen (ed.), Biblical Reception: Models and Methods. Bible and its Reception. Atlanta, GA: SBL, forthcoming. Wright, Terry R. The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007.

1

The Flood Narrative in Feminist and Queer Perspectives Denae Dyck

1.1 Introduction: Literary Resurgences of the Biblical Flood Story Among the many biblical narratives that resurface in twentieth and twenty-first century novels, the story of Noah’s flood has exerted a significant influence on postmodern literary imaginations. Ewa Rychter goes so far as to claim that this story ‘has attracted more attention from British novelists than any other biblical narrative’, and her point might be extended to consider how this founding myth has been revisited by writers across the globe.1 Rychter’s list of exemplary British novels highlights Michèle Roberts’ The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Geraldine McCaughrean’s Not the End of the World (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Meg Rosoff’s There Is No Dog (2011). From an international perspective, further examples range from Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s Der Wahre Noah (German, 1974) to Marianne Fredriksson’s Syndafloden (Swedish, 1993) to Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (Canadian, 2009); in addition, there are many contemporary films that engage with the flood narrative, as Marianna Ruah-Midbar Shapiro and Lila Moore have highlighted.2 While the enduring popularity of Noah’s ark toy sets means that the basic story is likely to be familiar to very young readers, these literary retellings are anything but child’s play: they have a tendency to probe weighty identity issues and uncover apocalyptic anxieties as they explore concerns at the intersection of religion, ecology, gender, and sexuality. In effect, these texts make this familiar tale strange and invite readers to view this story of divine regret, destruction, salvation, and re-creation from alternative perspectives. Such acts of narrative revision have a long exegetical history. Creative re-interpretations of biblical stories find precedents in rabbinic traditions of midrash, and the Hebrew Bible itself contains many instances of self-reflexive commentary, as Terry R. Wright remarks.3 Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the development of source criticism has called attention to the composite qualities of the flood story as it appears in Gen 6–9, chapters that integrate material from both the Yahwist (J) and Priestly (P) traditions.4 Furthermore, this story has parallels in a variety of other cultural mythologies, most famously the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. The biblical account of the world’s increasing wickedness, God’s intervention, the new covenant with Noah, and the cursing of Canaan raises a variety of cosmological and ethical questions, including the following: how do DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-2

12  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the fragmentary introductory remarks about the nephilim in Gen 6:1–4 set up the tale that follows, and what was at stake in this intermarriage between the sons of God and the daughters of men? Does the expression of divine regret in Gen 6:5–8 mean that God made a mistake? Was it right for the passengers on the ark to be restricted to Noah and his family, and might anyone else have escaped destruction? Were the non-human creatures sufficiently provided for? In essence, these are questions about relationships among the divine, the human, and all creation. The hermeneutic tendency ‘to flesh out the sparse biblical account’ remains a constant across a variety of reading communities, both religious and secular, as Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg observes.5 Without taking the figurative literally, many readers have found it worthwhile to ponder what this elemental myth has to say about embodied earthly experiences. Several recent articles have called attention to the literary motifs and theological problems that animate contemporary rewritings of Noah’s flood, including work by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer and Vladimir Tumanov. Adopting a comparative perspective, these studies have considered work by contemporary American, Belgian, British, Canadian, German, Swedish, and Swiss writers.6 The present chapter assembles a new constellation of international case studies: Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters (1986), Anne Provoost’s Die Arkvaarders (In the Shadow of the Ark) (2001), and Sarah Blake’s Namaah (2019). This discussion builds on recent critical interventions by highlighting how the theological questions provoked by the flood narrative find expression within narrative form. Specifically, the following analysis considers how these novels both subvert and transform their biblical sources as they broaden the story’s perspective to feature characters who are marginalised by or excluded from the Genesis account. Taking up the concerns of today’s feminist and queer reading communities, these texts unsettle dualistic constructions of man/woman, soul/body, reason/ emotion, heaven/earth, and human/animal. These rewritings expose and challenge reductive notions of purity, often in ways that overturn heteronormative assumptions and complicate species hierarchies. More radically still, they invite readers to consider how biblical texts might be both critiqued for their patriarchal logic and reclaimed for their imaginative potentials. 1.2 Through the Eyes of the Others: Feminist and Queer Strategies of Narrative Revision Many postmodern literary rewritings of the flood story might, at first glance, seem diametrically opposed to their source texts; however, what is at stake in these narrative revisions is less a rejection than a repositioning of biblical authority. Such literary re-interpretations approach the Bible not as a unified, monolithic entity but rather as a composite collection that incorporates many voices, motivations, and ideologies. Recognising and appreciating this dialogism makes possible a variety of strategic rewritings, including those that play with narrative devices such as point of view to call into question interpretive hegemonies. Working from a sophisticated and multidisciplinary critical perspective, Mieke Bal’s Lethal Love: Feminist Literary

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  13 Readings of Biblical Love Stories (1987) applies narratological theory to biblical exegesis, exposing the patriarchal ideologies that have long guided readings of these texts and opening new ways of understanding the stories of David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, Boaz and Ruth, Judah and Tamar, and Adam and Eve. Bal’s work is but one example of how feminist thinkers have sought not only to expose and challenge misogynistic applications of religious discourse but also to re-imagine sacred texts. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the American suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton led an international committee in compiling The Woman’s Bible (published in two volumes in 1895 and 1898), a commentary that reassessed the position of women in biblical narratives and discussed both apocryphal and canonical sources. Poet and scholar Alicia Suskin Ostriker, whose critical and creative work on feminist revisions of biblical narratives is informed by her Jewish heritage and knowledge of midrash, highlights the many different interpretive strategies at stake throughout imaginative portrayals of biblical women offered by women poets—including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and H.D. As Ostriker argues, these retellings negotiate between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of desire as they seek both to deconstruct and reconstruct their source texts.7 Moreover, Ostriker claims that biblical texts themselves ‘encourage and even invite transgressive as well as orthodox readings’, concluding that the decentred narratives advanced by women writers who re-envision these stories, ‘far from destroying sacred Scripture, are designed to revitalise it and make it sacred indeed to that half of the human population which has been degraded by it’.8 While her work focuses specifically on examples drawn from women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her broader point might be extended to consider how writers across the gender spectrum have explored a variety of feminist and queer interpretations. Since the advent of studies such as Marcella Althaus-Reid’s The Queer God (2003) and Gerard Loughlin’s edited collection Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (2007), queer theology has gained increasing traction as a vital aspect of liberation theology that aids in reconceptualising sexual relationships in biblical traditions.9 The novels examined in the following sections engage with the flood narrative by re-reading it through the eyes of the others: either those who are present but marginalised in the biblical tradition, such as Noah’s wife, or newly imagined characters who are left outside the Genesis account altogether. Arranged chronologically by publication date, these novels highlight the variety of forms that feminist/ queer revisionary narratives might take, reflecting a range of authorial positions and target audiences. While they each offer different responses to the theological questions raised by the flood story, they all engage in similarly twofold work of both challenging and revivifying their sources. Troubling the lines between saved/ damned, these texts highlight issues related to religious exclusivism arising from Gen 6–9 and move towards more pluralistic understandings of biblical narratives. 1.3 Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage: Crossing Lines From its opening lines, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage establishes itself as a story that aims not merely to fill the gaps within the biblical account

14  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry but, more actively, to correct it. Following the quotation of Gen 7:7 that prefaces the book’s Prologue (‘And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him into the ark, because of the waters of the flood’), Findley’s narrator declares, ‘Everyone knows it wasn’t like that’ (p. 3). Continuing this pattern, each of the novel’s four books begins with another epigraph extracted from Gen 6–9, and these quotations provide ironic counterpoints for the tale that unfolds. This imaginative retelling has several literary precursors: it continues the pattern of the medieval mystery plays in depicting Noah’s wife as resisting her husband’s command to board the ark and insisting on bringing her ‘gossips’, or close female friends and confidants, along with her—a tradition that itself traces its lineage to fourth-century Gnostic texts.10 In addition, Findley’s re-interpretation accords with the subversive revisions of biblical narrative advanced by Romantic writers such as William Blake and George Gordon Byron.11 However, Findley gives these traditions a decidedly postmodern twist, using elements of magical realism to heighten the story’s fantastic qualities. His playful anachronisms make this retelling difficult to situate within time and place: both his landscape descriptions and his accounts of the food prepared and consumed—including devilled eggs, pickled mushrooms, potato salad, and frosted chamomile tea—seem strangely reminiscent of Findley’s own geographical and cultural setting in twentieth-century southern Ontario.12 As its title underscores, this novel explicitly confronts the exclusivism encoded in the biblical account. While the narrative highlights those eight individuals identified as saved in the book of Genesis (Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives), it also gestures towards those humans and animals who were left behind—or, as this revisionary account would have it, almost left behind. After the doors of the ark are shut, the family becomes divided into those on the upper and lower decks, those wanted versus those not wanted on the voyage. The former category consists of Dr Noyes, the domineering head of the family who conducts ruthless experiments on the animals and remains indifferent to the humans left behind; his eldest son, Shem, a brawny blockhead who seems to have little care other than working and eating; Hannah, Shem’s seemingly devout and dutiful wife; and Japeth, the youngest son, who has inexplicably turned blue and whose anxieties about his masculinity are made painfully obvious through his preoccupation with swords. The latter grouping includes Mrs Noyes, who opposes her husband’s controlling moves with pluck, resourcefulness, and a keen sense of the world’s beauty; Ham, her second son, who takes a scientist’s interest in the natural world and a principled stance against his father’s ritual sacrifices; Lucy, Ham’s enigmatic wife, revealed to the readers as a cross-dressing fallen angel; and Emma, Japeth’s child bride, who refuses her husband’s advances until she is violently violated. The story’s cast of characters features a variety of animals, most especially Mottyl, the blind cat who perceives what the humans cannot and who rivals Mrs Noyes as the story’s centre of consciousness. Most of the action unfolds through Mrs Noyes’s perspective, but Findley’s lens shifts to allow for brief glimpses into the psyche of other characters—including, in notable acts of narrative sympathy, those on the upper deck—with substantial portions of the story seen through Mottyl’s eyes. By turning to the blind cat, Findley unsettles anthropocentric and ableist perspectives.

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  15 Furthermore, Findley blurs the lines between human and animal creatures in his depiction of Lotte, Emma’s younger sister, who appears to be an ape, as well as in the ape-child born to Hannah on board the ark, implied to have been sired by Dr Noyes. As the narrative unfolds, Not Wanted on the Voyage undoes the hierarchical ideologies encoded in the very structure of the two-tiered ark. The story’s critique of patriarchal culture and theology emerges in its characterisation. Yahweh, worshipped by Dr Noyes, appears as a ridiculous old fool, spilling Mrs Noyes’ tomato aspic on his white robe when he visits the family to warn Dr Noyes of the coming destruction (p. 80). The highly perceptive Mottyl senses both that Yahweh is human—in effect, made in the image of man—and that he is near death, in what amounts to a remarkable feline grasp of Nietzschean philosophy (pp. 63, 107). Patriarchal control of sexuality becomes a recurring motif: Dr Noyes seems perversely interested in the relations between his sons and their wives, while Japeth’s sexual frustrations ultimately lead Dr Noyes and Hannah to kidnap Emma and rape her by means of a unicorn horn, in a shocking, arguably gratuitous, scene (pp. 248–262). And yet Findley also displays an alternative to such violent abuses of power: the happy, curious coupling of Ham and Lucy. Lucy joins the Noyes family as a mysterious stranger, over seven feet tall with long black hair, majestically apparelled in robes and makeup. When the archangel Michael confronts his rogue comrade, asking what will happen in bed with Ham, Lucy replies playfully, ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, but, if you must know, I’ll make it up as I go along’ (p. 103). Without explicitly describing their erotic encounters, the story implies that they keep each other satisfied in both body and soul. The obvious association between Lucy and Lucifer introduces an element of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Findley clearly participates in the Romantic camp that valorises Satan as the hero); Lucy might also be an indirect reference to the nephilim described in Gen 6.13 Findley, himself an openly gay writer, uses Lucy as a disruptive presence who subverts the neat, heteronormative logic of the two-by-two pairings in the biblical account and offers a delightfully unruly alternative. Along with this alternative sexuality, Not Wanted on the Voyage advances an alternative spirituality, one characterised not by power and control but by creativity and wonder. Such is the sense of the sacred experienced by Mrs Noyes as well as Mottyl, in the antediluvian world and even on board the ark itself. Whereas Dr Noyes meets Yahweh in the enclosed space and inner sanctuary of the Orchard, Mrs Noyes and her cat find their own sense of meaning and mystery when they sit on the front porch during the summer evenings (pp. 18–19, 39, 94). After the rains begin to fall but before the doors of the ark are shut, Mrs Noyes resolves to pray—not to Yahweh but to the river itself (p. 146). Later, as the downpour continues, she reflects, ‘who the hell do you pray to, I wonder, when you want to live and there isn’t any God?’ and concludes, ‘Maybe we should pray to each other’ (p. 174). Mrs Noyes locates redemption not in transcendent powers but in earthly fellowship and, indeed, in the exercise of the imagination itself. She exhibits a creative, artistic spirituality whereby she revitalises religious imagery and liturgical traditions for her own purposes. Amid the chaos both within and outside the ark, she finds solace in singing hymns, accompanied by the sheep. Her veneration

16  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry of the ‘sacred Spirit, who didst brood / upon the chaos dark and rude’ praises a God who seems to have little or nothing to do with Yahweh as depicted in the story; however, her song is clearly recognisable as the seafaring hymn ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’, composed by William Whiting in 1860, which itself alludes to the first creation story in Genesis (p. 221).14 Whereas Dr Noyes and Yahweh rule by fear, Mrs Noyes contemplates the intriguing prospect that ‘fear itself was nothing more than a failure of the imagination’ (p. 241). At the same time that Not Wanted on the Voyage opposes authoritarian and institutional religion, it upholds a wideranging vision of spirituality as not an escapist fantasy but a means of more fully inhabiting the here and now. In a final expression of defiance, Mrs Noyes prays to the clouds and sky, asking for rain (pp. 338–339). Disrupting the biblical account’s trajectory towards deliverance on the mountains of Ararat, the novel ends with the family still on board the ark. Still, the story affirms creation over destruction—Mrs Noyes vows not to let her husband’s violent schemes prevail—even as it refigures the flood waters themselves as agents of renewal. 1.4 Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters: The Rising Tide of Love Published only two years after Findley’s book, Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters offers another literary retelling that blurs the lines between past and present—not through the playful anachronisms of magical realism but through the dual temporality of time travel in what might be described as scientific fiction, or scientific fantasy. Part of L’Engle’s Time Quintet, Many Waters opens with an unfortunate mistake made by the Murray twins, fifteen-year-old Sandy and Dennys, who wander into their parents’ lab without realising that an experiment in quantum physics is in process. They then find themselves transported to a desert wasteland that seems unlike anything they could have imagined, until they recognise the people who have provided them shelter—including the young man Japheth and his father Noah—as the characters in the biblical flood narrative. Because the twins are familiar with this story, their primary concern (other than the question of how they will return home again) is for those who are not named among the saved in Genesis, especially Noah’s daughter Yalith, to whom both twins are attracted. The story’s antediluvian setting brings Sandy and Dennys into contact not only with Noah’s extended family but also with other desert dwellers, fantastical creatures, seraphim, and nephilim. The third-person narrative shifts back and forth between the two twins, who are separated shortly after their arrival in the desert, occasionally taking up the perspective of other characters as well. Much of the story’s drama revolves around concerns about Yalith’s fate, as the twins sift through their vague memories of Sunday school tales and grapple with issues about divine providence (pp. 168, 178, 198). At first glance, this rewriting would seem to have little in common with Findley’s. Not only does L’Engle’s target audience of young readers mean that her story has none of Findley’s graphic sexual violence, but she offers a reverential vision of God (El), depicted as mysteriously and ultimately good, and an appreciative portrait of Noah, whom the story shows as unsuccessfully attempting to

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  17 warn those around him of the impending doom. She thereby curtails the issue of undeserved suffering and, because Yalith is finally rescued by being directly taken up to heaven—rather like the story of Enoch as recounted in the fifth chapter of Genesis—L’Engle’s narrative preserves both the patterning of the biblical account and the goodness of God. And yet Many Waters has more in common with other revisionary narratives than might at first appear. Though not overtly subversive, its narrative transformations subtly challenge patriarchal hierarchies and reclaim embodied expressions of love, both spiritual and sexual. Several concerns within feminist hermeneutics find expression in conversations between the Murray twins, whose metacommentary on the flood narrative recognises both that women are largely excluded from the biblical accounts and that the Bible itself was written by men (pp. 168–169). L’Engle, who preferred to identify as a ‘writer who was a Christian’ rather than a ‘Christian writer’, contextualises these sacred stories as the product of many hands and as having many other mythological equivalents.15 She thereby swerves away from a narrowly literalist interpretation of the flood narrative and towards a more inclusive form of religious pluralism. As L’Engle’s attempt to reconcile science and spirituality underscores, a faith-based perspective need not be a fundamentalist one. Though L’Engle is less overt than Findley in contesting empty notions of transcendence, she nevertheless questions reductive distinctions between spirit and matter. Her fiction advances what Marek Oziewicz identifies as an incarnational theology that locates the divine presence within immanent earthly realities.16 In Many Waters, this theology has distinctly ecological elements. The seraphim exhort the twins to seek divine guidance through listening to the sun, the stars, and the wind (pp. 280–281). Both in their own world and in this mythic past, Sandy and Dennys find peace and purpose through working in the garden, a practical expression of care for creation (p. 169). While the romantic relationships in this novel are all heterosexual, L’Engle nevertheless complicates the tidy two-by-two pairings in Genesis, insofar as her story sets up a love triangle between Sandy, Dennys, and Yalith. Rather than resolve this triangle through rivalry or conquest, the narrative allows it to stand. Before returning to their own world, both Sandy and Dennys declare their love for Yalith, who affirms her mutual love for both twins. This messy, almost polyamorous, configuration exists, as the characters themselves recognise, more in the realm of imagination than actuality—they are not in a position to give physical expression to this love, and, as Dennys puts it, laughing, ‘If we had been older, it would have been very complicated’ (p. 296). But even within their brief time together, this entanglement challenges a prudishly restrictive sense of what love can and should be, and the teenage boys are shown to be distinctly, if always euphemistically, aware of their sexual attraction to Yalith. L’Engle’s portrayal of the relationships between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’, as recounted in the opening of Gen 6, similarly unsettles conventional categories. Many Waters depicts the nephilim as fallen angels who try to seduce the daughters of men, but even as this coming-of-age story works to distinguish love from lust, it offers much more than a straightforward morality tale. Consider, for instance, the tastefully veiled sex scene between Japheth and Oholibama, his beautiful, wise, and talented wife: ‘And they

18  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry were one. And it was good’ (p. 120). Recalling the cadences of the opening chapter of Genesis, L’Engle celebrates the couple’s intimacy, a celebration that is all the more noteworthy because the narrative indicates that Oholibama is almost certainly the illegitimate daughter of the nephilim. She is welcomed into Noah’s family despite this lineage, and indeed her dubious heritage is implied to be the source of her gifts as a healer. Through a paradox reminiscent of the theological idea of the felix culpa, or fortunate fall, L’Engle suggests that the relationship between good and evil might be more complex than human knowledge can readily apprehend. Much as Findley valorises acts of creative re-imagination, so too L’Engle makes inventive use of the Bible as literature. Beyond the founding myths of Genesis, the novel invokes a variety of other biblical texts, including the parable of the prodigal son. One of L’Engle’s subplots involves the twins helping to repair a rift between Noah and his father, Lamech, who says upon reconciliation, ‘my son was dead and is alive again, is lost and is found’—almost a direct quotation of Luke 15:32 (‘For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found’) (p. 142).17 This shift from condemnation to celebration is in keeping with the story’s overall emphasis on the power of a love reconceived in ways that surpass tidy economies of rewards and punishments. Moreover, the story’s very title alludes to Song of Songs 8:7 (‘Many waters cannot quench love’), a line of sensual and spiritual poetry that accords with L’Engle’s overall reclamation of romantic love as a vital part of human experience and a pathway to divine presence. This story’s expansive energy is all the more apparent when considered in the context of L’Engle’s Time Quintet. In the previous books (A Wrinkle in Time, The Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet), Sandy and Dennys are the ordinary characters—‘the squares of the family’, as Dennys terms them (p. 202)—who have no part in the otherworldly adventures of their older sister Meg and their younger brother Charles Wallace. Many Waters thus performs a narrative decentring within L’Engle’s own series that accords with what it achieves within a biblical context as well. 1.5 Anne Provoost’s In The Shadow of the Ark: Transgression and Transformation Questions of inclusion and exclusion take centre stage in Anne Provoost’s Die Arkvaarders (In the Shadow of the Ark), first published in 2001, translated into English by John Nieuwenhuizen in 2004, and longlisted in the adult literature category for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2006. Marketed by Kirkus Reviews as a ‘YA/adult crossover’, this book explores sophisticated themes in engaging, accessible ways.18 Unlike the previous two examples, this story is set entirely within the mythic past, without fantastic or anachronistic elements. That said, the novel has substantial temporal bandwidth in terms of its engagement with the biblical account, spanning from the antediluvian period to the cursing of Canaan recounted in Gen 9. Readers experience the action through the firstperson perspective of Re Jana, the lover but not the wife of Ham. The story focuses on her relationship not only with members of Noah’s family, but also with her own, including her father, her adopted younger brother, and her paralysed mother.

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  19 Unlike Many Waters, the story portrays Noah (‘the Builder’) as a deceiver who recruits many people, including Re Jana’s father, to construct the ark but has no regard for their fate. And, unlike Not Wanted on the Voyage, the novel offers no direct representation of divine or angelic beings: the Builder’s god is simply ‘the Unnameable’, inscrutable and inaccessible. Provoost’s critique of patriarchal theology focuses on narrowly predetermined constructions of salvation. According to Ham, deliverance from the flood waters is ‘a matter of belonging to the elect’ (p. 52). While he initially presumes that belonging to this category is synonymous with being righteous, Re Jana challenges him, ‘If you were righteous, you would now be giving up your places. You would be giving them up to the children, the lame, and the feeble-minded! What do they have to atone for?’ (p. 127). Ham can make no response to this challenge, though he does smuggle Re Jana on board the ark. That it is Re Jana who conceives and bears Ham’s child, not his wife Neelata, further complicates questions regarding the identity of those elect or chosen. Taking matters of salvation into his own hands, Re Jana’s father builds his own boat and argues for the virtue of discernment over obedience: ‘Isn’t a new world with people of insight and intelligence to be preferred to a world with only those who are righteous?’ (p. 150). The narrative sides with him: against all odds, he survives, and the story ends as Re Jana turns her back on the ark and, together with her family, travels westward ‘following in [her] father’s footsteps’ (p. 366). Without expressing a clearly defined theological alternative, this trajectory challenges the notion of holiness as a state of being set apart. Re Jana, whose talents include her ability to find water—a vital resource in the antediluvian wilderness—retains a close connection not only with her father but also with the earth and its gifts. Her perception of the wind itself as something that ‘whispered of things that Ham would not tell us’ suggests a more immanent, almost ecological, concept of spirit and divinity, or at least, divination (p. 69). In the Shadow of the Ark further resists patriarchal structures of domination in its representations of sexual desire. Rather than dangerous temptations, Ham’s encounters with Re Jana become productive transgressions that not only help him to reject his father’s concept of blind obedience but also make it possible for his family line to continue. Perhaps the most subversive and surprising erotic relationship is that which develops between Re Jana and Neelata, who start as rivals and end as lovers who together enjoy something more fulfilling than what either of them are able to achieve with Ham. Their coupling while on board the ark is described in vague yet poetic terms, and when they sleep together Re Jana feels the wind and rain become gentle, as if the universe itself favours their union (p. 306). In addition to resisting heteronormative prescriptions, the story calls into question pronouncements of blessings and curses. Amplifying the story of Noah’s drunkenness recounted in Gen 9:20–29, Provoost makes Ham expose his father both physically and morally, remarking that he has turned to drink because he cannot face the consequences of his own actions (p. 362). With a defiance akin to Findley’s Mrs Noyes, Re Jana sees the patriarch’s direction of his curse at the young, innocent, and newly circumcised Canaan as something that might have the unintentional effect of opening up new horizons. She takes the curse for a blessing, insofar as it

20  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry gives her and her family the impetus to leave. During her final exchange with the Builder, she not only performs a powerful act of self-definition but also reclaims her matrilineal inheritance, as she describes herself as speaking and gesturing with the grace and elegance that she imagines her own mother to have had (pp. 363–364). In the Shadow of the Ark concludes with a postscript that takes the form of a genealogy, rewriting the biblical account of Noah’s descendants in Gen 10 to include the larger cast of characters depicted in this novel. Moreover, Provoost closes by underscoring that this story is far from over: ‘The flood did not wipe out evil. To this day, the fight between the Semites and the descendants of Canaan continues’ (p. 368). In an interview with Bill Moyers conducted in 2006, Provoost responded to questions about her book’s ‘message’ by not only affirming the story’s multiple meanings (‘There’s 500 in every page’) but also calling attention to the ongoing significance of this story: ‘we are still fighting for a spot on top of everybody else […] we’re leaving out many people, and we should build a better ark’.19 While she concluded this interview on a rather pessimistic note, remarking that throughout the course of history people continue to make the same mistakes, her novel holds out an element of hopefulness in its affirmation of the power of individual choices. Provoost’s challenge to religious exclusivism is such that her narrative does not ultimately reject even the Builder himself. In her last glance at the Builder, Re Jana acknowledges the prospect that he might come to his own ethical epiphany: ‘Just possibly, he understood what was happening, and how people escape from under a curse through small actions’ (p. 364). Such understanding would be an important step towards remedying the domination and exclusion that this novel exposes. 1.6 Sarah Blake’s Naamah: Sex and the Sacred In a debut novel that received a National Jewish Book Award for 2019, Sarah Blake re-imagines the biblical flood story through the eyes of Noah’s wife, Naamah. Meaning ‘lovely’ or ‘beautiful’, this name is assigned to Noah’s wife in some rabbinic sources, which alternately represent her as a pious wife or as a seductress, though later Protestant traditions have depicted Naamah as the idolatrous wife of Ham and used this characterisation to bolster religious and racial prejudices.20 Blake herself identified this name as chosen from the Book of Jubilees, a Jewish apocryphal text.21 As a creative response to Genesis, Naamah begins in media res, during the time on board the ark, and employs the present tense to heighten the sense of immediacy. Naamah remains the centre of consciousness throughout this third-person account, populated not only by the eight people on board the ark but also by a variety of angelic and animal creatures, who are depicted through a form of magical realism that borders on surrealism. The novel concentrates on the main character’s rich interior life: Naamah floats between waking and sleeping as she wrestles with her concerns about those who perished in the flood and questions the power, goodness, and presence of God. Her vivid dreamscapes include conversations with the matriarch Sarai (later called Sarah), wife of Abram (Abraham), who not only augments the backstories of other biblical accounts—such as when

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  21 Abraham lied about his marriage to save his life in Gen 20—but also assures Naamah of her life-giving role in her own story (pp. 115–117, 177–179). This delightfully anachronistic and self-reflexive turn, which includes a scene in which Sarai and Naamah visit a twenty-first century home and comment on a Noah’s ark toy set, effectively underscores Blake’s own work of feminist exegesis. Punctuated as it is by frequent and disorienting dream sequences, the novel’s plot resists summary, though a reviewer for The Christian Century aptly remarked that, in casual conversations with friends, she often began by introducing it this way: ‘It’s a novel about Noah’s wife. She has sex with an angel’.22 Indeed, Naamah has sex not only with an angel but also with a host of other characters, both male and female. What was more euphemistic in Provoost’s retelling is here rendered in graphic, explicit detail, so much so that another reader for the same magazine described this novel as ‘excessive’ and even ‘pornographic’.23 Defending her novel’s unapologetic eroticism, Blake affirmed in an interview for the Jewish Women’s Archive, ‘I think our physical experience is as valid and important as our thoughts and feelings’.24 Broadly speaking, this point is in keeping with the focus on embodiment throughout much feminist and queer theology, as in the respective work of Sallie McFague, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Marcella Althaus-Reid.25 Naamah’s memories of antediluvian life include her time with a woman named Bethel (‘House of God’), and this naming suggests that their physical intimacy brings Naamah into the dwelling place of the divine (pp. 22, 107). Naamah is similarly explicit in its engagement with the theological issues raised by the biblical flood account. As she grapples with the problem of divine regret, Naamah yells her questions about judgement and punishment at the sky, only to be met with silence (p. 49). Much later, after the flood waters recede, she finally hears the voice of God, who comes to her in the disconcerting form of a vulture, but their baffling exchanges raise more questions than they solve (p. 263). Rather than provide answers, the narrative simply affirms the vitality and necessity of mystery. Like Findley, Blake upholds imagination as a pathway to healing and to God, whether in the form of Naamah’s vivid visions or in the paintings that her daughterin-law Neela (the wife of Ham) smuggles on board the ark out of her keen sense that the making of art will be necessary for the recreation of the world (pp. 97–98). Although Naamah is arguably the most subversive of the four contemporary retellings discussed in this chapter, the novel remains surprisingly hopeful. Contrary to the women depicted in the books by Findley, L’Engle, and Provoost, Naamah expresses no sense of living in an oppressive, patriarchal society; instead, she experiences the freedom to do as she pleases. The four married couples on board the ark (Noah and Naamah, Japheth and Adata, Ham and Neela, and Shem and Sadie) are not neat pairings—Naamah and Adata sleep together, and Adata reveals that she, like Naamah, left a lover behind in the flood (p. 66)—but neither are they the embattled, divided family of Not Wanted on the Voyage. On board the ark, Naamah and Noah enjoy a vividly detailed erotic scene that underscores the depth of intimacy and tenderness that they continue to share (p. 195). Even though Noah’s relationship with God, as well as his process of dealing with guilt and regret about those left behind, differs from Naamah’s, their differences do not ultimately

22  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry put them at odds. When given the option to forget her partners and sons and go with the angel, Naamah refuses and instead chooses her love for her family, complicated though it may be (p. 104). This capacious love attains a kind of redemptive power after the ark comes to rest in the new world; the story’s final chapters make no reference whatsoever to the drunkenness of Noah or the cursing of Canaan but instead bring the family together as they care for and begin to repopulate the earth. The novel closes with a scene of renewal, as Naamah determines, ‘If she is the bearer of this new world, then let everything be touched by her hand’ (p. 296). When asked by interviewer Rebecca Lang about the one thing she hopes that readers will take away from this novel, the author responded simply, ‘Joy’—an emotion that is the antithesis of fear and judgement.26 1.7 Conclusion: Reception Exegesis Taken together, the narrative reversals effected by Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, L’Engle’s Many Waters, Provoost’s In the Shadow of the Ark, and Blake’s Naamah perform the vital work of symbolic renovation. Strategically centring the perspectives of those on the sidelines in the biblical account, they rewrite this story in the light of issues raised by twentieth and twenty-first century feminist and queer communities. Their novelistic interpretations approach old texts with new eyes, at once exposing the worst of the patriarchal constructions within Genesis and bringing forward the best of the flood narrative’s potentials. On the one hand, they show that the biblical account can all too easily devolve into a story of wrath, condemnation, and exclusion—an angry God wipes out the entire world, making exception of only one righteous man and his family. On the other hand, their narrative retellings shift the centre of gravity from judgement to mercy, as they transform what might otherwise be an apocalyptic fantasy into a story about metamorphosis and change. Questioning reductive notions about purity, obedience, and retribution, these novels suggest that the dangers of religious exclusivism might be overcome through radical acts of hospitality. Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage concludes with its lower-deck misfits choosing to band together and vowing to work against destructive forces. As Provoost tells the story, acts of resistance can lead to unexpected connections, as when the would-be rivals Re Jana and Neelata become lovers. Blake’s Naamah takes this point further by suggesting that the ability to conceive of such new, hopeful possibilities issues from the generative power of the female body. Her novel’s overt celebration of sexual experiences distinguishes it as the most provocative of these four retellings; even so, Blake’s emphasis on embodiment has some intriguing affinities with the incarnational energy of L’Engle’s more conservative yet still innovative re-interpretation of the flood narrative as a story of sensual and spiritual love, vis-à-vis the Song of Songs. In various ways and to varying degrees, these four postmodern novels critique abstract notions about transcendence as they explore and exalt the messy realities of the flesh—including the primal experiences of desiring, hungering, copulating, and excreting. Even as they expose the violence of patriarchal culture and its abuse of religious discourse, they also invite readers into the creative, ongoing work of imagining the promise

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  23 of a new world where it can truly be said that such acts of destruction will happen never again. Notes 1 Rychter, ‘Where the Novel Meets the Bible’, p. 183. 2 Shapiro and Moore, ‘Not Your Grandmother’s Bible’, pp. 1–17. 3 Wright, Genesis of Fiction, p. 17. 4 Brueggemann and Linafelt, Introduction, pp. 11, 52. 5 Stahlberg, ‘Refuse’, p. 24. 6 Tiemeyer, ‘Retelling’, pp. 219–239; Tumanov, ‘All Bad’, pp. 84–97. 7 Ostriker, Feminist Revision, p. 57. 8 Ostriker, Feminist Revision, p. 31. 9 For a useful overview of key developments within the field of queer theology and a thoughtful reflection on this approach’s ‘methodological commitment to antinormativity in reading practices’, see Tonstad, ‘Ambivalent Loves’, pp. 472–474. 10 Foley, ‘Noah’s Wife’s Rebellion’, p. 187. 11 Nicholson, ‘God’, pp. 87–88. 12 See, for example, Findley, Not Wanted, pp. 27–29. 13 W. J. Keith similarly sees Findley in the tradition of William Blake and George Gordon Byron (pp. 123–134). 14 Whiting, ‘Eternal Father’, Hymnary​.org​. 15 Quoted in Tiemeyer, ‘Retelling’, p. 22. 16 Oziewicz, ‘The Time Quartet’, pp. 211–212. 17 All biblical quotations come from the Authorized King James version. 18 Unsigned Review, Kirkus Reviews, n.p. 19 Provoost, quoted in Moyers, ‘Interview’, n.p. 20 Schipper, ‘Religion’, pp. 387–388. Schipper notes that these rabbinic sources include Bereishit Rabbah 23, as well as a commentary attributed to Pseudo-Rashi; a more sinister reading of Naamah as seductress and mother of demons arises from the Zohar Hadash (see also Kadari, ‘Naamah’, n.p.). Protestant sources that identify Naamah as Ham’s wife and blame her for idolatry began with Anglican bishop Richard Cumberland’s antiCatholic polemic Sanchoniatho’s Phoenician History, Translated from the Fifth Book of Eusebius De Praeparatione Evangelica, published in 1720. This theory became more popularly accepted by the mid-nineteenth century, when it was used in proslavery discourse such as John Fletcher’s 1852 Studies on Slavery (Schipper, ‘Religion’, p. 392). 21 Burack, ‘Author Sarah Blake’, n.p. 22 Peterson, ‘Review’, p. 38. 23 McFadden, ‘Excessive’, p. 6. 24 Quoted in Lang, ‘Interview’, n.p. 25 See, for instance, McFague, The Body of God, pp. 13–25; Ruether, ‘Ecofeminism’, pp. 51–62; and Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, pp. 33–38. 26 Blake, quoted in Lang, ‘Interview’, n.p.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2009. Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. London: Picador, 1990 (1989). Blake, Sarah. Naamah. New York, NY: Riverside Books, 2019. Findley, Timothy. Not Wanted on the Voyage. Penguin Canada, 1984.

24  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Fredriksson, Marianne. Syndafloden. Stockholm: Walhström & Widstrand, 1993. L’Engle, Madeleine. Many Waters. New York, NY: Dell Publishing, 1986. McCaughrean, Geraldine. Not the End of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Provoost, Anne. In the Shadow of the Ark. Translated by John Nieuwenhuizen. New York, NY: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2004. Roberts, Michèle. The Book of Mrs Noah. London: Minerva, 1993 (1987). Rosoff, Meg. There is No Dog. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2012 (2011). Schnurre, Wolfdietrich. Der wahre Noah. Zürich: Arche, 1974. Self, Will. The Book of Dave. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2006. Secondary Sources Althaus-Reid, Marcella. The Queer God. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. Brueggemann, Walter, and Tod Linafelt. Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination. 2nd edition. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 2012. Burack, Emily. ‘Author Sarah Blake Writes the Backstory of the Biblical Naamah, aka Noah’s Wife’. The Times of Israel, April 13, 2019. Foley, Michael. ‘Noah’s Wife’s Rebellion: Timothy Findley’s Use of the Mystery Plays of Noah in Not Wanted on the Voyage’. Essays on Canadian Writing 44 (1991), pp. 175–183. Kadari, Tamar. ‘Naamah: Midrash and Aggadah’. Jewish Women’s Archive, December 31, 1999. Keith. W. J. ‘Apocalyptic Imaginations: Notes on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 35 (1987), pp. 123–134. Lang, Rebecca. ‘Interview with Sarah Blake, Author of Naamah’. Jewish Women’s Archive. April 13, 2020. Loughlin, Gerard (ed). Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. McFadden, Cathie. ‘Excessive’. Christian Century, July 3, 2019, p. 6. McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. Moyers, Bill. ‘Interview with Anne Provoost’. Faith and Reason, July 14, 2006. Nicholson, Mervyn. ‘God, Noah, Lord Byron—and Timothy Findley.’ ARIEL 23.2 (1992), pp. 87–107. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Feminist Revision and the Bible. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Oziewicz, Marek. ‘The Time Quartet as Madeleine L’Engle’s Theology’. JFA 17.3 (2006), pp. 211–220. Peterson, Amy. ‘Review of Naamah: A Novel. By Sarah Blake’. Christian Century, May 22, 2019, pp. 38–39. ‘Review of In the Shadow of the Ark. By Anne Provoost’. Kirkus Reviews, May 20, 2010. Ruether, Rosemary. ‘Ecofeminism and Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth’. Feminist Theology 3.9 (1995), pp. 51–62. Rychter, Ewa. ‘When the Novel Meets the Bible: The Flood in Four Contemporary British Novels’. Anglophonia 33 (2013), pp. 183–195. Schipper, Jeremy. ‘Religion, Race, and the Wife of Ham’. The Journal of Religion 100.3 (July 2020), pp. 386–401. Shapiro, Marianna Ruah-Midbar, and Lila Moore. ‘“Not Your Grandmother’s Bible”—A Comparative Study of the Biblical Deluge Myth in Film’. Religions 10 (2019), pp. 1–17.

The Flood in Feminist and Queer Perspectives  25 Stahlberg, Lesleigh Cushing. ‘Refuse, Realism, Retelling: Literal and Literary Reconstructions of Noah’s Ark’. In Beth Hawkins Benedix (ed.), Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2009, pp. 23–39. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman’s Bible. 1895–1898. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia. ‘Retelling Noah and the Flood: A Fictional Encounter with Genesis 6–9’. Relegere 6.2 (2016), pp. 219–239. https://doi​.org​/10​.11157​/rsrr6​-2​-706 Tonstad, Linn Marie. ‘Ambivalent Loves: Christian Theologies, Queer Theologies’. Literature and Theology 31.4 (December 2017), pp. 474–489. Tumanov, Vladimir. ‘All Bad: The Biblical Flood Revisited in Modern Fiction’. Arcadia 42.1 (August 2008), pp. 84–97. Whiting, William. ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’. 1860. Hymnary​.org​. Wright, Terry R. The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

2

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales Reading the Sodom Narrative in Genesis with Its Retelling Stories Soo Kim Sweeney

2.1 Intrigued by the Narrator’s Control of the Genesis Sodom My research focuses on the Sodom narrative in Genesis 13–19 (Genesis Sodom hereafter). I am particularly interested in the omniscient narrator’s control of the story, often pausing, skipping, or jumping around without explanation. As a result, the Genesis Sodom text lacks sufficient details about the characters’ motivations behind their choices. My goal is to explore the retellings of this narrative and shed light on the characters’ underlying motivations. Why did Abraham stop pleading for Sodom after bringing down the number to ten righteous people? Why was Lot wandering near the city gate that evening and urging the two divine messengers to stay at his house? Why did Lot’s wife look back despite the solemn prohibition? Why did the messengers leave without providing any further direction or showing concern for Lot’s family, who barely survived? Genesis Sodom may seem to provide enough information, but it only offers a little. Although it is common in biblical narratives, the narrator’s reserved approach towards critical moments in this story of life and death, blessing and curse, can be deemed excessively ambitious. The author of Genesis Sodom appears to be reluctant to explore certain aspects of the story. However, this gap provides an opportunity to examine how the outside world reacts to the unanswered questions in the text. It is worth noting that numerous fascinating pieces of literature have transformed this story.1 Reading the retold stories (henceforth retellings) allows us to re-examine our initial interpretation of the biblical text. Upon my initial reading of the Genesis Sodom, I noticed that the characters did not seem to question the concept of theodicy enough. Even Abraham, in his plea bargaining, keeps his line in challenging God’s plan against Sodom. However, after reading other retellings of Genesis Sodom, I realized that a person’s silence might not always indicate compliance. Instead, the characters’ silences may often be the result of the Genesis narrator’s desire to have complete control over all the characters, especially regarding the theodicy. Retellings of the stories suggest that, at times, the characters express subtle signs of deviating from the narrator’s intended direction. Only a few skilled retelling authors capture those fleeting moments. After further analysis, I concluded that Genesis Sodom refrains from portraying any characters who confront God’s judgement of Sodom. DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-3

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  27 Allow me to explain this restraining strategy using Han Fei-Zi’s analogy. Han Fei-Zi [韓非子], a political philosopher from the State of Han in ancient China (ca. 280–233 bce), warned of the risk of fatal encounters by sharing the story of the dragon’s inverted scales: When the dragon is tame, you can play with him and ride on his back. However, beneath his throat are inverted scales (逆鱗), one foot in diameter. He will be furious and kill you if you dare to touch it. The ruler also has inverted scales. If you can avoid touching those, you will be successful on your way to mastering the art of persuasion.2 The metaphor ‘dragon’s inverted scales’ symbolizes the difficulty of convincing a person in authority to consider sensitive matters. Such attempts can put the life of the person with less power at risk. Despite the potential danger, some individuals still cross the line and touch the inverted scale. Whether they seek personal revenge or social justice, fatal confrontations have been a prominent theme in literature since ancient times. In my reasoning, the symbolic meaning of the dragon’s inverted scales in Han’s original tale can go beyond the idea of an authoritative figure’s sole ownership. Instead, it applies to all characters facing intensified reactions, even if it means sacrificing their lives. This means that even underdogs have those inverted scales, which can trigger fierce and unrelenting resistance when provoked. When selecting three retellings of Genesis, I considered whether the text addressed the fatal encounter experienced by various characters. In my assessment, I envision that each of the three authors begins their retellings by thoroughly examining the potential pitfalls in Genesis Sodom and allowing their characters to navigate through them. I shall begin with Bertolt Brecht’s German parable play, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan [The Good Person of Szechwan] (‘Szechwan Sodom’ hereafter). Brecht wrote this play during his exilic period (1938–1941) from the Nazis while residing in Finland. The play was first performed in Zürich in 1943.3 In this epic drama, Brecht introduces the counterpart deities of Yhwh in Genesis Sodom, who visit the earth to examine if the created world can continue to exist. Yhwh’s purpose in sending the two messengers in Genesis Sodom is the opposite, as he investigates if a specific city should be destroyed. In contrast to Yhwh’s messengers, who initially refuse Lot’s offer to stay at his house, the three divine figures eagerly search for someone to welcome them, believing that hospitality would indicate the maintenance of the world. Unfortunately, Shen-Te, a prostitute, is the only one who offers her tiny room to the gods. They give her substantial compensation for the lodging and encourage her to survive and do charitable deeds. As the story progresses, the seemingly straightforward command to be good and survive proves impossible, at least in a city like Szechwan. Shen-Te’s struggles in caring for poor neighbours, her lover, and her unborn child are intensified amidst several bankruptcy crises. Facing the harsh reality of the business world, Shen-Te devises a new persona named Shui-Ta. This new character is created to manage her business whenever the need arises. Brecht makes it clear from the outset that

28  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry these characters are not undergoing any unconscious psychological transformation. To put it differently, Shen-Te consciously adopts the persona of her heartless cousin Shui-Ta to survive. This is necessary to fulfil both sides of the divine mandate, namely, to survive and to do good deeds, in this way highlighting the absurdity of divine order and the world. It turns out that Shen-Te/Shui-Ta’s strategy of alternating their public appearances is effective. However, it is regrettable that Shen-Te’s impoverished neighbours miss her greatly, as the working conditions have significantly deteriorated under Shui-Ta’s management. They eventually accuse Shui-Ta of having murdered Shen-Te. As a result, Shui-Ta/Shen-Te appears before the courts. Not surprisingly, Brecht makes the gods, who irresponsibly threw out the impossible order and fled, play the judges. The ironical contrast with Genesis Sodom becomes maximized when the challenged deities, Erleuchtete (Enlightened), in Szechwan Sodom (p. 105), run away to ‘a pink cloud’ (eine rosa Wolke)4 instead of killing those who dare to touch their inverted scales.5 Seungwoo Lee’s Korean short story, ‘소돔의 하룻밤 [Sodom’s One Night]’ (‘One Night Sodom’ hereafter) is my second selection. It is the first story of five stories that retell the Abraham narrative in 사랑이 한 일 [What Love Has Done] (2020).6 Lee explores the story of Genesis Sodom in depth, shedding light on Lot’s behaviour and reasoning. ‘One Night Sodom’ delves into the circumstances surrounding Lot’s decision to wait for the divine messengers at the gate, his insistence on hosting them for the night, the underlying causes of the Sodomites’ hostility towards Lot, and his unexpected choice to offer his daughters as protection for his guests. Lee’s retelling of the story has a tone of ironic sorrow. It is revealed that Lot is unaware of the danger when he welcomes the disguised strangers into his home. Despite his insistence on staying overnight in his supposedly safe house to shield them from the dangerous city, it is the messengers who safeguard him. Lot enjoys the lively atmosphere of Sodom, but unfortunately, the locals do not like him. The night-time incident further highlights that despite residing there for over a decade, the native Sodomites still consider Lot to be an outsider. Lee employs a unique storytelling technique by dividing Genesis 19 into six segments and repeating each piece three times, resulting in a spiral movement in the narrative. The first movement introduces the basic plot, while the second delves into more detailed conversations and narration. The third movement explores waves of philosophical, social, and theological meanings. Accordingly, readers may experience something similar to listening to Maurice Ravel’s classic piece of music Bolero: the cumulative existential questions finally challenge our tendency to make inattentive scapegoats. Lee’s ‘One Night Sodom’ highlights persistent logical questioning, as it portrays the experience of an individual who is powerless and subjected to irrational xenophobic hatred from a dominant group. As we delve into the author’s art of retelling, we can understand Lot as a complex individual or even a ‘problematic’ character,7 who struggled to maintain his dignity in the chaotic world. My third selection takes us to a retelling of the story of Lot’s wife: Leopoldo Lugones’ Spanish short story ‘La Estatua de Sal [The Pillar of Salt]’ (‘Salt Sodom’ hereafter) in Las fuerzas extrañas (1906).8 According to the omniscient

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  29 narrator, Brother Porphyrius recounts the story of the unfortunate death of his fellow Armenian monk named Sosistrato. In Lugones’ brilliant imagination, Lot’s wife turns out alive, confined in the salt pillar for thousands of years. Persuaded by the visitor’s urge to rescue her from the pillar, this lifelong pious monk, Sosistrato, finally gears up to see the pillar and releases her from it. However, tragedy ensues when he persistently asks what she saw when she looked back while fleeing. Despite her warning, Sosistrato keeps asking and dies when he hears her story. As I interpret it, the wife’s decision to turn away and the monk’s tenacious questioning represent the human attempt to grapple with the complexities of theodicy, much like touching the dragon’s inverted scales. Reading Genesis Sodom with the three selected retellings will lead us to discover that Lot and his family are not merely foil characters of Abraham and his family. The benefit also provides an opportunity to depict three-dimensional characters in a more complex light. E. M. Foster observes that a single characteristic defines flat characters, whereas round characters possess conflicting thoughts and emotions and evolve alongside the plot development.9 The three retelling stories in this article powerfully illustrate the evolution of Genesis Sodom’s formerly flat characters, underscoring the crucial concepts of hospitality and divine justice. Encountering the inverted scale is a fascinating and fearful moment; touching it is more so. If we do not touch it, we can survive and be safe, as if Abraham in Genesis Sodom stops his plea for Sodom at the ten righteous people. However, we may beat the bushes repeatedly without facing ourselves, our suffering neighbours, and our tantalizing deity. With the three different retelling stories in our contemporary era, we may experience diverse interpretive communities’ interactions with the long-standing human heritage, the Bible. 2.2 Meet the Characters To present my thesis effectively in this limited space, I have chosen to analyze a select group of characters. These characters, including Abraham, the Sodomites, the Szechwanians, Lot’s wife, Sosistrato, Lot, and Shen-Te/Sui-Ta, offer a diverse range of perspectives, from those residing in secure zones to those advancing to the inverted-scale zone. Abraham and the Szechwanians are examples of characters in the safe zone who exhibit their straightforward personalities and are far from the dragon’s inverted scales. They maintain their current statuses by cutting off any potential growth of the inverted scales within them. While Abraham stays in the safe zone by seeking comfort in God, the Szechwanians keep their lifestyle by ignoring divine messages. Meanwhile, the second group of characters consists of those who change their beliefs out of frustration and face lethal consequences. They either die or end up living a meaningless life. Examples of such characters include the drunken Lot in a cave, Lot’s wife who turns into a salt pillar, and Sosistrato who relentlessly questions Lot’s wife. Finally, the characters in the liminal zone are still grappling with their situation. Despite many challenging problems, they remain hopeful for justice and extend hospitality without expecting

30  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry anything in return. At the same time, they also tend to make compromises during critical moments in life. This is evident from Lot in Sodom and Shen-Te/Shui-Ta in Szechwan. 2.2.1 Abraham

The Genesis 19 Sodom narrative differs from the Genesis 18 Abraham story in the narrator’s approach.10 Unlike the former, the latter often delves into the characters’ inner thoughts.11 For example, readers are privy to Sarah’s inner musings when she overhears news of her future pregnancy. Additionally, the narrator highlights God’s reasoning in disclosing the plan to destroy Sodom. The narrator helps readers grasp the big picture by actively revealing the characters’ motivations. Thus, although Genesis 18 concludes with Abraham’s persistent appeals concerning Sodom’s destruction, the overall tone of the divine visit remains optimistic and reassuring towards Abraham’s household.12 Interestingly, the initial proclamation of Sodom’s impending destruction accentuates the safety of Abraham’s residence, Beersheba. Simply put, the looming destruction of Sodom highlights the thankful promise of a son to Abraham and the exclusion of Lot’s family in this covenantal blessing.13 The narrator attributes Lot’s salvation to Abraham (Gen 19:29), but I question the true intention behind Abraham’s incomplete plea. Even in this bargain, Abraham refrains from putting his hand in the dragon’s (Yhwh’s) inverted scale zone. In Lukács’s perspective, Abraham would be the character who lived in a blessed era when the starry sky served as a guide to all appropriate paths.14 Abraham’s incognito hospitality is well rewarded, as Heb 13:1–2 confirms.15 Yhwh does not conceal anything from Abraham; he is destined to become a great nation, and his offspring will uphold righteousness and justice for God (Gen 18:17–19). Abraham fulfils God’s expectations by abstaining from the cursed city and never setting foot in Sodom, from the battle in Genesis 14 to the morning after the city’s destruction in Genesis 19. However, the narrator’s contrasting approach to narrating Genesis 18 and 19 has sparked important theodicy issues. To assess Lot and his family, we must consider John Rawls’ principles of justice, which include equality, fairness, and accessibility.16 Does the text offer enough details to make a judgement? Or are we simply relying on the narrator’s interpretation without question? Are we content with Yhwh’s treatment of Lot’s family? 2.2.2 Szechwanians (and Sodomites)

Genesis Sodom portrays the Sodomites as one collective entity that remains unchanged in any situation. ‘One Night Sodom’ describes them as machines driven by their desires (pp. 16–18). When divine messengers cause the Sodomites to become blind and unable to find the gate, their willingness to violate Lot explodes into a violation against themselves, blurring the lines between insiders and outsiders (p. 36). The end of the Sodomites’ infringement recalls René Girard’s theory

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  31 of scapegoat-making societies, where intense rivalry and desire for mimetic behaviour can lead to self-destructive crises.17 As I examined Szechwan Sodom, it became apparent that the Sodomites, initially depicted as one-dimensional characters, gain more depth and variety through the portrayal of the Szechwanians’ social and economic statuses. Interestingly, unlike the Sodomites, who are cursed to die, the Szechwanians maintain their way of life even after the deities’ visit. Brecht’s portrayal of Szechwan presents a tumultuous and post-apocalyptic landscape,18 yet the resilient Szechwanians have withstood divine trials. For them, the Shen-Te/Shui-Ta case may serve as an unwelcome reminder of the hardships the oppressed face. A frightening realization is that the dominance of Szechwanians could perpetuate the cycle without any intervention.19 Brecht likely faced difficulties concluding his play due to the stubbornness of the dominant class in his time but ultimately urged his audience to initiate transformative change.20 But can one person make a difference? Let’s explore the actions of those who dared to defy convention and contemplate whether they left an enduring mark on the world. 2.2.3 Lot’s Wife

In Protestant sermons, Lot’s wife is often compared to Rebecca as an example of different responses to a call to leave one’s old life behind. Rebecca is seen as the ideal resolution, swiftly cutting off her old sinful life upon receiving the good news.21 In contrast, Lot’s wife is portrayed as having abandoned the divine grace in a moment of almost being rescued and perishing due to her uncontrolled nostalgia for the world. This makes her an eternal warning to all, with the biblical passage ‘Remember Lot’s wife’ (Luke 17:32) serving as a reminder not to repeat her mistake.22 However, it is essential to consider whether the text offers Lot’s wife’s perspective on the tragic events. We should also reflect on the fates of those who cried out to God. These questions continue to trouble readers and prompt them to explore different ways of remembering Lot’s wife. For instance, some view her decision to look back as an act of motherly love for those she left behind.23 Midrashic traditions also paint her positively, calling her Edith (witness).24 Steven Katz even celebrates her defiance of prohibition and her courage to bear witness.25 Some writers have reimagined Lot’s wife as a heroic figure who confronts the past and present amidst the wreckage of time, drawing inspiration from the horrors of the Shoah.26 Elie Wiesel’s writings provide a prime example of this transformative approach. When I view her story from Wiesel’s perspective, I perceive Lot’s wife as a visionary figure. I compare her impulse to look back with the anguish of a woman (Mrs Schächter) on the train to Auschwitz in Wiesel’s autobiography Night.27 As the woman foretold the fate of those condemned to the unquenchable flames in Auschwitz camp, and Lot’s wife envisioned the sulphuric fire falling upon the innocent behind her,28 both figures can be considered prophetic visionaries. If Lot’s wife heard a voice behind her, causing her to turn back, what kind of voice would it be? The text does not indicate her motive or what she saw, so any

32  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry discussions would be based on assumptions made by the readers. The voice must have been powerful enough to prevent her from fleeing, as she knew that following it would mean touching the dragon’s inverted scale and heading towards certain death.29 She might wish to validate the destruction, indicating that the messengers could not locate ten righteous people in the city. She might believe this, but she also longs to witness the rescue of innocent people who lack power, just like her family, so that she can reluctantly accept the divine verdict.30 The question remains: what awaits her? This is my imagination, along with Wiesel’s insights. Although uncertain of what lay ahead, Lot’s wife feels a deep sense of worry. She cannot bear the thought of seeing those who have cried out against their oppressors suffer the same fate as them. Even though their pleas and call for divine intervention have reached the heavens, the oppressed remain unprotected. The possibility of such devastation is enough to crush anyone’s spirit. But we will never truly know the extent of the destruction that occurred upon Sodom. Genesis Sodom does not provide a detailed account; it is left to the reader to ponder about what happened. One of the readers of Genesis Sodom, Lugones in Salt Sodom, introduces Lot’s wife in her liminal status, confined to living in the pillar at the city’s threshold. Facing forward to flee the cursed city of Sodom, but with her head turned back to witness its destruction, she endures eternal liminality even in Genesis Sodom. Like Genesis Sodom, Salt Sodom does not reveal what she sees. However, the latter’s setting to let her be alive makes the reader’s imaginative hypothesis more plausible that her liminality must be cruel because she ‘endures’ all agonies over a more profound and extended period. Emmanuel Levinas expresses that it is ‘as though death were never dead enough’ or ‘the eternal duration of interval—the meanwhile’.31 Over the years, she has seen all the tragedy and pain that has befallen the city. Standing between Sodom and Beersheva, she must have heard Isaac and Sarah’s laughing voices, Hagar and Ishmael’s crying voices, and, above all, her daughters’ wailing voices when they gave birth to their sons through her husband, Lot. Did Lot’s family play a part in Sodom’s wrongdoing, or did they deserve God’s blessing for showing hospitality through Lot? These might be the questions that the old monk in Salt Sodom likely grappled with for many years. 2.2.4 Sosistrato

Salt Sodom begins with a portrayal of a long-abandoned monastery (Una soledad infinita, p. 147) near the Dead Sea. The monks residing there firmly believe that their unwavering devotion through fasting and prayers is the path to obtaining God’s compassion in a world that has undergone an apocalypse (pp. 147–148). This seemingly simple short story presents two challenges to our understanding: the unrealistic timeline and the author’s inconsistent portrayal of the characters. The storyteller implies that the monk has existed for thousands of years, traversing from the pre-Sodom destruction period to the post-Christ era. This forces readers to give up the idea of a realistic timeline and focus on the story’s message instead. According to the storyline, Sosistrato prayed for the city of Sodom and knew Lot’s

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  33 wife (pp. 148–149). After Sodom’s destruction, he devotes himself to piety in a monastery and seemingly forgets about Sodom. Sosistrato’s perspective changes when a pilgrim guest delivers shocking news about Lot’s wife being confined in a salt pillar. The pilgrim urges him to rescue the woman, reminding him of Christ’s mission to save sinners. Sosistrato is moved by the fact that the woman is still mourning, and her cries can be heard on the shore whenever the wind blows (pp. 149–150). The narrator’s ambiguous attitude towards Sosistrato presents a second challenge. Although the narrator is eager to introduce Sosistrato’s pious motivation to save a confined woman, his attitude towards the monk remains controversial. Even using the explicit Aside form32 to tell the secret only to the narratee, this homodiegetic narrator informs us that the visitor is a disguised Satan who comes to deceive the monk (y no necesito deciros que, á pesar de sus buenas apariencias, aquel fingido peregrine era Satanás en persona, p. 150). However, he also states that an angel appears in Sosistrato’s dream to urge him to save the woman. This confusion is further exacerbated because the narrator does not give any further attention to the angel’s identity, which implies that the messenger is from God (p. 150). Additionally, there are indications that Sosistrato’s life is wasted in vain. When Sosistrato departs on his journey, the narrator comments that the monk is senseless and motivated by criminal madness and infernal temptation (p. 151). The author’s decision to include conflicting statements may need to be clarified. Still, it could be a deliberate choice to avoid criticism from the reader or to tackle a complex topic like theodicy in Sodom. Sosistrato’s heart is deeply moved by the thought of seeing Lot’s wife alive after a thousand years of the city’s destruction. It raises profound questions worth pondering. His long-buried inquiries resurface and overwhelm his mind like a tidal wave (p. 151). Despite Lot’s wife’s warning to stop asking, Sosistrato eventually learns what she has seen in the destroyed city. However, the shocking news is only revealed to readers in the form of its aftermath, the death of the listener, Sosistrato. Here is the English translation of the final conversation between the wife and the monk. ‘Woman, tell me what you saw when your face turned to look.’ A voice knotted in anguish responded: ‘Oh, no … For the sake of Elohim, do not ask me that!’ ‘Tell me what you saw!’ ‘No … no … It would mean the abyss!’ ‘I want the abyss.’ ‘It is death…’33 With vivid imagery, Lugones may entice readers to become intrigued by this perilous curiosity. Alternatively, he may persuade readers by suggesting that the entire event serves as the ultimate test for Sosistrato to determine the purity of his soul. But I have compassion for the monk because, in my reading, his soul is pure enough to touch his deeply hidden inverted scales. As the wife’s answer remains shrouded in mystery, we can and should use our imagination to envision its content. He may have experienced his own sense of dread before touching God’s inverted scale and succumbing to the shock. Sosistrato can no longer pass this grave encounter this time and chooses to pay with his life.

34  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 2.2.5 Lot

In Genesis Sodom, Lot and his children are portrayed in contrast to Abraham and his children. Initially, Lot was a potential successor to childless Abraham until they separated in chapter 13. However, in Genesis 19, the narrator depicts Lot as the drunken ancestor of the Ammonites and Moabites due to his incestuous relationship with his daughters.34 Despite his attempts to practice hospitality to strangers and discourage the evil practices of the Sodomites, Lot ends up intoxicated in a cave. Lee’s ‘One Night Sodom’ explores this complex character.35 ‘One Night Sodom’ starts by explaining the reason behind Lot’s presence at the gate of Sodom. According to the narrator, Lot usually goes to the town entrance in the evening to protect any strangers that may arrive and keep them safe from the dangers of the city where he lives (p. 11).36 Robert Leteller highlights that hospitality to a stranger was considered a significant social value and even a sacred duty in ancient nomadic societies.37 Ironically, however, the problem lies in Lot’s misunderstanding that his house is safe. The ‘One Night Sodom’ narrator expresses this irony as Lot has metaphorically lived on the road, not in the house, for over twenty years because the Sodomites have not accepted him as an equal citizen. As far as he lives on the road as a nomad, his arrival at home is forever postponed, and his life in Sodom is marked to be forever temporary (pp. 27–28). Lot, ‘‎the one who came to sojourn (hāʾeḥād̲ bāʾ-lāg̲ûr)’ in Gen 19:9, found himself in a demanding situation because he is aware of the Sodomites’ evil deeds but has an impossible dream to change them. Lot wants to keep his integrity in the deeply corrupted city.38 Meanwhile, Lot in a cave (məʿārāh) displays a different picture. The term məʿārāh is typically used to describe a burial site, but in this case, it became the dwelling place for Lot and his daughters.39 The cave’s spatial dimension can serve as a metaphor for their post-Sodom life, as they essentially live in a realm of death. In the cave where he settles,40 Lot experiences a final irony as the ‘problematic character’. He had a keen sense of morality in the immoral city of Sodom, ultimately leading to the Sodomites despising him and forcing him to live as an outsider. But he abandons his sensitive consciousness, ironically, after those abusing Sodomites disappear in the fire. It’s hard to fathom the depth of despair that Lot must feel. As we previously discussed about Lot’s wife, the command not to turn back while fleeing may be a harsh demand for Lot to follow, leaving him unaware of his wife’s fate. Genesis Sodom reports that Lot is rescued on behalf of Abraham, but one may question if such a meaningless survival is truly a blessing. Looking at it from an existentialistic point of view, Lot finds himself in a world of abandonment with no guiding star to lead him to the next chapter of his life.41 The actions of the divine messengers towards Lot’s family raise more questions for us to consider. In Genesis 18, Yhwh intends to send two messengers to Sodom to determine if the city’s outcry against the Sodomites is warranted (18:20–21).42 Abraham’s negotiation establishes a more generous standard—a minimum of ten righteous individuals—necessary for judgement (18:23–32). The city’s fate now lies in the hands of its residents, as God promised to spare it for the sake of ten righteous people (18:32).

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  35 In Genesis 19, the approach of the two messengers’ investigation appears to have altered when Lot invites them to his house, and the Sodomites trespass to take them away. Based on the conversation between YHWH and Abraham, readers would expect the two messengers to examine the righteousness of each Sodomite to determine the survival of the city. However, the narrator presents a conclusive snapshot of their wickedness through the Sodomites’ clash episode at Lot’s house. The narrator’s description of the mobs as consisting of all the men of Sodom, including the young and the old, suggests that no innocent person exists in Sodom at that time.43 Do we agree with this logic based on metonymy, considering that it applies to the entire population of Sodom? What about the women, children, and infants who were not involved in the violation that night? And what about those residents whose status in Sodom, like that of Lot, is temporary? What if they cry out to heaven due to the horrible violation that night? Given God’s all-knowing nature in the Genesis Sodom presentation, I interpret the two messengers’ trip to Sodom as a transitional device to convince readers of the judgement’s validity. Their distant behaviour towards Lot confirms my hypothesis. They seem to view Lot’s rescue as a necessary step before they can destroy Sodom rather than an act of compassion towards him. Nonetheless, Lot’s family is devastated when the divine messengers leave without further direction and never return. Eventually, Lot’s drinking and his daughters’ unwillingness to perish result in a challenging predicament. The one who once could discern right from wrong and sought to prevent harm to strangers in Sodom44 has lost his way. The statement that Lot is unable to comprehend the intentions of his daughters means he has sadly sacrificed his dignity. Now, let us think about what makes Lot give up his dignity. What is he desperate to hold on to? Lot is attached to the city of Sodom despite knowing that it is unwelcoming to outsiders. According to ‘One Night Sodom’, Lot’s hospitality to the divine messengers, going as far as offering his daughters, indicates his desire to demonstrate that Sodom, the city that he has chosen to reside in, is liveable. Lot believes that prosperity and morality can coexist, leading him to select Sodom as his home (pp. 24–29). Like the wish of Szechwan Sodom’s deities, that is his wish. However, he soon realizes that Sodom is not a safe place for strangers, and he, as a stranger, faces the consequences of his decision. After the city was destroyed and the principles that had sustained him for so long crumbled, Lot lost his sense of purpose in life. To sum it up, the story portrays Lot as an outsider in Sodom due to the distorted values of its inhabitants. Later, when Lot retreats to a cave, the narrator depicts him as a despairing figure who realizes he has no community left to uphold his integrity. Rather than advancing to his inverted scale and reaching a new conclusion, Lot disregards his morals and faith. Sadly, this is the death of a ‘problematic’ character. Along with the retelling stories, I ask: to what degree does Genesis Sodom fulfil the ‘divine’ justice on Sodom and its residents? The prophet Hosea uses God’s compassion on Israel in his preaching: ‘How can I give up, O Ephraim? … How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me…’ (Hos 11:8). Although I began reading this verse with curiosity, I now

36  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry feel defiant when God shows unfair favouritism and leaves my questions unanswered.45 I would implore God on behalf of Lot’s family and other innocent individuals: ‘Have you ever felt a deep love for Lot like your love for Ephraim? And have you ever been moved by the cries of those in Admah and Zeboiim, feeling your heart ache for them?’ As we delve into the following tale, Szechwan Sodom, we will find a more blurred line between gods and mortals. The play portrays the gods’ frantic efforts to preserve the world’s balance. 2.2.6 Shen-Te/Shui-Ta

According to the water-seller Wang in Szechwan Sodom, the main character Shen-Te cannot say no to anyone who asks for her assistance (Die kann nicht nein sagen, p. 34). While this may have been initially true, Shen-Te’s circumstances have significantly impacted her personality. The virtuous and destitute Shen-Te requires the support of the immoral and wealthy Shui-Ta to sustain herself, carry out divine orders, and safeguard her loved ones. Through her purchase of the smoke shop with the financial assistance of the gods, Shen-Te embarks on a journey of discovery into the corrupt and duplicitous realm of commerce.46 As the story progresses, the boundary of her love becomes significantly narrowed from including her neighbours to only her unborn son while her financial damage and emotional suffering to keep their well-being have remarkably increased. As a result, the harsh and methodical abuses under Shui-Ta’s supervision have worsened. Shen-Te has eventually reached a point where she only focuses on her unborn baby and has entirely withdrawn from public life. By leaving her vicious alter ego, Shui-Ta, to handle all financial adversaries, Shen-Te tries to deny the incompatibility of dignity and selfishness. What does it mean? Shen-Te’s character appears to be facing a challenging decision between maintaining her moral principles and doing what is necessary for survival. To survive in Szechwan, inherently good Shen-Te must negotiate clandestinely with her fictional cousin, Shui-Ta, to ensure her son’s welfare. Furthermore, the neighbours whom Shen-Te intends to support end up being exploited by Shui-Ta for their low-cost labour. The way Shen-Te expresses her motherly love might suggest her potential selfish character to infringe on the rights of others to protect her son.47 Such actions prompt us to compare Shen-Te with other maternal characters. Sarah—the wife of Abraham in Genesis Sodom—is the first case. One of the keywords in Sarah’s story in Genesis 18–21 is joyful ‘laughing’ (yitzḥaq), which later becomes the root of her son’s name Isaac (yitzḥaq), the son of the covenant. As mentioned earlier, amidst the warning of the city’s destruction where Lot’s family lives, this promise secures the safety of Abraham’s future. Additionally, experienced readers are already aware that Sarah’s pregnancy may lead to the expulsion of Hagar and her son Ishmael. This concern ultimately becomes a reality when Sarah’s fear for her son’s safety results in the expulsion of Ishmael (Gen 21:8–10).

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  37 Lot’s daughters are the second example, although the story primarily focuses on how they became pregnant instead of exploring the theme of selfishly protecting one’s children, as seen in the cases of Sarah and Shen-Te. When examining the daughters’ decision, it is essential to consider the lack of parental guidance they face. Their mother is gone and has become the symbol of infertility, the salt pillar.48 Their father has lost all motivation to keep the integrity of life. While Malcolm White quickly describes Lot’s daughters as lustful characters who fail to seek divine intervention and wait for God’s help,49 it is crucial to acknowledge that they face tough choices. With no parental guidance, divine guidance, or connection to the outside world while being trapped in the cave, the daughters ultimately chose to bear children to secure their family’s future.50 2.2.7 Deities

Through the three retelling stories of Genesis Sodom, we learn about the varying accessibility to deities for different characters. The divine messengers leave Lot’s surviving family in a mountain cave, indicating a lack of equal access to God. Similarly, Shen-Te’s gods run away when desperate human beings seek answers, highlighting their irresponsibility, aloofness, and fatigue towards the world’s struggles. In addition, they consider the Szechwanians’ decision not to invite them as a one-time incident in a specific circumstance rather than indicating any malicious nature on the part of the Szechwanians (p. 32). The deities come to confirm that they can keep the world as it is (Die Welt kann bleiben, wie sie ist, p. 33), but everybody except them knows that something must be wrong (Et was muß falsch sein an eurer Welt, p. 104). When the deities appear as judges in Shui-Ta’s trial, the audience is likely aware of who should be in the defendant’s seat. Let us now listen to the final discussion among the three gods. ‘Shall we admit that our commandments are deadly? Shall we renounce our commandments? Dogged: Never! Should the world be changed? How? By whom? No, it’s all right!’ (Sollen wir eingestehen, daß unsere Gebotetödlich sind? Sollen wir verzichten auf unsere Gebote? Verbissen: Niemals! Soll die Welt geändert werden? Wie? Von wem? Nein, es ist alles in Ordnung! p. 105). The gods feared facing the harsh reality. Regardless of what they discover, they may have already decided their answer before the journey. Debunking deities’ conviction as the false ideology of the dominant class, particularly in twentieth-century capitalist societies, Brecht poses a thought-provoking question: how can one condemn those who do evil for their survival if good people are not recognized and rewarded? This deep agony is on the same line that Victor Frankenstein might feel after listening to his creature’s laments in Mary Shelley’s SF novel Frankenstein.51 After carefully examining the retellings, a new perspective can be gained on Genesis Sodom. It is possible that, like the gods in Szechwan Sodom, yhwh has already made a predestined decision about Sodom, regardless of the findings of the two messengers. These new insights bring us to the last part of this article, where we will discuss Hospitality and Inverted Scales.

38  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 2.3 Hospitality and the Inverted Scales The themes of hospitality and the interaction between humans and deities are central to the stories that we have read. Hospitality is opening one’s mind and stepping outside of one’s comfort zone. Throughout the four stories that we have read, hospitality is emphasized as a clear indication of one’s piety. However, the resulting rewards and consequences are only sometimes directly correlated.52 In some situations, when an act of hospitality is not well-received, it can lead to negative consequences or cause complicated issues. For instance, in the stories of Lot and Sosistrato, offering hospitality led to unfavourable outcomes. These experiences can make us question the value of our society and belief systems. Let us start with Abraham. He demonstrates hospitality to unknown visitors at his house. In return, Abraham receives great rewards, including a promise of the birth of his son, recognition as an intimate fellow of Yhwh, and the opportunity to plead for Sodom. What about Lot’s situation? Lot is the one who shows the most active hospitality to unknown strangers without expecting rewards. His hospitality should be considered more significant than Abraham’s because Lot shows more active invitation despite being aware of the cost of this practice.53 In the story of ‘One Night Sodom’, displaying hospitality is seen as a reflection of one’s integrity. Unfortunately, this virtue leads to Lot being despised by the native Sodomites. In First Clement 11:1, Lot’s abundant hospitality and piety are credited as the essential qualities that save him and his family. However, the aftermath story in both Genesis and First Clement is not beautiful. How about hospitality in Szechwan Sodom? In the play, Shen-Te displays an active practice of hospitality towards the deities and her neighbours but is left perplexed. Unfortunately, her attempts to assist those in need often lead to more troubles than solutions. What about Sosistrato in Salt Sodom? He extended his hospitality to a disguised visitor, but sadly, it resulted in his untimely death. Let us further ponder this ironic relationship between divine retribution and human hospitality. First, Genesis Sodom reports that Sodom was destroyed by God’s judgement. However, in Szechwan Sodom, the ‘wicked’ city, Szechwan, survives the divine examination while the deities vanish to avoid a further fatal encounter. Second, while the Genesis Sodom narrator proclaims that all the problems come from the vanished city Sodom, Brecht in Szechwan Sodom lets Shen-Te/Shui-Ta challenge it. Ironically enough, Abraham stops his plea not to touch the inverted scale, while Shen-Te does not give up on asking for divine justice until the end. The result is quite surprising: Sodom becomes a vanished city in Genesis Sodom, while the three gods become vanished deities in Szechwan Sodom. Shen-Te, unlike Lot’s daughters who are abandoned in a cave without divine guidance, calls out to the gods to stay with her. However, the outcome is similar as both must make their choices without divine guidance. Reading the biblical narratives with the retelling stories gives a voice to the silenced characters or refurbishes the uneven ground. Those who get voices now shout to us to dare to encounter the inverted scales, even if they are still fearful. As we immerse ourselves in these tales, we sense our growing struggle between

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  39 our inclination to avoid risks and our yearning for a daring adventure. This inner turmoil persists until it eventually reaches a tipping point where we can no longer remain in our current state. When faced with the question, the three gods disappear, while Lot drowns his sorrows in alcohol. However, Sosistrato and Lot’s wife are deeply affected by their negative experience with hospitality and begin questioning its fundamental principles. There has yet to be a definitive response to expect. According to the ‘One Night Sodom’ narrator, those who lament do so because they have no other means but to lament.54 Their story is not only theirs because our world frequently presents more challenging circumstances. Therefore, I would like to conclude this article with an excerpt from a poem by Brecht. So, we come forward and report what evil has been done to us. The first time it was reported that our friends were being slowly butchered, there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered, and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out, ‘Stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.55 Notes 1 For the reception history of the Sodom narrative, see Noort and Tigchelaar (eds), Sodom’s Sin. In selecting the retelling of stories, I exclude the stories of homosexuality because I do not read the Sodomites’ request in Gen 19 as reflecting group homosexual desire. 2 Han, ‘Shuinan’ 《說難》, pp. 223–224. ‘夫龍之為蟲也，柔可狎而騎也；然其喉下有 逆鱗徑尺，若人有嬰之者，則必殺人。人主亦有逆鱗，說者能無嬰人主之逆鱗， 則幾矣’ English translations are excepted from Watson (trans.), ‘Difficulties of Persuasion [Shuinan]’, p. 79. 3 Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, pp. 30–107. For the English-translated version, see Willett (trans.), The Good Person of Szechwan. 4 Thanks to Iuli Gerbase’s recent dystopian film, Pink Cloud (2021), Brecht’s term, ‘Eine rosa Wolke’, gets a more ironic feature in the intertextual reading as the vanishing deities in apocalyptic settings. 5 Compared with Genesis Sodom, Grimm’s Bertolt Brecht (p. xxi) expresses the view that, in Brecht’s play, ‘no longer does God judge the world, which is Hell anyhow, but the world judges God’. 6 Lee, ‘Sodomui harusbam’, pp. 9–54. 7 Cf. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 17, 40–55. 8 Lugones, ‘La Estatua de Sal’, pp. 147–154. 9 Foster, Aspects of the Novel, pp. 65–75. 10 Van Seters, Abraham, pp. 215–216; Culley, Studies in the Structure, pp. 54–55. 11 Letellier, ‘Language of Genesis’, pp. 71–195. 12 Levine, ‘Sarah/Sodom’, pp. 131–146.

40  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 13 According to Graves, ‘Sodom and Salt’, pp. 19–21, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt, violating the ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) covenant. This event is considered a representation of the curse of infertility. See also Lyons, Canon, pp. 222–225. 14 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 29. 15 Referring to Abraham’s hospitality, the text says, ‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that, some have entertained angels without knowing it’ (NRS). 16 Rawls, Theory of Justice; idem, Justice as Fairness. 17 Girard, Job, pp. 21–23. 18 The narrator of Salt Sodom (p. 147) also expresses the monastery as absolute desolation, an infinite solitude, and a colossal silence. 19 It looks like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Act II, shows the repeating pattern of Act I. 20 This metaleptic strategy, in which the actor directly jumps into the audience’s world by breaking the stage’s fourth wall, is frequently used in Brecht’s epic dramas. 21 The comparison draws from the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Abraham’s servant in Genesis 24, which symbolizes the Trinity—God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the story, Rebecca is seen as a representation of the church and makes the right decision promptly after receiving the good news. See especially the Pentecost traditions. www​.raystedman​.org​/old​-testament​/genesis​/here​-comes​-the​-bride. 22 Spurgeon, ‘Remember’. 23 See Gallagher, Sodomscapes, for the retellings of Lot’s wife in various media formats. 24 Pirḳe de Rabbi Eliezer, p. 186. 25 Katz and Rosen (eds), Elie Wiesel, pp. 105–111. 26 In her book Pillar of Salt, a Memoir, Anna Salton Eisen, a next-generation Shoah (Holocaust) survivor, brings Lot’s wife into a discussion of the unspoken terrors of the past. The book’s title phrase, ‘Pillar of Salt’, reflects the author’s breaking of silent history as Lot’s wife becomes the witness of destruction. 27 Wiesel, Night, pp. 24–27; idem, ‘Lot’s Wife’, pp. 37–38; idem, ‘A Plea for the Dead’, p. 180. 28 My illustration assumes that innocent people were present during the moment of destruction. However, two factors may allow for other interpretations. Firstly, Abraham’s repeated requests for God not to punish the righteous along with the wicked suggests that there were either no righteous people or, at most, fewer than ten during the destruction. However, based on the conversation between Yhwh and Abraham, it can be inferred that crying people still existed in Sodom at the time of the conversation. Second, the ambiguous expression, cry out of Sodom and Gomorrah (tzaak Sodom), implies the land’s cry out (Gen 4; 2 Chron 7), which also means the innocent and oppressed people were already killed at the narrative time, and the wicked Sodomites corrupted the land with the innocent blood. It is possible to think that the pouring of innocent blood into the ground is an ongoing action, which means innocent death has continued in the land. So, the land was corrupted, and the people were suffering. In any case, Yhwh may not be free from the blame for neglecting theodicy since he did not protect the innocent from suffering and death. 29 As I reflect, I am reminded of a stanza from a Korean song, ‘5.18’ by Tae-Chun Chong. The lyrics vividly portray the devastating massacre during the Kwangju Democratic Movement in May 1980: ‘What did you hear, daughters? I heard the footsteps of soldiers trample the innocent citizens’. The daughters of the city in the song—who paused escaping, stood, looked back, and helped many innocent dying citizens—must have been arrested and tortured by the military forces of the coup d’état due to their brave actions. 30 According to PRE, pp. 181–183, Rabbi Jehudah taught that one of the out-crying voices comes from Lot’s daughter, Peleṭith, because she got caught feeding a poor man and was burnt by fire due to her hospitality. It became the source of heavenly investigation.

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  41 31 Levinas, ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, p. 141, emphasizes Lot’s wife’s enduring liminality as ‘Meanwhile’. 32 ‘Aside’ is a metaleptic literary device that breaks the fourth wall, allowing the characters in a play to speak directly to the audience, or the narrator in a story to address the reader using the second-person pronoun. In both cases, the speaker’s words are not meant for the characters within the story. 33 ‘“Mujer, dime que viste cuando tu rostro se volvió para mirar.” Una voz anudada de angustia, le respondió: “Oh, no… Por Elohim, no quieras saberlo!” “Dime qué viste !” “No… no… Sería el abismo!” “Yo quiero el abismo.” “Es la muerte…”’ (p. 154). 34 Cf. Harari, ‘Abraham’s Nephew Lot’, pp. 31–41. 35 Turner, ‘Lot as Jekyll and Hyde’, pp. 85–101, also interprets Lot as a complex character, like Jekyll and Hyde, not fitting into one category, righteous or wicked. 36 It’s worth noting Ellen van Wolde’s unique interpretation in her ‘Cognitive Grammar’, pp. 213–214. According to her, the city gate seating is reserved for the town judge, and, as a stranger, Lot did not have the authority to make decisions or exercise jurisdiction. Consequently, the people of Sodom paid close attention to Lot’s actions. Despite this, Lot still welcomed the newcomers into his home without seeking permission from the city council. This action caused the Sodomites to harbour even greater hatred towards Lot, which intensified on that fateful night. 37 Letellier, Day in Mamre, p. 155. 38 Regarding discussing the gap between Lot’s self-identity as a Sodomite and his reality as a resident alien in Sodom, see von Rad, Genesis, p. 217; Matthews, ‘Hospitality and Hostility’, p. 4; Blenkinsopp, Abraham, p. 131. 39 According to BDB 7455, the word məʿārāh in Genesis ‘all used as a grave site (23:9, 11, 17, 19, 20; 25:9; 49:29, 32; 50:13) except this Lot and daughters’ dwelling place in 19:9’. 40 The editorial comment for the eponymy of the Moabites and Ammonites (Gen 19:37– 38) should not be confused as an account of the improved living conditions of Lot’s family out of the cave. 41 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 97. 42 Distinguishing ‘cry out’ and ‘outcry’, van Wolde, ‘Cognitive Grammar’, pp. 189, 201, 206, suggests translating the latter as ‘an outburst out of distress’. She also further clarifies that Genesis Sodom has only ‘outcry’, which does not appeal to the superior being for help, although it still contains a request for the legal investigation and trial as a technical term. Van Wolde’s legal interpretation provides a better understanding of the reason for the severe punishment inflicted on Lot’s wife when she looked back while fleeing. Her action can be seen as defiant against God, the judge, or at least questioning with doubt. In contrast, the interpretation of the Hebrew word za’aqat by Letellier, Day in Mamre, p. 119, as ‘outcry’, indicates the cry of the oppressed, the plea of the victim of great injustice. 43 Cf. Scott Morschauser, ‘Hospitality’, p. 467, interprets this expression as a legal delegation of all Sodomites. 44 This is Lee’s description of Lot in his short story, ‘One Night Sodom’. 45 Also see Noort, ‘For the Sake of Righteousness’, p. 7. 46 John Willett, ‘Commentary’, p. 8. 47 In her trial, Shen-Te defends herself before the judge (gods). Still, we see here that the object of her love has become remarkably narrowed to her son: ‘Verdamnt mich: alles, was ich verbrach Tat ich, meinen Nachbarn zu helfen Meinen Geliebten zu lieben und Meinen kleinen Sohn vor dem Mangel zu retten’. (p. 104) 48 Graves, ‘Sodom and Salt’. 49 White, Another One, pp. 35–39. 50 Cf. Sweeney, Reading the Hebrew Bible, pp. 239–240. 51 Shelley, Frankenstein. For the monster’s laments and Frankenstein’s response, see especially ‘Frankenstein’s Anatomical Notebook’ in Volume II, pp. 137–144.

42  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 52 For the discussion of hospitality among philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, Jacque Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, see Gallagher, Introduction. 53 See also Safren, ‘Hospitality Compared’, pp. 157–178; Peleg, ‘Was Lot a Good Host?’, pp. 129–156; Alexander, ‘Lot’s Hospitality’, pp. 289–291. 54 ‘울부짖는 자는 울부짖는 것 말고는 다른 대응 수단이 없기 때문에 울부짖는다’ (p. 38). 55 Brecht, ‘Wenn die Untat kommt, wie der Regen fällt’, p. 247.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954. Brecht, Bertolt. ‘Wenn die Untat kommt, wie der Regen fällt’. In John Willett and Ralph Manheim with the co-operation of Erich Fried (eds), John Willett (trans.), Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913–1956. London: Methuen, 1976, p. 247. Brecht, Bertolt. ‘Der gute Mensch von Sezuan’. In Bruce Thompson (ed.), Twentieth Century Texts. London: Routledge, 1986, pp. 30–107. Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Person of Szechwan. Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland (eds), John Willett (trans.). London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chong, Tae-Chun. ‘5.18’. In People 2019. Seoul: Culture of Life, 2019. Eisen, Anna Salton. Pillar of Salt, a Memoir: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2022. Gerbase, Iuli. Pink Cloud [A Nuvem Rosa]. Directed by Iuli Gerbase. Brazil: Prana Films, 2021. Grimm, Reinhold, with Caroline Molina Y. Vedia (eds). Bertolt Brecht, Poetry and Prose. The German Library 75. New York, NY and London: Continuum, 2006. Han Fei Tzu. ‘The Difficulties of Persuasion [Shuinan] 說難’. In Chen Qiyou (ed.), Han Feizi jishi 12. Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1974, pp. 223–224. Lee, Seung-woo. ‘One Night of Sodom [sodomui harusbam 소돔의 하룻밤 ]. In What Love Has Done [sarangi han il사랑이 한 일]. South Korea: munhakdongne, 2020, pp. 9–54. Lugones, Leopoldo. ‘La Estatua de Sal’. In M. Gleizer (ed.), Las fuerzas extrañas [Strange Forces]. Triunvirato 537. Buenos Aires, 1926 [originally written in 1906], pp. 147–154. Pirḳe de Rabbi Eliezer (The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great). Gerald Friedlander (trans.) New York, NY: The Bloch Publishing, 1916. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Originally published anonymously by Lackington Publishing House in the UK in 1818. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers, 2018. Watson, Burton (trans.), Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1964. White, Malcolm. Another One Bites the Dust. Canada: Gospel Folio Press, 2010. Wiesel, Eli. Night. Marion Wiesel (trans.). New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006. Wiesel, Eli. ‘Lot’s Wife’. In idem (ed.), Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 2003, pp. 23–38. Wiesel, Eli. ‘A Plea for the Dead’. In idem (ed.), Legends of Our Times. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 2004, pp. 174–197. Secondary Sources Alexander, T. Desmond. ‘Lot’s Hospitality: A Clue to his Righteousness’. JBL 104 (1985), pp. 289–291. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Abraham: The Story of a Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmanns, 2015.

Before the Dragon’s Inverted Scales  43 Culley, Robert C. Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1976. Foster, Edward Morgan. Aspects of the Novel. Spain: E. Arnold, 1927. Gallagher, Lowell. Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017. Girard, René. Job, the Victim of His People. Yvonne Freccero (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. Graves, David E. ‘Sodom and Salt in Their Ancient Near Eastern Cultural Context’. Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 61 (2016), pp. 8–36. Harari, Raymond. ‘Abraham’s Nephew Lot: A Biblical Portrait’. Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 25.1 (1989), pp. 31–41. Katz, Steven T., and Alan Rosen. Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives, Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives. Jewish Literature and Culture Series. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 105–111. Letellier, Robert Ignatius. ‘The Language of Genesis 18 and 19’. In idem (ed.), Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19. BINS 10. Leiden: Brill, 1995, pp. 71–195. Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘Reality and Its Shadow’. In Seán Hand (ed.), Alphonso Lingis (trans.), The Levinas Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 129–143. Levine, Nachman. ‘Sarah/Sodom: Birth, Destruction, and Synchronic Transaction’. JSOT 31 (2006), pp. 131–146. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Anna Bostock (trans.). London: The Merlin Press, 1988. Lyons, William John. Canon and Exegesis: Canonical Praxis and the Sodom Narrative. JSOTS 352. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Matthews, Victor H. ‘Hospitality and Hostility in Genesis 19 and Judges 19’. A Journal of Bible and Theology 22.1 (1992), pp. 3–11. Morschauser, Scott. ‘“Hospitality,” Hostiles and Hostages: On the Legal Background to Genesis 19.1–9’. JSOT 27 (2003), pp. 461–485. Noort, Ed. ‘For the Sake of Righteousness, Abraham’s Negotiations with Yhwh as Prologue to the Sodom Narrative: Genesis 18:16–33’. In Ed Noort and Eibert Tigchelaar (eds), Sodom’s Sin: Genesis 18–19 and its Interpretations. TBN 7. Leiden: Brill, 2004, pp. 3–16. Peleg, Yitzhak (Izik). ‘Was Lot a Good Host? Was Lot Saved from Sodom as a Reward for His Hospitality?’ In Diana Lipton (ed.), Universalism and Particularism at Sodom and Gomorrah: Essays in Memory of Ron Pirson. SBLAIL 11. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2012, pp. 129–156. The Pentecost Traditions. https://www​.raystedman​.org​/old​-testament​/genesis​/here​-comes​ -the​-bride. Accessed August 25, 2023. Rad, Gerhard von. Genesis. J. H. Marks (trans.). OTL. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1972. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999. Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Safren, Jonathan D. ‘Hospitality Compared: Abraham and Lot as Hosts’. In Diana Lipton (ed.), Universalism and Particularism at Sodom and Gomorrah: Essays in Memory of Ron Pirson. SBLAIL 11. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2012, pp. 157–178. Spurgeon, Charles Haddon. ‘Remember Lot’s Wife (Luke 17:32)’. In Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit 25, August 24, 1879. The Spurgeon Library | Remember Lot’s Wife. Accessed August 20, 2023. Sweeney, Marvin A. Reading the Hebrew Bible after the Shoah: Engaging Holocaust Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008.

44  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Turner, Laurence A. ‘Lot as Jekyll and Hyde: A Reading of Genesis 18–19’. In David J. A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl, and Stanley E. Porter (eds), The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield. JSOTS 87. Sheffield: Sheffield, 1990, pp. 85–101. Van Seters, J. Abraham in History and Tradition. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Willett, John. ‘Commentary’. In Bertolt Brecht (ed.), The Good Person of Szechwan. John Willett, Tom Kuhn, and Charlotte Ryland. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. xx–lxxii. Wolde, Ellen van. ‘Cognitive Grammar at Work in Sodom and Gomorrah’. In Bonnie Howe and Joel B. Green (eds), Cognitive Linguistic Explorations in Biblical Studies. Berlin/ Boston: de Gruyter, 2014, pp. 193–221.

3

She Chose to Turn Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness in Contemporary Literature Katherine Low

3.1 Introduction In Genesis 19, under cover of night, angels enter Sodom to do God’s reconnaissance work concerning who might still be righteous in the wicked city (cf. 18:20– 22). Lot takes them to his home for hospitality (19:1–3). When a mob of men surrounds Lot’s house to ‘know’ the visitors, Lot offers the men his two daughters to ‘do to them’ as they please (19:8). The offer does not appease the mob so the angels ‘struck with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they were unable to find the door’ (19:11).1 The angels urged Lot to get his family out, for at dawn God was to destroy the city. Even though Lot received instruction from the angels not to turn back upon fleeing (19:17), Lot’s wife ‘looked back, and she became a pillar of salt’ (19:26). The biblical text provides no background information on her, nor does it provide her motivations for looking back. It is revealed after this that God remembers Abraham and thus reaches out to save Lot, his nephew, who had settled in Sodom (19:29). But who will remember Sodom and its people? Lot’s wife remains at the precipice of destruction, on a boundary of the cities of the plain, a marked witness to the scorched earth. Lot’s wife acts as the standing pillar of remembrance.2 Lot’s wife exists in a perpetual post-destruction position. Her placement on the edge of destruction makes her a symbol for what it means to witness it. She also represents defiance in the face of violence because she chose to look back and thus witness the pain of destruction. In this chapter, I focus on works that imagine her rooted at Sodom, that Lot’s wife’s ‘looking back’ serves as a symbolic, and often deviant, act to remember one’s communal disruption and destruction. In other words, the authors under discussion here ground her in community, as a citizen of Sodom, imagined from within their own contexts. Discussion of a short stand-alone poem from three renowned poets is included here: Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘Лотова жена [Lot’s Wife]’ (orginially written in Russian in 1924) contrasted with a tribute poem by Jewish author Margaret Kaufman, Nicaraguan poet Carlos Martínez Rivas’s ‘Beso para la mujer de Lot [Kiss for Lot’s wife]’ (Spanish, c. 1940s), and Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’s ‘Of Course She Looked Back’ (written in English in 2012). I discuss these alongside Rosalind Chase’s short novel entitled Lot’s Wife: An Erotic Retelling (2019). The sources portray a deviant Lot’s wife in choosing to remember, to stand in protest DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-4

46  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry and witness disaster from within her own community rather than escape from it. They align her experience with that of their own cultural and political situations. They do not attempt to provide a name for this woman because her namelessness serves the mythological quality of the character. In terms of myth, I take cues from Susan Sellers that ‘myths are stories which distil aspects of common experience in a concentrated and therefore highly potent form’.3 Based on this definition, a mythological approach for Lot’s wife exists here. She offers authors a way to make sense of the human experience, as a person grounded at Sodom, offering meaning to continuing generations who suffer to witness loss of beloved homelands and communities. Whether the disaster she witnesses is justified by God remains less of an issue for the authors I discuss here; their focus on Lot’s wife means to address the horrors of human suffering rather than relegate it to a lofty theological didactic tale of obedience to God. As a result, the authors engage Lot as a symbol for righteousness, and hypocrisy, that justice means a god could wipe out entire cities. They contrast Lot’s piety, his ability to walk away from Sodomite screams of agony at the orders of his god, with his wife’s devotion to her community. Furthermore, the angel leading the way does not belong to her, but to her husband and his god. For the authors under discussion, she does not interact with God, nor is there any sense that she is being punished. Lot’s wife helps the authors confront the uncomfortable and subvert accepted traditions. The first example comes from a Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. 3.2 ‘Lot’s Wife’ by Anna Akhmatova Akhmatova’s poem is four strophes, each containing four lines. Lot is referred to as ‘the just man’ who falls in step with ‘God’s messenger’.4 The messenger shines bright against the black mountain. Lot’s wife is uneasy because an unsettling voice urges her that it is not too late to look again at her home, the towers of Sodom, where she sang in the courtyard and bore her children. When she grants herself a gaze back, she does not ‘see a grave’ but remains ‘rooted to the earth’.5 The poet calls for the reader to mourn her, the ‘crushed life in a single glance’.6 Alternately, this life in a single glance ‘suffered death because she chose to turn’.7 The suffering of death means not only her own but witnessing the death of others. Composed between the years of 1922 and 1924 during the new Soviet world, the poem’s trivial things bear enough weight to press Akhmatova into remembering. The poem is a famous example of how Akhmatova ‘expressed through allusion to history and myth what she herself cannot say openly’.8 Bearing witness is an appropriate response at the loss of life no matter how seemingly insignificant. It is not surprising that Akhmatova uses Lot’s wife as a witness to chaos, for she did the same. Born Anna Gorenko in Ukraine in 1889, Akhmatova’s parents divorced in 1905 during a time of political upheaval. By 1905, revolutionary insurrections caused Tsar Nicholas II and his government to provide concessions. Women, at least for those from privileged backgrounds, engaged in limited public roles at that time.9 She

Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness  47 attended school in Kiev, during which she corresponded with Nikolay Gumilyov, a fellow poet, who regularly visited Vyacheslav Ivanov’s salon in Petersburg known as ‘the Tower’. It was a time of confluence, almost a Russian Renaissance. She married Gumilyov in 1910, a marriage that allowed her to meet the literary elite of the day, including those in ‘the Tower’, and to travel abroad.10 Akhmatova published her first collection of poetry, Evening, in 1912 while Gumilyov worked to oppose Symbolism and instead embrace ‘Acmeism’, which means linking objects from the everyday world to psychological states rather than find transcendental meaning in them as the Symbolists did.11 For ‘Lot’s Wife’, this means Akhmatova imbuing her with self-consciousness rather than a divine purpose, as the poet continues to contemplate fragmentation after the 1917 Revolution.12 The February Revolution of 1917 brought chaos to Russia. Civil war broke out in 1918 and the years that followed saw bloodshed as the Bolshevik Party eventually triumphed to form the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1923. Akhmatova’s husband Gumilyov was executed in 1921, a few years after they separated, and only a year before she begins writing ‘Lot’s Wife’. Certainly, to look back is ‘not a mark of sin, but a response to unjustifiable crimes and horror’, but there is more to it for Akhmatova.13 She stayed in the country as an official widow, making her ‘seem a miraculously preserved representative of the old, preSoviet Russia’.14 The question remained why she stayed, why she ‘rooted her feet to the ground’, as Lot’s wife did. In the 1922 poem ‘I am Not One of Those Who Left the Land’, she laments lost friends but lauds the survivors who unflinchingly stand proud.15 Many of her friends abandoned Russia, and Akhmatova struggles with that choice yet chooses her lot as ‘an artist willing to take on the suffering of others’.16 In a way, Akhmatova places herself in the biblical mythological story, so that it can inform her contemporary situation. Therefore, the choice Lot’s wife made to turn becomes an act of resilience to stay and witness the destruction of the land and people. To emphasise the way Akhmatova offers a symbolic vision of witnessing the loss of her homeland, I contrast a tribute poem of the same name by the American Jewish poet Margaret Kaufman. Kaufman’s poem contains five strophes of four lines each, one more strophe than Akhmatova’s poem. The ‘just man’ appears in Kaufman’s poem in the opening line, along with God’s messenger who follows along a black ridge. Due to her grief, Lot’s wife lags as well. While Akhmatova has Lot’s wife look upon the towers of Sodom and the city square, Kaufman has her ‘heavy with useless things’ she cannot take with her, like family photos and other symbolic elements of being a woman: ‘her mother’s ring, her wedding quilt’.17 Akhmatova mentions the daughters of her marriage bed but seems to intentionally de-emphasise her femininity beyond that. Akhmatova lacks emphasis on her gender whereas Kaufman enhances it. According to Koplowitz-Breier, a trend exists to cast personal emotions of womanhood upon Lot’s wife in a feminist midrashic ‘Jewish American form’.18 For Kaufman, the poet grieves because ‘I know holding on can cost a life’.19 Holding on, perhaps uselessly, casts a different motivation for Lot’s wife than rooting herself to the ground to maintain solidarity with her homeland.

48  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry A poignant image in Kaufman’s poem is when Lot’s wife becomes ‘what she has shed’; the salty tears of her grief consume her.20 Her loss is personal, representing the ‘female cycle of life’.21 Many modern American examples from female poets take this angle, such as in a longer series of poems in Shake & Tremor by Deborah Bacharach, who has Lot’s wife address her audience concerning why she looked back. She thought, she tells them, of ‘my wedding ring. I could picture my knitting, my frail peonies’.22 I highlight these Jewish feminist perspectives and their suspicions of the patriarchal undergirding of the biblical story because they offer a valuable yet different scope. Lot’s wife as a disappointed wife, loving wife, mother, or daughter, or a disobedient wife in the face of societal strictures, is less important for Akhmatova than her identity rooted in the nationhood of Sodom. Going forward into the sources in this chapter, we find that Lot’s wife offers no redeemable ideal feminine qualities because she occupies a mythological space to address when someone’s homeland, lover, and community is taken away from them. We now turn to a poet who was born in Nicaragua the same year Akhmatova wrote her poem. 3.3 ‘A Kiss for Lot’s Wife’ by Carlos Martínez Rivas Initially, the poem commemorating Lot’s wife by Carlos Martínez Rivas (1924– 1998) asks, ‘Who was that lover that fooled good old Lot?’23 However, the ‘good’ imagery for Lot shifts. In sixteen strophes, four of which are one line, he imagines a lover for Lot’s wife and then describes the destruction. Lot’s wife could not pretend for long as the destruction came. She trailed behind, she looked back, searching for her lover: ‘And perhaps you saw him. Because the eye of a woman can recognise her king even when nations tremble and fire rains down from the skies’.24 Love is a driving force that penetrates trembling nations. In a rare interview, Martínez Rivas divulged that, while living in Paris in the 1940s, he was inspired after visiting the Louvre to write ‘A Kiss for Lot’s Wife’. There, he saw ‘Lot and his daughters’ by Lucas de Leyden (c. 1521).25 In that painting, the foreground features Lot fondling the chest of one of his daughters in front of their red tent while his other daughter pours wine amid a green landscape. The last line of his poem hauntingly describes the scene: ‘The suspiciously evergreening Zoar with Lot, now white and senile, and the two girls nubile, delicate and disgusting’.26 Lot’s wife caught Martínez Rivas’s eye in de Leyden’s painting. Behind them, fire rains down from the sky while the city crumbles into the sea. A wooden bridge reaches from the city to the mountain pass through which Lot and his daughters escaped. Lot’s wife can be seen at the front of the bridge, facing the city, fixed as a small figure on the periphery of the painting. Something had to keep her there, and Martínez Rivas imagines a scenario in which Lot’s wife looks back for a lover, because ‘What is the most profound thing for a woman? A Lover. It is not a jewelry bag’.27 The focus on relationship with an unknown lover rather than material wealth echoes the life of Martínez Rivas himself. There is also an act of deviance to assign her an adulterous relationship that would keep her connected to her homeland.

Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness  49 Known in small international circles, Martínez Rivas could be described as the quintessential ‘wandering penniless poet’, with a trunk full of papers reflecting a lifetime of unpublished works. He grew up in Nicaragua and moved to Mexico in the early 1950s, where he only published one book in his lifetime, The Lonely Insurrection (La insurreccion solitaria). His poems were published after his death in a collection known as Poesía Reunida (2007). In essence, he travelled the world rather than published. When it comes to imaging a lover for Lot’s wife, Martínez Rivas might have had inspiration from his lover Eunice Odio, a poet from Costa Rica. Yet, the kind of love that keeps Lot’s wife rooted in place becomes part of a larger paradigm of transcendence, a way out of the existing scheme. For the poet, the profundity of that love provides her escape from the kind of sexuality Lot displays with his daughters in de Leyden’s painting. When everything is reduced to ash, and no phoenix would rise, her salt statue offers up inspiration like a muse. Martínez Rivas describes her salt formation in the end of the poem as ‘Ridges of genuine expression. And not the laughing hills seasoned with angel fire’.28 A glimpse of hope for Lot’s wife remains, as enduring as genuine love itself, that which no angel fire— that associated with the life of her husband—can extinguish. Meanwhile, Lot goes on to repulsive living, perhaps like those who enjoy the spoils of war. Lot’s wife chooses to love at the cost of never to be born again. Critics have wondered about the political overtones of his work.29 Images of war in the poem emerge, like ‘rockets over Sodom’. Martínez Rivas was influenced by the Nicaraguan poet Joaquín Pasos, who died in 1947 in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua.30 His best-known work, ‘Canto de guerra de las cosas [war song of the things]’, was written the year before he died, an epic poem reflecting on the violence and pain lived in human existence and the size of the human heart to hold it all. In this lifetime, Pasos spoke out against the family dictatorship in Nicaragua that began with Anastasio Somoza García (1937–1956) after US military occupation and political unrest.31 While dictatorship was the political context of Martínez Rivas’s childhood, he felt a blood connection to Nicaragua but a kinship with the whole world.32 Martínez Rivas claimed his poetry does not take political sides, rather he expresses his individuality, what intrigues him about the world. In this way, his life of ‘insurrection’ of which he speaks is not political but cultural. He states, ‘I have no ideas, no ideals, no ideology. I only have thoughts. Thoughts that wither like flowers’.33 The lack of victory in his poem on Lot’s wife, the focus on love and loss, remains a theme in his work. For instance, in ‘The losers crumble to the canvas’, Martínez Rivas centres on the US boxer Gene Tunney (1897–1978) who held the heavyweight title from 1926 to 1928 and published a memoir in 1932 entitled A Man Must Fight. Martínez Rivas alternatively posits that ‘winning is a vulgarity’ because somewhere someone else loses.34 He instead focuses on the personal life of the losing men, those whose children look to for how to handle defeat. Or, on those who remain in love with their wives or those going through divorce. Martínez Rivas concludes, ‘If we are all, no one is greater. If the victory of one is the defeat of another then all victory is, somewhere, a fraud’.35

50  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry With a lover left in Sodom, Lot’s wife committed adultery, but there is no judgement; Martínez Rivas maintains this focus on the masquerade of victory and defeat. His work counts on finding the singular moments to destabilise traditions and modern assumptions, while never dismissing the permanent struggle of living.36 His focus is on the small rebellions that materialise for him in a work of art, or in the mythological space of Sodom, where Lot’s wife can become a metaphor for disputed order and thus an ethical and political moment. The painting by Lucas de Leyden displays a triumphant Lot alone with his two daughters, but the biblical text goes on to critique the incest Lot commits, and he disappears from the biblical story. Martínez Rivas highlights that in Genesis 19, and amid human suffering, there are no winners. We move on to a poem by Latina and Native poet Natalie Diaz, who grew up in Native communities in the United States and who enters the story with less triumphalism as well. 3.4 ‘Of Course She Looked Back’ by Natalie Diaz When My Brother Was an Aztec is Natalie Diaz’s first collection of poetry. The poem ‘Of Course She Looked Back’, with seven strophes, is featured in the third and final part of the collection. The collection centres on her family dynamics while growing up in Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, in the southwest of the United States. Indigenous people occupied the continent for thousands of years; Spanish colonisers arrived in the southwest part of the country in the sixteenth century and encountered the Mojave people. The United States military established an outpost there in 1859 along the Colorado River to facilitate Western expansion. Thus, Diaz contrasts her life on the reservation, the area of land held and governed by a federally recognised tribal nation, with other societal and economic realities from Euro-Americans who have been hostile to Natives. In the poem ‘Hand-Me-Down-Halloween’, for instance, she relates how ‘All them / whites / laughed at me / called me half-breed /’ (p. 6). The trauma from these experiences denotes a long history of a brutal separation of indigenous people from their lands and cultures. Diaz subverts traditional Christian imagery as well, bringing in questions around the economic implications of living on reservations, asking, ‘What if Mary was an Indian & when Gabriel visited her wigwam she was away at a monthly WIC clinic…’ (p. 25). Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a government-funded food-supplemental programme for low-income families. Mary then, receives ‘boxed cheese & peanut butter instead of Jesus’ (p. 25). Through her use of biblical women, Diaz ‘embraces and subverts mythology’ because myth captures the human condition.37 As with Akhmatova, Lot’s wife is a mythological figure onto which they can map musings about the political and economic systems impacting women in their own time.38 Lot’s wife provides another mythological lens through which to view a Native propensity toward intimately connecting to the land and the people on it. In her poem on Lot’s wife, ‘Of Course She Looked Back’, the last line is ‘the neighbors begging her name’ (p. 89). Diaz demonstrates the connection Lot’s wife has to her

Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness  51 native Sodom. They knew her by name; out of such a community, there remains no other way for Lot’s wife to react. Thus, Diaz enacts the first words of the poem: ‘You would have, too’ (p. 88). Even with her husband whispering, ‘Baby, forget about it. She couldn’t’ (p. 88). In Native writing, the land and geographical orientation to it remain fundamental to identity. Tribal nations in North America consider the earth as a living force that contributes to cultural meaning.39 Therefore, of course Lot’s wife looked back to her land. Even amid the terrible noises of destruction—‘dogs wept’—her mind wanders to her domestic life back at home: ‘Was the oven off?’ (p. 88). Through the ordinary objects, much like the ordinary life Akhmatova paints for Lot’s wife, the poets speak to living communities that are wrecked by violence. Rather than focus on strong feminine imagery related to ideals of womanhood, the emphasis remains on home rather than loss of feminine identity. In the last stanzas of the poem, someone afraid is asking for prayer, and Diaz writes, ‘Her daughters, or the crooked-leg angel, maybe’ (p. 89). Lot’s wife, however, offers no such prayer. Grouping her daughters with the angel aligns them with the dominant narrative of obedience to God (God is not mentioned by Diaz in the poem). The image of the ‘crooked-leg angel’ relates to the first poem in her book, ‘Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation’, that points out how angels do not visit the reservation: ‘They’re no good for Indians’ (p. 5). Angels signify the colonising force and imperialistic histories of Christianity in America: ‘You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to / Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us’ (p. 5). Therefore, by not looking back, Lot’s wife resists the ‘crooked-leg angel’ and its march out of her territory. Looking back is an act of resistance, one that challenges colonial projects. The unfair laws and treatments of her Mojave/Gila River communities remain part of her history, but so does do family and strength in identity. Diaz embraces a multitude of identities in her life. She grew up ‘with a native mother and a Spanish, Catholic father. We held to many truths all at once. Each seemed to strengthen the possibility of the other, rather than cancel it out’.40 Grounding Lot’s wife in her various traditions and heritages allows Diaz to participate in the biblical story while subverting its traditional uses. The final example from Rosalind Chace places Lot’s wife in erotic literature, and therefore, also in a subversive reading. 3.5 Lot’s Wife: An Erotic Retelling by Rosalind Chase Rosalind Chase’s debut short novel, Lot’s Wife: An Erotic Retelling, is set at the time Lot and his family flee Sodom. Lot’s wife stands at the border, remembering her life in Sodom. Lot’s wife is proud to be a Sodomite. She grew up in her family’s weaving shop. When Lot’s army invades (see Genesis 13:5, 11 in which it indicates Lot has many posessions; the author assumes an army in this case), they bring social reform that includes taking away property ownership rights from single women and widows. She marries Lot for a variety of reasons, including to keep her family business. Like Akhmatova, Chase imagines Lot’s wife as a weaver. In

52  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry fact, the way Akhmatova describes Lot’s wife’s spinning-shed of the house bears a striking resemblance to the novel’s setting: ‘the spinning-shed, at the empty windows set in the tall house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed’.41 For Chase, the weaving shop was a room of the house and represents her independence, financially and sexually. As a weaver, Lot’s wife can hold multiple threads in her hand, she literally weaves her story into a multicolour tapestry throughout the novel. Multiple lovers, sexual freedom to explore her desires and needs, remain more of a focus than that of her role as wife and mother. She wears four rings on the fingers on her left hand, each one signifying a relationship in her life. Looking back signifies a life fully lived. Whereas Lot, a soldier, holds one thread, one God, one storyline. He has no trouble marching ahead out of Sodom. The book is also about the stories we choose to tell, and those we can reject. The Genesis account is one side of the story, Lot’s version told in reverence to his God. Erotic literature plays with social boundaries, such as between pleasure and pain, conventional and unconventional. Lot’s wife fits; herself a marker between Sodom, the unacceptable, and Abraham’s clan, the acceptable. Lot’s wife muses, ‘If you only need one man, just one man to carry the sad story of Sodom forward, how do you pick anyone besides Lot?’ (p. 117). Indeed, he was so pious that he could not understand the beauty of Sodom. Lot’s wife in erotic literature evokes questions of cultural control of narrative. The term ‘erotic’ denotes pleasure and embodiment, usually of a sexual nature as it takes its cue from the Greek word ‘eros’. Erotic literature works from the premise that cultural forces have regulated the ‘pleasures of the erotic body’.42 Lot and his god symbolise the regulatory cultural force, while she embraces multiple cunning gods that represent the fluidity of human nature. After their marriage, Lot’s wife attempts sexual pleasure, yet he refuses. He engages in sexual intercourse only for conception, saying ‘I will come to you only to conceive’, therefore, ‘tears burned my eyes’, explains Lot’s wife, ‘I had only given to my husband what I wanted to give. But what had I got back?’ (p. 64). In sum, ‘I was Lot’s wife. Not his partner’ (p. 83). Lamenting the loss of her earlier lover, Kali, Lot’s wife begins regular nightly visits with Nasha, her second lover. Nasha, a Sodomite, lives in a brothel and provides Lot’s wife with the companionship, care, and intimacy she deserved. Doing so, she offers herself in the throes of pleasure to the gods of Sodom (p. 72). The third lover comes after she gives birth to four daughters. Lot’s wife encounters a regular visitor at the brothel, a mysterious man who does not seem to age, a poet and a soldier, with rippling muscles, bronze hair, clay-coloured skin, and redbrown blood-coloured eyes (pp. 87–88). After their BDSM sexual encounter, his identity is revealed as Gabriel. His desire for pain and pleasure stems from his need for forgiveness, ‘railing against his own deity every time he walked the streets of Sodom, every time he stepped foot into one of the brothels…’ (p. 122). In a twist, he is one of the two angels that Lot welcomes into his home. Gabriel reveals to her that Sodom will be destroyed, allowing for the possibility that Lot’s wife could warn her fellow Sodomites about the pending doom. She laments that her daughters, Abi and Gia, are so indoctrinated into Lot’s piety that they would follow him.

Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness  53 She wonders, ‘Do we all look back in a mix of triumph and despair?’ (p. 126). As she looks back, she asks, ‘Is looking back not merely part of life?’ (p. 127). As with Martínez Rivas, Lot’s wife does not represent either victory or defeat, but a complicated mix of both. Chase imagines that Lot’s wife warned the people of Sodom of the pending destruction, and she turned back to escape with her people in a tunnel that existed under the city. In the tunnel, as Sodom the city is destroyed, she rests with her two lovers, Kali and Nasha. The last line subverts the traditional story: ‘as far as Lot knows, I turned into a pillar of salt’ (p. 134). Lot tells his version of the pious story, but Lot’s wife gets her own version wrapped in her identity as a Sodomite. By giving Lot’s wife an erotic body, and Lot a pious story without sexual desire, Chase takes on what David Carr observes as ‘an issue of having multiple culturalreligious ideals that are not reconciled with each other or our bodies. We are alienated from our erotic selves’.43 Lot’s wife can come out of the confinement of a heteronormative marriage, and thus readers can question the patriarchal strictures placed on the biblical story. Chase imagines a beautiful Sodom with multiplicity in celebration of human sexuality. Lot’s wife chooses her homeland despite her roles as wife and mother because those roles do not ultimately define her. Her experience as a human with sexual desire frames her story. By redeeming Lot’s wife away from the fixed position of salt, Chase allows for the possibility of playing with multiple identities and multiple sides to dominant cultural narratives. 3.6 Concluding Thoughts In 2019, Laura Eve Engel published Things That Go, a book of poetry centred around Lot’s wife, to address ways of seeing in America when every technological advantage provides humans the ability to do so. Every section begins with a poem entitled ‘Lot’s Wife’, until the last section which begins with ‘Lot’s Wife Speaks’. In that poem, she ponders: Maybe the solution To cleanse by fire Always required a witness To prevent it from ever being a solution to draw out a flush on the face of a great god ashamed of his own arrogance44 If witnessing tragedy is her fate, then Lot’s wife can also hold the god responsible for such tragedy. For Engel, the danger of witnessing tragedy comes when it is livestreamed all the time. Americans consume destruction at their fingertips. Engel imagines how contemporary citizens sit at their desks like Lot’s wife sits at the

54  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry edge of the cities of the plain, fixated on watching, and the act of looking changes them into a ‘solid looking column’.45 Like the short poems and short erotic novel highlighted here, Engel brings Lot’s wife to bear witness to human suffering and to question the god of such tragedy. Contrary to the short poems and erotic novel highlighted in this chapter, Engels does not describe Sodom, nor find anything valuable in Sodom to keep Lot’s wife rooted to it. In fact, Engels does not mention the word ‘Sodom’ in any of the poems. She extracts Lot’s wife from Sodom to address the ethics of spectatorship, whereas Akhmatova, Martínez Rivas, Diaz, and Chase keep her tied to Sodom to address destruction of homelands and loss of love and community. Akhmatova’s famous poem on Lot’s wife parallels her own struggles with staying in her homeland in the wake of violent revolutions. Martínez Rivas finds a moment of rebellion for Lot’s wife that she would stay back for a Sodomite lover. Diaz imagines Lot’s wife as unapologetically and naturally part of the people and the land. Chase’s erotic novel offers a protest to the notion that a single theological story is the only story worth telling amid the multiplicity of human experience. Reading Genesis 19 alongside these authors provides three insights into the text. First, the authors here enter the mythological space created by Lot’s wife to play with the ongoing process of identity formation. Thus, they do not give her a name. Rather than judge the biblical authors for not providing her a name due to patriarchal dismissal, the authors subvert her namelessness. Her namelessness compliments her role as a symbolic standing witness. She is a monument onto which the names of displaced communities and peoples throughout history can be placed. Second, they carry ‘a refusal to posit a solution to any problems raised’.46 Genesis 19 certainly raises questions for Lot’s wife when it comes to her relationship with her husband and his cultural and religious assumptions. Her husband offered the bodies of her two daughters to an angry mob to save his male guests (Gen 19:8). That act backfires and the angels have to pull Lot back into the house (19:10). The men betrothed to marry her daughters dismissed Lot when he warned them to flee; such disrespect does not cast his household in a respectable light (19:14). Lot lingered long enough in Sodom that the angels had to ‘seize him and his wife’ (19:16). Lot argues with the angels about fleeing to the hills and instead asks to go to a little city known as Zoar (19:19–20). Lot disappears from the Abrahamic saga after Genesis 19. In contrast, his wife holds the lasting presence by fixing herself on the edge of her homeland. The authors in this chapter pick up on these nuances and frustrations, asking questions regarding why she should even be loyal to Lot and his god. A related third and final insight is a theological one. While biblical exegetes might be tempted to resolve the theological tension and conclude that Lot’s wife’s disobeyed God by looking back at the destruction, the authors discussed in this chapter flip the question and ask why God would require destruction to gain obedience. They challenge dominant cultural and theological narratives through Lot’s wife’s choice to turn. For instance, Martínez Rivas has her choose love over obedience. Diaz portrays her dismissing the angels as representative of an imperial colonising religion. These challenges shed light on how Lot’s wife might be a

Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness  55 lasting hero of Genesis 19 for her choice to defy orders and stay behind to witness tragedy of loss, suffering, and displacement. Notes 1 All biblical quotes come from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise stated. 2 I argue that readers memorialise Lot’s wife, even though a salt formation will eventually dissolve. Low, ‘Lot’s Wife’, pp. 79–105. 3 Sellers, Myth, p. 8. 4 Akhmatova, ‘Lot’s Wife’, translated by Tony Brinkley. Lot’s designation as ‘just’ can also mean ‘righteous’ (праведник). 5 Brinkley: ‘Глаза ее больше смотреть не могли; И сделалось тело прозрачною солью’. Alternatively, Stanley Kunitz’s translation does not mention a grave, rather, ‘a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound…’ (p. 77). Kelly, History, p. 209, points out that ‘grow into’ the ground is appropriate as well. 6 Brinkley: ‘Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд’. 7 Kunitz, p. 77: ‘Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд’. 8 Reeder, Anna, p. 161. 9 Kelly, History, pp. 123–4. 10 Reeder, Anna, pp. 1–48. 11 Reeder, Anna, p. 46. 12 Kelly, History, p. 217. See also Gamburg, ‘Biblical’, p. 128. 13 Henderson-Merrygold, ‘Lot’s Wife’, p. 1237. 14 Kelly, History, p. 218. 15 Kunitz, Poems, p. 75. 16 Reeder, Anna, p. 163. 17 Kaufman, Snake, p. 70. 18 Koplowitz-Breier, ‘Looking’, p. 2. For a similar case with Israeli poet Asher Reich and her poem on Lot’s wife, see Jacobson’s discussion, pp. 183–186. 19 Kaufman, Snake, p. 70. 20 Kaufman, Snake, p. 70. 21 Koplowitz-Breier, ‘Looking’, p. 9. 22 ‘Lot’s Wife, Now a Pillar of Salt, Addresses Her Audience’, Bacharach, Shake, p. 43. Before this poem, Bacharach includes another poem that imagines Lot’s wife in a camp for displaced persons, waiting ‘for the Red Cross packets of unleavened bread, for the child soldiers leaning on their AK-47’s’ (41). 23 Grisby, ‘Two Poems’, accessed online at https://lat​inam​eric​anli​tera​turetoday​.org​/2018​ /02​/two​-poems​-carlos​-martinez​-rivas/: ‘¿Quién fue ese amante que burló al bueno de Lot?’. 24 Grisby: ‘Porque el ojo de la mujer reconoce a su rey aun cuando las naciones tiemblen y los cielos lluevan fuego’. 25 White, ‘Entrevista’, p. 97. 26 Grisby: ‘La sospechosamente siempreverdeante Söar con el blanco y senil Lot, y las dos chicas núbiles, delicadas y puercas’. 27 White, ‘Entrevista’, p. 98: ¿Qué es lo único profundo para una mujer? Un amante. No es una bolsa de joyas. Translated by the author. 28 Grisby, ‘Two Poems’: ‘Aristas de expresión genuina. Y no la riente colina aderezada por los ángeles’. 29 White, ‘Entrevista’, p. 93. 30 White, ‘Entrevista’, p. 95. 31 Blandón, ‘Revolución’, pp. 116–17. 32 White, ‘Entrevista’, p. 102.

56  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 33 White, ‘Entrevista’, p. 101: ‘Yo no tengo ideas, ni ideales, ni ideología. Yo sólo tengo pensamientos. Pensamientos que se marchitan como las flores’. Translation by the author. 34 Grisby, ‘Two Poems’: ‘Ser el ganador es una vulgaridad’. 35 Grisby: ‘Si todos somos, nadie es más grande. Si la victoria de uno es la derrota de otro, toda victoria es, en algún lugar,un fraude’. 36 Blandón, ‘Revolución’, pp. 118–119. 37 Matejka, ‘Introduction’, accessed online: https://poetrysociety​.org​/poems​-essays​/new​ -american​-poets​/natalie​-diaz​-selected​-by​-adrian​-matejka 38 Fairy tales and myths provide ways to challenge the rigid conventions traditionally imposed on women. See Sellers, Myth, p. 34. 39 Harjo, Light, p. 2. 40 Diaz, ‘Statement’, https://poetrysociety​.org​/poems​-essays​/new​-american​-poets​/natalie​ -diaz​-selected​-by​-adrian​-matejka 41 Kunitz, Poems, p. 77: ‘На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла,На окна пустые высокого дома, Где милому мужу детей родила’. 42 Mudge, Companion, p. 1. 43 Carr, Erotic, p. 8. 44 Engel, Things, p. 107. 45 Engel, Things, p. 109. 46 Sellers, Myth, p. 131.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Bacharach, Deborah. Shake & Tremor. West Hartford, CT: Grayson Books, 2021. Brinkley, Tony, trans. Anna Akhmatova: ‘Lot’s Wife’. Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts & Culture 1.2 (Fall/Winter 2009–2010): http://www​.cerisepress​.com​/01​/02​/lots​ -wife​#english Chase, Rosalind. Lot’s Wife: An Erotic Retelling. Middletown, DE: Harebell Press, 2019. Diaz, Natalie. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012. Diaz, Natalie. ‘Statement’. New American Poets: Natalie Diaz. Poetry Society of America, Brooklyn: NY (2013): https://poetrysociety​.org​/poems​-essays​/new​-american​-poets​/ nataliediaz​-selected​-by​-adrian​-matejka. Engel, Laura Eve. Things That Go. Portland, OR: Octopus Books, 2019. Grisby, Carlos F., trans. ‘Two Poems by Carlos Martínez Rivas’. Latin American Literature Today (February 2018): https://lat​inam​eric​anli​tera​turetoday​.org​/2018​/02​/two​-poems​ -carlos​-martinez​-rivas/ Harjo, Joy (ed.). When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. Jacobson, David C. (ed.) Does David Still Play Before You? Israeli Poetry and the Bible. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Kaufman, Margaret. Snake at the Wrist. San Francisco, CA: Sixteen Rivers Press, 2002. Kunitz, Stanley, trans. Poems of Akhmatova. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Martínez Rivas, Carlos. Poesía Reunida. Managua: Anama Ediciones Centroamericanas, 2007. Pasos, Joaquín. Canto de Guerra De Las Cosas. New York, NY: Vanishing Rotating Triangle, 1972.

Lot’s Wife as Sodom’s Witness  57 Secondary Sources Blandón, Erick. ‘Revolución Y Sujetos Micropolíticos en Carlos Martínez Rivas’. Revista Iberamericana 79.242 (January-March 2013), pp. 111–129. Carr, David. The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. Gamburg, Haim. ‘The Biblical Protagonists in the Verse of Anna Akhmatova: An Expression of Feminine Identification’. Russian Language Journal 31.109 (Spring 1977), pp. 125–134. Henderson-Merrygold, Jo. ‘Lot’s Wife, Literature’. EBR 16. Boston: De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 1235–1238. Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820–1992. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994. Koplowitz-Breier, Anat. ‘Looking Back, or Re-visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets on “Lot’s Wife”’. CLCWEb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23.3 (2021): https://doi​.org​/10​.7771​/1481–4374.3523 Low, Katherine. ‘Lot’s Wife is Still Standing: In Search of the Pillar of Salt’. JBR 8.1 (2021), pp. 79–105: https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/jbr​-2020​-0010 Matejka, Adrian. ‘Introduction to the Work of Natalie Diaz’. New American Poets: Natalie Diaz. Poetry Society of America, Brooklyn: NY (2013): https://poetrysociety​.org​/poems essay​s/new​-amer​ican-​poets​/nata​lie-d​iaz-s​elect​ed-by​-adri​an-ma​tejka​. Mudge, Bradford K. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Reeder, Roberta. Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Sellers, Susan. Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001. White, Steven F. ‘Entrevista con Carlos Martínez Rivas’. Cuad Hispanoam. n. 469–470 (July August, 1989), pp. 94–104.

4

Sad and Beautiful Sarah’s Laughter in Itzik Manger and Other Modern Poetry Zohar Hadromi-Allouche

4.1 Introduction Genesis 18 famously relates that, upon hearing the divine annunciation of her forthcoming pregnancy, barren old Sarah laughed. However, in reception history Sarah is not heard laughing. This chapter explores the meanings, characterisation, and application of Sarah’s laughter, and its absence. Starting with the biblical portrayal of Sarah, the chapter briefly surveys her depiction in early reception history as background for discussing the laughter of Sarah within the broader context of her reconstruction in modern poetry. The discussion of Sarah’s laughter within this broader context reveals the ancient origins of its removal. It furthermore accentuates possible motivations for the choices made by modern poets and translators concerning which stories to tell about Sarah and how to portray her within them. 4.2 Sarah in the Bible Sarah is present in the Bible throughout Genesis 11–25 (the ‘Abraham medley’), where she is often mentioned explicitly. Her main traits are barrenness, beauty, and dominance. Already her first appearance in Gen 11:29–30 depicts her as barren. This is her main characteristic, which is present even in her absence, for example, through God’s promise to Abraham of multiple descendants (Gen 13, 15, 17). Also the references to Abraham’s 318 ‘trained men born in his house’ (14:14); the fertility of Abraham’s brother (22:20–23); and that of Abraham himself in his second marriage (25:1–4), are striking contrasts to Sarah’s barrenness. Her attempt to have a son through Hagar (Gen 16) fails and destabilises the power balance in the household. Instead, Hagar, like Abraham, is promised multiple progenies (16:10). When God blesses Sarah too and promises Abraham a child from her, Abraham laughs (vv. 16–17). A complementing trait is the outstanding beauty of Sarah, which led two kings to take her into their palaces and only return her to Abraham following divine intervention (Gen 12 and 20). Notably, the second incident took place after Genesis 17 and 18, which describe Sarah as aged 90 (17:17), old, and post-menopause (18:11). Mentions of Sarah’s beauty cease after she gives birth (Gen 21).1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003280347-5

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  59 The dominance of Sarah is evident through her name Saray/Sarah (Gen 11–17, 17–25, respectively) and its Hebrew root, ‫ש–ר–ר‬, which indicates dominance.2 Scholars thus argue that biblical Sarah is the embodiment of a goddess, a princess, or a priestess figure.3 This dominance is manifest through her actions, too. Nehama Leibowitz notes the proactive approach of Sarah in Genesis 16, versus Abraham’s passivity.4 In Genesis 21 too, Sarah initiates, acts, and instructs; and divine and human beings comply. Genesis 23 implies that following the binding (Gen 22), Sarah left Abraham.5 Finally, Gen 17:16 presents Sarah as foremother of nations and kings, and Isa 51:2 presents her as the progenitor of the nation, alongside its father, Abraham. Despite her barrenness, she emerges as a proactive, procreative matriarch. 4.2.1 Sarah’s Laughter

The above traits are brought together and transformed via Sarah’s laughter in Genesis 18. Genesis 18 is the central link in the Abraham medley in Genesis (being the eighth of fifteen chapters). It describes (18:1–16) the visit of divine visitors (vv. 1–8), who announced to Sarah and Abraham Sarah’s forthcoming motherhood at the age of ninety. Sarah responded with an internal laughter, and God challenged her over it (vv. 10–15). The stated purpose of the visit (v. 9: ‘Where is Sarah your wife?’); the eight references to Sarah in verses 10–15; and the four references to her laughter in these six verses, indicate the centrality of Sarah in this episode and the importance of her laughter, which signifies her fertility, agency, and sexuality. In the Hebrew Bible laughter often relates to sex, particularly illicit or abnormal.6 In Genesis 18, the laughter of Sarah relates to a 90-year-old woman giving birth and might also relate to the sexual act which impregnates her. Genesis 18 supports this suggestion with its heavily sexual vocabulary; high compatibility with the sexual-hospitality model; parallels to ancient myths about gods who provide childless humans with offspring; and remnants of Sarah’s mythic past as a female deity, priestess queen, and royal genealogy—in particular, her identification as a ‘laughing goddess’.7 Moreover, Rivka Miriam argues that Sarah is barren because, and as long as, she does not know how to laugh.8 Melila Melner-Eshed notes that in Indian culture a great laughter is used to prevent sterility and drought. With its time- and realityinversion qualities, the laughter allows the transition of Sarah from sterility to fertility and opens up her womb.9 The laughter is thus indicative of Sarah’s fertility rather than her barrenness; agency rather than dependency on God; and sexuality rather than untouchable beauty. It transforms barren old Sarah into a mother and progenitor of a nation, and represents, as David Fishelov observes, ‘a latent rebellious element’.10 4.3 Sarah in Early Reception History This ‘complex but coherent’ portrayal of Sarah in the Masoretic Text is much changed in reception history, which tends to present Sarah as a one-dimensional character.11

60  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Second Temple period sources often marginalise Sarah. To make her suit the values and needs of their time, authors reconstructed her character and removed her dominance, agency, and sexuality. The Septuagint (3rd c. bce) portrays Sarah as almost entirely passive.12 This portrayal is evident in early Christianity, too. In the New Testament, 1 Peter 3:6 presents Sarah as a model of female subservience. Similarly, argues David Eastman, the Syriac Homily of Pseudo-Ephrem (5th century ce) portrays Sarah as ‘a model of female piety’ and subservience. By ignoring the proactive aspects of Sarah (e.g., Gen 16 and 21), these tendentious depictions use her as a means ‘to reinforce patriarchal control over female itinerancy and cultic practice’.13 Likewise, argues Joseph McDonald, when the Genesis Apocryphon of the Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 2nd century bce) emphasises the beauty of Sarah, this is intended to demonstrate how Abraham could use her for his benefit.14 Early Christian sources also use Sarah as a polemic argument. In Gal 4:21–31, Sarah and Hagar represent, respectively, the new and old covenants. Similarly, the Glossa Ordinaria on Genesis preserves views of Sarah and Hagar as respective emblems of faith and disobedience.15 A more composite portrayal of Sarah is found in Philo (45 ce) and Josephus (100 ce). Both depict Sarah as a royal figure and an exemplary virtuous model.16 Yet Maren Niehoff shows that Philo, while highly sympathetic of Sarah in his literal exegesis, denies in his allegorical exegesis all her feminine traits. Philo, who identifies femininity with the inferior, material world and a threat to male rationality, allegorises Sarah as a virtue of ‘a distinctly masculine figure’, similar to ‘Pythagorean Athena’—to the extent that he allegorises her ‘out of existence’ and assimilates her with Abraham.17 Josephus depicts Sarah as similar to Abraham. Unlike some midrashim and modern poets, he maintains her biblical ownership of the maid Hagar.18 However, he also diminishes Sarah’s initiative.19 Niehoff demonstrates that in his retelling in Jewish Antiquities Josephus is unsympathetic of Sarah, silences her, limits her role, and ‘strips Sarah of her personality’.20 When portraying her as mastering her emotions in Genesis 16, Josephus aims at presenting Sarah as compliant with Roman values.21 In order to turn her into a suitable model of the values and needs of his time, he ignores her anger at Abraham in Gen 16:5. Reception history up to the fifth century thus tends to portray Sarah as passive and uses her character as a means to promote the values of the period, religious polemics, and patriarchal control over and potential use of women. Circa the fourth and fifth centuries, however, there emerges an intriguingly dominant Sarah. Justin Rogers notes that Didymus (4th century ce) offers a reading of Genesis 16 that considers Hagar’s child as belonging to Sarah, not Abraham.22 Genesis Rabbah (5th century ce), in particular, deals extensively with Sarah. It depicts her as a model of Jewish faith and practice, close to God, who accepts her prayer, and as an equal partner to Abraham in spiritual work, instructing him. She conspicuously shares traits with Ancient Near-Eastern goddesses. Yet this exceptional depiction of Sarah, argues Rami Schwartz, emerged as a response to Origen’s appropriation of Sarah as ‘the spiritual mother of Christianity’ and a prefiguration of the Virgin Mary.23 Around that period also Midrash Tanhuma (c.500–c.800 ce)

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  61 and Babylonian Talmud (albeit less sympathetic of Sarah than Genesis Rabbah) recognise Sarah as a prophet.24 Yet over time this positive approach changed again. Susanne Plietzsch indicates that already the Babylonian Talmud reduces Sarah’s predominance, independence of Abraham, and divine-like traits. Yalqut Shimoni (11th–14th century ce) depicts Sarah as an emblem of feminine obedience and unreliability.25 4.3.1 Reception and Laughter

A negative and negating approach is ever more evident concerning the laughter of Sarah as one moves further away from Genesis. Indications of its removal are found already in the Hebrew Bible, argues Robert Alter. Alter observes the repetitious annunciation of Sarah’s motherhood in Genesis 17 and 18, with both Abraham and Sarah, respectively, laughing in response. However, whereas in Genesis 17 God does not rebuke Abraham for his explicit laughter and disbelief, in Genesis 18 God challenges Sarah over her internal laughter. Alter notes further that such annunciations are usually made to the mother, not the father as in Genesis 17.26 Alter concludes that this chapter, which transfers to Abraham the annunciation, laughter, and agency, is a later adaptation of Genesis 18, the purpose of which is to exclude Sarah, and put Abraham in the centre.27 The reception history of Sarah’s laughter follows a similar line. For example, the Book of Jubilees (2nd century bce), Onkelos (2nd century ce), and Rashi (11th century ce) explain the laughter of Abraham as expressing joy and that of Sarah as mockery.28 Philo, who allegorises Sarah as virtue and wisdom, interprets Gen 18:11 as indicating the removal of Sarah’s feminine traits and sexuality, following which God dropped ‘the seed of happiness’ into ‘virgin soil’. That is, laughter is only valid as long as its origin is masculine.29 Christian interpreters, too, perceived the laughter of Sarah as expressing disbelief. It was in an attempt to overcome this negative aspect of Sarah, argues Fishelov, that Christian writers associated her with Mary.30 Prudentus (348–after 405 ce) tried to exonerate Sarah by regarding her laughter as ‘a momentary lapse in belief that was later remedied, so that she became a symbol of faith’.31 4.4 Sarah in Modern Poetry Whereas pre-modern reception history demonstrates a mixed approach towards Sarah, modern poetry of the 20th century is mostly unified in its removal and transference of Sarah’s beneficial traits, particularly her laughter.32 Although the Bible also describes Sarah as beautiful, laughing, and proactive (e.g., Gen 13, 16, 18, 20, 21), modern poetry (in particular Israeli, but also Jewish-American and PalestinianAmerican) portrays Sarah as hard, old, ugly, and anything but laughing. Modern poems, many of which discuss Sarah in a national, religious, or political context, situate her mainly in the unhappy contexts of the binding of Isaac (Gen 22), her relations with Hagar (Gen 16 and 21), or her own death (Gen 25). Her relationship with Abraham, too, is perceived negatively. Even poems that relate specifically to

62  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the happier contexts of the annunciation, or birth of Isaac, depict Sarah as crying, angry, anxious, and complaining. Sarah’s laughter, which incorporates her agency, sexuality, and transition from barrenness to fertility, is systematically removed—in line with earlier reception history and possibly influenced by it. 4.4.1 Sarah and the Binding

The biblical narrative of the binding (Gen 22) conspicuously omits Sarah. This gap has been addressed already in Midrash.33 Poetry, too, aims to fill this gap. The binding—a central motif in Jewish consciousness and history, is present in Jewish and Israeli culture in a ‘thick, inescapable’ manner, and remains continuously valid. Modern poems often associate this theme with death in a military context, and the question of parental acceptance that children become thus sacrificed.34 Sarah in Israeli art and poetry thus represents motherly bereavement, and sacrifice for the sake of patriarchal order.35 In ‘‫‘( ’ חיי שרה‬Sarah’s life’), Benjamin Galai uses Sarah as a metaphor of a mother whose son died in war. Due to the binding of Isaac, she became a living dead woman long before she died.36 By linking the binding to Sarah’s death, Galai echoes earlier commentaries, such as Midrash and Rashi.37 He uniquely perceives Sarah as the true victim of the binding.38 A bereaved mother, she at once stops laughing concretely and symbolically (sexually), as per social expectations from bereaved mothers and wives. T. Carmi in ‘‫‘( ’מעשי אבות‬Deeds of the Forefathers’) blames Abraham (not God) for the binding and depicts Sarah as having grown old (‫ )בלתה‬overnight.39 The root ‫ ב–ל–י‬connotes and contrasts with Gen 18:12, where it is used to describe Sarah’s old age before the annunciation. Whereas in Genesis 18 the divine annunciation resulted in Sarah’s laughter and rejuvenation, in the poem news of the binding turned her old and sad. Other poems often interpret the absence of Sarah from Genesis 21 as evidence of her blameworthy passivity over the binding.40 Israel Pinkas combines in ‘‫’צפירה‬ (‘Siren’) the laughter of Sarah with the binding: ‘No but you did laugh.41 Although there was nothing funny there […] for the sun set, darkness fell, and the donkey and young men42 were already ready…’.43 He thus accuses Sarah of an inappropriate laughter. In ‘‫‘( ’עקדת שרה‬The Binding of Sarah’) by Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, Sarah is the speaker. Here, too, biblical vocabulary serves to link annunciation with binding. Laughter appears three times, but it is never Sarah’s. In stanza 1 Sarah bleeds into the dough (Gen 18:6) the ‘laughter which God has made’ (Gen 21:6);44 in stanza 2 she kneads a ‘laughing mouth’; and in stanza 6 she is urged to hasten (Gen 18:6) ‫שיצחק‬, an ambivalent word meaning both ‘so that he laughs’ and ‘so that Isaac [lives]’. But Sarah is late, the altar (Gen 22:9) is set, and the child/dough is burnt (stanza 5). Her laughter is replaced with guilt. Also Shin Shifra in ‘‫‘( ’יצחק‬Isaac’) posits Sara as the speaker, and a metaphor of a bereaved mother who is responsible for the death of Isaac: ‘I bound; and I slaughtered’. The ram never came, and ‘God did not look with favour [‫ ;]שעה‬he laughed’. In Gen 4:5 it is Cain’s offering

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  63 to which God ‘did not ‫’שעה‬. Its use here identifies Sarah the mother with Cain the murderer. The laughter belongs to God.45 A unique perspective of the binding episode is presented by Yehuda Amichai. In ‘‫‘( ’תנ״ך תנ״ך איתך איתך ומדרשים אחרים‬Bible Bible with you with you and other midrashim’), section 6, Amichai declares that Abraham had three sons: ‫ישמעאל‬ (Ishmael, literally: God shall hear), ‫( יצחק‬Isaac, literally: He shall laugh), and ‫יבכה‬ (Yivke, literally: He shall cry). Hagar saved Yishmael; the angel saved Isaac; but no one saved little Yivke, who was sacrificed (rather than the ram) on Mount Moriah. Following the binding, Yishmael heard of God no more; Isaac never laughed; and ‘Sarah only laughed once and no more’.46 Amichai is critical of Sarah, who, unlike Hagar, did not save her son. The poem moreover implies that Sarah’s single laughter occurred not during the annunciation, but after the binding of little Yivke. The laughter thus becomes repugnant. 4.4.2 Sarah and Hagar

A ‘withered and forgotten’ Sarah is contrasted with a ‘young, beautiful’ Hagar in Aharon Amir’s poem ‘‫‘( ’הגר‬Hagar’), and Yaakov Cahan’s story ‘‫’גאון הדר‬ (‘Glorious Splendour’).47 The aforementioned midrash criticises marrying ‘a wife for pleasure’ over the ‘wife for procreation’.48 Sarah, however, was both old and barren. The literary contrast between her and Hagar might, therefore, serve to authorise the male gaze and provide a tacit licence for men to follow Abraham and take a second, younger wife.49 Other poems turn both women into polemic argumentations in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. In Mohjah Kahf’s ‘Hagar Writes a Cathartic Letter to Sarah as an Exercise Suggested by her Therapist’ the speaker is Hagar, who approaches Sarah in a positive manner, highlighting their shared destiny.50 Yet she depicts Sarah’s lips as ‘always thin when you disapprove’ (stanzas 1, 3). By recalling Sarah’s laughter as something of the long-lost past, when they first met in Egypt (Gen 12), Hagar dismisses Sarah’s laughter in Genesis 18 (stanza 3). Rather, she encourages Sarah to free herself of Abraham, loosen up, and ‘Laugh, Sarah, laugh’ (stanza 4). Kahf is unique in that although she depicts Sarah’s laughter as lost, she nevertheless regards it as positive and desirable. Lynn Gottlieb in ‘Achti’ (‘My Sister’) as well speaks of a shared destiny.51 In this poem, which aims to reconstruct the beginnings narrative of Judaism and Islam, Sarah apologises to Hagar for her sin of betraying the feminist sisterhood and cooperation with patriarchal oppression.52 The etymology of her name is changed from ‫‘( ש–ר–ר‬to rule’) into ‫‘( ש–ו–ר‬to see’), but Sarah is blind to divine presence (stanza 3). The binding makes her realises her mistake, and admit to having been used ‘to steal your womb, Claim your child, As if I owned your body and your labor [sic]’ (stanza 2). Sarah is thus objectified and victimised, stripped of her agency, status, property, royal descent, and prophethood, as Gottlieb transforms her into a political-social argument. A single poem which supports Sarah in her decision to expel Ishmael and Hagar is Yitzhaq Lamdan’s ‘‫‘( ’עין אם‬A mother’s Eye’).53 Lamdan praises Sarah for her

64  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry insight that ‘something bad is contained in the laughter of the maid’s son; horror darkens from his mouth when laughter expands it’ (stanza 1); ‘For the laughter shall reveal the Egyptian’s son’s teeth; like a knife drawn from a sheath’ (stanza 4). While sympathetic of Sarah, this 1930 poem, which again considers the characters as representative of the Israeli-Arab conflict, ascribes the laughter to Ishmael. Sarah thus emerges in most poems about the binding or Hagar as a negative and/or weakened character. Such poems, which tend to turn Sarah into a political and national argument, portray her as being old, sad, and guilty. Her laughter is mostly transferred to another time or person, and, where it is not, it is deemed inappropriate. 4.4.3 Sarah and Abraham

Poems that depict the relationship between Sarah and Abraham tend to be more personal. Many of these were written by women. Nonetheless, such poems, too, portray Sarah negatively. Delis, in ‘‫‘( ’מבטה של שרה אל אישּה�ּ אברהם‬Sarah’s look at her man Abraham’), although emphatic of Sarah, describes her as crying at the vitality of Hagar.54 Miki Preminger uses the image ‘As hard as Sarah towards Abraham’; and Dahlia Ravikovitch in ‘‫‘( ’אשה מקנאת‬A jealous woman’) relates that these feelings of envy and anger made Sarah lose her joy and beauty (stanza 1).55 This loss is evident as Sarah is washed with tears and her hair turns white (stanza 6), whereas ‘the beloved of Abraham’ (stanza 7) thrive: Hagar is blooming (stanza 7) and Ishmael flourishes (stanza 5). Ravikovitch moreover blames Sarah, who initiated the expulsion of Hagar and her son, for the continuous wars ever since (stanza 4). Other poems posit Sarah in a subservient position. Whereas Genesis 16 clearly states that Hagar belonged to Sarah, Reuven Avinoam depicts Abraham as ‘her husband and master’.56 Also Michal Snunit depicts Hagar as the maid of Abraham, whom Sarah sends to him. Shenhar thus considers Sarah as having masculine authority; yet the ending of this sentence reveals her weak position: ‘sending to you your maid Hagar, […so that] she will get the humiliations […]’.57 4.4.4 Sarah and the Annunciation

Even in poems that focus on Genesis 18 and the annunciation, laughter is turned into tears. B. Mordechai’s ‘‫‘( ’שרה‬Sarah’) retells Genesis 18. Its main motif is sorrow.58 When Sarah hears (Gen 18:10) the annunciation, her eyes are filled with tears (stanza 1). She wonders about its late timing, now that the sun of her life is about to set ‘so fast with my little joy’ (stanza 3). Her son’s destiny involves a wail (stanza 4); and, once the messenger leaves, a burning pain remains (stanza 5). Poems that do refer to Sarah’s laughter in the context of the annunciation are Delmore Schwartz’s ‘Sarah’ and ‘Abraham’; and Yehuda Amichai’s ‘‫‘( ’לשון אהבה ותה על שקדים קלויים‬Love talk and tea over roasted almonds’).59 Section 14 in Amichai’s poem begins by stating that ‘any loving woman is like Our Mother Sarah’, who lurks behind the door while the men inside discuss her body and future.

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  65 This depiction of Sarah as passive and lacking agency is followed by her description as laughing ‘into her hollow palm’. While associating the palm with the womb, and laughter with fertility, the hollow palm imagery also indicates that Sarah lacks substance. Amichai goes on to compare her laughter with the ‘light cough of a cunning vixen’. This image echoes Delmore Schwartz’ poem ‘Sarah’, where Sarah denies having laughed by saying ‘I did not laugh. It was a cough. I was coughing. Only hyenas laugh’. Its twin-poem, ‘Abraham’, depicts the annunciation as making Sarah ‘Burst out laughing hysterically’; and Sarah herself as possessing ‘sour irony’. Rather than agency, the laughter represents sourness and hysteria. Despite maintaining the laughter within the context of the annunciation, these poems present Sarah and her laughter negatively. The above discussion demonstrates that, similar to older sources of reception history, modern poetry, too, tends to downplay the character of Sarah. The tone towards her is often critical and negative. Her beauty, laughter, and agency (e.g., Gen 12, 16, 18, 20, 21) are ignored. Instead, she is portrayed as old, grumpy, and passive. Her laughter, in particular, is either transformed into tears, or transferred to another character or era. These poetic choices, which flatten Sarah as a character, are often part of turning her into an argument of some sort. 4.5 Sarah in the Poetry of Itzik Manger Remarkable in modern poetry about Sarah are the poems of Itzik Manger. Unlike most other poets, Manger discusses Sarah in a variety of contexts and represents her as a round character. Itzik Manger (1901–1969) was one of the most prolific and popular poets of modern times, and the most popular of modern (that is, post-1863) Yiddish poets. Born in Czernowitz in Austria-Hungary, he moved to Warsaw in 1928, where he gained meteoric success, and his poetic concerts were attended by thousands. By 1938 he had published ten books. During the Holocaust he managed a narrow escape from Nazi France to the UK and settled in the 1950s in New York. In 1967 he moved to Israel, where he was well received, despite the language barrier. His work has been widely translated into Hebrew, as well as performed on stage.60 In his poetry, Manger engages extensively with biblical themes. His 1935 Chumash Poems are dedicated to the stories of Genesis. Uniquely, these poems create a new form of Midrash, an exegetical interpretation of the biblical events which provides the readers with a ‘synchronic Bible’: for Manger, Abraham was ‘a Polish Jew’.61 His biblical poems, which are considered the apex of his work, reenact the biblical stories in the context of the Shtetl: the Yiddish-speaking, Jewish small town of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe.62 Its residents become Manger’s protagonists. This relocation of the Bible enabled Manger to create a poetic interpretation of the Bible by way of ‘dialectics of innovation through continuity’, and create a ‘poetic, dream- and Chagall-like midrash rabba’.63 This approach, combined with Manger’s view of the Bible as containing ‘treasures of humour’, provoked harsh criticism over his disrespect for the patriarchs and matriarchs.64 Yet Manger, unlike

66  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry some other modern Yiddish poets, did not mock the biblical characters. Rather, he sought to reconcile with the older Yiddish tradition, which influence is evident in his poems. The fore-mothers and -fathers thus emerge from his poems as multifaceted characters.65 An evident example is the composite character of Sarah in Manger’s Chumash Poems. Manger’s Sarah enacts in multiple circumstances. His poem ‘‫‘( ’שרה זינגט יצחקלען א שלאפליד‬Sarah is singing a lullaby for little Isaac’) shows a soft, motherly side of Sarah, which is absent from the Bible.66 Manger voices Sarah’s emotions in ‘‫‘( ’די מוטער שרה האט א שווער געמיט‬Mother Sarah has a heavy mood’), too.67 Sarah overhears (alluding to Gen 18:10) a conversation between her own tear and the shadow on the floor (alluding to the midrash about Satan informing Sarah of the binding) and learns that Abraham intends to sacrifice Isaac (stanzas 5, 6).68 Whereas in Genesis 18 overhearing made her laugh, here she is upset. Refusing to believe, Sarah proactively ‘throws the shadow and the tear down all the stairs’ and naively prays to God (the perpetrator…) to watch over her little child (stanzas 8, 9). Manger thus holds Sarah as aware of the binding, yet seeking help in the wrong place. In ‘‫‘( ’אברהם שיקט אליעזרן זוכן פאר יצחקן א ווייב‬Abraham Sends Eliezer to Seek a Wife for Isaac’) Sarah appears to Abraham in a vision and congratulates him.69 In contrast to these generally positive representations, Manger, who constantly stands with those hurt and deserted, is also critical of Sarah, particularly concerning her treatment of Hagar.70 In ‘‫‘( ’הגרס לעצטע נאכט ביי אברהמען‬Hagar’s last night at Abraham’s’), Hagar refers to Sarah as a Gabba’īt, a deaconess-like administrative religious role—before identifying the presumably pious Sarah as initiating Hagar’s expulsion.71 Indeed, in ‘‫‘( ’אברהם אבינו שארפט דאס מעסער‬Abraham Our Father sharpens the knife’),72 Sarah smiles at the thought that it has been over a month since Hagar and Ishmael left (stanza 3). Here Sarah’s laughter is present, yet its portrayal is both negative and ironic. Manger at once transfers the laughter from the context of the birth annunciation (Gen 18) to that of the deportation of Hagar and Ishmael (Gen 21) and links both with the binding (Gen 22). The deportation anticipates the binding: while Sarah smiles, Abraham prepares the knife for the binding (stanza 6, 7, 9). This linkage is also suggested by biblical commentators, and poets such as Shin Shalom.73 Manger, however, adds into this context the laughter of Sarah. This laughter expresses at once Sarah’s malicious joy, almost justifying the binding; and her weakness, as she is unaware of the forthcoming binding. The binding itself is a major, reoccurring theme in Manger’s poetry.74 Despite her biblical absence from this narrative, Manger represents Sarah in this context through a presence of absence. In ‘‫‘( ’אברהם אבינו פארט מיט יצחקן צו דער עקידה‬Abraham our Father Travels with Isaac to the Binding’) Manger has the [weeping] willows run back home to see whether Sarah cries over the empty crib (stanza 4).75 The discussion below examines Sarah and her laughter in three Chumash Poems that discuss the annunciation episode (Gen 18), as well as related episodes that occurred before and after it: Sarah’s craving for a son (Gen 16); and the birth party (Gen 21). An analysis of these poems is indicative of Sarah’s traits, and particularly her laughter, in Manger’s poetry.

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  67 4.5.1 Abraham and Sarah

The poem ‘‫‘( ’אברהם און שרה‬Abraham and Sarah’) conveys a dialogue between Sarah and Abraham. Its timing is sometime between Genesis 16, where Sarah gives her handmaid Hagar to Abraham in the (failed) hope to become a mother through her, and the future divine annunciation to Sarah in Genesis 18.76 Despite its dialogical nature, the structure of the poem is unbalanced, with Sarah approaching Abraham in stanzas 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and Abraham responding in stanzas 2, 5, 9. This structure of 1–1, 2–1, 3–1 reflects the growing anxiety of Sarah in face of Abraham’s consistent indifference, which echoes his renouncing Sarah’s complaint in Gen 16:5. The poem begins with Sarah’s explicit question: ‘Avreml, when shall we have a son’?77 Sarah then notes their old age, by which other women would have been pregnant eighteen times (stanza 1). She complains that hearing Abraham and Hagar nightly makes her heart sob, for ‘Hagar is but your maid, whereas I am your truly wedded wife’ (stanza 3). Sarah describes how she imagines the stars in the window as the soul of their child, wandering each night between rain, shadow, and wind (stanza 4). Contrarily, in stanzas 6 and 7 she describes Hagar’s son, whom she sees playing with the sun in the sand. Upon caressing his head, Sarah’s hand becomes strangely sad; whereas taking him in her lap and seeing him smile, clever and good, make her eyes wet and large, and her blood strangely saddened. Sarah concludes (stanza 8) by repeating her words, and question, from stanza 1. But all this to no avail. Abraham responds in an unchanged manner throughout the poem (stanzas 2, 5, 9), despite Sarah’s gradually enhanced emotional exposure: ‘Our Father Abraham silently smiles, smoke blowing from his pipe; “Confidence, my wife, for should God will, even a broom can shoot”’. Unlike Genesis 16, which emphasises the tension between Sarah and Hagar, Manger’s poem focuses on Sarah’s relationship with Abraham and her craving for a son. Craving, notes Hofer, is a constant, reoccurring motif in Manger’s poetry.78 Here it allows Manger’s Sarah to share her dreams, tenderness, spirituality, and empathy towards little Ishmael. In the poem she refers to him as ‘the son of Hagar’, rather than ‘son of the maid’, as in the Bible. Moreover, Manger interprets Sarah’s complaint and anger at Abraham (Gen 16:5) as expressions of her jealousy of Abraham’s relationship with Hagar. He thus portrays Sarah as complaining (stanza 1), sobbing (stanza 3), sad (stanza 6), crying and sad (stanza 7); yet she fondly approaches Abraham as ‘Avreml’, whereas Abraham calls her ‘my wife’. Alongside his empathic approach to Sarah, Manger nevertheless transfers her laughter and its symbolism (agency, sexuality) to the smiling Abraham. This transference echoes Genesis 16, where the failed initiative of Sarah results in procreation for Abraham only, and her loss of status. It is further evident through the phallic symbols that the poem ascribes to Abraham: the smoking pipe (a phallic symbol consumed by Abraham alone) and shooting broom. The broom metaphor connotes a Hasidic tale of a broom that was mistakenly believed to have shot an animal.79 Fichler notes that this phrase originated in the image of a broom which, should God

68  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry so will, might bloom; a mispronunciation turned blooming into shooting.80 Manger clearly refers to the latter.81 He turns the ‘broom that is just a broom’ into a phallic symbol by creating an expectation that it will indeed shoot. Similar to Chagall in his paintings, Manger here applies a literal interpretation to a Yiddish cultural image.82 The reversed metaphor at once introduces another layer of humour into Abraham’s character; and criticises Sarah for her agency and initiative that imply a lack of faith: ‘Confidence, my wife, for should God will, even a broom can shoot’. The transference of agency and laughter are further extended in the poem through the characters of Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac. The soul of Sarah’s son, Yitzhaq, whose name means ‘he shall laugh’, wanders in the dark, between rain, shadow, and wind (stanza 4), whereas the son of Hagar—who is also the son of Abraham—plays with the sun (stanza 6) and smiles (stanza 7). Alongside the laughter, Manger also transfers to Abraham ownership of Hagar, whom Genesis 16 regards as Sarah’s maid.83 Manger thus continues the line of reception history and, similar to other modern poems, he removes laughter, sexuality, and agency from Sarah. He also criticises Sarah for her initiative in Genesis 16 to actively seek fertility and status, an initiative that achieved the opposite result. However, Manger also portrays Sarah as a round character, with a spectrum of emotions, thoughts, and actions. He portrays her as a jealous, nagging wife, but also sympathises with her.84 Intriguingly, this complexity is less present in adaptations of his poems. Manger’s poems have been widely translated into Hebrew, and to a lesser extent into other languages. They have also been set to music, and performed on stage.85 These adaptations still more remove from Sarah her laughter, and narrow her character into a whining old lady. Hayim Hefer translated ‘Abraham and Sarah’ into Hebrew for the purpose of a stage performance of Manger’s Chumash Poems. His translation depicts Sarah as asking ‘when will I have a son’ (stanza 1), whereas in Manger’s poem she asks ‘when will we have a son’.86 In stanza 3 Hefer depicts her as crying at night, but omits the cause: her overhearing (Abraham and Hagar). In stanza 4, which describes the wandering soul of Isaac, the translation makes the soul weep. Stanza 7 of the poem, where Sarah takes little Ishmael in her lap, is completely omitted.87 Stage and audio adaptations of this poem furthermore transform Sarah from an object into a subject, by turning her laughter into a laugh at her. In 1969, ‘Abraham and Sarah’ was included in what came to be known as the first Hebrew Rock album (Arik Einstein, ‘Poozy’, 1969). Following the passing away of Manger, Arik Einstein, a renown Israeli singer, asked the musician, Misha Segal, to set to music ‘Abraham and Sarah’ in the Hebrew translation of Benjamin Tene.88 Einstein proposed to sing it in a Beatles’ style, and Segal’s tune and musical arrangement are heavily influenced by Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, itself a cheerful song about a couple who builds a family and lives ‘happy ever after in the marketplace’.89 The ending of Sarah and Abraham’s relationship, in light of Genesis 22 and 23 (binding of Isaac and death of Sarah), is not so happy; nor is Manger’s poem, which leaves the dialogue unresolved. Yet the artistic choices in Einstein’s song make it highly cheerful.90 They focus on the couple’s relationship and play down Sarah’s craving for a child. Occasionally, Einstein

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  69 sings Sarah’s role in an exaggerated pronunciation. The background voices are of men laughing and imitating a woman crying. These give the poem a light, humorous atmosphere; yet these laughs are not by Sarah, but at her. She is thus excluded, mocked, and turned into an object. This poem was also set to music by Dov Seltzer and performed by Nechama Lifshitz and Shraga Friedman, as part of a 1970 theatre musical in Yiddish, based on Manger’s ‫( חומש לידער‬Chumash Poems).91 Watching this video, one needs not understand Yiddish to realise that, here, Sarah is literally wailing. Abraham, too, seems upset. The laughter is transferred from Sarah to the humorous choir of the three divine visitors (Gen 18). These visitors are not present in Genesis 16, nor in this dialogical poem (Manger includes them in other poems—see below). They were added into this scene by the director, Shmuel Bunim, in an artistic choice that introduces an ambivalent comic relief into Abraham and Sarah’s marital crisis. Their inclusion, which links between the annunciation (Gen 18) and Sarah’s complaint to Abraham (Gen 16), at once necessitates Sarah’s laughter and removes it from her. On the one hand, they suggest a more sympathetic interpretation of Sarah, whose plea the divine visitors join through their gestures; particularly when she slowly sings about seeing Hagar’s son. On the other hand, they ridicule Sarah by interfering in her lines with their gestures. Their recurring, iconic single line, always follows hers, at once stressing her words and mocking them: ‘Yam ti didi dam yam tam tam, yam ti didi dam—tam tam!’. A year later, in 1971, Bunim directed the Hebrew version of this musical, using the translation by Hefer. Here, Bunim used casting, too, as a humorous means. Clearly, this musical is strongly rooted in the Yiddish heritage of Eastern Europe, as is evident from its original language, context, tune, and production. However, for the roles of Sarah and Abraham of the Shtetl, Bunim cast Shoshanah Damari and Arye Elyas, who performed it, respectively, with their distinctive Yemenite and Iraqi accents.92 Aware of the grotesque situation, Elias’s tone is amused; almost laughing. Here, too, the artistic choices add humour to Manger’s poem, but the laugh is at Sarah, not by her. 4.5.2 The Three Angels Come to Our Father Abraham

The divine visitors play a central role in another Chumash poem, which is a dialectical retelling of Gen 18:1–15. The poem ‘‫‘( ’די דריי מלאכים קומען צו אברהם אבינו‬The three angels come to Our Father Abraham’) opens with Abraham sitting at the threshold, carving a date from a bone, while Sarah’s wailing comes from the dark alcove.93 As Abraham silences her—‘Be quiet, beast’—he sees, as darkness falls, three Turks approaching silently. Abraham invites them in, noting that Sarah has prepared rice in milk and caraway bread. The visitors discuss diverse matters. As they mention the bringing up of children, Sarah, who stands and listens, shoots out in a wail, telling Abraham that with no (son to say) Qadish (over their souls after they die), their bones will rot. The visitors then announce to Abraham that within a year he will father his son. The visitors leave, and joy flutters through the window.

70  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry The dialectical relationship with Genesis 18 is evident as the entire episode is set in a dark atmosphere. Rather than high noon (Gen 18:1), it takes place during sunset (stanza 3). Sarah, who in Genesis is characterised as laughing, here cries continuously. In three of the nine stanzas she moans, cries, wails, and laments (1, 2, 7). In stanza 7 she refers to the desired, as yet unborn, son as he who would say Qadish—that is, pray over the souls of his dead parents. The divine visitors, who Manger depicts as Turks, constitute part of his ‘rewriting of the sacred’, where ‘an aestheticised Turkey, rather than the Holy Land, is […] a site of Jewish and romantic yearnings’.94 The food, which in Gen 18:5–8 is prepared by Abraham, is here handled by Sarah. This poetic re-narration at once makes the biblical text compatible with traditional patriarchal gender roles, as well as solving the exegetical difficulty of the bread that is mentioned (Gen 18:6), but never served. Also the replacement of calf meat for rice solves an exegetical problem, as dairy and meat served together (Gen 18:8) contradict Halacha. This calf, however, is present through stanza 1. Manger uses a wordplay when he depicts Abraham as carving a date from a bone (Bayn), rather than wood (Boym), while Sarah wails in the dark alcove. This bone concurrently substitutes the slaughtered calf (Gen 18:7) and anticipates the binding of Isaac (Gen 22), the son who is meant to pray over his dead parents. Moreover, by calling Sarah a ‘Beast’, Abraham is not only extremely vulgar (and resonates with the critique of Manger for his treatment of the matriarchs and patriarchs), but also links her to Isaac-the calf.95 The imagery of a fruit originating in a bone rather than a tree is so disturbing that Hefer in his translation of this poem wrote instead that Abraham was carving wood in the shape of a hand.96 Whatever joy appears later in the poem, this bone casts its shadow over it. Whereas Gen 18:11 is explicit that childless Abraham and Sarah were old, Manger anticipates their parenthood through naming them ‘Our Father Abraham’ and ‘Mother Sarah’ (stanza 1). However, in contrast to the biblical annunciation and promise in Gen 18:9–14 where Sarah shall have a son within one year, Manger transfers both the annunciation and the son to Abraham. In stanza 8 the visitors promise Abraham to ‘be father to your son’ within a year. The poem and Bible alike depict Sarah as hearing the visitors and responding to them. But whereas the biblical Sarah responds with an internal laughter (Gen 18:12), Manger has Sarah shoot out in a wail (stanza 7). Both the poem and the biblical story conclude on a positive note. The reference to Sarah’s blue dress and golden broch, Manger’s main poetic colours, expresses a craving for perfection, blue sky and golden sunsets.97 However, stanza 9 in the poem remains ambiguous, as the Yiddish is inconclusive concerning whether the joy that passes through the window as the visitors leave flutters into the house, or flutters away, out the window. Either way, unlike the internal laughter of Sarah in Gen 18:12, here the joy is external to her. 4.5.3 Abraham Our Father Hosts a Sholem-Zokher

In the poem ‘‫‘( ’אברהם אבינו פראוועט א שלום זכר‬Abraham Our Father Hosts a SholemZokher’), Manger describes Abraham as hosting a Jewish-Ashkenazi customary celebration that is held at home on the first Friday following the birth of a son.

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  71 It begins with the birth amulets shining from the walls, as ten Jews wearing s htreimel98 hats clap their hands and sing the melody of the Turkish Rabbi (stanza 1–2). As they eat boiled chickpeas and drink beer, they congratulate Abraham over the miraculous birth (stanza 3). Abraham smiles and hears little Isaac whine beneath the sheets (stanza 4). Abraham closes his eyes and sees the three Turks appear, clinging to the cry of the child (stanza 5). As they kiss the mezuzah99 and congratulate Abraham, they remind him of the night when Sarah laughed at them (stanzas 6–7). He wants to invite them to join the party, but they disappear, and Abraham opens his eyes and wonders where the visitors are (stanzas 8–9). The party guests congratulate him again and invite him to join their song (stanza 10); ten Jews in shtreimel hats clap their hands, and the birth amulets shine from the walls (stanza 11). In this poem, Manger alludes to Gen 21:8, which discusses the weaning celebration of (probably) two-year old Isaac and transforms it into a Sholem-Zokher, which takes places shortly after the birth. Whereas in Genesis 21 Sarah, too, is present, the Sholem-Zokher only involves the father. Abraham hosts friends and relatives, while Sarah is still in the lying-in chamber.100 Multiple cultural references situate the poem in the Hassidic culture and popular beliefs of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish towns. The birth amulets, which would include qabbalistic and psalmist quotations; the ten dancing and singing men (constituting a minyan: a Jewish prayer quorum), who probably were part of vigils that continue until the circumcision ceremony; as well as the mezuzah (stanza 6): these are all means of protection against evil spirits. The round chickpeas are traditional Sholem-Zokher food. They are often explained as symbolic of the life cycle, and sometimes linked with the divine promise to Abraham to multiply his seed (Gen 22:17).101 However, boiled chickpeas are traditionally served also during the Jewish ‫( שבעה‬seven days of mourning following the death of a family member). It is thus plausible that in the context of a baby’s birth chickpeas are served as ‘an edible amulet’: a means to mislead the evil spirits by pretending that this is not a birth party but a mourning gathering.102 The multiple anti-demonic protections in this poem is indicative of Manger’s irony: for the real danger to Isaac was God himself (Gen 22). By turning the weaning party into an all-male Sholem-Zokher, Manger removes Sarah from this episode. Whereas in Genesis 21 she has a dominant role concerning the birth and its implications (vv. 1–12), in the poem Sarah is completely absent. In particular, she is not there to protect Isaac from Ishmael’s laughter (Gen 21:9). Instead, in this poem, too, Manger depicts Isaac ironically: ‘he who shall laugh’ is whining (stanzas 4, 5). The joy and laughter are transformed from Sarah and Isaac (her proxy) to smiling Abraham (stanza 4) and the dancing men, with their prayer minyan, mezuzah kissing, scriptural amulets, and boiled chickpeas. The omission of Sarah and her protection of Isaac (Gen 21) links the birth party with the binding (Gen 22), where, too, Sarah is absent and Isaac unprotected. Sarah’s presence of absence is materialised in this poem through the vision of Abraham—similar to his vision of Sarah in the poem ‘Abraham Sends Eliezer to Seek a Wife for Isaac’. Here, however, the vision summons the divine visitors,

72  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry and Sarah is only present through their words. As in ‘The Three Angels Come to Our Father Abraham’, the visitors are identified as Turks.103 Through the reference to Sarah as laughing at the visitors on the annunciation night (Stanza 7), Manger mixes scripture and poetry, as only in his poem the visitors arrive by night, and only in the Genesis 18 annunciation Sarah laughs: in the poem she cries throughout. The depiction of her laughter is critical: Sarah laughs in mockery, whereas Abraham smiles out of joy (stanza 4). Abraham smiles at present, while Sarah’s laughter belongs to the past (as in Mohjah Kahf’s poem)—if at all, seeing that in Manger’s retelling of the annunciation Sarah never laughed. The validity of her laughter is thus questioned both essentially and ontologically; moreover, the visitors dismiss this laughter, since following the birth, Sarah’s ridiculing laughter became ridiculous. Intriguingly, Hefer, who adapted and translated this poem for the 1970–1971 musical productions, included stanza 7 which refers to Sarah’s laughter, but omitted stanza 5, which mentions the vision.104 4.6 Summary The laughter of Sarah is a significant motif in the annunciation story in Genesis 18, which concludes in the birth of Isaac in Genesis 21. It brings together Sarah’s definitive characteristics: barrenness, sexuality, and agency, in a way that transforms Sarah from a barren old woman into a national matriarch, and indicates her fertility, vitality, authority, supreme origins, and mythic past. Yet reception history, probably starting already within the Bible, tends to remove these traits, and particularly the laughter, from Sarah. This removal is evident across genres, eras, regions, and cultural and religious backgrounds. Modern poetry, in particular, represents Sarah mostly as crying, angry, and complaining— anything but laughing. It moreover takes away from Sarah her beauty and sexuality, too. Despite the explicit indication in Genesis 20 that these continued beyond the events in Genesis 16 and 18, poets choose to depict Sarah as a grumpy old lady and transfer her laughter, sexuality, beauty, and agency to Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael. The removal of Sarah’s laughter is part of a tendency to flatten and deny her biblical complexity. This tendency derives from a combination of factors. Reception history, which plays down Sarah’s laughter, her mythic past, status, agency, and sexuality, turns Sarah into a subservient figure, dominated by patriarchal conventions. Ancient and modern writers alike reconstruct Sarah in order to subjugate her to norms, values, and community interests of their period, be these religious, social, or national struggles. Modern poetry, too, often treats Sarah as a one-dimensional motif, representation, or polemic argument, and views Sarah with a patriarchal gaze. This includes poets who in the process of making a feminist claim through Sarah, turn her into a polemic argument, strip her of her agency and dominance, and turn her from a proactive, round character, into a poster. Itzik Manger stands out among modern poets in his depiction of Sarah. Manger portrays Sarah as a round, complete, and composite character. Fishelov observes

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  73 that ‘Manger’s most important move seems to lie in giving Sarah a voice’.105 His circumventing representation of her portrays concurrently as a woman craving for a child; and aching after the betrayal of her partner. She gently caresses the head of her partner’s son from the other woman; and sees through, and rejoices at, the expulsion of that child and his mother. A soft, caring mother, she sings her son a lullaby. Naively, she refuses to believe that her partner would harm him; a ‘helicopter’ yiddishe mama, long after she dies she keeps watching over Isaac via visiting Abraham’s visions. This holistic view distinguishes Manger from other poets, such as Carmi, Delis, Lamdan, and Galai, all of whom show sympathy towards Sarah, but mostly depict her from a single perspective, particularly when considering her a polemic argument (Lamdan) or national representation (Galai). Manger’s unique treatment of Sarah derives from several causes. First, unlike many other poets, Manger portrays Sarah in multiple poems and diverse contexts. This allows him to portray Sarah emphatically, critically, or both, according to the relevant context. Secondly, Manger discusses Sarah within the framework of her biblical stories. Despite having situated these stories in the Shtetl, Manger identified the biblical characters with the Jews of rural Poland, whom he knew. He thus viewed Sarah, Hagar, and his other characters as persons, and treated them with humanity and compassion. From among other poets, only Schwartz, who gives Sarah a voice; Delis, who like Manger identifies and maintains the craving of Sarah; and Ravikovitch who, despite criticising Sarah, identifies her fears and challenges, consider Sarah as human.106 Thirdly, Manger, whose poems identify with the hurt and deserted, demonstrates grace and sympathy towards lonely, barren Sarah; but concurrently stresses the grave injustice done to Hagar.107 Intriguingly, despite his intricate portrayal of Sarah, Manger, too, in line with old and new reception history, denies the laughter of Sarah, rejects it, or transfers it to other characters. Here, again, a combination of factors seems to be involved: Manger’s emphasis on the grim theme of the binding; his identification with Hagar; and influence of older Yiddish tradition on his poetry. Unlike the dominant patriarchal tendency in reception history to silence Sarah, Manger gives Sarah a voice. Yet his rejection of her laughter nevertheless supports this tendency of turning Sarah into a model of feminine subservience. This tendency is so prominent, that it emerges even in feminist-motivated poems; as well as audio and stage adaptations of Manger’s poems. The enhanced humour and laughs in such adaptations are at Sarah, not by her, turning Sarah from a subject into an object. Sarah, a strong, dominant character, did not make a good bargain by entering the Bible. Downgraded from a (fertility-?) goddess, queen, or princess into a mere human, she is then further downgraded from the progenitor of the nation and its foremother into a supporting role. Genesis 17 transfers her scene, lines, and laughter to Abraham. In reception history, other than a brief, elevating interval around the fifth century, Sarah is by and large downgraded further. From a person of selfagency and property, whose instructions God and her partner follow, she is turned into a model of feminine obedience. From a desired, laughing, biblical sex symbol, she becomes an ugly, whining old woman. This image continues into modern poetry, too. Itzik Manger stands out in his poetic depiction of Sarah. Yet here, too,

74  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the laughter of Sarah has been lost in the thicket of his poetry. Indeed, ‘Sad and beautiful, says the poet, are the ways of the Bible’.108 Notes 1 Intriguingly, the linkage between barrenness and beauty is indicated in Genesis Rabbah 32:3, which critically interprets Lemech’s two wives (Gen 4) as representing a practice of marrying a (neglected) wife for procreation, alongside an overly adorned wife for sexual pleasure. 2 Yavin, Queen, p. 60. 3 Graves, Goddess, pp. 160–161, 277; Yavin, Queen, p. 60. Philo and Josephus depict Sarah as a princess or queen (Tervanotko and Uusimäki, ‘Princess’, pp. 115, 133). For her parallel to goddesses in rabbinic texts, see Plietzsch, ‘Supernatural’, p. 241, n. 2. 4 Leibowitz, Genesis, p. 110. 5 Genesis 22, which relates the binding episode, does not mention Sarah; however, it indicates (v. 19) that after the binding Abraham settled in Beer Sheba. Genesis 23:2 relates that Sarah died in Hebron, and Abraham came there to mourn her—indicating that Abraham was not present when Sarah died. 6 Hadromi-Allouche, ‘Sarah’s Divine Child’. See also Melner-Eshed, ‘Sarah’s Sterility’, p. 270. In Gen 21:1–13, which describes the birth and weaning of Isaac, the root ‫צ–ח–ק‬ appears nine times. 7 Graves, Goddess, p. 161. Sexual vocabulary in Gen 18 includes for example, ‫רחצו רגליכם‬, ‫אהל‬, ‫ותצחק‬, ‫עדנה‬, and ‫( חמאה‬vv. 4, 8, 9, 12), see Hadromi-Allouche, ‘Sarah’s Divine Child’. For the sexual-hospitality model, see Gur-Klein, Hospitality. Gen 18 is highly compatible with this model (intriguingly, Gur-Klein does not discuss it). Scholars identify parallels between Gen 18 and several myths, e.g., Aqhat (Alter, Genesis, p. 77) and Orion (Zakovitch, Samson, p. 74). 8 Miriam, ‘Laughter’, p. 138, adds further that contrarily Michal, who despises David’s laughter and dance, is cursed with barrenness (2 Sam 6:16, 21, 23). 9 Melner-Eshed, ‘Sarah’s Sterility’, p. 270. 10 Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 11 McDonald, Sarah, p. 32. 12 McDonald, Sarah, p. 94. 13 Eastman, ‘Matriarch’, pp. 241–242. 14 Machiela, Genesis Apocryphon, p. 140; McDonald, Sarah, p. 174. 15 This twelfth-century source nevertheless reflects the views of the Church Fathers to a large extent. See Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 16 Tervanotko and Uusima�ki, ‘Princess’, pp. 115, 133. 17 Niehoff, ‘Mother’, pp. 431–434, 442. 18 Josephus, Antiquities, Gen 16; Shenhar, Love and Hate, p. 23; Sections 3.3 and 4.1 of this chapter. 19 Tervanotko and Uusima�ki, ‘Princess’, p. 126. 20 Niehoff, ‘Mother’, pp. 416–418, 444. 21 Tervanotko and Uusima�ki, ‘Princess’, p. 116. 22 Rogers, ‘Didymus’, pp. 58–59 (n. 8), 62. 23 Genesis Rabbah 47:1; Zohar, ‘Sarah’s Voice’, p. 82; Schwartz, ‘Virgin’, p. 65; Tervanotko and Uusimäki, ‘Princess’, p. 120; Plietzsch, ‘Supernatural’, p 259. 24 Tanhuma, Exod 1; Babylonian Talmud, Meg 14a. 25 Yalqut Shimoni, Gen, remez 24; Plietzsch, ‘Supernatural’, pp. 259–260. 26 Compare, e.g., with Manoah’s wife in Judg 13. 27 Alter, Genesis, p. 77.

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  75 28 Jubilees, 15, 17; Rashi, gloss on Gen 18:16; Onkelos, Gen 18:12 (‫—וחיכת‬a ridiculing laughter)—compare with his translation of the same verb in Gen 17:17, where it applies to Abraham (‫—וחדי‬a joyful laughter). 29 Tervanotko and Uusimäki, ‘Princess’, pp. 436–437. 30 E.g., Ambrose, Commentarius, 9; cited by Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 31 Prudentus, Psychomachia, 45–49; cited by Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 32 This tendency has changed to an extent in 21st century Jewish-American poetry. Anat Koplowitz-Brier, in her ongoing project on Jewish-American Women’s Midrashic Poetry, discusses five poems from the early 21st century (2000–2007), where Sarah’s laughter expresses disbelief as well as joy and agency. Rather than deny her laughter, Sarah embraces it. She laughs aloud and uses laughter against patriarchal society. However, Koplowitz-Brier also discusses two other such poems (dating from 1995 and 2000) that associate laughter with negative emotions, or transfer it from Sarah to other characters, who use it against her. Such negative depictions of Sarah’s laughter are typical of 20th century poetry concerning Sarah, as the current chapter demonstrates. Koplowitz-Breier‫‏‬, ‘Why did Sarah Laugh?’. 33 Pirke deRabbi Eliezer 32. 34 Shaked, Forever, vol. 2, pp. 109, 159; Kartun-Blum, Sword, p. 14. 35 Ofrat, ‘Mother Figure’, p. 156. 36 Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, p. 412. 37 Pirke deRabbi Eliezer 32; Leviticus Rabbah, 20:2; Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 38 Kartun-Blum, Sword, p. 118. 39 Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, pp. 87–88. 40 E.g., Aleph Eli (Eli Alon), ‘‫‘( ’בראשית היה הסיפור הזה‬In the beginning there was this story’) and Yehudit Kafri, ‘‫‘( ’בראשיות‬In the beginnings’). Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, pp. 107–108, 415. 41 Gen 18:15. 42 Gen 22:3. 43 Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, pp. 111–112, stanza 5. 44 Appelbaum, ‘‫’עקדת שרה‬, pp. 12–13. Ackerman, ‘Dough’, pp. 3–18, shows that kneading dough was part of the worship of the Queen of Heaven, an Ancient Near-Eastern goddess of fertility. Rashi, gloss on Gen 18:6, holds that the bakes which Abraham instructs Sarah to prepare in Gen 18:6 are not mentioned again in the chapter since, while kneading, Sarah regained her menstruation, making the dough defiled. Rashi thus explains Gen 18:11 (Sarah having reached menopause) while denying the implication that God impregnated her. Elad-Appelbaum echoes this exegesis. 45 Shin Shifra, Woman Song, section B3, poem 9. 46 Amichai, Open Closed Open, p. 30. 47 Zmora, Women, pp. 288–290, 304–305; Shenhar, Love and Hate, pp. 47, 50–51. 48 See note 1 above. 49 I am grateful to Siobhán Garrigan for suggesting this perspective. 50 Kahf, ‘Waters of Hajar’, pp. 31–32. 51 The word achti is a mispronunciation by the poet of the Arabic word uḥtī (‘my sister’). See Gottlieb, She Who ‘Dwells’ Within, p. 89. 52 Zion, ‘Reconciling’. 53 Unlike Shenhar’s claim that no poem justifies Sarah in this context. Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, p. 410; Shenhar, Love and Hate, p. 49. 54 Delis, ‘‫’מבטה של שרה אל אישּה�ּ אברהם‬, p. 185. 55 Preminger, ‘‫’קשה כמו שרה לאברהם‬, p. 18; Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, pp. 413–414. 56 Shenhar, Love and Hate, p. 49. 57 Shenhar, Love and Hate, p. 37; Snunit, Lips, p. 41. 58 Zmora, Women, p. 428.

76  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 59 Schwartz, ‘Two Poems’; Amichai, Open Closed Open, p. 98. 60 Sadan, ‘The poet’, pp. ‫ו–טז‬. Only a few poems by Manger were translated into English, until in 2002 Leonard Wolf published a selection of Manger’s work translated into English. See Wolf, ‘Poetry’, p. 42; Wolf, The World According to Itzik, p. xiii. 61 Bashan, ‘Poet’, p. 31. 62 Wolf, ‘Poetry’, p. 22. 63 Gamzu, ‘Desecration’, pp. 91–92, 95. 64 Bashan, ‘Poet’, p. 31. Religious leaders and literary critiques alike accused Manger of desecration following the publication of the Chumash Poems (1935), and into the 1950s. Manger replied that not criticising biblical characters, and sanctifying them, would be desecration. See further Gamzu, ‘Desecration’, pp. 93–95; Spiegelblatt, Corners, pp. 217–219. 65 Shmeruk, ‘Problem’, pp. 347–354; Wolf, ‘Poetry’, p. 92’; Gamzu, ‘Desecration’, p. 92. 66 Manger, Midrash, pp. 27–28. 67 Manger, Midrash, pp. 35–36. 68 Tanhuma, Gen vayera 23. 69 Manger, Midrash, pp. 41–42. 70 Wolf, ‘Poetry’, p. 23. 71 Manger, Midrash, pp. 29–30. 72 Manger, Midrash, pp. 37–38. 73 E.g., Rashi, on Gen 23:2. Shin Shalom in ‘‫‘( ’פתח האהל‬The Tent’s Entrance’) has Sarah suddenly understand this connection after Abraham and Isaac leave for the mountain. See further Shaked, Forever, vol. 1, p 411. 74 Rabinovitch, ‘Comments’, p. 299. 75 Manger identified with Isaac in person, due to his own name. He first wrote on the binding in his first book ‫( שטערן אויפ׳ן דאך‬Stars on the Roof), 1929. He famously personalised it in his 1937 poem, ‘‫‘( ’עקידת איציק‬The Binding of Itzik’). See further Weichert, ‘Bindings’, pp. 24–26. 76 Manger, Midrash, pp. 21–22. 77 I am grateful to Rabbi Zalman Lent for reading this poem with me in the original Yiddish. All citations from this poem in the chapter follow Rabbi Lent’s translation. 78 Hofer, Manger, pp. 16, 74–78. 79 Rakocz, Serafim, part 5, p. 52; Fichler, ‘Shooting and Blooming’. 80 Tanhuma (Gen vayera 15) interprets the divine statement in Ezek 17:24 regarding making a dry tree bloom as referring to Sarah’s pregnancy. 81 Following Manger this expression became prevalent in modern Hebrew, and derived from it is the ambivalent ‘any broom shoots’, which means both a time of plenitude, when everything succeeds (used, e.g., for the stock market), and a difficult time, when anything goes due to distress. 82 Manger, ‘Folklore’, p. 15, explains, for example, that Chagall’s painting of the lovers floating in the air, their heads turned backwards, is not fantastic, but reflects the popular Yiddish proverb about lovers as turning each other’s heads and being unaware of the world around them. 83 Hagar is depicted as Abraham’s maid only in Gen 21, in the context of her and Ishmael’s expulsion. 84 Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 85 As early as 1941, Avraham Shlonski published a Hebrew translation of Manger’s ‫נאענטע‬ ‫( גשטאלטן‬Close Figures). Successful productions of Manger’s Songs of the Megillah were performed in Israel (1965) and Broadway (1968–69). 86 Manger, Chumash, p. 20; Manger, Midrash, pp. 21–22. 87 Manger, Chumash, p. 20. 88 Manger, Lid, p. 101. 89 https://youtu.be/_J9NpHKrKMw

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  77 90 https://youtu.be/AJ1QWQ7OLKk 91 www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQXEzDxTsYw&feature=youtu.be This production was later staged again by the Israeli Yiddishpiel theatre in 1990 and 1995. 92 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFtC1xZSODc&feature=youtu.be 93 Manger, Midrash, pp. 23–24. I am grateful to Rabbi Zalman Lent for reading this poem with me in the original Yiddish. All citations from this poem in the chapter follow Rabbi Lent’s translation. 94 Kronfeld and Adler Peckerar, ‘Tongue-Twisted’. 95 Whereas Manger’s main knowledge of the Bible was not direct, but through informal, Yiddish adaptations, this term demonstrates his poignant intuition; scholars identify Sarah with a fertility cow goddess. See further Yavin, Queen, pp. 96–97; Shmeruk, ‘Problem’, p. 347. 96 Manger, ‘Chumash’, p. 30. 97 Hofer, Manger, p. 16. 98 A fur hat worn by Hassidic Ashkenazi Jews on festive days. 99 A small case fixed to the doorpost, containing a parchment with Deut 6:4–9 and 11:13–21. 100 Levin, ‘Sholem’. 101 Levin, ‘Sholem’. The Yiddish pronunciation of the words ‘I shall multiply the’ (‫ארבה את‬, Gen 22:17) and ‘chickpeas’ (‫ )ארבעס‬is identical. Shinan, Sidur, p. 4. 102 Similarly, the breaking of a glass in Jewish weddings originates in an anti-demonic make-believe, which was later ‘converted’ into a commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. 103 So is the Rabbi, whose melody the invitees sing. This again indicates to Manger’s use of Turkey as the ‘site of Jewish and romantic yearnings’. See Kronfeld and Adler Peckerar ‘Tongue-Twisted’. 104 Manger, Chumash, p. 32. Similarly, Hefer replaces the chickpeas (stanza 3) with liver, perhaps perceiving it a more typical Ashkenazi food than chickpeas (which modern Hebrew knows as Hummus, and associates with the middle-eastern dish). Tene translates here a ‘boiled legume’, again blurring the chickpeas. 105 Fishelov, ‘Biblical Women’, section 4. 106 Shaked, Forever, vol. 2, p. 518, considers this poem as providing a psychological justification for Sarah’s treatment of Hagar. However, the negative depictions of Sarah in the poem, alongside those which highlight her worry about her son, clarify that understanding one’s motives differs from justifying one’s actions. 107 Biletzky, Manger, p. 166. 108 ‫’אברהם אבינו פארט מיט יצחקן צו דער עקידה׳‬, in Manger, Midrash, p. 39.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Amichai, Yehuda. Open Closed Open. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998 [Hebrew]. Appelbaum, Tamar. ‘‫[ עקדת שרה‬The Binding of Sarah]’. Mashiv HaRuach 24 (2007), pp. 12–13. Bashan, Raphael. ‘‫ רפאל בשן משוחח עם איציק מאנגר‬:‫[ המשורר אשר בא מן הכחול‬The Poet who Came from the Blue: Raphael Bashan Talks to Itzik Manger]’. Maariv. 30 July 1965, pp. 30–31. Beatles. ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’. https://youtu.be/AJ1QWQ7OLKk Goldman, Moshe, trans. The Book of Jubilees. In Avraham Kahana et al. (eds), ‫הספרים‬ ‫[ החיצוניים‬The Apocrypha]. Tel Aviv: Mekorot, 1937. Vol. 1, pp. ‫[ רט"ז–שי"ג‬Hebrew]. Damari, Shoshanah, and Arye Elyas. ‘Abraham and Sarah’ [Hebrew]. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=PFtC1xZSODc&feature=youtu.be

78  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Delis El’aluf-Maimon. ‘‫[ מבטה של שרה אל אישּה�ּ אברהם‬Sarah’s Look at her Man Abraham]’. In Ben Zion Yohoshua et al. (eds), Yerushalayim: A Literary Anthology. Vol. 23–24 (2007). Jerusalem: Hebrew Writers Association in Israel, p. 85. [Hebrew]. Einstein, Arik. ‘Abraham and Sarah’ [Hebrew]. https://youtu.be/AJ1QWQ7OLKk Fichler, Ben-Zion. ‘‫[ יורים ופורחים‬Shooting and Blooming]’. Haaretz, 26.09.2004. https://www .haaretz .co .il /literature /2004 -09 -26 /ty -article /0000017f -e93e -da9b -a1ff -ed7f35e60000 Gottlieb, Lynn. She Who ‘Dwells’ Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism. San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 1995. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities. Abraham Shalit, trans. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2002 [1955]. 2nd edition [Hebrew]. Kahf, Mohja. ‘The Waters of Hajar and other Poems’. The Muslim World 91 (2001), pp. 31–44 [31–32]. Lifshitz, Nechama, and Shraga Friedman. Abraham and Sarah [Yiddish] https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=UQXEzDxTsYw&feature=youtu.be Machiela, Daniel A. The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon: A New Text and Translation with Introduction and Special Treatment of Columns 13–17. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 79. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Manger, Itzik. ‘Between Folklore and Literature’. Iton77 219 (May 1998), pp. 14–15 [Hebrew; no translator]. Manger, Itzik. Lid un Ballade. Benjamin Tene, trans. Dov Sadan, intro. Tel Aviv: Al Hamishmar, 1969. 2nd edition [Hebrew]. Manger, Itzik. The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose. Selected and edited by Leonard Wolf. David G. Roskies and Leonard Wolf, intro. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Manger, Itzik. ‫[ דמויות קרובות‬Close Figures/‫] נאענטע גשטאלטן‬. Avraham Shlonki, trans. Merhavia: Sifriyat Poalim, Hakibbutz Ha'artzi–Hashomer Hatzair, 1941 [Hebrew; original Yiddish publication: Warsaw, 1938]. Manger, Itzik. ‫[ מדרש איציק‬Midrash Itzik]. A selection edited by Chone Shmeruk. Dov Sadan and Chone Shmeruk, intro. Jerusalem: Magnes, The Hebrew University, 1984. 3rd edition [Yiddish and Hebrew]. Manger, Itzik. ‫[ שירי החומש‬Chumash Poems]. Hayim Hefer, trans. and transition sentences. Dov Seltzer, tunes. Meir Noy, ed. and preparation for print. Tel Aviv: ‘Im Ein Ani Li Mi Li’, 1998. Manger, Itzik. ‫ ליד און באלאדע‬:‫[ דעמערונג אין שפיגל‬Twilight in the Mirror: Poems and Ballads]. Warsaw: Biblioṭeḳ fun Yidishn pen-ḳlub, 1937. Midrash Tanhuma. Shlomo Baber, ed. Jerusalem: Orzel, 1964 [Hebrew]. Miriam, Rivka. ‘‫[ צחוק עשה לי אלהים‬God has Made a Laugh for Me]’. In Ruth Ravizki (ed.), Reading Genesis: Israeli Women Write about Femininity in the Book of Genesis. Tel Aviv: Miskal—Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Hemed Books, 2002, pp. 138–139 [Hebrew]. Pirke deRabbi Eliezer. Shmuel b. Rabbi Eliezer Lurya, ed. Jerusalem: 1970 [Warsaw: 1852]. Preminger, Miki. ‘‫[ קשה כמו שרה לאברהם‬As Hard as Sarah towards Abraham]’. Pseifas, April 1988 (2), p. 18 [Hebrew]. Rabbi Shimon the Darshan. Yalkut Shimoni on the Pentateuch. Yizhak Shiloni, ed. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1973 [Hebrew]. Rakocz, Yoetz Kim Kadish. ‫[ שיח שרפי קודש‬Discourse of Holy Serafim]. Lodz: Mesora, 1931 [Hebrew]. Shaked, Malka. I’ll Play you Forever: The Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry—An Anthology. Two volumes. Tel Aviv: Miskal—Yedioth Ahronoth books and Hemed Books, 2005 [Hebrew]. Schwartsz, Delmore. ‘Two Poems’. Commentary (March 1959). https://www.commentary .org/articles/delmore-schwartz/two-poems-9/

Sarah’s Laughter in Manger and other Poetry  79 Shin Shifra. ‫[ שיר אשה‬Woman Song]. Tel Aviv: Mahbarot leSafrut, 1962 [Hebrew]. Snunit, Michal. ‫[ שפתיים לעשות דבש‬Lips to Make Honey]. Merhavia, Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1973 [Hebrew]. Secondary Sources Ackerman, Susan. ‘And the Women Knead Dough’. In Susan Ackerman (ed.), Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022, pp. 3–18. Alter, Robert. Genesis: Translation and Commentary. New York, NY and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. Biletzky, I. Ch. Itzik Manger: A Critical Essay. Tel Aviv: Israel Book, 1976 [Hebrew]. Eastman, David L. ‘The Matriarch as Model: Sarah, the Cult of the Saints, and Social Control in a Syriac Homily of Pseudo-Ephrem’. Journal of Early Christian Studies 21.2 (2013), pp. 241–259. Fishelov, David. ‘Biblical Women in World and Hebrew Literature’. Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 31 December 1999. Jewish Women's Archive. Viewed on February 3, 2024. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/biblical-women-in-world-and -hebrew-literature Gamzu, Yossi. ‘‫ שירתו המקראית של מאנגר‬:‫[ שירי החומש או חילול החומש‬Chumash Poems or Chumash Desecration: Manger’s Biblical Poetry]’. Zehut 5 (1988), pp. 90–95. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980 [1948]. Gur-Klein, Thalia. Sexual Hospitality in the Hebrew Bible: Patronymic, Metronymic, Legitimate and Illegitimate Relations. Durham: Equinox, 2013. Hadromi-Allouche, ‘Sarah’s Divine Child: Reading Gen 18 via Qurʾan 11:71’. In Zohar Hadromi-Allouche et al. (eds), Scriptural Sexuality. De Gruyter, 2025 (in progress). Hofer, Jechiel. Itzik Manger (Essays). Hanoch Kalai, trans. Tel Aviv: I.L. Perets House, 1979 [Hebrew]. Kartun-Blum, Ruth. The Sword of the Word: The Binding of Isaac in Israeli Poetry. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013 [Hebrew]. Kartun-Blum, Ruth. ‘‫ שירת נשים ישראלית והעקידה‬:‫[ מרטירולוגיה ומלנכוליה‬Martirology and Melancholy: Israeli Women Poetry and the Binding]’. MiKan 4 (January 2005), pp. 80–107 [Hebrew]. Koplowitz-Breier, Anat. “Why Did Sarah Laugh? On Sarah’s Laugher in Jewish American Women’s Midrashic Poetry.” The 18th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, 8–11 August 2022. Kronfeld, Chana, and Robert Adler Peckerar. ‘Tongue-Twisted: Itzik Manger between mame-loshn and loshn-koydesh’. In geveb (August 2015): Accessed Dec 30, 2023. https://ingeveb .org /articles /tongue -twisted -itzik -manger -between -mame -loshn -and -loshn-koydesh Leibowitz, Nehama. Studies in Bereshit Genesis. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1983. 8th edition [Hebrew]. Levin, Neil W. ‘Der sholem zokher—Editor’s note’. Milken Archive. Vol. 9: The Art of Jewish Song. Retrieved 09.02.2024. https://www.milkenarchive.org/music/volumes/ view/the-art-of-jewish-song/work/der-sholem-zokher/ McDonald, Joseph. Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era: Images in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the Antiquities. London: T&T Clark, 2020. Melner-Eshed, Melila. ‘‫[ עקרותה של שרה‬Sarah’s Sterility]’. In Tania Zion (ed.), with Noam Zion. Sipure reshit: rav-siah al she'elot enoshiyot be-sefer Be-reshit/ Stories of Our Beginnings: Conversations about Human Relations, A Dialogue with the Book of Genesis. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Aharonoth—Sifre Hemed, 2002, pp. 267–271 [Hebrew].

80  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Niehoff, Maren R. ‘Mother and Maiden, Sister and Spouse: Sarah in Philonic Midrash’. Harvard Theological Review 97:4 (2004), pp. 413–444. Ofrat, Gideon. ‘‫ הגר‬,‫ שרה‬,‫ רחל‬:‫[ דמות האם באמנות הישראלית‬The Mother Figure in Israeli Art: Rachel, Sarah, Hagar]’. In Emilia Perroni (ed.), Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and Other Disciplines. Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute / Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009, pp. 152–164 [Hebrew]. Plietzsch, Susanne. ‘Supernatural Beauty, Universal Mother, and Eve’s Daughter: Sarah in Genesis Rabbah and in the Babylonian Talmud’. In Tal Ilan et al. (eds), Rabbinic Literature. The Bible and Women—An Encyclopaedia of Exegesis and Cultural History. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2022, pp. 241–262. Rabinovitch, Reuven. ‘‫[ הערות לשירי איציק מאנגר‬Comments to the Poems of Itzik Manger]’. Moznaim, March 1969, pp. 294–300. http://www.jstor.com/stable/23861756 Rogers, Justin M. ‘The Philonic and the Pauline: Hagar and Sarah in the Exegesis of Didymus the Blind’. The Studia Philonica Annual 26 (2014), pp. 57–77. Sadan, Dov. ‘‫ ״ברו כתוכו״‬,‫[ המשורר‬The Poet, Inside Out]’. In Itzik Manger (ed.), Lid un Ballade. Benjamin Tene, trans. Dov Sadan, intro. Tel Aviv: Al Hamishmar, 1969. 2nd edition, pp. ‫[ ו–מו‬Hebrew]. Schwartz, Rami. ‘The Virgin Mother Sarah: The Characterization of the Matriarch in Genesis Rabbah’. Journal for the Study of Judaism 52 (2021), pp. 63–103. Shenhar, Aliza. Love and Hate: Biblical Wives, Lovers, and Mistresses. Haifa: Pardes, 2011 [Hebrew]. Shinan, Avigdor, ed. and clarifications. ‫[ סידור אבי חי‬The Avi Chai Sidur]. Jerusalem: Yedioth Aharonoth—Sifre Hemed, 2000 [Hebrew]. Shmeruk, Chone. ‘‫[ מדרש איציק ובעיית מסורותיו הספרותיות‬Midrash Itzik and the Problem of its Literary Traditions]’. HaSafrut 2(2), January 1970, pp. 347–354 [Hebrew]. Spiegelblatt, Alexander. ‫ שיר ובלדה‬,‫ איציק מאנגר—חיים‬:‫[ פינות כחולות‬Blue Corners: Itzik Manger — Life, Poem and Ballad]. Yehuda Gur Arye, trans. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009 [Hebrew]. Tervanotko, Hanna Kaarina, and Elisa Uusimäki. ‘Sarah the Princess: Tracing the Hellenistic Afterlife of a Pentateuchal Female Figure’. Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 32.2 (2018), pp. 115–134. http://dx.doi.org/1470850 Weichert, Rafi. ‘‫[ עקדותיו של איציק מאנגר‬The Bindings of Itzik Manger].’ Iton 77 219 (May 1998), pp. 24–26 [Hebrew]. Wolf, Leonard. ‘The Poetry of Itzik Manger’. Oded Peled, trans. Iton 77 219 (May 1998), pp. 22–23, 42 [Hebrew]. Yavin, Zipora (Zipi). ‫ קורותיה של מלכת ישראל‬:‫[ המלכה שרי‬Queen Sarai: The History of an Israeli Queen]. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014 [Hebrew] Yerushalmi, Dorit. ‘Between Weaving and Unraveling: Shmuel Bonim Directs Itsik Manger’. Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies. Vol. 3: Languages, Literatures, Arts, pp. 333–352 [Hebrew]. Zakovitch, Yair. The Life of Samson. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982 [Hebrew]. Zion, Noam. ‘Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: Feminist Midrash and National Conflict’. TheTorah.com (2019). https://thetorah.com/article/reconciling-hagar-and-sarah-feminist -midrash-and-national-conflict Zmora, Israel, ed. Women of the Bible. Tel Aviv: Mahbarot leSafrut, 1964 [Hebrew]. Zohar, Noam. ‘‫[ דמותו של אברהם וקולה של שרה במדרש בראשית רבה‬Abraham’s Character and Sarah’s Voice in Genesis Rabbah]’. In Moshe Hallamish et al. (eds), The Faith of Abraham: In the Light of Interpretation throughout the ages. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2002, pp. 71–85 [Hebrew].

5

‘Ah gots daughtuh, an’ she gots daughtuh’ Hagar and Her Offspring in Three Reincarnations of Her Biblical Original Kathryn Walls

5.1 Introduction The Biblical Hagar is fascinating in her moral ambiguity. The authors of Genesis are inscrutable, but the divine interventions in their story indicate that her resistance to Sarah was culpable, her resilience commendable. She is enormously significant as a representative of the category to which she belongs—which is gender-based, racial, and cultural, but also (thanks to Paul’s allegorisation in Galatians) moral and spiritual. She thus embodies the ‘other’. As such, she is a victim of oppression, oppression which is exchanged for providential favour. In the light of her various dimensions, it is not really surprising to discover that she has been of interest to story-tellers from the Middle Ages to the present.1 In what follows, I survey the Old Testament sources before going on to examine three modern works whose protagonists are named after Hagar. All are by celebrated authors.2 The works are, in chronological order, Mamba’s Daughters (1929) by the American DuBose Heyward, The Stone Angel (1964) by the Canadian Margaret Laurence, and the verse sequence Hagar Before/After the Occupation by Iraqi poet Amal al Jubouri, translated (with authorial approval) by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Hasan Qaisi (2011). I compare these Hagar characters with their Biblical eponym and with each other. They prove to be alike in their fates, their complexity, and their status as victims of oppression. But they are also very different from each other, primarily thanks to the fact that, as victims of oppression, they are historically determined, by time and place. I conclude with a consideration of the remarkable ways in which all these authors coincide in their uncompromising departures from their Biblical model on the important question of Hagar’s offspring and turn Hagar into a contemporary victim and heroine. 5.2 The Judaeo-Christian and Islamic Sources Genesis 16 identifies Hagar as the Egyptian ‘handmaid’ of Abraham’s wife Sarah. Her story is strange and sad: It explains that, being barren (due to her age), Sarah proposed to Abraham that he conceive children by Hagar on her (Sarah’s) behalf. Once she had conceived, Hagar began to despise Sarah. When, with Abraham’s permission, Sarah ‘dealt hardly’ with her, Hagar ‘fled from [Sarah’s] face’ (Gen

DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-6

82  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 16:6) only to receive an angelic instruction (‘by the fountain on the way to Shur’,3 Gen 16:7) to ‘[r]eturn to [her] mistress and submit [herself] under her hands’ (Gen 16:9). The angel promises the multiplication of her seed ‘exceedingly’ (Gen 16:10) and names her unborn son ‘Ishmael’ (meaning ‘God shall hear’), ‘because the Lord hath heard [her] affliction’ (Gen 16:11). Ishmael, the angel declares, ‘will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him’ (Gen 16:12). Hagar responds to this two-sided promise by naming God ‘Thou God seest me’ (Gen 16:13); she also names the fountain ‘Beer-lahai-roi’ (‘The well of him that liveth and seeth me’). Hagar’s narrative is continued in Gen 21, which reiterates and tantalisingly revises the motifs and themes of Gen 16. We are told that Sarah, when she found her son Isaac being mocked by Ishmael, urged Abraham to banish both Hagar and her son, and that Abraham, on God’s instructions, did so: And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off […] for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept. And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar […] and said unto her […] God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation. And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. Gen 21:14–19 As anticipated above, this two-part story is disorienting for the moral ambiguity it attaches to Hagar. On the one hand, she and her son are shown to set themselves against Abraham’s legitimate wife and heir, but—on the other—to be instruments and beneficiaries of divine providence. Hagar, moreover, expresses gratitude and faith in God. Furthermore, as has been brilliantly demonstrated by both Thomas Dozeman and Yvonne Sherwood, her consignment to the wilderness paradoxically mirrors that of the Jews—the chosen people, to whom (being Egyptian) they are the negative ‘other’.4 But the positive aspects of Hagar were to be at one level ironed out by Paul’s uncompromising allegorical treatment in Galatians 4 of Hagar and Sarah as, respectively Jews (Hagar’s children, but not, as in Genesis, Arabs or pagans) and Christians (Sarah’s children, but not Jews). The irony is obvious. According to Saint Augustine’s interpretation of Galatians 9 (in City of God XV), Hagar as Synagoga is both the inferior of Sarah (as law-bound Judaism to Christianity) and at the same a metaphor for (or type of) her mistress. His reading revives the essential ambiguity of Hagar.5 This ambiguity remained unresolved

Hagar and Her Offspring  83 during the Reformation. Luther thought Hagar ‘saintly’ in her repentance, while Calvin viewed her as an unrepentant reprobate.6 Of course, once the overlapping Islamic tradition is taken into account, this ambiguity is writ large. According to this tradition, Hagar was not a slave but an Egyptian princess. As explained by Alice Ostriker in her Foreword to Hagar Before/After the Occupation: In the Book of Genesis the banished Hagar and her son Ishmael are saved from death in the desert by angelic intervention—but then we hear no more of them. Ishmael for the Jews becomes the quintessential other to Isaac, and in today’s Israel the name is still used as a synonym for Arab. In Hebrew, the name Hagar is a cognate for Ha-ger, ‘the stranger’. But in Islamic tradition, Hagar is the legitimate wife of Ibrahim, and Ismail his legitimate beloved son. Sent into the desert by Sarah’s jealousy and by God’s will, according to Islamic legend, Hagar becomes a founder of the holy city of Mecca and is an ancestress of the prophet. Her name, pronounced in Arabic with a soft g, Hajar, is honored in the haij, the pilgrimage every Muslim is expected to take to worship at Mecca. (p. xiv.) The miraculous spring of Gen 21:19 has been identified with the Zamzam well. It is said to have sprung out at Ishmael’s feet when Hagar (model of the Islamic pilgrim) was searching for water between the hills of Sara and Marwah, running between them seven times. The well is thus an important pilgrimage site in Mecca. One would not expect twentieth-century authors writing in English to be particularly aware of the Islamic version of Hagar. But there is so much overlap between her elevated Islamic and her inferior Judaeo-Christian identity (and so much ambiguity inherent in the latter) that such lack of awareness is less relevant than it might otherwise have been for DuBose Heyward and Margaret Laurence. By the same token, Jewish and Christian readers unfamiliar with the Islamic sources are in a position to appreciate the identification with Hagar of the Iraqi poet Amal al Jubouri. 5.3 The Absence of Ishmael These works share a puzzling reticence about Ishmael, the conception of whom is the virtual raison d’être of Hagar’s presence in Abraham’s household as well as her banishment from it - and whose providential survival gives the Biblical story (and the Islamic version) its positive ending. In this respect, they stand apart from the vast majority of previous treatments. I am aware of just two anticipations. The first is the early nineteenth-century anti-Napoleonic play written by Mme Germaine de Staël (whose six-year-old daughter took the part of Ishmael in her exiled mother’s Agar dans le désert, performed in Geneva in 1806). The second is a mid-nineteenth-century short story by the American writer Louise Moulton in which the infant daughter of the main character (Margaret, wife of a bigamist) dies, intensifying her mother’s desolation.7 Heywood’s Hagar sacrifices all for her only child who is not a son but a daughter. Al Jubouri (whose poetic persona is Hagar) also seems

84  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry to lack a son, writing only of her daughter. Although Laurence’s Hagar has two sons (quite confusingly in the context of the Biblical source), neither corresponds with absolute clarity to the Biblical Ishmael. The recipient of Hagar’s unalloyed adoration is instead a girl, this being her granddaughter, Tina (whose name, significantly in view of Galatians 4, is short for Christina, italics mine). Hagar longs for Tina’s presence, but (like Beckett’s Godot), she never appears, not even (unlike her brother) at her grandmother’s deathbed. As I hope to explain in what follows, these divergences from the Biblical story reveal the importance attached by their authors to the virtues—and also weaknesses and vices—of the Hagar character, who instead of being rendered redundant by her son, as in Genesis, is perfected in the form of her daughter or (in Laurence) granddaughter. It is surely significant, then, that all three of these same authors also depart from Genesis in their concern to represent Hagar herself as a descendant; in Heywood she is the daughter of the shrewd and determined Mamba, in Laurence of the mother who died giving birth to her (and whose grave is marked by the eponymous stone angel), and in Al Jabouri of a mother who is invoked as the grandmother beloved of the poet’s daughter. 5.4 DuBose Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters Heywood’s Mamba is an African-American woman, living in Charleston in the era of Reconstruction. She seeks security through her incorporation as an initially unpaid retainer in the socially secure white household of the widowed Mrs Wentworth, before transitioning into the household of the socially inferior (and desperate to rise) Atkinsons. As she explains to Polly Wentworth when applying for wages, ‘Tain’t fuh me, Miss […] Ah gots daughtuh, an’ she gots daughtuh’ (p. 36). That daughter is Hagar. Mamba is as intent on the security of her family as are the Atkinsons on their acceptance by Charleston’s white society. The quest of the Atkinsons is ultimately successful, but we come to see it as trivial and shallow by comparison with the intensely activated ambition of Mamba and her race. Although Hagar herself is relatively dark the skin of her beloved illegitimate daughter Lissa is said to be ‘unlike either that of its mother or grandmother […] of a light bronze hue’ (p. 29). While Heyward’s preoccupation with colour as such is troubling as symptomatic of what comes across as unconscious racism, it functions as a clue to Lissa’s parentage. Although this (fictional) fact is never made explicit, Hagar’s daughter appears to have been fathered by a sinister ‘mulatto’, one Gilly Bluton. As the narrator remarks, in the black quarter, where Mamba feels at home, ‘thefts and loves were casual, frank and gay affairs’ (p. 27). Hagar first appears in the novel bring doused with water by her mother Mamba, who wants her to stay out of jail for the sake of her (Hagar’s) daughter (and Mamba’s granddaughter) Lissa. Hagar’s taste for drink and association with water (she earns money as a washerwoman) and the river recall the iconography of the Hagar of Genesis, normally depicted with the water-bottle that she will give up in despair when Ishmael appears to be dying of thirst, until the appearance of the angel when he is given water and his future and that of his progeny is assured. Preternaturally large and strong, Hagar is eventually banished (like her Biblical forbear) from the

Hagar and Her Offspring  85 city. This is as punishment for successfully defending herself against a sailor who has defrauded her of payment when she returns his laundry.8 She takes care of Bluton when he has been injured in a drunken scuffle; he appears to be dying, and Hagar holds his hand, which she sees as ‘an enlarged replica of Lissa’s’ (pp. 103–104). If Lissa is Bluton’s own daughter, it is all the more appalling when Bluton, under the guise of his nickname ‘Prince’, abducts the girl, only to be confronted in his lair by Mamba with the physically powerful Hagar at her side. Hagar murders Gilly, thus courting prosecution, execution, and posthumous disgrace. In the meantime, however, Hagar has gained credit with a quasi-episcopalian minister (Thomas Grayson) who has dared to set himself up in the black community in competition with its existing pastor, whose proclivities are extremely evangelical—and much more popular. (His congregation is thrilled to shout and sway to the spiritual ‘Honour de Lamb’, p. 101). The Pauline resonance of the story of Hagar and Sarah (as, respectively, representatives of the unredeemed and the redeemed) provides an ironic context within the novel for Hagar’s name and deeds. In other words, Hagar’s spiritual status becomes an issue. Discouraged by his failure, the new minister happens to be found alone in his church by Hagar to whom he addresses an essential question: ‘You do believe in the God that I preach about, do you not? A God of beauty and light and loving-kindness?’ (p. 189). Hagar answers in the negative. But Heyward still represents his Hagar as the representative and messenger of Christ. She speaks graciously to the punningly-named Grayson: ‘Ah been lonely a lot too’ (p. 190). As Grayson, comforted by her presence, assures her: ‘You have been a real Christian today’ (p. 190). He presents Hagar with a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, inscribed with his name and address, a volume that Hagar will eventually give to Lissa. Having returned to New York to join a ‘rising intellectual element’ (p. 269), Grayson proves a literal godsend to Lissa whose brilliance as a singer has taken her to the same city where her career flourishes. Meanwhile, back in Charleston, Hagar is haunted by apparitions of her victim. Knowing the future that lies in wait for her as a criminal once Bluton’s body is found as it is sure to be (and especially the profound impact the ensuing scandal would likely have on Lissa’s career), Hagar makes a public confession of guilt before drowning herself. The novel then picks up on Lissa’s story. It comes to an end with Lissa’s successful performance in the Metropolitan Opera House, and her singing to an implicitly white audience (‘most of whom had never heard of it’) of ‘the National Anthem of the American Negro’: ‘Lift every voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring, / Ring with the harmonies of Liberty’ (p. 307). Thus the Christ-like sacrifice of Hagar has secured the triumphant liberation of her daughter, prefiguring (as the hymn suggests) the redemption of a United States converted from unchristian racism. Heywood’s Hagar is both the bondslave of Galatians and Luther’s saintly penitent; she recalls Augustine’s interpretation of Hagar as a humble type or forerunner of the Christian Church. She foreshadows redemption in the form of her daughter, a redemption that depended upon her own strength and courage. Ishmael means, as we have seen, ‘God listens’. Not dissimilarly, Lissa’s full name (Elizabeth) means ‘My God is an Oath’. The Hagar of Genesis disappears from the Old Testament narrative, but not before she has heard God’s promise to the effect

86  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry that ‘[H]e will make [of her son] a great nation’ (Gen 21:18). Heyward’s Hagar embodies that promise by dying to save the future of her daughter and (symbolically) of America itself. Significantly, the reader is informed that Lissa, meditating on what has befallen as she makes her way to the Opera House, ‘felt no horror over her mother’s act. On the contrary, a latent savagery in her own nature caused her to feel a curious pride, a deep sense of sympathy with her mother, and a realisation of a kinship closer even than that which existed between Mamba and herself’ (p. 289). Saint Julien, scion of the socially superior Wentworth family, present in the audience at Lissa’s triumph, ‘recognise[s] the voice’. It is, he says to himself, ‘Hagar’s—Mamba’s’ (p. 301), the single voice of three generations. What we may read as Heyward’s substitution of Lissa for Ishmael encourages entails a retrospecive view of Hagar’s suffering as a kind of victory. Just as Hagar fulfils the maternal ambition of Mamba, her own triumph lies in her having ensured the apotheosis of her own daughter, through which she herself is metaphorically transcended and resurrected (in Pauline terms, perhaps, ‘justified’). 5.5 Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel Heyward is an opinionated and omniscient narrator in the Dickensian mould, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. Margaret Laurence applies a completely different approach in The Stone Angel. The novel is centred in the consciousness of its central character, the very elderly Hagar. We infer everything from her (often dubious) actions and reactions as her health declines, and the novel ends with her death. But her mind is full of memories and from these the reader is able to construct a biography. As intimated above, the mother of Laurence’s Hagar died in childbirth when she was born, and thus she has no Mamba figure to direct and protect her. Hagar’s mother’s grave is marked by a stone angel purchased by her father. Its immobility and sightlessness are metaphors for (among other things) the absence of the maternal presence for which the statue is an impotent substitute or, at a more philosophical level, the death of God. Hagar’s father, by comparison, is all too powerful. Hagar, his favourite child, compares him with Pharaoh (an Egyptian monarch p. 36). His aspirational and snobbish tendencies determine much of Hagar’s early life (her enrolment in an academy for ‘young ladies’, for instance) and personality. She marries ‘Bram Shipley’, whose nickname is suggestive of ‘Abraham’ although it is actually short for ‘Brampton’. She marries Bram against her father’s will and goes on to oppose her own will to Brampton’s, maintaining a stance of resentment towards his sexual advances, while being openly contemptuous of his grammatical solecisms and inelegant manners. ‘Big-boned and hunky as an ox’ (as she describes herself, p. 51), Hagar’s physique, like that of Heyward’s Hagar, embodies the dangerous willpower (and/or admirable resilience) that she shares with her Old Testament ancestress. If Laurence’s Hagar has a mistress comparable with Sarah, that person must be Doris, her dutiful (but, to Hagar, intensely irritating) daughter-in-law, for whom she is an uncooperative responsibility. Hagar’s husband is a widower. His first

Hagar and Her Offspring  87 wife, Clara (whose name, needless to say, rhymes with Sarah), died leaving him with two daughters as her underwhelming representatives. Hagar’s likeness to her Biblical exemplar extends beyond her name and dark beauty, her status as a second wife and as a mother, her thirst and drinking, into the moral and spiritual spheres. These impinge on the novel through her conscience but also through the presence of a Christian minister, in this case Doris’s agent, the Reverend Troy (whose name suggests that he will be defeated in his battle to ‘win’ Hagar for God). Another such character is the fellow social refugee whom Hagar encounters when she escapes to the coast from the (as she sees them) machinations of Doris and Marvin who are hoping to enrol her in the old people’s home (which rejoices in the name of ‘Silverthreads’). Sheltering in a deserted house she is given food and wine by Murray Lees (employee of ‘Dependable Life Assurance’, p. 197). Lees is an inadequate substitute for the angel of the Old Testament story. The assurance that Hagar seems to need is the Pauline ‘full assurance of faith’ (Heb 10:22).9 As Lees explains to Hagar, the Christian sect to which he once belonged was that of the ‘Redeemer’s Advocates’ (pp. 200–201), and in his humility and loving-kindness he is redeemer’s advocate for her. In that he draws forth her latent empathy (his life has been tragic), he succeeds—up to a point. Indeed, Laurence’s Hagar does have her Christian moments, moments that recall Heyward’s Hagar’s crucial interaction with Grayson. Furthermore, Hagar’s rare expressions of loving-kindness are extended even to the people who most irritate her: to Doris, for example, she is humble enough to soften and humbly admit that the minister’s visit that was patronisingly arranged by her, was a kind of blessing (‘He sang for me, and it did me good’, p. 262). Thus, Laurence’s Hagar is both rebellious (cf. Gen 16) and grateful to God. She is also, in her extreme age, reminiscent of Sarah. Furthermore, she is the mother of not just one but two sons, sons who war with each other as Ishmael did with Isaac. In this, she seems to be both Sarah and Hagar in one. Doris is married to Hagar’s first son, the thoroughly decent Marvin. But Hagar has always greatly preferred her second son, John (to the extent that she has felt that Marvin was not her own child, p. 53). It is the practical straightforward Marvin who is rejected by Hagar. The sensitive John has found himself at odds with her father. In his proclivity for ironic amusement, John is reminiscent of the Ishmael of Gen 21:9, which recounts how Sarah came upon Ishmael ‘mocking’. In their squabbling, the brothers are strongly reminiscent of Isaac and Ishmael. But it is impossible to say with any certainty which brother corresponds to which Biblical half-brother, and neither emerges as the privileged recipient of divine grace. Marvin is the first-born, like Ishmael, but (unlike Ishmael) he seems not to belong to Hagar. John’s habitual mockery connects him with Ishmael, but he is (like Isaac) the second son. By the time in which the novel is set, however, John has died during a fatal escapade prompted in part by Hagar’s refusal to accommodate (literally, as well as emotionally) his girlfriend. Marvin and Doris are, however, the parents of two children, one of whom is the above-mentioned girl, Tina, for whose presence Hagar yearns. Hagar’s pottery pitcher, inherited through Bram (and iconographically reminiscent of the water-bottle supplied to Hagar by the Biblical Abraham), was, she recalls at one point, liked

88  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry by Tina ‘for some reason’ (p. 54). Tina, we discover, was a peacemaker, always able to reconcile the incompatible Doris and Hagar. Hagar compares John’s girlfriend unfavourably with the granddaughter to whom she refers possessively as ‘my Tina’ (p. 130). At one point, Hagar recalls that at the time of Tina’s birth, she ‘couldn’t have guessed […] that my granddaughter Tina would become so dear to me’ (p. 163). When she learns of Tina’s impending marriage, Hagar presents the sapphire ring that had belonged to her mother to Doris to give to Tina: ‘Send her this, Doris, will you? It was my mother’s sapphire. I’d like Tina to have it’ (p. 249). This simultaneous invocation by Hagar of her mother and her granddaughter is reminiscent of the Mamba-Hagar-Lissa trinity invoked by Saint Julian Wentworth in Mamba’s Daughters (quoted above). When, on Hagar’s deathbed in hospital, her grandson Steven visits, Hagar muses once again on how she has ‘always been so fond of Tina’ (p. 263). But unlike Steven, Marvin, and John (the male candidates for the role of Ishmael), Tina lies beyond Hagar’s reach. She is thus an apt symbol of the grace that Hagar herself has felt unable to claim. Her absence suggests that Tina’s grandmother, like the Hagar of Paul’s allegory in Galatians, is tragically unredeemed. By the same token, however, Hagar’s yearning testifies to her spiritual potential. The Biblical characterisation of Hagar as a ‘bondwoman’ suits the concerns with the nature of freedom of both Heyward and Laurence. For Heywood, freedom is the political and social condition upon which the human being depends in order to flourish as an individual. For Laurence it could be the freedom offered by Christ to his Jewish interlocutors according to John 8:32: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’. But this declaration raises the famous question posed by Pontius Pilate, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:38). If knowing the truth is to know God, this is subtly suggested by Laurence’s novel, rich as it is in references to churches of various stripes, fragments of hymns, and Biblical references, not to mention the analogy that governs this present essay. ‘Can God be One and watching?’ Laurence’s Hagar asks herself once subjection to an x-ray has made her confront (without admitting it) the prospect of death from cancer (p. 81). Here she recalls the Biblical Hagar who ‘called the name of the Lord […] Thou God seest me’ (Gen 16:13), the point being that Laurence’s Hagar is, unlike her Biblical forebear, uncertain as to the existence of God. But knowledge of the truth may also be (or, perhaps, be limited to) self-knowledge, as implied by Laurence’s choice of streamof-consciousness narration. Thanks to this narrative technique, the reader can know only what Hagar knows. What she knows is only herself (although, importantly, her self-knowledge sometimes releases empathy). The message she preaches to herself on her deathbed is as apt as it is unforgiving. Prompted by the hymn sung to her by the Reverend Troy, Hagar laments her inability to rejoice (p. 261). ‘When’, she asks, ‘did I ever speak the heart’s truth?’ Eschewing self-pity she reflects on her fatal failings as wife and mother: Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never free, for I carried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched. Oh my two, my dead. (p. 261)

Hagar and Her Offspring  89 Two questions arise. Has Laurence’s Hagar (like Luther’s) actually repented? If so, might she be forgiven? The second question remains (the Reverend Troy asks it of Hagar, p. 106) as to whether there is such a thing as ‘God’s Infinite mercy’ (p. 106). God’s mercy is embodied by the angel in Genesis. But Laurence’s substitute is an angel made of stone. Installed by Hagar’s father, it embodies that father’s stony heart. But, although Hagar herself can be hard, her heart does, as we have seen, sometimes soften. In her refusal to attach responsibility to anyone (or any being) other than herself, Laurence’s Hagar is an existential heroine. The Tina for whom she longs is (as already suggested) the Christ-like (and thus human) daughter of an unknowable non-God. 5.6  Amal al Jubouri’s Hagar Before/After the Occupation The twenty-first century poet Amal al Jubouri (b. 1967), author of Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation, is a 1990s dissident who, fearing that she had been targeted by Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime, had taken refuge in Germany in 1997, returning immediately after the occupation of Iraq by United States forces and the fall of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in 2003. We might therefore expect her collection to expose the contrast between the one-time repression of the Iraqi people and their present ‘freedom’. The freedom at issue is that of the nation symbolised by its ancestress Hagar, whose story (according to both JudaeoChristian and Islamic sources) captures the experience of alienation but also of providential authentication. Yet these brief riddling poems are clearly designed to expose a cruel irony. This is epitomised by the true meaning of the repeated noun ‘occupation’ which generally refers to the invasion and control of one nation by another, as opposed to the freedom the United States forces believed their occupation was bringing to Iraq. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ represent experiences that are different but the same in their oppressiveness. In the paired ‘Honour Before the Occupation’ and ‘Honour After the Occupation’, opposing mantras are the same in being mere mantras in the form of simplistic imperatives (redolent of control). ‘Worship the Leader/Love the Party’ gives way to ‘Curse the Dictator/Forsake the Party’. Suffering under both dispensations, Hagar remains the bondslave that she was in Genesis, but, given that Hagar is the poet, her persistent witness through both phases of her experience embodies resilience, that is, the opposite of despair. The collection is made up primarily of paired poems echoing the title. These are organised into meaningful sequences, so that (for example) ‘My mother Before [then After] the Occupation’ gives way to ‘My neighbour’, ‘My Daughter’, ‘My husband’, while ‘My Soul’ leads into ‘My Body’ and then ‘My Grave’. The title poems occupy the penultimate position before the body of the collection comes to a kind of end with ‘Baghdad Before the Occupation’ and ‘Baghdad After the Occupation’. The collection concludes with a coda made up of six poems (‘The Cantos Chapter’). This chapter stands out for its directness and intensity. The essence of al Jabouri’s poems is best indicated from examples. Thus, while ‘Religion Before the Occupation’ ‘stood lost, scared / on the doorstep of the Regime’ (the brevity of the poem testifying to the vulnerability and perhaps

90  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry decorous hesitancy of its oppressed and terrified subject), ‘Religion After the Occupation’ operates from a position of power. We are told that it (to quote the whole poem) ‘dressed the country in black / the constitution in the robe of alSayed – / shroud of Persian words’. Al Jubouri refers to the sectarian extremism unleashed by the downfall of Saddam Hussein which brought with it the subjugation embodied by the black burqa. In its covering function it is, for the poet, the perfect embodiment of hypocrisy, the enemy and companion of true faith.10 Religion under Hussein is pitiable; after the Occupation it is reduced to nothing. While Hagar is the speaker, upon whom the pairs of poems pivot, she is (like Heyward’s Hagar and as in the Bible) a mother. She is the subject of the fourth pair in the collection ‘My mother Before/After the Occupation’. The ‘Before’ poem characterises her by her dead children’, by insufferable loss: ‘Enough! She screams / at her deferred happiness / Absent savior Useless charm’. But after the occupation she expresses only disillusion with the democracy bestowed by the United States. She has no more children. Democracy is her child, but he or she is not only unborn but also dead and decayed: ‘Democracy, I lost my taste for you / Your cant rotted inside me, years ago’. But the fact that the poet as Hagar has a daughter is abundantly clear, as if to belie the absolute nature of her despair. Furthermore, just one pair of poems further on in the sequence we find the pair ‘My Daughter Before/After the Occupation’, revealing that the supposedly childless old woman of ‘My mother’ has a daughter who herself has a daughter. The point may be that there is, after all, a future. The daughter detaches herself from her mother’s escape from Iraq, posing the question ‘If Iraq is our Iraq, why did you abandon our home?’ From ‘After the Occupation’, however, we find that the child’s critical stance, which could be characterised as the self-centred assertiveness typical of adolescence, has given way to a more authentic and settled embrace of the home that her mother (Hagar the poet) also loves but which (as declared at the end of the ‘Before’ poem), has been reduced to ‘diaspora’). After the occupation the daughter now ‘knows no-one but her grandmother / […] / And that’s all she wants to know’. Interestingly, it would appear that the occupation has some value, in that it teaches its victims what matters. Continuity with the past as represented by the grandmother is the antithesis of the revolution as triggered by the occupation. Depending on the context, however, true reformation might take the form of a return to the past. Paradoxically, such a reversal is here shown to be the kind preferred by the next generation. Al Jubouri’s Hagar, bridging the gap, and joining her mother with her daughter, seems to stand for continuity between past and present, the continuity lost to the revolutionary zeal of Saddam as dictator and by the American occupiers as liberators. The title poems ‘Hagar Before [After] the Occupation’ depend upon the Islamic tradition, according to which Hagar was the legitimate wife of Abraham (and Ishmael his beloved son).11 The ‘Before’ poem represents Hagar as an outcast longing for her legendary home in which the Tigris and Euphrates (which mark the borders of Iraq) are still holy. She warns her country against war (‘a whore’). In the ‘After’ poem Hagar’s quest proves futile. The ‘streets wear blindfolds’, and she finds herself alone: ‘There is no one but Hagar / Before her, the Occupation / Behind her, the Occupation’ (the implication being that dictatorship and occupation

Hagar and Her Offspring  91 are identical in their oppressiveness) so that freedom is ‘a bastard child’, like Ishmael as viewed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. As Rebecca Howell notes, ‘the poet implies that freedom is the bastard child of the temporary marriage between Iraq (Hagar’s ‘Wounded master’ [in] ‘To My Lord Iraq’) and the United States’.12 As such it is the opposite of freedom, which may explain why, according to the poem’s final lines, the child is ‘An Orphan / Without a name’. Al Jabouri’s riddles are open to interpretation, but the poem’s dependence upon them as such points to the hypocrisy of conquerors and sectarians who claim the moral high ground. This pair of poems leads logically into the final ‘Cantos Chapter’ which is a sequence of laments for a once-great and holy civilisation and for the seeming futility of poetry in the face of its destruction. Through her mother and her daughter, Al Jubouri yokes memory with hope. 5.7 Conclusion Why, one must ask, should these three twentieth and twenty-first century Hagar narratives replace Hagar’s Biblical and Islamic son with a daughter? The answers to this question surely differ depending upon the work concerned. Feminism was probably a factor for Laurence and al Jubouri, but unlikely for Heyward. A common thread suggests itself, however. By giving Hagar a daughter, an image of herself, all three authors commend continuity as the foundation of future political and mental stability. As intimated at the outset, these modern treatments of Hagar adapt her biblical status as ‘the other’ to the time and place of their authors. In each case these are rendered in context, the rich everyday detail foreign to Genesis. In Mamba’s Daughters, Hagar is an African-American descendant of slaves in class-conscious South Carolina during Reconstruction. In The Stone Angel, Hagar (brought up on the Manitoban Prairie) is a determinedly discontented older woman who was in her youth sexually (to say the least) reticent, and who remains very much at odds with the carefree counterculture of the sixties. In Hagar Before/After the Revolution, Hagar is inseparable from the poet as a dissident in an oppressive post-revolutionary Iraq. In each of these iterations, Hagar experiences the constraints and injustices that characterise her moment in history. But, picking up on the salvation achieved by their Biblical forerunner (as will be realised in Ishmael), these modern Hagar figures prove instrumental in the positive transformation of their societies. Hagar’s daughters (and granddaughter) will be the beneficiaries of (respectively) Civil Rights, feminism, and (as one at this historical moment can only hope for Al Jabouri’s Iraq) freedom from internal and external oppression. It is tempting to represent the narrative points of view of the three latter-day texts as an advance on the Biblical source—by suggesting that the first-person stance of the speaker in Hagar Before/After the Revolution ensures that the reader will empathise with the heroine—or that Laurence’s first-person (almost streamof-consciousness) narration encourages a sympathetic response to her problematic protagonist. Yet, to distinguish these texts from the Biblical source on such grounds would be to underestimate the power of the original story in which Hagar’s

92  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry emotions (resentment, despair) play such a large part—and were no doubt inspirational for authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Notes 1 For a conspectus of literary reminiscences, see Kathryn Walls, ‘Hagar: Literature’. 2 Heyward became famous for his invention of Porgy, who was to become the main character of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess; Laurence was invested Companion of the Order of Canada, and in 1999 al Jubouri won the Lebanese ‘Best Arabic Book’ Award for her collection Edehuanna. 3 Quotations are from the long pre-eminent King James Version (KJV). That it was top of mind for Laurence is evident from her quotations from Psalms in an interview recorded by Lois Wilson, available online at http://bookopenedition​.org​/uop​/1944. Heyward could have used the American Standard Version (1901), although the KJV was still popular in his day. (Because al Jubouri wrote in Arabic, the question of English versions does not arise in relation to her work.) 4 See Dozeman, ‘The Wilderness’; Sherwood, ‘Migration as Foundation’. 5 See Dozeman, ‘The Wilderness’; Sherwood, ‘Migration as Foundation’. 6 Luther (‘Lectures on Genesis’) is less concerned with Paul’s allegory, with which Calvin (in his sermons on Galatians 4, in ‘Thirty-Six Various Sermons’) appears to identify. On Luther’s reading, see Ashleigh Elser, ‘Luther’s Tears: Hagar and the Limits of Empathy’, Studies in Christian Ethics 35:3 (2022), pp. 471–485. 7 For a detailed account, see Walls, ‘Louise Moulton’s “Number 101”’. This is another narrative in which Hagar herself is represented as a daughter (as discussed below). 8 Mamba’s attachment to the Atkinsons means that George Atkinson, convinced he is acting in accordance with his wife’s desired social status, appeals to the judge on Hagar’s behalf and achieves a moderation of her sentence. 9 The whole verse is relevant to Hagar’s spiritual need: ‘Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water’. 10 Cf. George Orwell: ‘hypocrisy implies a moral code’ (‘War Criminals’). 11 See the note to ‘To My Lord Iraq’ in the (unpaginated) commentary at the end of the volume: ‘According to Islamic texts, Hagar […] was either the wife or the maidservant of the prophet Ibrahim and was the mother of Ismail, patriarch of Islam. In response to Sara’s jealousy, Ibrahim leaves Hagar and their son in the desert of Patan which surrounds Mecca. Hagar and Ismail begin to dehydrate, and Hagar runs between the mountains Safa and Marwa praying for water. Allah rescues her, when the ground springs a miraculous well known as Zamzam. Contemporary Muslims on pilgrimage walk between the two hills seven times in memory of Hagar’. 12 See Howell’s note referenced immediately above. It is interesting to find a glimpse of the half-brothers of Genesis in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (p. 41), where the boy who is Godot’s messenger claims that Godot favours him, but beats his brother.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Al Jubouri, Amal. Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation. Trans. R. Gaye Howell. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2011. Augustine of Hippo. Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin Books, 1972. http://orwell​.ru​/library​/articles​/criminals​/ English/

Hagar and Her Offspring  93 Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber & Faber, 1953. The play (in the original French) was staged in Paris in 1953 and published by Les éditions de minuit in 1954. The first edition of the English text was published in the US (New York: Grove Press, 1954). It was subsequently published in the UK (Faber & Faber, 1956). Heyward, DuBose. Mamba’s Daughters: A Novel of Charleston. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angels. Toronto: Seal Books, 1978. Orwell, George. ‘Who Are the War Criminals?’ Tribune, 22 October 1943. London. https:// orwell​.ru​/library​/articles​/criminals​/english​/e​_crime Staël, Germaine, de. ‘Agar dans le désert’. In Oeuvres posthumes de Madame la baronne de Staël-Holstein. Paris: 1838. Secondary Sources Dozeman, Thomas B. ‘The Wilderness and Salvation History in the Hagar Story’. JBL 117:1 (1998), pp. 23–43. Hassam, Riffat. ‘Islamic Hagar and Her Family’. In Phyllis Trible and Letty M Russell (eds), Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006, pp. 149–167. Sherwood, Yvonne. ‘Migration as Foundation: Hagar, the ‘Resident Alien’, as EuroAmerica’s Surrogate Self’. BibInt 26 (2018), pp. 439–468. Walls, Kathryn. ‘Hagar: Literature’. In EBR 10. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Cols 1127–1133. Walls, Kathryn. ‘Louise Moulton’s “Number 101”: A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anticipation of the Stone Angel in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel’. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 27.4 (2014), pp. 171–176.

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Seeing, Connection, and Visibility in Margaret Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales Jo Carruthers

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is perhaps the most well-known biblical retelling of the twentieth century. Much criticism on Atwood’s two handmaid novels (the original novel published in 1985 and the sequel, The Testaments, published in 2019) have focused on the novels’ dystopian, feminist content. This is no surprise when there are so many similarities between the present or recent past and the supposedly post-apocalyptic post-American surveillance culture of Atwood’s authoritarian Gilead. Critical work that has engaged with the Bible has inevitably focused on the novels’ uptake of biblical narratives of handmaids—a term in the Hebrew Bible often used interchangeably with concubine or wife, but that indicates a position of service, as when used metaphorically in the case of the Christian New Testament’s Mary who declares to the angel, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’ (Luke 1:38, KJV). Handmaids in the Hebrew Bible are women who are servants or enslaved in the household and who tend to enter the narrative when they become surrogates or wives of the family’s patriarch, often in complicated relationship with the household wife or wives. In Gilead, of course, this role is transformed into one of enforced surrogacy in an environmentally damaged and consequentially authoritarian world that is hyper-focused on the production of children. This chapter attempts to further readings that trace a thread from the Bible’s patriarchal narratives to Gilead by setting the Bible and Atwood’s handmaid novels into conversation in a way that draws on a less obvious and thereby neglected handmaid tale—Hagar’s—that highlights the issue of interpersonal communication and connection and how this is played out in these narratives of patriarchal, authoritarian societies. My interest in these novels is informed by my teaching of The Handmaid’s Tale for the past few years in my ‘Bible and Literature’ third-year course on the English Literature degree at Lancaster University, UK. Many of the students have studied the text at A-Level but few have considered the intertext of the Bible at any depth. For my course, students are set the novel and the handmaid narratives in the King James Version for seminar preparation: in the class itself we first discuss Rachel and Leah’s story precisely because it is explicitly invoked in the novel’s epigraph, and the story also exists in the novel as part of the liturgical pre-meeting for the grisly impregnation ‘ceremony’ and the ‘Rachel and Leah’ centre is where handmaids learn to submit to the system of enforced surrogacy. Students read of Jacob’s story of falling in love with Rachel, being tricked by her father into first marrying DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-7

Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales  95 her sister Leah, as well as the labour the father demands in return for his daughters. Both women in the Genesis story make use of their handmaids to act as surrogates as they strive to have children or, for Leah, more children. Students also discuss Hagar’s story which, in contrast, is not mentioned at any point in Atwood’s novel. Hagar is the handmaid of the patriarch Abram and his wife Sarai, ‘given’ by the childless wife to her husband so that they may have children.1 Throughout the ‘Bible and Literature’ course I promote the close reading of biblical texts to encourage students to practice the kinds of sophisticated reading techniques that they intuitively bring to bear on the novels and poems they read. They easily assume that modern literary texts are crafted and complex and, as a result, are unsurprised that they are multivalent, self-contradictory or opaque. For each biblical handmaid tale, I lead a discussion shaped by the question, ‘Whose tale is it?’, itself prompted by Atwood’s first-person narrative and book title (hers is, after all, unequivocally the handmaid Offred’s story). Discussion is, then, from the first shaped by connection across the novel and biblical text: if Atwood’s novel tells Offred’s tale, where can we find the handmaid’s voice in the Hebrew Bible? This discussion often pushes us to consider power relations and agency: for example, when Rachel demands of Jacob, ‘Give me children, or I die’, is this a personal expression of desire, a demonstration of her agency, or is it Rachel’s internalisation of a patriarchal system that values women only for their reproductive abilities?2 (In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred herself recognises the phrase’s instability as she insists, ‘There’s more than one meaning to it’, p. 71.) We can of course look at the wider Genesis story for clues for interpreting character and motive, to what Erich Auerbach calls a text’s ‘background’. Where Atwood’s novel offers us the kind of psychological insight that we often expect of a modern novel, the biblical narratives are what Auerbach has called ‘fraught with background’: tricky narratives that take a lot of readerly work to reach any conclusions about motivation or character perspective.3 There are clues that perhaps Rachel’s seemingly instinctual responses are ones that have been shaped by societal pressures. After all, she rejoices when her son Joseph is born and declares that God has taken away her ‘reproach’ (Gen 30:23; herparti, which can also mean shame or disgrace), which gestures towards societal judgement. Although students often disagree over whose story this is, they rarely suggest it is Jacob’s story, despite his position as patriarch: after all, women rather than men fill the narrative space, and Jacob’s procreative activity is at one point traded between wives. Although there is little clue about tone, Leah’s ‘I have hired you’, sekartika, seems demeaning. Whatever else they disagree on, students largely concur that it is a tricky narrative to unpick. Hagar’s story usually takes up most time because hers is the most difficult to decipher. Hagar is a remarkable figure in the Hebrew Bible. As Phyllis Trible noted in her 1984 Texts of Terror, Hagar is the first person in the Bible to be visited by an angel and the only person to give a name for God (Hagar calls him El’ Roi, a grammatically ambiguous name that can mean God sees me, or the God who may be seen).4 It is also the one biblical story that might legitimately be called the handmaid’s tale rather than the patriarch’s or the wives’ tales. Like Offred’s first-person narrative, Hagar’s follows her activities; her fleeing from Sarai, her

96  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry visitation from the angel of the Lord (normally considered to be a manifestation of God), who tells her to return to Sarah. Students are often appalled that the story seemingly endorses Hagar’s enslavement: after all the same root is used to describe the reason for Hagar’s escape (her being ‘dealt harshly with’, KJV, and the angel’s command to ‘submit yourself’, KJV, have the same Hebrew root; the same root is later used in the Hebrew Bible to describe the Hebrews’ suffering in Egypt). When as a class we turn to discuss Hagar’s response to the interaction and her proclamation, ‘Thou Lord seest me’ (KJV), the complexity of the story suggests something beyond simple endorsement of Hagar’s affliction. Rather than feeling oppressed, Hagar says she feels ‘seen’: it is this surprising fact of ‘being seen’ that I want to take as a prompt for bringing the second Handmaid’s novel The Testaments, into conversation with the Bible. Although, in my focus on Hagar, I am turning to one of the few handmaid stories not explicitly cited in either of Atwood’s novels, I do take my approach to biblical reception from a model suggested in The Handmaid’s Tale itself. In the opening lines, Offred gives us a sense of her life in the Gilead regime, tracking the vestiges of the old America in her surroundings: ‘We slept in what had once been the gymnasium’ are the novel’s opening words. Offred reflects on the traces of the old life: ‘I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls’. She goes on: ‘Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style’ (p. 13). Atwood’s use of the language of rewriting here—afterimage, palimpsest—conjures this idea of the old world and new like a text (the palimpsest is a piece of parchment that been written over but where older script is still legible). This sense of layering seems to me a useful way of thinking about the Bible’s relation to these novels: its narratives are a perceptible trace that can be best accessed when aided by thoughtful imagination. Offred after all needs to set her imagination to work to picture the dances that took place in the gymnasium, yet her visualisations are not strictly fictitious. Offred sets up a conversation between the old and new world, or one story and another. The oscillation between biblical intertext and novel that Atwood sets up has been described by Hager Ben Driss as ‘a stimulating game of hide and seek’.5 Hagar’s story may not be cited in the novels explicitly but because hers is the biblical story that may rightly be named a ‘handmaid’s tale’, it demands attention as it echoes through the novels’ pages in generative ways, enabling a readerly game of ‘hide and seek’. Hagar’s story, written from her perspective but in the third person, is nothing like the triad of first-person narratives we find in the second handmaid novel, The Testaments. There we read the perspectives of Aunt Lydia (who runs the women’s side of Gileadean society and who featured in the first novel) and two girls: Agnes, who grows up within the regime, and Daisy, who grows up in nearby Canada. The novel’s first-person, almost stream-of-consciousness accounts contrast, then, with Hagar’s more opaque story and especially the inspiration for my analysis here, Hagar’s naming of God, ‘Thou Lord seest me’ as it is rendered in the KJV. As we are given no reason for Hagar’s proclamation, the reader is provoked to guess at

Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales  97 why she makes such a claim. It is a phrase that provokes investigation: what has God heard and what is it about God’s interaction with her that makes Hagar say she has been ‘seen’? To be seen here suggests that Hagar has been understood: she here testifies that the way she has been treated and responded to indicates a recognition of her experience and perhaps also her feelings and thoughts on it. To be seen is to be understood in a way that brings a sense of connection to the person seeing. Here it is an entirely different action to observation, gaze, or surveillance. The latter activities suggest distance and separation whereas being seen suggests profound and meaningful connection. ‘Thou God seest me’ is Hagar’s response to the ‘angel of God’ whom she meets after running away from Sarai and harsh treatment. In a narrative of striking anaphora, ‘And the angel of the Lord said unto her’, the angel of the Lord tells her to return, that she should name her son Ishmael (which means ‘God hears’), and in the first break from the repeated opening phrase she is told her son will be wild, his ‘hand against every man’. Hagar’s response undercuts assumptions that this is a straightforward story of coercion and control on behalf of Hagar’s divine visitor. It also averts attention away from the order to return and demands a rereading of the angel’s speech if we are to take seriously the implications of the act of naming: that Hagar has experienced an encounter with someone who recognises something true and authentic about herself. One detail of the Hagar story that often trips up my students, but that suggests a more radical reading of Hagar’s encounter with the angel, is the promise that Hagar’s son, Ishmael, will be a wild man (or literally a wild donkey of a man, a pere adam, Gen 1:12), at war with his brothers. On the surface it a strange promise, but it makes some sense in the context of the enslavement that Hagar suffers. To hear that her son will not be either meek, compliant, or enslaved may well be very welcome to Hagar. Hagar is herself of course not shy about resisting her enslavement: when she conceives her son, she ‘despises’ Sarai (weteqal is a word that carries connotations of slighting or lightly esteeming). Perhaps it is that Hagar knows through this promise that in returning she is not condoning her son to enslavement (a move that, as Dolores Williams points out, is ultimately the safest for her and her child).6 We are not told how the pregnant Hagar feels about any of these issues of parenthood, living with Sarai and Abram, and the eventual fate of her son; but directly after she hears that her son will not be complicit in his enslavement she says she has been ‘seen’. We have, then, two types of seeing set up in the narrative: a watching that sets up two people as distant and separate and seeing as a moment of intimacy and connection. The contrast is obvious in how God’s actions in this scene are understood by Hagar—to be caring, sympathetic, and insightful—and the ways in which God’s watchfulness is presented in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. In both novels the regime’s spies, called ‘the Eyes’, and the greeting ‘under his eyes’, are named after the depiction of God’s watchfulness in the Bible that is read out by the Commander to mark the end of the prayer meeting that is held before the regime’s gruesome impregnation Ceremony:

98  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry This is what he does to let us know that in his opinion it’s time we stopped praying. “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to know himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect towards him,” (2 Chron 16:9). (Handmaid’s Tale, p. 103) The implication is that we read the regime’s surveillance as an analogy of God’s watchfulness and that both are controlling and sinister. And it is easy to read the novels’ oppressive regimes in an analogical relation to the Bible’s patriarchal scenes that they invoke: that Gilead’s patriarchy is, in short, the Bible’s patriarchy. The world of Atwood’s handmaids indeed holds striking similarities to some of the cultural ideologies propagated from biblical texts. For example, a handbook for Sunday-school address published in London in 1883 suggests to young minds the point of the Hagar story is, rather ominously, that ‘God’s eye is always upon us’ including that ‘He sees us when we are naughty’.7 This application has more obvious sinister overtones in The Testaments when Aunt Lydia recounts that her inculcation into the Gileadean regime was through a group execution accompanied by a man giving a speech about how ‘sinners were always visible to the Divine Eye and their sin would find them out’ (pp. 117–118). The nineteenth-century Sundayschool author interprets Hagar’s experiences as her own fault in a way that echoes the victim-blaming of Gilead: Hagar ‘was rude’ to Sarai, who merely ‘punished her’. God tells Hagar to: ‘Go back to her mistress—behave nicely to her’. The internalisation of submission so familiar in Atwood’s handmaid’s tales may be more subtle in religious pedagogical tracts from the nineteenth century but no less insidious. But to read both stories for their patriarchal structures does not do justice to the complexity of the power dynamics depicted in both narratives. Foregrounding what I will call ‘seeing’ in my discussion of Atwood’s handmaid novels (and later in relation to Hagar again), enables attention to the novels’ finely grained depiction of the interpersonal costs of a surveillance society like Gilead, its implications for subjectivity and group control, and the importance of interpersonal connection. The negative outworkings of totalitarian regimes may be all-too-obvious: of course Offred’s attempts to make connections with other humans are stifled by the watchfulness that the regime sets up. She does not even express her personal thoughts and feelings to the handmaid she is paired with for shopping, instead using the ordained greetings that bolster the regime’s ideology of procreation, ‘Blessed be the Fruit’, ‘May the Lord open’ (p. 29). Beyond the obvious restrictions, the handmaid novels articulate the fine nuances of seeing and being seen in an authoritarian society. Agnes, the child of a commander, explains how she ‘worked hard at seeing without being seen and hearing without being heard’, a surveillance from below that itself demands hermeneutic ingenuity. She explains: ‘Most of what I heard came in fragments and even silences, but I was becoming good at fitting these fragments together or filling in the unsaid parts of sentences’ (Testaments, p. 98). Or, as Offred states of the handmaids’ literally blinkered eyeline, ‘We learned to see the world in gasps’ (Handmaid’s Tale, p. 40). Offred’s choice of word here—the

Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales  99 gasp—suggests a visceral, unsettled, or fearful brevity—the terrified short-lived intake of air. To see the world in gasps suggests a desperation in the attempt to counter a deficiency, as well as drawing attention to the lack itself. While a version of this kind of interpretive effort is a commonplace of everyday life—we only ever experience others’ lives in fragments—the ‘gasp’ is a terrifying exaggeration of challenges to interpersonal connectivity fitting to the Gilead regime. The figure I want to focus on in my discussion here, and that I think benefits from this conversation with the Bible, is the depiction of the one major character in The Testaments who does not have a first-person narrative: Becka. The novel’s three first-person narratives become increasingly intertwined as the three characters are eventually brought together; they collectively weave a picture of Gilead’s international standing, children’s lives within the regime, how regime change happened, as well as revealing how Aunt Lydia has planned, and implements, its destruction. We learn about Becka primarily through Agnes’s account: Becka is a school friend of Agnes. Both go to an elite school, Agnes because she is a commander’s daughter and Becka because her father is an admired dentist. Though not a narrator, Becka is a central figure, celebrated at the novel’s end. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments has an academic postscript in which the academic Professor Piexoto talks about the unearthing of a statue to Becka that heralds her as one of the heroes of the fall of Gilead. The statue has two biblical quotations on it, one from the Song of Songs about love being strong as death and one from Eccles 10:20 (the novel uses the KJV): ‘a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter’. The Ecclesiastes text is cited earlier in The Testaments, as Peter Sabo and Rhiannon Graybill also note, to refer to Agnes’s escape from Gilead, intimating that Agnes is just such a bird, carrying the voice of the disenfranchised women of Gilead, Becka included, to nearby Canada.8 As Sabo and Graybill explain in their article on ‘Testifying Bodies’, Eccles 10:20 is only partially quoted, and it significantly begins with ‘Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber’. As Sabo and Graybill recognise, this opening is ‘a warning about the all-encompassing reach of the powerful’ enjoining us to avoid even private dissent for fear it will be discovered, and, I would suggest, anticipates Foucauldian notions of the internalisation of power and the ‘docile body’ produced through the precluding of even thoughts against authority.9 This memorial use of the Ecclesiastes quotation is of interest to me because of its attention to the thought-life of the oppressed or marginalised and its implications for reading Becka. Becka’s and Agnes’s opportunities for expressing counter-regime thoughts are as limited as Offred’s had been in The Handmaid’s Tale. At school, the Aunts who act as teachers instil a Foucauldian discipline on their pupils to inculcate not just right behaviour but right thinking. This is demonstrated in the teaching of the biblical story that is called at the school ‘The Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces’ from Judges 19–21 (another handmaid tale, as Agnes notes explicitly that a concubine is ‘a sort of Handmaid’, p. 78). The story—of a concubine who runs away, is retrieved by her husband and on their journey home is then raped and killed by men who have her husband as their chosen target—is interpreted by Aunt Vidala

100  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry as demonstrating that, because the ‘concubine’ ‘acts disobediently’ by leaving her husband, she deserves her fate and ‘This is God’s way of telling us that we should be content with our lot and not rebel against it’ (p. 79). The twofold disciplining here is evident: you should not only not escape or leave, but you should also adjust your mind to be content and not rebel. Although seemingly kinder, another Aunt’s, Estée’s, explanation further condones the internalisation of a system of injustice. She suggests: ‘There’s another way of looking at the story […] The concubine was sorry for what she had done, and she wanted to make amends, so she sacrificed herself to keep the kind traveller from being killed by those wicked men’ (pp. 79–80). The story here blames the victim, ignores male responsibility, while also valorising female sacrifice in a patriarchal system that exploits women. It is no surprise, then, that Becka (who we find has been sexually abused over a long period), responds viscerally to the story but is also not willing to ‘curse’ her abuser, to the extent that later in the novel she is upset when he is punished. Yet, even this assertion about Becka’s response to her abuser’s death is speculation because, as readers, we are not party to Becka’s thoughts, hearing her story entirely through Agnes’s first-person narration. Yet the most logical interpretation of Becka’s actions is that she has internalised the regime’s ideology. But the fact remains that Becka remains partially opaque to the reader. When Becka later sacrifices herself, it is not clear whether this is a practical choice, an act of self-punishment, or a continuation of a more passive lack of self-worth and agency that is suggested throughout Agnes’s narration. Although the story of Becka’s abuse is shocking and demonstrates the kinds of exploitation of power made possible by inequitable regimes, it is also the secrecy of that abuse and how Becka responds to it that the novel draws attention to. Becka does not ‘curse’ in her heart or even when in private. Ultimately, even though the bird Agnes in her transport of espionage material to Canada succeeds to ‘carry the voice’ and ‘tell the matter’ of the reality of Gilead’s male corruption, we are not given access to Becka’s inner voice or really find out the full extent of the ‘matter’ and its effect upon her. We cannot and do not ‘see’ Becka. What this portrayal of Becka highlights is the atomising of society under a Gilead-style regime, in which people are separated and inner thoughts and feelings are disciplined. And even when people escape this discipline to feel or think in ways that disrupt the regime, there is limited scope for communication and perhaps even imagination. Hagar’s story and experience of being ‘seen’ suggests that communication is not just an act of fact-sharing (such as the taking of espionage material into Canada or telling a woman to return to an oppressive situation) but is instead about interpersonal connection and enabling moments where people have meaningful connections in which they might feel ‘seen’. The moments of intimacy and friendship between Becka and Agnes are to me some of the most touching in the novel and suggest that being seen has been possible for Becka, despite her many sufferings and isolation. What the novel exposes, then, is not just that the misuse of the Bible and oppressive control corrupts society, it also damages—but does not necessarily annihilate—the kind of interpersonal connection in which a person

Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales  101 feels ‘seen’ by another. Even the hardened Aunt Lydia muses in The Testaments that ‘One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others’ (p. 148). Being seen is of vital personal importance, but it is also of political import. The existence of barriers that prevent someone both being and feeling ‘seen’ is not just felt on an individual level in an oppressive surveillance regime, but informs how hierarchies are instilled and internalised on the ground more generally and how they work without the need of surveillance. Here, the writings of the philosopher Jacques Rancière on aesthetics and politics are helpful (as well as related philosophers’ writings on visibility that I will also engage with in my discussion). Rancière considers in his writings the invisibility of the disenfranchised or the subaltern. His focus is the ways in which certain groups within any given society—the handmaids in Gilead, for example, but also those disenfranchised by identification by race, class, or gender—are not literally unseen, but seen and then looked through, ignored, and overlooked. This is obvious in The Handmaid’s Tale and further underlined in The Testaments in Agnes’s observation of how her household’s handmaid is simultaneously visible and invisible, treated like a ‘stray dog’ (p. 93). The subaltern, then, are invisible in the sense that they lack the possession of a ‘social “validity”’ as Axel Honneth articulates it: they are the ‘stray dog’ rather than an equal.10 A key concept in Rancière’s thinking is the ‘distribution of the sensible’, a ‘configuration of the perceptible’, in terms of what he describes as ‘an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not’.11 To explain further, the ‘sensible’ that he writes about is a play on words and refers to both that which seems reasonable (sensible) and that which can be sensed (sense-able): the ways in which we intuitively judge and position other people via our sensory response to their bodies—perhaps their skin colour, but also markers of class or gender, including things like smells and noises. Rancière in his writings is responding to Aristotle’s hierarchy of humans drawn through the distinction between the political and animal human as those who can articulate political needs on the one hand and those who, like animals, can only express pain and pleasure.12 The outworking of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is what the philosopher David Owen has helpfully called ‘continuous aspect perception’, the bias or aspect that is constantly in play in someone’s perception of the world order: the intuitive assumption, say, that scruffy people are less important and people in nice suits must be important.13 Rancière identifies an act of politics in the shift from a ‘continuous aspect perception’ that feels natural, but is entirely biased, to one in which the form of domination or injustice becomes obvious: it is the shift from one to another that can be named politics. This kind of continuous aspect perception is apparent in racist prejudice. David Owen in his article on invisibility draws on Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, quoting the latter, who writes: ‘I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people’.14 In succinct terms, Baldwin here outlines the intuitive response to a prompt, here skin colour, that shapes the social fabric of interaction (what Rancière would call the ‘distribution of the sensible’) and that overrides being ‘looked at’ or ‘seen’. The principle is attributable to Atwood’s

102  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry handmaid novels in which an intuitive reflex is created in the new society of Gilead primarily through clothing in which certain people are ‘at the mercy of the reflexes’ of other people because of the colour of their clothes. Owen writes of ‘hypervisibility’, something applicable to the handmaid’s red dress, which can combine with and reinforce invisibility. Hypervisibility can somewhat counter-intuitively aid invisibility because ‘cognizing’ (noting someone’s identity) happens before the decision to ‘recognize’ (the social gestures of recognition of social validity, such as an effusively friendly greeting or gesture), as Alex Honneth explains: ‘The subject can only claim of another person that she looks through, ignores, or overlooks him if he has already ascribed to that person the achievement of primary identification of him’.15 Owen again uses the example of race: ‘the framing of the black man as criminal, as dangerous (especially to white women), has the effect of making the presence of any and all black men into people of which those who think of themselves as white are acutely aware in social space’.16 This hypervisibility is something both novels seem acutely aware of. Offred at one point notes: ‘We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it’ (Handmaid’s Tale, p. 66). The exclusionary ignoring of the hypervisible handmaids is echoed in the handmaids’ own dissembling practices of pretending not to see that which they nonetheless have to be acutely aware of to survive. Offred is a successful handmaid in the sense that she is hypervigilant, noticing every small detail as she navigates her dangerous world. One important feature of visibility and invisibility here is the reflex nature of the responses—that a response is intuitive and as such cannot necessarily be changed through thought processes or intellectual realisation. Owen explains: ‘aspect change cannot be willed in the sense that it cannot be the subject of a decision. I cannot just decide to see differently and have that outcome as a direct and immediate outcome of that decision’.17 So, if a group of people are considered invisible in terms of not having ‘social validity’, and this response is inculcated socially as an intuitive reflex, how can people become visible? Rancière argues that change can occur through what he calls an act of ‘dissensus’, the revealing of ‘two worlds in one’, by which he means the simultaneous existence of bias and its unfairness, or what I earlier described as a shift from the status quo, from one ‘continuous aspect perception’ that feels natural but is entirely biased, to one in which the form of domination or injustice becomes indefensible.18 Rancière and others suggest that art is one form through which such aspect change, ‘dissensus’, can occur—through the representation or dramatisation of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ in which a set of people who have been presumed animal are revealed to inhabit a world in which they have always had political capacity. To a degree first-person narrative can act as dissensus in these novels— as readers we don’t question that Offred is a political human in Aristotle’s terms because she speaks articulately to us. Yet, a character like Becka remains a problem, or rather exemplifies the problem as it occurs in real life rather than in the pages of literature. After all, in our everyday lives we ‘see’ each other with difficulty, penetrating the depth of each other’s humanity only within the kind of first-person narrative expressions, or subtle gestures and body language, that are

Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales  103 easy to access in a novel but that in real life take time and demand profound and sustained interaction and attention. This is why The Testaments is such an intriguing novel, I’d suggest: because it lays bare the issues not just of surveillance, but of the kind of invisibility that becomes internalised and that affects human interaction and the difficulties and challenges of seeing and being seen. Recognising Becka’s lack of visibility and its relation to the ways in which handmaids are made invisible is significant then to understanding the ways in which prejudice functions, how surveillance mitigates against human interaction, and also the political as well as personal import of visibility. Both handmaid novels take seriously the ambivalence of seeing and being seen. This is apparent in Aunt Lydia’s speech to the handmaids expanding on the principle that ‘Modesty is invisibility’. Offred recalls Aunt Lydia’s speech: ‘To be seen—to be seen—is to be—her voice trembled—penetrated. What you must be, girls is impenetrable’ (Handmaid’s Tale, p. 39). Pertaining to sexual modesty, penetration here also refers to being seen into. The handmaids practise a mode of clothing that represents a (perverse) form of (selective) celibacy, but this covering also makes them secretive and unreadable. Is the italicised emphasis here (‘seen’) Aunt Lydia’s (her distaste at being seen), or is it instead an expression of Offred’s desire for interpersonal connection and intimacy (‘oh, if only one could be seen’)? The novels surely demonstrate throughout that the appeal or avoidance of penetration is always contextual, not only in sexual but also interpersonal cases. At one point in The Testaments Becka is telling Agnes what it is about Aunt Lydia that makes her the most terrifying of the Aunts. Becka states: ‘You get the feeling she wants you to be better than you are’, and expands: ‘She looks at you as if she really sees you’. While Agnes longs for this kind of attention noting ‘So many people had looked past me’, for Becka ‘That’s why she’s so scary’ (Testaments, p. 243). To have another know your intimate feelings and thoughts is aspired to by one girl but is revealed at the same time to feel dangerous to another. For someone like Becka, who at no point in the novel reveals her feelings or thoughts about her abuse, it is potentially the re-stabbing of a wound. Throughout our reading of both handmaid tales, we are reminded through textual prompts of the tenuous and difficult nature of knowing others. While as readers we may be swept away by the narratives told by Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy, the academic postscript to The Testaments questions these narratives’ reliability: how can we really know that what these women testify to is really their own words or their own thoughts, or even authentic? The narrative implications of Atwood’s handmaid novels reveal that there are social setups that make that kind of interconnection less or more easy: Gilead stultifies interpersonal interaction and demands a forensic attention to detail that is always fraught with danger. Returning to Hagar, we can of course recognise many of the societal structures of Gilead, based as it is, partly, on a biblical model (although more worryingly, as Atwood is repeatedly quoted as noting, it is primarily based on our own recent histories). But we can practise a form of reading the Bible that recognises the significance of Hagar’s proclamation, ‘Thou God seest me’. Hagar after all is introduced twice as ‘the Egyptian’, distancing her from the biblical narrative’s focus on

104  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the Hebrews.19 Both a national and cultural outsider, Hagar is enslaved or at best a servant. Identified as an outsider on various levels, then, Hagar’s proclamation that she has been seen by God reveals to the reader her political being: the persuasive depiction of worth that is Hagar’s naming of God, self-assertion of God’s attentiveness to her, and a proclamation of the visibility she experiences. Hagar’s naming of God demonstrates a humanity that is precisely political in Rancière’s terms in that it reveals an already-existing humanity that has been hidden and compromised by the status quo. Her assertion establishes Hagar not only as the centre of the tale, but the opacity of her claim (what is it after all that God sees?) also reveals her as a complex, partly unknowable, protagonist who is inherently a political being. Seeing and being seen are, then, as vital in the biblical narrative as they are in Gilead, but so is the complexity of the political being. Early feminist responses such as Trible’s, important and sophisticated though they are, focus almost exclusively on Hagar’s oppression. In response to the ambiguity of the angel’s speech to Hagar, Trible responds, ‘We know only that the maid who names the deity “God of seeing” must return to the suffering that Yahweh imposes upon her, specifically to the mistress who is slight in her eyes’.20 Focusing on enslavement alone neglects the ‘gasps’ or glimpses of political being, but also overlooks the fact that these narratives point, if we are attentive, to the precise and complex ways in which political being, connection, and communication are all stultified by certain social setups but that oppressive regimes cannot achieve a negation of an individual’s humanity or agency. Whereas the rivalry and envy of figures like Rachel and Leah are often focused on in critical responses to the Bible, it is also their concern with being seen and heard that the narrative exposes. Rachel states after her handmaid Bilhah conceives a son, as an expression of her joy: ‘God has heard my voice’ (Gen 30:6, KJV). Although we rarely hear their voices directly in the narrative, the Bible’s handmaids and wives do articulate their visibility. Reading Atwood’s handmaid’s tales alongside the Bible provokes reflection on the relation between visibility, hypervisibility, control, and ‘being seen’. For readers of the biblical narrative, it perhaps encourages an attentive reading of ‘gasps’ and ‘fragments’ of handmaids’ lives in order to see not just the established social framework that oppresses and constrains them, and their undeniable experience as victims, but to recognise—to ‘see’—the implications and outworking of that social framework and to recognise something of the fuller reality of these women’s lives. Notes 1 For a reception history of Hagar, see Thompson, ‘Hagar: Abraham’s Wife and Exile’. 2 This is the argument put forward for example by Claassens in her article ‘Reading Trauma Narratives’. She writes: ‘Throughout the narrative it is evident that their obsession to have children is not only determined by societal norms that value women predominantly for their ability to procreate, but also by their deep desire to gain the attention and affection of Jacob’. (p. 19) 3 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 12. 4 See Trible, Texts, pp. 14, 28 (fn. 34).

Atwood’s and the Bible’s Handmaids’ Tales  105 5 Driss, ‘Art of Retelling’, p. 107. 6 Cited in Fisk, ‘Sisterhood in the Wilderness’, p. 117. 7 Tuck, New Handbook, p. 38. 8 It is a connection underlined by Agnes’s middle name, Jemima that means ‘dove’, as Sabo and Graybill point out in ‘Testifying Bodies’, p. 144, fn. 44. 9 Sabo and Graybill, ‘Testifying Bodies’, p. 144. See also their edited collection Who Knows What We’d Make of It. On docile bodies, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 10 Honneth, ‘Invisibility’, p. 115. 11 Rancière Disagreement, p. 29. See also on the ‘distribution of the sensible’, Rancière, ‘The Thinking of Dissensus’. 12 See Rancière, Disagreement, p. 17. 13 Owen, ‘Ways’, p. 355. 14 Owen, ‘Ways’, p. 358, fn 30, cites James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (London: Corgi, 1965), p. 77. 15 Honneth, ‘Invisibility’, p. 114. 16 Owen, ‘Ways’, p. 359. 17 Owen, ‘Ways’, p. 362. 18 For a succinct explanation of dissensus, see Rancière, ‘Ten Theses’. 19 Regarding the complexity of mapping race onto biblical narratives, and especially this one, see Junior, Reimagining Hagar. 20 Trible, Texts, p. 18.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaids Tale. [1985] London: Penguin, 2017. Atwood, Margaret. The Testaments. London: Penguin, 2019. Tuck, Robert. The New Handbook of Sunday-School Addresses. London: Elliot Stock, 1883. Secondary Sources Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Claassens L., Juliana. ‘Reading Trauma Narratives: Insidious Trauma in the Story of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29–30) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’. Old Testament Essays 33.1 (2020), pp. 10–31. Driss, Hager Ben. ‘The Art of Retelling: Text/ile in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments’. American, British and Canadian Studies 40.1 (2023), pp. 104–125. Fisk, Anna. ‘Sisterhood in the Wilderness: Biblical Paradigms and Feminist Identity Politics in Readings of Hagar and Sarah’. In A. K. M. Adam and Samuel Tongue (eds), Looking through a Glass Bible: Postdisciplinary Biblical Interpretations from the Glasgow School. BINS 125. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 113–137. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 2020. Honneth, Alex. ‘Invisibility: On the Epistemology of “Recognition”’. Supplementary Volume – Aristotelian Society 75.1 (2001), pp. 111–126. Nyasha Junior. Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. David Owen. ‘Ways of (Not) Seeing: (In)visibility, Equality and the Politics of Recognition’. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 24.4 (2023), pp. 353–370. Sabo, Peter, and Rhainnon Graybill. ‘Testifying Bodies: The Bible and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments’. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 38.1 (2022), pp. 131–147.

106  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Sabo, Peter, and Rhainnon Graybill (eds).‘Who Knows What We’d Make of It, if We Ever Got Our Hands on It?’: The Bible and Margaret Atwood. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020. Rancière Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rancière Jacques. ‘The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics’. In Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds), Reading Rancière. London: Continuum, 2011, pp. 1–17. Rancière Jacques, with Davide Panagia and Rachel Bowlby. ‘Ten Theses on Politics’. Theory and Event 5.3 (2001). https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/tae​.2001​.0028 Stillman, Peter G., and S. Anne Johnson. ‘Identity, Complicity and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale’. Utopian Studies 5.2 (1994), pp. 70–86. Thompson, John L. ‘Hagar: Abraham’s Wife and Exile’. In idem (ed.), Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 17–99. Trible, Phyllis. Texts of Terror: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. OBT. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984.

7

Seeing Red The Elision of Gender-Based Violence in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent Caroline Blyth

7.1 Introduction Since its publication in 1997, Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent has become a global phenomenon, selling millions of copies worldwide and appearing on multiple bestseller lists. The novel is ‘loosely’ based on Genesis 34, which recounts the rape of Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, by the Hivite prince Shechem and the subsequent vengeance enacted by her brothers against Shechem and his entire community. Additionally, The Red Tent (hereafter TRT) draws on some of the Jacob and Joseph traditions in Genesis 29–45, both to provide the ‘backstory’ of Dinah’s family and to create a narrative journey for her following the death of Shechem. Diamant describes her novel as a work of ‘historical fiction’, rather than a midrash or commentary on the biblical texts; drawing on her research into ancient Southwest Asian culture and her creative imagination, she attempts to counteract the biblical narratives’ androcentric bias by homing in on the lives and experiences of the Jacobite women.1 In this chapter, I take a closer look at Diamant’s portrayal of her female characters in TRT.2 Specifically, I focus on the author’s seeming reluctance to depict women as victims of gender-based violence, as well as her problematic rendering of such violence when it does occur in the novel. To this end, I first offer a brief overview of TRT before turning my attention to Diamant’s ‘revision’ of Dinah’s rape, her treatment of enslaved women Bilhah and Zilpah (Gen 30; 35:22), and her portrayal of Ruti—a non-biblical character—who is a victim of intimate-partner violence. I argue that, in her efforts to characterise women as agentic and strong, Diamant elides the gender-based violence encountered by the biblical women and by some of the female characters in TRT. At the same time, the novel’s portrayal of Ruti renders her abject, blameworthy, and undeserving of readers’ empathy. 7.2 Entering The Red Tent Dinah is the first-person narrator of Diamant’s novel, and from the outset, readers are invited to listen to her storytelling and immerse themselves in her world. Her narrative voice is richly embroidered with the sights, sounds, and smells of her surroundings, as well as the complex relationships between her various family members. This is a book about stories and memories: we learn about Dinah’s family DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-8

108  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry history, from Rachel and Leah’s first meeting with Jacob (based on Gen 29:9–12) to Dinah’s eventual death in Egypt at a ripe old age.3 In between these two key narrative moments, the novel introduces us to Dinah’s ‘mothers’ and ‘aunties’ (Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah), her father Jacob, her grandparents (Laban, Adah, Isaac, and Rebecca), and her band of (less than salubrious) brothers. And of course, readers also encounter Shechem (or Shalem as he is called in TRT), whose relationship with Dinah begins with a starburst of passion and ends in dark, bitter grief. Much of the action and dialogue in the novel takes place in the titular red tent, where women retreat when they menstruate, give birth, or recover from illness. It is less a place of segregation than a space where the women can spend time together, ‘passing on wisdom and spinning collective memory’.4 Outside the tent, the women are depicted as ‘far more than simply the wives of the patriarchs’.5 They are astute, resilient, family-oriented, and skilled in a multitude of crafts, including spinning, weaving, cooking, brewing, gardening, animal husbandry, midwifery, and healing. They are also emotionally intelligent and have sophisticated knowledge about goddess worship and ritual, particularly as these pertain to fertility, menstruation, and childbirth.6 As Diamant explains, TRT ‘honors women’s work, courage and ingenuity and it celebrates women’s relationships with one another’.7 7.3 Searching for Gender-Based Violence in The Red Tent While women’s strengths and skills are foregrounded in TRT, the novel is far charier about admitting women’s vulnerabilities to violence and subjugation. This is most apparent in Diamant’s decision to depict Dinah’s relationship with Hivite prince Shalem as one based on mutual love and desire, rather than coercion and violence. The couple meet, they fall instantly in love (and into bed), and they enjoy a blissful, sex-saturated marriage until Dinah’s brothers ruin everything by murdering Shalem along with all the other Hivite men (TRT, 2.7, 3.1). The precise nature of Dinah’s encounter with Shechem in Genesis 34 has been the subject of much interpretative debate over the centuries. While the majority of scholars argue that Shechem raped and abducted Dinah, others contend that the verse depicts a sexual event that is illicit in some sense, rather than violent.8 In her introduction to TRT, Diamant explains why she chose to present Dinah’s relationship with Shalem as passionate and consensual: In Genesis 34, Dinah’s experience is described and characterized by the men in her family, who treat her as a rape victim, which in that historical setting meant that she was irredeemably ruined and degraded. Because she does not say a word (and because of the loving actions taken by her accused assailant), I found it easy to imagine an alternative telling to the story, in which Dinah is not a passive victim but a young woman who makes choices and acts on her own initiative.9 And, in an interview included at the end of the novel, Diamant makes a similar point about why she did not include Dinah’s biblical rape in the novel: ‘I wanted

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  109 Dinah and all of the women in my story to be active agents in their own lives, not passive pawns or victims’.10 The women who populate TRT are doubtlessly impressive; but the author’s insistence that they are depicted as ‘active agents in their own lives’ rather than ‘passive pawns or victims’ gives me pause for thought. When I initially read this novel, I was struck by just how often the narrative reframes and rehabilitates patriarchally controlled systems, such as marriage, motherhood, enslavement, and the primacy of male authority, all of which serve to regulate and police biblical women’s lives and bodies.11 In Diamant’s hands, these systems (and the ideologies that scaffold them) are often embraced and affirmed by the women who populate her novel. Heterosexual marriage and motherhood become the overriding concerns (if not obsessions) of many of the female characters, who recognise these as the means through which they can achieve personal fulfilment and social status. The Red Tent also regularly glosses over the gender-based violence that women experience in the Genesis traditions and in the novel itself by either erasing it completely or passing it off as an inevitable feature of ancient Southwest Asian culture. Additionally, there are occasions when such violence is framed as something for which women themselves are culpable. These various treatments of gender-based violence come out particularly clearly in the novel’s characterisation of enslaved women Bilhah and Zilpah and also Laban’s wife Ruti, whom I now discuss in turn. 7.3.1 Enslaved in the Red Tent: Bilhah and Zilpah

In the Genesis traditions, Bilhah and Zilpah are referred to as either the ’amahot or šep̄ aḥot (enslaved women) of Laban, who gave them to his daughters, Rachel and Leah, as a wedding dowry (Gen 29:24, 29).12 According to Diane Kriger, biblical ’amahot (sing. ’amah) and šep̄ aḥot (sing. šip̄ ḥah) could occupy the dual role of both ‘slave’ and ‘wife’ when they were integrated into a family or kinship structure and used for their ‘reproductive capabilities’.13 This is demonstrated in Genesis 30, where Bilhah and Zilpah are utilised by Rachel and Leah, respectively, to bear children on their behalf. In verse 3, we read that, frustrated by her childlessness, Rachel tells her husband Jacob, ‘Here is my ’amah Bilhah; go into her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her’.14 Rachel then ‘gave him her šip̄ ḥah Bilhah as a wife, and Jacob went into her’ (v. 4). Over time, Bilhah gives birth to two boys, whom Rachel names Dan and Naphtali (vv. 5–8). Leah then follows suit after she ceases to bear children, giving ‘her šip̄ ḥah Zilpah’ to Jacob ‘as a wife’ (v. 9). Two sons, named by Leah as Gad and Asher, are then born to Zilpah (vv. 10–12). As enslaved women, Bilhah and Zilpah would have had no choice but to comply with these childbearing arrangements described in Genesis 30. Their status as ’amahot and šep̄ aḥot deprived them of any right to bodily autonomy and rendered them vulnerable to ‘sexual servitude’—in other words, rape—at the hands of their enslavers.15 That they are given to Jacob as ‘wives’ (Gen 30:4, 9) does not preclude the abusive and coercive nature of these two women’s experiences; despite their location within the Jacobite family, Bilhah and Zilpah are treated as ‘little more

110  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry than surrogate wombs’.16 And while the biblical text suggests that Jacob ‘went into’ both women twice, resulting in their giving birth to two sons apiece, it is probable that Bilhah and Zilpah had to endure multiple rapes at the hands of their enslaver before they fell pregnant. As Gafney astutely notes, ‘The reader must imagine how many times the slave-women were forced/required to have sex with these men in order to provide their mistresses with the children they craved’.17 In TRT, Zilpah and Bilhah’s inclusion within the Jacobite kinship structure is made clear. Diamant presents them as the daughters of Laban and half-sisters to Rachel and Leah, and Dinah variously refers to the two women as her ‘mothers’ and ‘aunties’. Bilhah and Zilpah also play an integral role in family life.18 They are skilled workers, child carers, healers, and holders of sacred knowledge; they enjoy a particularly close relationship with their half-sisters; they share their stories and wisdom with the other women in the red tent; and they eventually become mothers to Jacob’s sons Dan, Gad, and Asher.19 By characterising Bilhah and Zilpah in such a positive light, Diamant stresses these enslaved women’s strengths and their inclusion within the family. Nevertheless, Bilhah and Zilpah’s place among the freeborn women remains demarcated and prescribed through the structures of enslavement. They are both identified as the daughters of enslaved women, and their father Laban treats them more as property than as kin; this is attested by the fact that he uses them as dowries for Leah and Rachel (TRT, 1.1, cf. Gen 29:24, 29). Furthermore, like their biblical namesakes, Diamant’s Bilhah and Zilpah are expected to act as ‘surrogate wombs’ for their half-sisters/enslavers. Yet TRT reconfigures this Genesis 30 tradition in a way that elides the inherent violence of this text by reframing both Bilhah and Zilpah as consensual participants in their own sexual servitude. In the following sections, I discuss these two characters separately, as their portrayals in the novel are significantly different. 7.3.1.1 Bilhah

While Rachel is the instigator of her šip̄ ḥah’s sexual servitude in Gen 30:3–4, TRT portrays Bilhah volunteering for this role after witnessing Rachel’s deep-seated grief about her childlessness: Bilhah saw Rachel’s despair and went to her where she huddled on her blanket. The little sister lay down beside Rachel and held her as gently as a mother. ‘Let me go to Jacob on your behalf’, said Bilhah, in a whisper. ‘Let me bear a son on your knees. Let me be your womb and your breasts. Let me bleed your blood and shed your tears. Let me become your vessel until your time comes, for your time will yet arrive. Let me be your hope, Rachel. I will not disappoint you’. (TRT 1.3) In this scene, Bilhah literally pleads with Rachel to let her fulfil the role assigned to a šip̄ ḥah—she wants to be a ‘vessel’ for her enslaver; she wants to suffer the pangs of childbirth on Rachel’s behalf, to bleed and shed tears in her place. She abdicates

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  111 her bodily autonomy and offers to let her own womb and breasts become Rachel’s womb and breasts. What is more, Diamant’s Bilhah is motivated by more than simple loyalty to her half-sister/enslaver; her offer to bear Rachel’s baby ‘also served her own heart’s desire’. Bilhah admits to Dinah that the sounds of lovemaking in the close world of our tents had roused her at night, leaving her shaken and sleepless. Attending [Leah’s] births made her wish to become part of the great mother-mystery, which is bought with pain and repaid with an infant’s sparkling smile and silken skin. Her breasts ached to give suck. (TRT 1.3) Here, Bilhah is portrayed as a woman driven by her own longings to experience the pleasures of (hetero)sex (with one of her enslavers) and motherhood (bearing a child who will technically not belong to her). By depicting her eagerness to fulfil these desires, she is effectively rendered complicit in her own sexual servitude. The novel’s description of ensuing events only reiterates Bilhah’s secondary status within the red tent sisterhood. Compared to Leah and Rachel, whose weddings are lavish and celebratory, there is no marriage ceremony for Bilhah—she simply goes to Jacob’s tent alone after receiving Rachel’s permission. Jacob pays no dowry for her; indeed, the only gift he gives her—a simple bracelet made of wool scraps—merely reinforces her lower standing as Jacob’s enslaved ‘wife’. ‘It was nothing’, Dinah recounts, ‘No precious metal, or ivory, or anything of value […] Such a sad little nothing of a bride price’ (TRT 1.3). Bilhah admits to Dinah that, although she knew she ‘had no right to the rituals of a dowered bride’, she wept because her ‘marriage’ had not been marked by celebration (TRT 1.3). On seeing her tears, Jacob ‘comforted’ her with the ‘poor gift’ of the bracelet. ‘I stopped crying’, she tells Dinah, ‘I smiled into his face’. In TRT, this enslaved female character must smile in the face of her enslaver, all the while accepting her own sexual and social subordination. Bilhah is also portrayed as enjoying her sexual encounter with Jacob, telling Dinah that it was ‘all [she] had hoped for’ (TRT 1.3).20 She also reveals, with ‘great satisfaction’, that their subsequent couplings gave her husband a sense of ‘peace’ (TRT 1.3). The sexual servitude experienced by Bilhah in Gen 30:3–4 is thus reframed as a romantic fantasy, wherein the enslaved woman receives both sexual pleasure and emotional contentment in the arms of her enslaver. There is one other tradition about Bilhah recorded in Genesis that TRT alludes to, but in a way that similarly ignores the violence inherent in the biblical text. Genesis 35:22 reports that Reuben, the eldest son of Jacob, ‘went and lay with Bilhah his father’s pilegeš’.21 The term pilegeš is often translated as ‘concubine’ or ‘secondary wife’, although its exact meaning is the topic of much debate.22 In essence, though, the word designates Bilhah as Jacob’s sexual property; thus, by having sex with Jacob’s pilegeš, Reuben dishonours his father because he effectively reveals Jacob’s incapacity to control sexual access to ‘his’ women. While

112  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Jacob appears to do nothing at the time of this infraction (he ‘hears of it’ but does not act), he makes his displeasure known to Reuben when he ‘blesses’ him on his deathbed: ‘Unstable as water, you shall no longer excel because you went up onto your father’s bed; then you defiled it—you went up onto my couch!’ (Gen 49:4). The tragedy of this story, as Gafney points out, is that ‘no comfort is offered to Bilhah in the text […] Bilhah’s body has belonged to Laban, Rachel, Jacob, and now Reuben’.23 Nor does Genesis 35 record Bilhah’s reaction to this event; like Dinah, she is given no narrative voice to testify to her experience. But one thing is clear: as an enslaved woman, Bilhah would have had no authority or agency to deny Reuben access to her body. The power disparity between them would have made it impossible for her to withhold her consent in any meaningful way. Reuben therefore raped her, using her body either for his own sexual pleasure or as a way to engage in some form of powerplay with his father.24 Reuben’s rape of Bilhah is not recorded in TRT. Instead, her relationship with Reuben is presented as loving and consensual (just as Dinah’s encounter with Shechem is similarly transformed). Dinah describes Bilhah and Reuben as the ‘truest lovers’, whose ‘abiding affection’ for each other did not fade over time (TRT, 2.8, 2.3). But when Jacob eventually finds out that they are having a sexual relationship, he disinherits Reuben and strikes Bilhah ‘across the face, breaking her teeth’ (TRT, 2.8). ‘After that’, says Dinah, ‘she began to disappear. The sweet one, the little mother, became smaller and thinner, more silent, more watchful […] Then one day, she was gone […] She vanished, and Jacob never spoke her name again’ (TRT, 2.8). Bilhah thus disintegrates and disappears in the TRT narrative, and she is conjured up sporadically thereafter only in Dinah’s memories and dreams. Her sudden, unexplained absence highlights the ‘otherness’ that shrouds her character throughout the novel; she is forever an outsider, even among the close-knit community of her red tent sisters. Bilhah’s otherness is further accentuated by the fact that Diamant chose to portray her as a woman of colour. Early on in the novel, she is introduced as the daughter of Laban and ‘a slave named Tefnut—a tiny black woman’ (TRT, 1.1).25 Dinah relates that, as a child, Bilhah was sad […] and it was easier to leave her alone. She rarely smiled and hardly spoke. No one, not even her doting grandmother Adah, could warm to this strange, lonely bird, who never grew taller than a boy of ten years, and whose skin was the color of dark amber. (TRT, 1.1) Compared to her sisters, Bilhah stands apart, unlovely and unlovable, even as a child. ‘Bilhah was not beautiful like Rachel, or capable like Leah, or quick like Zilpah’, Dinah tells readers. ‘She was tiny, dark, and silent. Adah was exasperated by her hair, which was springy as moss and refused to obey her hands. Compared to the two other motherless girls, Bilhah was neglected dreadfully’ (TRT, 1.1). The šip̄ ḥah’s darkness and her untameable hair are both interwoven here with her smallness, her silence, her unloveliness, and her discomfiting presence among the

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  113 other girls and women in the household. Even amidst the novel’s world of cosy red tent sisterhood, some sisters, it appears, are more at home than others; and it is the sister with the ‘dark amber’ skin who is marked as the outsider. Now, I acknowledge that, in writing a work of historical fiction, Diamant is enjoined to capture the social mores and practices of the period in which it is set, including those that may be considered abhorrent today.26 Yet for a novel hailed as a ‘feminist classic’ on the publisher’s website and in myriad reviews, I am deeply troubled by its portrayal of an enslaved woman of colour who is unsightly and unlovable; who takes great pleasure in bearing a child for her enslavers; and who has a ‘loving’ sexual relationship with her enslavers’ son.27 Particularly when read alongside the long and painful history of enslaved women of colour suffering rape at the hands of their enslavers, the novel’s treatment of Bilhah strikes me as unforgivably tone deaf. 7.3.1.2 Zilpah

Zilpah’s sexual servitude in TRT is framed quite differently than Bilhah’s, and in ways that do at least raise questions about her lack of agency and bodily autonomy. Zilpah knows that, as a šip̄ ḥah, she cannot refuse to serve as Leah’s surrogate womb. Dinah recounts that Zilpah ‘knew it would happen someday, and she was resigned to it. But unlike Bilhah, Zilpah would never ask. Leah would have to command it. Finally, she did’ (TRT, 1.3). However, Leah’s ‘command’ is presented in the novel as more of a wistful pleading. She meets with Zilpah late one night, waxes lyrical about the full moon, then takes her šip̄ ḥah’s hands and asks her, ‘Are you ready to swallow the moon at last?’ (TRT, 1.3). Zilpah’s response is one of tragic resignation. ‘What could I say?’ she asks Dinah. ‘It was my time’ (TRT, 1.3). But she does not share Bilhah’s yearning to experience (hetero)sex and motherhood. Jacob’s touch gives her no pleasure; ‘I did what was required of me’, she reports, and her tone of voice is such that ‘no one dared ask her to say more’ (TRT, 1.3). This by no means sounds like a consensual encounter, especially given the significant power imbalance between this enslaved woman and her enslavers. Yet Zilpah’s sexual subjugation is not acknowledged (either explicitly or implicitly) within TRT. Instead, readers are reassured that she ‘never complained’ about Jacob’s ‘attentions’, which she describes to Dinah as nothing more than ‘a duty, like grinding grain—something that wears away at the body but is necessary so that life can go on’ (TRT, 1.3). By giving Zilpah these words to say, Diamant once again compels an enslaved female character to express a level of complicity in her own sexual subjugation. Zilpah does eventually fall pregnant and is ‘glad to be free from Jacob’s attentions’ during her pregnancy (TRT, 1.3). Lest readers are concerned about Zilpah’s lack of enthusiasm for (hetero)sex and motherhood, Diamant assures us that she ‘gloried in her new [heavily pregnant] body’ (TRT, 1.3). Yet her happiness is curtailed, temporarily at least, when she endures a brutal three-day labour, during which she is described as being ‘all but dead from the pains’ (TRT, 1.3). After eventually giving birth to twin boys, Gad and Asher, she suffers a massive haemorrhage

114  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry that leaves her on the brink of death for the next ten days. When she awakens, though, she immediately asks about ‘her’ sons and laughs when she hears their names (given to them by Leah). And despite the traumas of her labour, Dinah assures us that Zilpah ‘tasted only the joy of mothers, the sweetest tears’ when she holds Gad and Asher in her arms (TRT, 1.3). The coercion that underpins Zilpah’s sexual servitude is all too easily glossed over here amidst the intoxication of maternal bliss. Diamant does, however, grant Zilpah a crumb of agency at the end of this harrowing episode. Determined not to endure another round of Jacob’s ‘attentions’ and the trauma of labour, she seeks out her ‘husband’ to tell him that ‘another pregnancy would surely kill her’ and asks him to ‘remember this when he called a wife to his bed’. After issuing this request, ‘she never slept with Jacob again’ (TRT, 1.3). Zilpah thus regains something of her bodily autonomy, but Jacob’s acquiescence to her request does nothing to redeem either him or Leah. Their sexual subjugation of Zilpah caused her emotional discomfort and almost claimed her life; the novel’s attempts to mitigate this are too little and far too late. 7.3.2 An Outsider in the Red Tent: Ruti

While the biblical rapes of Dinah, Zilpah, and Bilhah are erased from TRT, the novel does include a few references to sexual violence, including child abuse, male rape, and multiple-perpetrator rape.28 These are generally handled sensitively (albeit briefly), but Diamant’s sole depiction of intimate-partner violence is undermined by her portrayal of the victim as weak, passive, and defeated. Ruti is one of Laban’s wives, and her suffering at his hands renders her an abject foil to the more agentic female figures of Leah, Rachel, and Dinah. ‘Poor Ruti’, as Dinah refers to her, is initially treated well by Laban after she gave birth to his sons, but his affection soon turns to contempt when she is no longer able to bear children. Dinah recounts that her grandfather began to hit [Ruti] and call her names so ugly my mothers would not repeat them to me. Ruti’s shoulders stooped with despair, and several of her teeth were broken from the force of Laban’s fists. Even so, he continued to use her body for his own pleasure, a thought that made my mothers shudder. (TRT, 1.3) The sisters’ ‘shudders’ here are ambiguous: are they disgusted by their father’s brutish behaviour or by Ruti’s battered appearance? Certainly, throughout the novel, Ruti is never portrayed empathetically, despite the horrific violence inflicted upon her. Instead, she becomes a pariah, and the language used to describe her only degrades and dehumanises her further. When Dinah’s mothers spend time together in the red tent, Ruti sits with them in silence, ‘her blackened eyes and her bruises reproach[ing] them’ (TRT, 1.3). But this does not compel the women to offer Ruti any significant care. And while they ‘pity’ her, their indifference only exacerbates Ruti’s maltreatment in the Jacobite camp. As Dinah recounts,

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  115 For all their pity, Jacob’s wives did not embrace Ruti. She was the mother of their sons’ rivals, their material enemy. The bondswomen saw how the sisters kept themselves apart from her, and they followed suit. Even her own sons laughed at her and treated her like a dog. Ruti, already alone, kept to herself. She became such a ragged, battered misery to look at that no one saw her. (TRT, 1.3) In the eyes of Rachel and Leah, the mother of Laban’s sons is not deserving of their concern; maternal and material interests clearly trump female solidarity within the red tent. Ruti is repeatedly degraded and dehumanised to the point of abjection; as a ‘ragged, battered misery’, she is rendered all but invisible, openly shunned by the bondswomen and even by her own flesh and blood. She is also likened to an animal on more than one occasion and is repeatedly spoken of as though she has already left the land of the living. She is ‘more a ghost than a woman’; her voice is ‘nothing but an echo from the grave’; her eyes are ‘empty’; and despair clings to her ‘like a fog from the world of the dead’ (TRT, 1.3). When Ruti discovers she is pregnant again, she begs Rachel to give her medicine to induce an abortion (TRT, 1.3). Rachel tells her sisters, and they in turn feel ‘ashamed’ about not doing more to help their stepmother. But it is only enslaved women Bilhah and Zilpah who voice this shame. ‘We are no better than [Laban] is’, Bilhah declares, ‘to have let her suffer alone, to have given her no comfort, no help’ (TRT, 1.3). Despite Bilhah’s words, though, Dinah admits that the sisters did not change in their apparent treatment of Ruti. They did not speak to her or show her any special kindness. But at night, when Laban snored, one of the four would find her, huddled on her filthy blanket in a far corner of the tent, and feed her broth or honeyed bread. (TRT, 1.3) The women’s covert efforts to care for Ruti are sorely limited, and the way Ruti is depicted here conjures images of a mistreated animal being placated with scraps of food. There is no clean blanket for Ruti, no welcoming safe space for her in the red tent, and no meaningful sisterly support. Rachel helps Ruti end her pregnancy, but the woman’s troubles are far from over. Readers are told that Laban’s treatment of his wife ‘only worsened as the years passed’ (TRT, 2.1). At one point in the narrative, Laban ‘loses’ her in a wager to another man, who then arrives at Jacob’s camp to collect his ‘winnings’. This time around, Ruti approaches Leah to beg for her help. And, to her credit, Leah implores Jacob to intervene. Laban, she insists, has treated Ruti ‘as though she were an animal from the flock or a stranger among us, and not the mother of his sons’ (TRT, 2.1). There is a bitter irony to her words here, given how they echo Ruti’s treatment at the hands of Leah and her sisters. But Jacob does at least agree to ‘buy back’ Ruti from her would-be enslaver. After this incident, readers are told that Laban ‘only became fouler in his use of Ruti, whose eyes seemed permanently blackened after that. Her sons, following

116  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry their father’s pattern, showed their mother no respect […] She crept around her men in silent service’ (TRT, 2.1). Ruti’s ‘service’ also extends to Leah, towards whom she has become pathetically grateful. Dinah remembers that ‘she became Leah’s shadow, kissing her hands and her hem, sitting as close to her savior as she could’ (TRT, 2.1). But the ‘ragged woman’s presence’ only irked Leah, whom, we are told, ‘occasionally lost patience with her’ and sent her away. Nevertheless, she ‘always regretted rebuking Ruti, who cringed at a single cross word from my mother. After she sent her away, Leah sought her out and sat down beside the poor, wasted soul and let herself be kissed and thanked, again and again’ (TRT, 2.1). It is of little surprise that a woman who is used to angry words being accompanied by physical violence would ‘cringe’ when Leah admonished her. And yes, Leah may have shown some remorse, but her efforts to console Ruti consist only of allowing this ‘poor, wasted soul’ to heap praises and thanks upon her. This scene between Leah and Ruti does nothing to reassure readers that Ruti is receiving any form of support or care from Leah or her sisters. Rather, Leah’s behaviour appears to recreate the cycle of abuse that victims of intimate-partner violence often experience at the hands of their abuser.29 During this cycle, growing tensions lead to an outburst of anger from the abuser; this is then followed by a period of ‘reconciliation’, where the abuser attempts to preserve the loyalty of their victim (and thus entrap them in the relationship) by apologising to them or showing them affection. Leah’s abuse of Ruti in this scene is emotional, rather than physical, but that does not make it any less abhorrent. Indeed, the litany of Ruti’s abject portrayals in TRT likewise echo the tactics of emotional abuse and coercive control, where abusers degrade and humiliate their victims, thereby reminding them that they are undeserving of empathy or care.30 Ruti is therefore victimised on so many levels within this novel—Laban and Leah may deliver the physical and emotional blows, but readers are themselves invited to be complicit in the abuse by witnessing in silence Ruti’s ongoing degradation. In the following chapter of TRT, Jacob decides to leave Laban’s camp and seek a new home for his family. On learning about the incipient loss of her ‘saviour’, Leah, Ruti sinks even further into despair. The preparations for leaving ‘might have been a joyous time had it not been for Ruti’, admits Dinah (TRT, 2.2). Laban’s battered wife ‘took to sitting in the dust before Leah’s tent, a graven image of despair forcing everyone to step around her’ (TRT, 2.2). In her deepest grief, Ruti is nothing more than a joyless presence, who drains everyone else’s happiness and ‘forces’ them to inconvenience themselves. While Leah makes several inadequate attempts to coax Ruti ‘out of her misery’, she soon loses patience with this deeply traumatised woman and ‘move[s] on’ to continue preparing for the family’s departure (TRT, 2.2). The following day, however, Ruti does not appear in front of Leah’s tent. When Leah sends Dinah to find her, no one can remember seeing her. ‘By then misery had made her nearly invisible’, Dinah tells readers, as though Ruti is somehow responsible for everyone’s indifference to her suffering (TRT, 2.2). Shortly thereafter, when Dinah and her brother Joseph find Ruti’s body in a dry wadi—‘a desolate place’—she is not even afforded any dignity in death. Dinah

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  117 recalls that Ruti’s ‘mouth was slack and that there were flies at the corners of her eyes and on her wrist, which was black with blood. Carrion birds circled above […] She did not look sad. She did not look pained. She looked nothing but empty’ (TRT, 2.2). When Joseph goes to alert the adults, Dinah stays behind to keep the vultures away from Ruti’s body: I walked to the top of the wadi and tried to think kind thoughts about Ruti. But all I could remember was the fear in her eyes, the dirt in her hair, the sour smell of her body, the defeated crouch. She had been a woman just as my mother was a woman, and yet she was a creature totally unlike my mother. I did not understand Leah’s kindness to Ruti. In my heart, I shared her sons’ disdain for her. Why did she submit to Laban? Why did she not demand her sons’ respect? How could she find the courage to kill herself when she had no courage for life? (TRT, 2.2) Dinah’s angry questions about Ruti’s ‘submission’ to Laban echo the questions that are so often asked of contemporary victims of intimate-partner violence: why didn’t they leave? Why did they put up with the abuse? Yet these are infuriating questions, because they ignore the insidious nature of intimate-partner violence, which corrodes victims’ agency and leaves them feeling helpless and entrapped within their abusive relationship.31 These questions also fail to acknowledge that, for many victims, leaving the relationship may well be impossible: they may be financially dependent on their abuser; they may have no other support systems and nowhere else to go; and they may fear the repercussions that will inevitably ensue if they do try to leave. But by having Dinah—the novel’s protagonist and hero—ask such questions, Diamant grants them an air of veracity that is never challenged elsewhere in the novel. Instead, readers are left with the sense that Ruti has let everyone down, including herself. She is portrayed as nothing more than a dirty, foul-smelling, abject ‘creature’ whose lack of ‘courage for life’ makes her a source of others’ disdain. And that will doubtless be a bitter pill to swallow for readers of TRT who themselves are victims and survivors of intimate-partner violence. So let me answer Dinah’s questions here: Ruti had no choice but to submit to her husband’s brutality because, in the novel’s deeply patriarchal world, she was utterly dependent on him, both socially and financially. Where else could she go? Who would support her? Leah, the nearest thing Ruti had to an ally, appeared indifferent to her plight and even contributed to her abuse. Ruti’s ‘courage for life’ was therefore exhausted and eventually extinguished by the relentless batterings and rapes she endured at the hands of her husband, and by the abusive disdain of her sons, and by the ongoing inaction, indifference, and emotional abuse of her stepdaughters and their household. Ruti deserved better than that—her abuse and her death were not her fault.

118  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 7.4 Leaving the Red Tent Anita Diamant’s bestselling novel is crafted from the stories of women. Dinah tells us in the prologue that remembering these stories ‘seems a holy thing’.32 Yet, as I have discussed throughout this chapter, TRT seems reluctant to recognise that remembering stories about women who are victims of gender-based violence deserves to be considered a ‘holy thing’ too. The novel’s relentless focus on women’s strength and agency only effaces the violence experienced by some female characters and by their counterparts in the Genesis traditions. The biblical rapes of Dinah and Bilhah are reframed as consensual, romantic relationships. The sexual subjugation of enslaved women is accepted and even celebrated, especially when it leads to the birth of sons. Women must be strong, agentic, and resilient in TRT— ‘active agents in their own lives’, rather than ‘passive pawns and victims’.33 On the rare occasions when female characters (such as Ruti) are deficient in this task, they are marked as feminine failures—outsiders to the red tent community and culpable to some extent at least for the fate that befalls them. The novel thus ignores the systems of patriarchal power (both in the biblical world and in our world today), which subordinate women to male authority, control their bodies, and diminish their agency, thus rendering them even more vulnerable to oppression and abuse. If women are ‘passive pawns and victims’ in the biblical texts and in TRT, it is because these unjust patriarchal systems have compelled them to be so. Diamant should also recognise that women’s capacity to be ‘passive pawns and victims’ and ‘active agents in their own lives’ is not a zero-sum game. To argue otherwise only denies the dignity and resilience of every victim and survivor of gender-based violence. Up until her death, Ruti was a victim and a survivor, doing whatever she could to find support in her community—a support that, tragically, was never forthcoming. Yet in TRT, her death frames her as a failure, rather than as a woman who tried so hard to survive despite her abuse. Bilhah and Zilpah were also victims and survivors, notwithstanding the novel’s attempts to render them complicit in their own victimisation. Surely these women’s stories are ‘holy things’ too and deserving of readers’ compassion and respect. What is more, while TRT pays lip service to the vivifying power of sisterhood and female solidarity, it also demonstrates that not every woman is equal in the red tent community. In an interview about TRT, Diamant claims that the novel ‘elevates relationships among women to the status they deserve’.34 Yet the relationship between Ruti and the women in Jacob’s family is far from ‘elevated’, and the enslaved status of Bilhah and Zilpah leave their mark on both women’s experiences of sisterhood throughout the novel. This is particularly true for Bilhah, whose identity as an enslaved woman of colour diminishes her status within the Jacobite family and among her female kin. The novel may claim to champion women’s solidarity, but it actually illustrates (unwittingly perhaps) how multiple forms of oppression—such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and enslavement—can intersect to subordinate women and render them ‘other’, even within their own community.35 In a 2014 interview, Diamant explained that society’s enduring degradation and abuse of women was the reason she felt there was an ‘urgent need’ to depict the

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  119 female characters in TRT as ‘wise, talented, supportive and strong’.36 To an extent, I empathise with her efforts; but I also believe it is equally ‘urgent’ to represent women’s experiences of victimisation in an honest and critical way. There is no shame in being a victim of gender-based violence; there is no shame in struggling against intersecting oppressions that deplete women’s capacity to survive and thrive in a disturbingly patriarchal world. There is already too much shame attached to victims and survivors of gender-based violence; there is already too much pressure on victims and survivors to stay silent about their trauma; and there are already too many occasions when the voices of victims and survivors are silenced, discredited, or dismissed. Erasing gender-based violence from both biblical stories and the novels they inspire will not serve to erase such violence within our contemporary cultures. It will not provide empathy or support to victims and survivors of this violence, nor will it bring them closer to any sense of justice or healing. Instead, such erasure will simply reinforce to all victims and survivors that their stories and voices do not deserve to be heard. Diamant has always insisted that she did not write TRT as a form of biblical interpretation or commentary; yet it is still worth asking if this ‘feminist classic’ of a novel might provide feminist scholars with any new insights into the biblical texts on which it is based. To be sure, TRT has introduced millions of readers to many of the women who appear in the Genesis traditions. Akin to some feminist biblical scholars, Diamant draws attention to the androcentric nature of these traditions and attempts to shift the focus onto the lives and experiences of ancient Southwest Asian women. In one sense, she has been hugely successful in this venture, given the novel’s impressive global readership and its overwhelmingly positive reviews. As one reviewer of TRT notes, ‘Diamant has done more for the biblical narrative than acres of unread scholarship’.37 Yet the novel’s elision of biblical women’s encounters with gender-based violence, its attempted ‘rehabilitation’ of women’s experiences of enslavement, its abjection of women of colour, and its singular focus on women’s capacity as wives and mothers all serve to perpetuate the androcentric and white-supremacist exegetical strategies that have dominated biblical scholarship for hundreds of years. Diamant’s TRT fails to offer any new feminist insights into the Genesis traditions; it merely repackages the patriarchy and misogyny inherent in the biblical texts, thereby rendering them more palatable for contemporary readers. Notes 1 Rosen, ‘Anita Diamant’s Red Tent’, p. 32; Wright, Genesis of Fiction, p. 115. Further details about Diamant’s writing process for TRT can be found on her website: https:// anitadiamant​.com​/books​/the​-red​-tent/ (accessed 1 March 2023). 2 My edition of the book comprises a prologue and three parts (as well as an introduction by Diamant and an interview with her at the end). The chapters are not numbered sequentially throughout the book; instead, each part begins with chapter 1. As I am using the e-book version of TRT, any quotes or citations from the novel will consist of the part number followed by the chapter number, rather than page numbers. 3 Dinah’s life and death in Egypt are not recorded in the Hebrew Bible traditions, although Gen 46:15 mentions her among the members of Jacob’s family who travelled to Egypt for their reunion with Joseph.

120  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 4 Redmont, ‘Biblical Women’, p. 28. The red tent is a space created by Diamant and has no known biblical basis. 5 Wright, Genesis of Fiction, pp. 128–129. 6 Diamant’s novel depicts the women’s religious practices as quite distinct to the men’s worship of El/yhwh. For further discussion, see Tumanov, ‘Yahweh vs. the Teraphim’, pp. 139–151. 7 Quoted in Shluker, ‘Anita Diamant’. 8 For an overview of these two competing approaches to Gen 34, see Shemesh, ‘Rape is Rape’, pp. 2–21; Blyth, Narrative of Rape, pp. 38–92. 9 TRT, ‘Introduction’. 10 TRT, ‘Interview with Anita Diamant’. 11 As Trible, ʻWomen’, p. 964, observes, ‘From childhood to old age, the Hebrew woman belonged to the men of her family […] their bodies were not their own’. 12 For further discussion of the semantic nuances of ’amah and šip̄ ḥah, see Kriger, Sex Rewarded, pp. 35–88. Kriger suggests that the two words are often used synonymously in Hebrew Bible texts (p. 45). 13 Kriger, Sex Rewarded, Sex Punished, p. 35. 14 Unless otherwise stated, biblical quotes are from the NRSVue (New Revised Standard Version updated edition 2021). 15 Gafney, Womanist Midrash, pp. 57, 67; see also Kriger, Sex Rewarded, p. 37. 16 Kriger, Sex Rewarded, Sex Punished, p. 315; see also Scholz, ‘Gender, Class’, p. 12; Claassens, ‘Reading Trauma Narratives’, pp. 22–24; Gafney, Womanist Midrash, pp. 68–70. 17 Gafney, Womanist Midrash, p. 68. 18 Interestingly, Hagar, the šip̄ ḥah of Sarah, is not mentioned in TRT. There is only a brief name-check of her son, Ishmael, whom she bore to Abraham through the same process of sexual servitude experienced by Bilhah and Zilpah. 19 In TRT, Bilhah gives birth to only one son, Dan, compared to Gen 30:7–8, where she also bears Naphtali. For reasons that remain unclear, Leah takes on the role of Naphtali’s birth mother in the novel. 20 In this scene, Bilhah gives her niece an alarmingly detailed account of her first sexual encounter with Jacob. 21 Translation my own. 22 Kriger, Sex Rewarded, pp. 104–111, discusses Bilhah’s designation as a pilegeš in Gen 35:22. 23 Gafney, Womanist Midrash, pp. 68–69. 24 Scholz, ‘Gender, Class’, p. 23; Gafney, Womanist Midrash, pp. 68–69. 25 Zilpah is the daughter of an Egyptian enslaved woman, but Dinah describes her having olive skin, straight black hair, and the same ‘family nose’ as Leah and their father Laban. It is Bilhah alone among all Laban’s daughters whose hair and skin colour mark her as ethnically ‘other’. 26 TRT, ‘Interview with Anita Diamant’. 27 For the description of TRT as a ‘feminist classic’, see https://www​.panmacmillan​.com​/ authors​/anita​-diamant​/the​-red​-tent​/9781529086348 (accessed 21 March 2023). 28 On two occasions, Laban sexually assaults his adolescent daughters, Leah and Zilpah, thereby incurring the wrath of his wife Adah. Later in the novel, Dinah is told (in passing) that her brother Joseph was raped during his enslavement in Egypt. Lastly, Diamant describes the multiple-perpetrator rape and physical assault of enslaved woman Werenro, who survives but is left blinded and seriously disfigured due to her injuries. The author’s choice to permanently ‘mark’ Werenro with the scars of her assault (to the extent that she must wear a veil in public) is uncomfortably reminiscent of the common myth that rape victims are rendered ‘damaged goods’ (devalued, debased, defiled) by their experience (see Blyth, Narrative of Rape, pp. 94–103, for further discussion of this myth). 29 I am grateful to Emily Colgan for sharing this insight with me. For more information on the cycle of abuse, see https://domesticviolence​.org​/cycle​-of​-violence/ (accessed 22 March 2023).

Gender-Based Violence and The Red Tent  121 30 For more information on the tactics of emotional abuse and coercive control, see Hill, See What You Made Me Do, ch. 1. 31 Hill, See What You Made Me Do, ch. 1. 32 TRT, ‘Prologue’. 33 TRT, ‘Interview with Anita Diamant’. 34 Cited in Berkovic, ‘Menstrual Hut’, p. 25. 35 Claassens, ‘Reading Trauma Narratives’, p. 23, also mentions the importance of recognising how the intersections of race, gender, and social status impact Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s experiences of trauma in Genesis. 36 Shluker, ‘Anita Diamant’. 37 Berkovic, ‘Menstrual Hut’, p. 24.

Bibiliography Fiction/Primary Sources Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. 10th anniversary ed. New York, NY: Picador. iBook, 2007. Secondary Sources Berkovic, Sally. ‘Tales from the Menstrual Hut: The Astonishing Success of The Red Tent’. Jewish Quarterly 49.2 (2002), pp. 23–25. Blyth, Caroline. The Narrative of Rape in Genesis 34: Interpreting Dinah’s Silence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Claassens, L. Juliana. ‘Reading Trauma Narratives: Insidious Trauma in the Story of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29–30) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’. Old Testament Ethics 33.1 (2020), pp. 10–31. Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2017. Hill, Jess. See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control, and Domestic Violence. Carlton, VIC: Black Inc., 2019. iBook. Kriger, Diane. Sex Rewarded, Sex Punished: A Study of the Status ‘Female Slave’ in Early Jewish Law. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011. Redmont, Jane. ‘Biblical Women Take Center Stage at Last’. National Catholic Reporter 34.29 (1998), p. 28. Rosen, Judith. ‘Anita Diamant’s Red Tent Turns to Gold’. The Writer 114.4 (2001), pp. 30–33. Scholz, Susanne. ‘Gender, Class, and Androcentric Compliance in the Rapes of Enslaved Women in the Hebrew Bible’. Lectio Difficilior 1 (2004), pp. 1–33. Shemesh, Yael. ‘Rape is Rape is Rape: The Story of Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34)’. ZAW 119 (2007), pp. 2–21. Shluker, Zelda. ‘Anita Diamant on The Red Tent Miniseries.’ Hadassah, Dec. 2014. https:// www​.hadassahmagazine​.org​/2014​/12​/04​/anita​-diament​-red​-tent​-miniseries/ Trible, Phyllis. ʻWomen in the Old Testamentʼ. In Kenneth Crim (ed.), The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, supplementary volume. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1976, pp. 963–966. Tumanov, Vladimir. ‘Yahweh vs. the Teraphim: Jacob’s Pagan Wives in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers and in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent’. Nebula 4.2 (2007), pp. 139–151. Wright, Terry R. The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

8

‘The Sire, to Whom I Must Make Love’ Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature Eric Ziolkowski

8.1 Introduction The story of Judah (Yehuda), the patriarch Jacob/Israel’s fourth son by Leah, who at Gen 29:35 etymologizes his name as an offshoot of the Hebrew verb ydh (‘praise’ the Lord), unfolds almost entirely in Genesis 38, 43–44, 46, and 49, within the broader context of the sweeping narrative of Genesis 37–50, which has been likened to a novel, about his younger brother Joseph, Jacob’s firstborn by Rachel. Judah debuts through an isolated cameo, Gen 37:26–27, where he pipes up as the sole dissenter against his other brothers’ jealous plot to kill Joseph, proposing successfully that they instead sell him to the Ishmaelites. This scene, and a later one where Joseph threatens to enslave their youngest brother Benjamin in Egypt, and Judah begs for Benjamin to be freed and offers himself as a substitute, are viewed as casting Judah in a sympathetic light. Encompassing Genesis 38, the tale of Judah and Tamar constitutes ‘a completely independent unit’.1 This sole side story in the Joseph narrative attaches itself to the account of Judah’s obtaining an anonymous Canaanite wife for himself (v. 2); his siring by her a trio of sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah (vv. 3–5); his ill-fated acquisition of Tamar, putatively another Canaanite, as a wife for Er (v. 6); and then, after Er’s untimely, ill-omened death (v. 7), his command that Onan cohabit with her in fulfilment of Onan’s levirate marital duty as Er’s brother (v. 8). As the narrator of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933–43) puts it, the Judah-Tamar interlude is ‘only a charming interpolation [eine anmutige Einschaltung] in an epic of an incomparably vaster scale’ and, hence, ‘an episode within an episode’2. Within this interlude, we might add, the notorious disclosure about Onan’s sexual impropriety and consequent fatal punishment (Gen 38:8–10), constitutes a mini-episode within an episode within a larger episode, which in turn has a distinct literary reception history of its own.3 We will have more to say later about the Judah-Tamar story, which is highlighted by the ruse by which Tamar leads Judah, shortly after he becomes a widower, to father by her, unwittingly, twin sons, Perez and Zerach (Gen 38:12–30; 46:12b), who replace the two he has lost. Jacob/Israel’s oracular blessing of Judah, metamorphizing him as ‘a lion’s whelp’ (Gen 49:8–12, quote at 9a), accounts for the common post-biblical symbolization of Judah, his tribe, and the entire House of David as the lion of Judah—Judah being the eponymous progenitor of the tribe or people of Judah, the Judahites (Num DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-9

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  123 7:12; Josh 15:1).4 The Talmud, because Judah publicly sanctified the Holy One’s name, holds that he warranted having his name contain the Tetragrammaton’s four consonants: Yehuda (yod-he-vav-dalet-he) / Yhwh (yod-he-vav-he).5 The rabbis blamed him for marrying a Canaanite but excused his intercourse with Tamar on the speculation that an angel had compelled him to lie with her, even though Judah in an apocryphal scriptural legend blamed his sexual indiscretions on his own lust and drunkenness.6 Because of his ancestral linkage with David and David’s monarchy, the rabbis identified Judah as the Messiah’s progenitor, associating him with redemption and supporting his characterization as a lion, the beast that will metaphorize the Babylonian kingdom that Judah’s descendant Daniel later overcomes.7 Meanwhile Christian patristic writers, owing to Jacob’s blessing of Judah (Gen 49:8–10), perceived him as a type of Christ as ‘lion’.8 His consorting with and impregnation of Tamar, though ostensibly scandalous, was excusable because it occurred not by his volition but ‘by divine design’ or ‘divine plan’ (Chrysostom); was prompted by Tamar’s prayer (Ephrem the Syrian); and points to ‘the mystery of the incarnation of our Saviour’, instructing Christians about ‘spiritual union and the rebirth of our mind’ (Cyril of Alexandria).9 Although Judah featured among the personages in early modern stage plays in Europe about his brother Joseph, not until the early twentieth century did Judah come into his own as a character in literature, mostly in the context of his liaison with his daughter-in-law. It is in Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers that ‘Judah enjoys his most complex and, arguably most important modern Nachleben’.10 However, my present essay considers three other modern literary works focused on Judah: a ‘novel in drama’ by Izak Goller, published two years before the first volume of Mann’s tetralogy appeared; a lyric poem by Gertrud Kolmar, written a year after the third volume of Mann’s tetralogy was published, and six years before the fourth and last volume appeared; and a novel in English by Joy Sikorski and Michael Silversher, published exactly seven decades after that last volume of Mann’s tetralogy. 8.2 Izak Goller, Judah and Tamar: A Novel in Drama Reconstructing Genesis 38, 11–26 (1931) Born in Lithuania into a Jewish family that emigrated to England when he was a child, Izak Goller (né Eliezer Yitshak, 1891–1939) was an English poet, playwright, preacher.11 Also a visual artist, possibly self-trained, who ‘cartooned’ (his term) his books with his own austere engravings, Goller is remembered as an influential teacher and ardent Zionist who inspired young Jews to visit and immigrate to Palestine/Ereẓ Yisrael prior to World War II. Raised in Manchester, where he attended the ‘Jews’ School, then Manchester Central School, and probably a yeshiva, he served and preached to congregations in Manchester, London, and Liverpool, where his nonconformism, heated sermons, and reputed eccentricity resulted in his ouster in 1926. This setback, however, did not impede his embarkation on a fruitful literary career: his initial poetry collection, The Passionate Jew and Cobbles of the God-Road (1923), was followed by another, A Jew Speaks!

124  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry (1926), and then a novel, The Five Books of Mr. Moses (1929). His manifesto as a Jew, in First Chapter: A Summary of the History of My People from Abraham of Ur to Herzl of Budapest, appeared in 1936. Before then, however, in 1931, Goller published under his own imprint, the London-based Ghetto Press, three new plays of his, each with a scriptural subject: Judah and Tamar: A Novel in Drama Reconstructing Genesis 38, 11–26; A Purim-Night’s Dream: A Phantasy of Esther, Queen of Mede [sic] and Persia, Some 2,400 Years Ago, in Rhythm, Rhyme and Fourteen Winks (1931), based on the book of Esther; and Modin Women: The Story of the Revolt of the Maccabees in the Land of Judea against the Greco-Syrian Domination in Rhythm, Rhyme, and Melodrama (1931), based, unlike the other two plays, on apocryphal not biblical sources (1–2 Maccabees). While Modin Women and A Purim-Night’s Dream were intended for children, Judah and Tamar was advertised ‘for adults only’.12 Judah and Tamar, which was warmly received in print but appears never to have been staged, exhibits Goller’s power of imagination, creativity, and flair for entertaining dialogue by expanding into a full-length, three-part drama a tale the Bible recounts ‘in about 250 Hebrew words’.13 Innovations in wordplay and plot abound. For example, ‘Shua’, the name of the Canaanite whose daughter married Judah (Gen 38:2), by whom she conceived Er, Onan, and Shelah, is adopted as the name of Judah’s wife, Shuah (with the added terminal ‘h’), whom the Torah left unnamed.14 One of the play’s several invented characters, no doubt inspired by Gen 38:28a’s ‘midwife’, is the old nurse Meneket, whose name derives from the Hebrew term for ‘nurse’ (meneqeth), a role associated with comfort (cf. Isa 49:23a).15 Judah’s Adullamite friend Hirah (cf. Gen 38:1b, 12b, 20a) is here renamed Adullam, whose daughter, another invented character, is named Zillah, a name presumably drawn from one of the two wives of Lamech (Gen 4:19; see also vv. 22a, 23a), a violently inclined patriarch descended from Cain.16 In Goller’s play, Zillah is Tamar’s successful rival to marry Judah’s third and sole surviving son Shelah, who fears Tamar as a bloodthirsty ‘Lillit’, ‘witch’, and ‘vampire’ (p. 27).17 This fear embellishes his father’s concern in the biblical account that Shelah, if married to Tamar, ‘might die like his brothers’ (Gen 38:11): suggesting to Tamar that Shelah was too young to marry her, Judah ordered her to remain as a widow in her father’s house until Shelah reached maturity; and she did so, until the day ‘she saw that Shelah was grown up, yet she had not been given to him as wife’ (38:14b). The novel’s first part opens in Judah’s tent in Israel’s camp in Mamré, seven years after Er’s and Onan’s deaths. Judah is absent, and when Adullam shows up and asks Meneket of Judah’s whereabouts, she confides her conviction that Judah’s tent, and Judah himself, a man of ‘strength of body and […] madness’, are haunted by a ‘Lillit’ who ‘flies round and round and round […] laughing and gloating’.18 Meneket thus broaches one of the play’s major extra-biblical motifs, the association of Tamar with Lilith, the legendary demon or witch out of whose complex, multifaceted mythology ‘much of the demonic realm in Jewish folklore grew’.19 Reputed to have been Adam’s first wife, Lilith in Jewish legend is also Queen of Demons, counting Samael and Ashmedai (Asmodeus), King of Demons, among her lovers or spouses.20 Cognate with the name of the Assyrian demon Lilit, the term

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  125 lîlît at Isa 34:14b, the word’s sole tanakhic occurrence, is commonly transliterated as a noun, ‘the lilith’ (e.g., JPS [Jewish Publication Society of America Tanakh]), or as the proper name Lilith (e.g., NRSV [New Revised Standard Version]).21 Meneket also reveals to Adullam that tremendous grief has sapped the will to live from Judah’s wife ever since, seven years ago, ‘her two sons died one after the other on their wedding nights with Tamar’.22 Meneket further worries, ‘There is no telling what this Tamar will do. When Er died in her bridal bed they gave her Onon’ (i.e., Onan). ‘And when Onon died was Shelah still a child, and she would be wife to—Judah!’ (pp. 16–17). Given these circumstances, impliedly nothing would have prevented Judah from taking Tamar as a second wife and siring children by her, except—here occurs another of Goller’s embellishments upon the biblical text—for the premarital ‘bonding oath’ Judah had sworn to Shuah ‘that she, Shuah, should be his only one for life and for death’ (p. 17; cf. pp. 26, 66, 95). Judah is said to bear ‘a hatred […] to Tamar that she would take the last of his sons in Shuah’s despite or make him break his vow’, and this hatred became ‘madness’ when he was recently told that she has been spotted on the road to his camp (p. 18). Told also that a lion was threatening his flocks and that his wife was having bad dreams of perishing ‘in a lion’s claws’, Judah has gone to slay a lion, ‘the Judah of beasts’, with his bare hands (pp. 18–19). Following this exploit, which accords with a pseudepigraphic legend, he returns triumphantly to camp, making his first entry onstage ‘stooping a little under the burden of a dead lion […] like some earlier Samson’.23 This emphasis on the robustness and prowess of Judah, as when he later humiliates his brothers Levi and Simeon by lifting ‘lightly in his two hands’ the boulder that they, when challenged to lift it, had failed to budge, accords with aggadic lore about Judah’s supreme physical strength.24 Diverging from the scriptural account, Goller’s play evolves into an unlikely love story quite distinct from the biblical account. Goller’s Judah, after his wife dies and he is no longer monogamously bound, confesses within Tamar’s earshot that he has actually loved Tamar since she first entered his tent. While Shuah was still alive, he now admits, he ‘threw’ his sons Er and Onan ‘to be another barrier between you and me’ (p. 95); after Er died, ‘I gave to you Onon that you might not be a stumbling-block in the way of the vow I swore to Shuah. And Onon died—and I loved you, Tamar’ (p. 98). After his eventual tryst with Tamar becomes known, Judah defends her honour, lauding her ‘the virgin maid who was too pure for the unhallowed approach of Judah’s sons’ (p. 138), an allusion to his sons’ scripturally noted wickedness (Gen 38:7a; 10a). The play’s final act places emphasis upon Tamar’s unjust reputation as an infernal sorceress or ‘Lillit’ who through her wiles killed off her two husbands, contributed to her mother-in-law’s death, and now controls and torments Judah. In Meneket’s words, from that same [d]ay […] Judah first fell to muttering of his vow and to crying out against an unseen phantom that tormented him! For it was the Lillit that the eyes of his soul beheld, the Lillit all laughing and gloating and mocking him with her hellish eyes while Shuah waned […] And at the last

126  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry she dreamt her dream of the avenging gods and Judah slew the lion with his bare fingers and thought to be triumphant over the gods, but ah! Tamar was come back and Shuah died as the gods foretold her.25 Voicing a calumny introduced by Zillah (p. 114) and echoed by Shelah (see pp. 115–116), Meneket asserts that Tamar, through ‘witchcraft’, ties up souls—most notably those of Judah and Tamar’s dead husbands—‘in her Lillit bundle’ (p. 119). The liberties the play takes with the biblical narrative include Meneket’s accusation that Judah ‘obstinately and bewitchedly harbour[s] the evil one in the camp of Israel’ (p. 120) and the bitter dispute between Judah and his older brother Levi shortly before Tamar is brought out to be burned as an accused harlot: Judah: (half-mocking, half-serious). Ah! And you know not, Levi, that a phantom of dream cheated me out of your heritage for a cursed hour of Paradise? Levi: (bitterly, as he regards Judah’s empty wrist and girdle). Still with your mocking and madness and phantoms? The strongest and wisest of us all you were till the witch you will not cast out put her Lillit craft round you and began to suck your wisdom and strength—and God knows what else! (p. 131) Linked with the declaration by Judah that his and Tamar’s souls ‘are but two halves of one whole, parted by a broken oath’ (p. 138), the most consequential departure from the biblical narrative is his marriage to Tamar in the closing scene. This marriage accords with an aggadic tradition that contradicts the biblical claim that Judah, after exonerating her from the charge of harlotry and his saving her from being burned, ‘was not intimate with her again’ (Gen 38:26b).26 8.3 Gertrud Kolmar, ‘Thamar und Juda’ (composed 1937) In twentieth-century German literature, especially between the two world wars, the image of Judah proves inseparable from that of his relationship to Tamar.27 This is largely because his line of descendance depended upon her. For example, in the German physician and writer Friedrich Wolf’s (1888–1953) early expressionistic play Tamar (written 1921, published 1949, republished 1952, 1960), a highly embellished dramatization of the biblical narrative, Judah—prior to his own unwitting sexual encounter with Tamar—cruelly and guilt-trippingly blames her alone for her failure to produce any urgently desired offspring to be his heir: Patriarch: […] aber der Herr hat keinen Segen auf dich; er hat dich verworfen wie eine taube Nuß. [Tamar sinkt zusammen.] Sterben werde ich! Dein Unsegen fällt wie ein Fluch auf uns alle; […] Dreifach sterben werde ich im Tod meines Hauses, verdammt und verdamft auf leerem Rost, du […] Mädchen.28 (Patriarch: […] but the Lord has [bestowed] no blessing on you; he has rejected you as an empty nut. [Tamar collapses.] I will die! Your misfortune strikes

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  127 us all like a curse; […] Thrice shall I lose my life through death in my house, condemned and vaporized on an empty grill, you […] girl.) (Translation mine) Later, recognizing her as the ‘whore’ he lay with, Judah’s public avowal of that act (cf. Gen 38:26) captures the situation through subtle wordplay upon the euphemistic biblical sense of ‘erkennen’ (‘to know’, as in Gen 4:1, 17, 25 LB29): ‘Ja, ich tat’s’, says Judah. ‘Ich habe sie erkannt, da ich sie nicht erkannte’ (‘Yes, I did it […] I knew her, because I did not know her’).30 A very different perception of Judah, albeit one that likewise binds his image with Tamar’s, is offered in the little poem ‘Thamar und Juda’ (composed 1937) by the German poet Gertrud Kolmar (pseudonym of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, 1894–1943). Kolmar, whose poem will be examined below, was born into an upper-middle-class assimilated Jewish family in Berlin: she was the oldest of four children of a successful lawyer, Ludwig Chodziesner, and his wife Elise (née Schönflies), and a cousin of Walter Benjamin.31 Her cultured upbring instilled in her a passion for art, nature, gardening, animal lore, and history, especially the French Revolution (she wrote a scholarly essay and poetic cycle on Robespierre). Fluent in French, English, and Russian, and an accomplished student of Hebrew later in life, she worked as a translator and interpreter, then as a teacher of ill and disabled children (deaf, mute, and crippled). After the start of World War II, she was forced into labour in a cardboard factory. Eventually, in 1943, she was deported to a Nazi extermination camp in the East, probably Auschwitz, where she putatively perished. Considered often alongside her two more famous contemporary German Jewish female poets, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) and Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), both of whom survived the Shoah in exile, Kolmar has also been likened to Emily Dickinson for her withdrawn, self-effacing lifestyle and ‘the daring pressure she puts on language in order to force a crack in the side of the planet, letting out strange figures and fires: she is a mythologist’.32 She is recognized as ‘one of the great poets of her time, and perhaps the greatest woman poet ever to have written in German’.33 Dwelling on ‘the experience of unfulfillment’ in ‘unmarried, childless womanhood’, and more broadly on ‘the experience of the isolated, unwanted individual and race in a hostile society’, Kolmar gravitated to Jewish subjects often in her poems (e.g., ‘Die Jüdin’, ‘Die jüdische Mutter’, ‘Ewiger Jude’, ‘Wir Juden’) and in her one novel (Eine jüdische Mutter, written 1930–1931, published posthumously, 1965).34 She owned and consulted four Bibles, avowedly ‘reach[ing] again and again for’ the Hebraist Harry Torczyner’s (1886–1973) new German rendering of the Tanakh, ‘especially when I’m reading my Hebrew Bible’, presuming Torczyner’s to be ‘the most reliable German text’, although she had ‘been reading the Luther Bible all my life’, and the Luther Bible’s language had ‘clearly influenced my poetic language’.35 In 1937 she composed five poems devoted to biblical subjects: ‘Esther’, ‘Judith’, ‘Mose im Kästchen’, ‘Thamar und Juda’, and ‘Dagon spricht zur Lade’.36 In her earlier poem, ‘Die Jüdin’, she expressed a longing to rediscover ‘mein eigenes uraltes Land’ (‘my own ancient land’), a place replete with such resonant biblical images as ‘das begrabene Ur der Chaldäer / […]

128  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry / Den Götzen Dagon, das Zelt der Hebräer, / Die Posaune von Jericho’ (‘buried Ur of the Chaldeans / […] / The idol Dagon, the Hebrews’ tabernacle, / The trumpet of Jericho’).37 Brigitte M. Goldstein discerns a ‘clear line’ running from this poem of Kolmar’s youth ‘to the sentiments that filled her in the last stage of her life. Jewishness and historicity are inextricably intertwined in Kolmar, being Jewish means to be part of that chain of being that stretches through millennia back to the days of the Patriarchs’.38 If Kolmar’s poetry is dominated by a ‘sense of frustration at not having been used by life in the way she conceives as most fruitful for herself: through love and family’, it clearly was not only the Jewishness of the Judah-and-Tamar story that drew her to the theme of a childless, unmarried double-widow so desirous to conceive and bear a child that she seduced her father-in-law.39 A monologue of Tamar, addressed possibly to Judah, or more likely to God or herself, Kolmar’s ‘Thamar und Juda’ consists of six four-line stanzas of an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme. My translation and analysis below proceed stanza by stanza.40 The poem opens depressingly: Ich habe mich in Tränen schön gebadet: O der Hure, die ich nun bin! Granatfrucht, die geschmückt den Pflücker ladet; Laubig lockend hängt Schleier über mich hin. (I have bathed myself beautifully in tears: O the harlot who I am now! Pomegranate fruit, which, decorated, summons the picker; A leafy, tempting veil hangs over me, thither.) In view of the tanakhic account of her encounter with Judah, the opening utterance by Tamar here, with its first-person self-disclosure (‘Ich […]’), comes as a shock. In the tanakhic narration of her story, Tamar never spoke prior to her roadside encounter with Judah. She remained silent throughout both her marriages, at both her husbands’ deaths, and through all the ensuing years leading up to this encounter. And during her transaction with Judah by the road into Enaim (Gen 38:14a), she was all business, never saying ‘I’, but repeatedly addressing ‘you’, keeping the focus on her interlocutor, Judah, who propositioned her. Tamar asks him, ‘What, will you pay for sleeping with me?’ In response, he inquires whether sending a kid from the flock will suffice. To which she retorts, ‘You must leave a pledge until you have sent it’. He asks her, what pledge? Her response: ‘Your seal and cord, and the staff which you carry’ (Gen 38:16b, 17b, 18a, emphases mine).41 The tanakhic account said nothing about the ‘tears’ in which Kolmar’s Tamar was now bathing ‘beautifully’ as Judah approached; her veil would have obscured them from his sight. However, her metaphorically bathing ‘beautifully’ in them anticipates two other ‘beautiful’ scriptural women, Bathsheba and Susanna, who, while actually bathing (nakedly, not wrapped and veiled), attracted (albeit unwittingly, not intentionally) the lustful gaze of men who pursued them sexually.42 Arguably

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  129 these intertextual associations are unjust to Judah. Unlike the men who gazed on those two women, Judah was no voyeur. If his overture to Tamar was crude (‘Here, let me sleep with you’ [Gen 38:16]), his sex with her was consensual, and, unlike David’s sex with Bathsheba, did not make him an adulterer (let alone a rapist, which is what some say David became through his powerplay over his married subject, Bathsheba). And unlike the two voyeuristic elders who tried unsuccessfully to blackmail Susanna into having sex with them, Judah is no criminal. Nor, for that matter, is she the ‘harlot’ (Hure) Kolmar’s Tamar ashamedly pronounces herself ‘now’ to be. Gen 38:15a’s mention that Judah ‘took her for a harlot [zonah; LXX (Septuagint): πόρνη; LB: Hure]’ represented only the second use of that term in the Tanakh. The first use, several chapters earlier, was in reference to Judah’s younger sister, Dinah, hinting at the vulnerability of prostitutes to violent abuse. Like Tamar, Dinah was no prostitute. Yet following her rape by the Hivite, Shechem (Gen 34:2b), and after two of Judah’s brothers avenged that crime by slaughtering all the males of the Hivite city, including Shechem and his father (34:25–26a), Judah and his other brothers plundered the city (34:27) to avenge their sister’s having been ‘treated like a whore [zonah]’ (34:31; LB: Hure). Given their implication that a prostitute is someone vulnerable to rape, it now seems hypocritical for Judah to sleep with a woman he ‘took […] for a harlot’, this alluring, veiled ‘pomegranate fruit’ (Granatfrucht) that now ‘summons’ him as the ‘picker’ in Kolmar’s poem, evoking the obscured voluptuousness of the beloved in the Song of Songs, whose brow gleams ‘like a pomegranate [rimmon] split open’ (Song 4:3b = 6:7b; LB: Granatapfel), and whose limbs ‘are an orchard of pomegranates [rimmonim]’ (4:13a; LB: Granatäpfeln). In the next three stanzas, the associations of a sex worker shift to those of a royal mother-to-be with a sacred obligation to posterity, an obligation that requires Judah’s participation to fulfil: Der Mantel deckt mich, den die Nacht der Hirten Über Lammweiden weht. Und ich bin Thamar: Palme vor den Myrten. Und wenn mein Herr mit seinen Knaben geht Zur Schur gen Timnath, wo gedrängt die Schafe Ihm wandeln, wellig wie ein Fluß, Soll er mich schauen, daß er bei mir schlafe, Der Zeugende, mit dem ich buhlen muß Um diese Kinder, alle Kindeskinder, Die schon in meiner Tiefe weinen nach Licht, Die Helden, stark und ernst wie hörnige Rinder, Und Könige mit meines Herrn Gesicht. (The mantle covers me, which the night of the herdsmen Blows over lamb pastures.

130  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry And I am Tamar: palm tree before the myrtles. And when my lord with his boys goes To the sheep-shearing, toward Timnath, where the sheep, crowded, Stroll to him, undulating like a river, He should see me, that he may sleep with me, The sire, to whom I must make love, For these children, all children’s children, Who already in my depths cry for light, The heroes, strong and solemn as horned oxen, And kings with my lord’s face.) While Genesis does not specify the sort of garment Tamar ‘wrapped herself up’ in after she disposed of the ‘widow’s garb’ (38:14) she had on before learning of her father-in-law’s approach to Timnah for sheep-shearing, Kolmar’s Tamar has covered herself in a Mantel (mantle or cloak). Scripturally this might evoke Ezekiel’s allegory of the personified, pagan-born maiden, Jerusalem, upon her attainment of womanhood: ‘your breasts […] firm and […] your hair sprouted’, but ‘still naked and bare when I [i.e., God] passed by you again and saw that your time for love had arrived. So I spread My robe [kanaf, lit. wing; LB: Mantel] over you’ (Ezek 16:8a)—that is, he drew her through marriage into his covenant. However, the maiden ‘Jerusalem’, as God rebuked her, ‘confident in [her] beauty and fame, […] played the harlot’ (as Tamar now does): Jerusalem ‘lavished [her] favors on every passerby’ (16:15a), an allusion to the Canaanite practice of cult prostitution and to Jerusalem’s idolatrous involvements. No less germanely connectible to the mantle of Kolmar’s Tamar, and to the covenantal-espousal kanaf/Mantel/robe God covered Jerusalem with, is the ‘robe’ (kanaf; LB: Gewand) Ruth asks Boaz to spread over her as a symbolically marital act. Ruth requests that Boaz fulfil his levirate obligation with respect to her, to his property, and to the perpetuation of his bloodline (see Ruth 3:9b and 4:1–12 as per Lev 25:25 and Deut 25:5–6), in the same way Judah’s second son had been expected, but failed, to fulfil the related expectation regarding his bereaved sisterin-law Tamar, albeit in a pre-Mosaic time, before that custom became codified in levirate law (see Gen 38:8–9 as per Deut 25:5–10). The book of Ruth closes by pointing to Tamar and Judah as having anticipated Ruth and Boaz in the circumstances of their parenthood, and by locating Ruth in King David’s ancestral lineage, just as Matthew’s Gospel, which Kolmar read, opens by including both those couples—Tamar and Judah, Ruth and Boaz—in Jesus’s Abrahamic-Davidic genealogy (Ruth 4:12–22; Matt 1).43 The announcement by Kolmar’s Tamar, ‘I am Tamar’, discourages any idea that the poem is addressed to Judah, except maybe within her own thoughts, because her ability to seduce him hinges on her preventing him from recognizing her identity. Her further self-description, ‘palm tree before the myrtles’, does three things: it (a) plays upon her name, meaning ‘(date) palm tree’ (tamar); (b)

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  131 relinks her with the Song of Song’s beloved, whose ‘stately form’ the lover likens to a palm tree (7:8a: tamar; LB: ein Palmbaum); and (c) associates Tamar with another beautiful biblical heroine, Queen Esther, reinforcing Tamar’s alreadyevoked royal associations. Esther’s Jewish birthname, Hadassah (Esth 2:7a), derives from the Hebrew term for myrtle, hadhas, a shrub that further conjures prophetic scenarios, serving in Isaiah (55:13a) ‘as a testimony to the Lord’, and it is from ‘among the myrtles’ that the Lord’s angel first addresses Zechariah (1:8a, 10a). Perhaps Kolmar knew the legend of Tamar’s endowment ‘with the gift of prophecy’.44 So sieh, ich will dich stillen. Mit den Lüsten, Die, Datteln und dunkle Trabuen, mein Wuchs dir bringt, Mit meinem blauschwarzen Haar, dem Mund, den Brüsten, Draus einst die weiße Quelle springt. Es breite doch mein Herr über mich seinen Schatten, Er lege bei mir nieder Stab und Ring. – Und Juda zog zur Herde auf die Matten Und kam und tat. Und sie empfing. (So look, I want to suckle you. With lusts, Which, dates and dark grapes, my figure brings you, With my blue-black hair, mouth, breasts, From them one day the white spring leaps. May my Lord spread his shadow over me, May he lay down his staff and ring beside me. – And Judah went to the flock on the pastures, And came and did. And she conceived.) Kolmar’s poem here associates Judah with both passionate love (‘I want to suckle you. With lusts / Which […] my figure brings you’) and divine love (‘May my Lord spread his shadow over me’). As Magda Motté observes, the ‘shadow’ provides essential relief in the heat of the day, and the image of ‘the shadow of the Lord’ derives from a frequent biblical metaphor for God’s protection (cf. Ps 91:1 LB: ‘unter dem Schatten des Allmächtigen’, ‘in the shadow of the Almighty’). The beloved in the Song of Songs, an analogue to Kolmar’s Judah, is likened to an apple tree in whose shade the lover yearns to sit (Song 2:3 LB: ‘Unter seinem Schatten zu sitzen, begehre ich’).45 Psalm 9:1, and perhaps the corresponding line in Kolmar’s poem, will again be echoed in another, later ‘Juda und Tamar’ poem, this one by the German poet and writer Karl Emerich Krämer (1918–1987), among the Biblische Gedichte (Biblical poems) he published in 1968 under the nom de plume George Forestier. Krämer’s/Forestier’s Tamar introduces herself as the daughter-in-law of Judah, ‘der Herr des Stammes, / ein Hirtenkönig unter Hirten’ (‘lord of the shadow, / a pastoral king among the herdsmen’).46

132  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 8.4 Joy Sikorski and Michael Silversher, Tamar of the Terebinths: A Novel (2013) Through the first decades of the present century, it is primarily the story of Judah’s affair with his daughter-in-law that has inspired Judah’s rare recurrences in literature. For example, the poem ‘Judah and Tamar’s Sin’ by Native American poet Paul Rowley (‘of Haida, Tlingit, Blackfoot, and Cree descent’47) rehearses Genesis 38 straightforwardly in 48 lines, adding a little moral in the last two, after Tamar has compelled Judah to admit his guilt: ‘Sins of the mind are worse than the flesh, / This truth she has helped me to see’ (Rowley, 2004). The most recent literary incarnation of Judah to be examined here occurs in the novel Tamar of the Terebinths (2013), ‘Book One’ of the projected Judah and Tamar Trilogy by Joy Sikorski and Michael Silversher (b. 1952). Neither Sikorski nor Silversher is known as a novelist; my information on their lives and careers comes from the book’s back-page ‘About the Authors’ and their website to promote the novel.48 Brought up in Los Angeles, Sikorski later lived in a log cabin in Alaska she helped to construct, where she delivered two of her three children and raised all three. A composer and singer, she has written books about singing, pregnancy, and early child development; overcoming cancer while forgoing chemotherapy, radiation, and drug treatments; a memoir; and some children’s books. Silversher is a Grammy Award-winning songwriter and three-time Emmy-nominated composer who has worked with the Walt Disney Company and the Jim Henson Company on films, records, television series, and other projects. He has also composed theatrical musicals for the Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Opera, Mark Taper Forum, and South Coast Repertory among other venues. Today Silversher resides in the Los Angeles area, and Sikorski, in Idyllwild, a small town in the San Jacinto Mountains, a little over 100 miles east of Los Angeles. Tamar of the Terebinths’s coauthors prefatorily disclaim: ‘Although based on stories from the Bible, the characters, events and story lines are created from the combined imaginations of the two authors’.49 Narrated by Tamar, the novel follows Genesis 38’s plot, but with manifold super-fanciful embellishments, delving back to her traumatic childhood, about which the Bible says nothing. In the novel, because her mother died giving birth to her, her father Yergat hated her, and once, when drunk, tried to rape her, and therefore Tamar is raised by his aged aunt, Anush. Meanwhile Yehuda (Judah), a neighbour, herdsman, and family man, consistent with both the aggadah and Goller’s play, is portrayed as a physically large, mighty, imposing he-man with a preternaturally powerful voice.50 Even his ‘broad smile’ attracts Tamar, revealing ‘his nearly perfect white teeth’ (p. 145). That she yearns for him as a substitute father figure is evident early on, as when she sees him crouching to scratch his pet dog: ‘I inwardly groan, for it’s easy to see the love that Yehuda has for his dog and the love the dog has for him. I want to feel that kind of love too’.51 At the same time, Tamar manifestly resents Yehuda’s wife, here named Illit, whom she fantasizes about controlling by means of ‘secret powers’ (p. 31). Like a romance novel, Tamar of the Terebinths also stresses Yehuda’s raw sex appeal, which overwhelms Tamar even as a young girl, as when Yehuda rescues

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  133 her in the local shuk from a wild, axe-wielding male marauder whom he fights off and kills before picking her up protectively in his arms: I look at Yehuda’s face. ‘You are bleeding’. I frown. He looks down at me. ‘But not you’, he answers with a smile. It is then that I become aware of his strong arms around me, the smell of his sweat and blood, the pounding of his heart near my right ear. I smile back […] and look as far into his eyes as I can see. My body trembles all over, and suddenly I am very cold. He holds me closer, and says with a voice that rumbles low like distant thunder, ‘It is over, Tamar, and you are safe’. I know in that moment that I will never again feel unsafe when he is near.52 This passage calls to mind one of the most famous scenes in cinematic Westerns. Near the end of the 1956 film The Searchers (dir. John Ford, USA), when Ethan Evans (John Wayne) at long last recovers his niece (Natalie Wood) who was abducted years earlier as a child by Comanche Indians, he lifts her above his head and then lowers her into his cradling arms, telling her comfortingly, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie’. Young Tamar, aside from her sense of security around Yehuda, also comes to feel a spiritual kinship with him, as when, in attendance at a Baalist evening prayer ceremony which she deems nonsensical, his face stands out among the other, idolatrous attendees’ ‘statue faces’: Like me, he does not look at the priest. Instead his eyes search the night skies as though looking for an answer there. My heart races to think I’m not alone […] Then, as though he senses that he is not alone either, he brings his head down, turns it slowly, looks at me, smiles and holds his gaze. I am suddenly warm all over and have to catch my breath as I smile back. (pp. 95–96) The novel’s denouement freely and elaborately embellishes the biblical plotline. The two chapters concerning Tamar’s marriages to, and the untimely deaths of, Er and Onan (pp. 159–181), need hardly occupy us, as Yehuda recedes almost entirely from narrative’s focus, and I have discussed it elsewhere.53 Yehuda defends Tamar against his moribund wife Illit’s accusation that Tamar caused Er’s and Onan’s deaths, and against Illit’s desire that Tamar be punished by death (p. 174). After Illit then dies while arguing heatedly with Tamar, but not before cursing her, the rumour spreads that Tamar serves the Annunaki (i.e., Sumerian deities who decide humans’ fates) and ‘is to blame’ (p. 180). In Genesis, it is the fear that Shelah, if he were to marry Tamar, would die as his brothers did, that drives Judah’s refrainment from enabling Tamar to marry him (38:11a). However, by this point in Tamar of the Terebinths, when Yehuda’s servant discloses to Anush that ‘Yehuda is the one […] not ready to let him marry quite yet’ (p. 184, emphasis in text), there is every reason to suspect that this unreadiness

134  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry has less to do with worry about Shelah’s fate than with Yehuda’s hidden attraction to Tamar. Following up on Anush’s earlier boast to Tamar of being about to ‘set things in motion for’ her to join Yehuda’s bloodline through betrothal to Er (p. 134), the novel climaxes with Anush’s revelation to Tamar that she, Anush, barely survived the massacre long ago of all the males of Sh’chem (Shechem) by Yehuda’s older brothers to avenge Dinah’s rape (cf. Gen 34:25). In Anush’s account, Yehuda played a fateful role, rescuing Anush from his brother Levi just as Levi was about to slit her throat. After the massacre, she was able to recover in secret the most precious of all the Shechemite women’s jewels that Ya’akov (Jacob) had ordered to be buried, together with the women’s idols (cf. Gen 35:4). Now, as an old woman, just before she dies, Anush bestows upon Tamar her bag containing those jewels (pp. 198–199)—including a pair of apparently magical amber earrings from Tamar’s grandmother, which emit a light ‘from within’, and which Yehuda had been the only other person to behold before they were buried (see p. 196, emphasis in text). Although Anush dies instructing Tamar to fulfill Yehudah’s legal obligation to marry her to Shelah, ‘to raise up […] seed from the bloodline of his family’ (p. 197), Tamar, like her biblical prototype, evidently has another plan of her own. This ‘Book One’ of the projected Judah and Tamar Trilogy ends with Tamar wrapped in colourful linens, perfumed, veiled, and wearing her newly bequeathed amber earrings as she awaits Yehuda at the roadside, poised to seduce him. Unlike Kolmar’s Thamar, this more modern, feminist Tamar never thinks of herself as a harlot: Under my veils Yehuda will think I am a zonah, but I am not. I will take no payment for what I am about to give him. Nor am I a kedeshah [sacred prostitute], for I will give no Moon Blood, nor enter into any sacred marriage. (p. 204) ‘Book One’ ends with Judah about to approach her (cf. Gen 38:15–16), and Tamar suggestively ‘whisper[ing] to the wind’ through her veils: ‘It’s time, Yehuda. It is time’ (p. 205). 8.5 Reception Exegesis The Judahs met in the three literary works examined above in each case contrast significantly with both the biblical Judah and his counterpart in Mann’s Joseph und seine Brüder. None of the three Judahs we considered ever frees his image from its connection to Tamar, whom Mann represented as having seduced Judah not out of carnal or amorous desire but rather out of her prophet urge to ‘interpolate herself’ (‘sich selbst einschalten’) into Israelite history by conceiving and delivering the patriarch’s heirs.54 Unlike Mann’s and Kolmar’s Judahs, Goller’s Judah shows genuine love, and Sikorski and Silversher’s Yehudah, strongly suggestive affection, for Tamar, whereas Kolmar’s Tamar, who somewhat resembles Mann’s Tamar in her single-minded ambition of procreating ‘heroes’ and ‘kings’, casts Judah mainly in the role of the ‘picker’ that she, as ‘pomegranate’, must

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  135 entice to accomplish her procreative aspiration. Neither Kolmar’s nor Sikorski and Silversher’s account reaches the point in the Judah story where he can be shown, as in Goller’s and Mann’s accounts, reduced to a butt of derision following the public exposé of his having been duped by Tamar’s harlot-trick. Goller’s Judah does, in the end, manage to regain respect by admitting his wrong and marrying Tamar. Yet, unlike all three Judahs we have considered, Mann’s Judah alone, in an elaborated adaptation of a much later episode in Genesis, is able to distinguish himself apart from Tamar and redeem himself more fully through several extended speeches to Joseph (qua Pharaoh’s governor in Egypt) and to their other brothers.55 Considering the biblical portrayal of Judah in view of his depiction in these three works can stimulate one’s contemplation of this biblical hero’s inner character and motivations, especially with respect to his involvement in what Wendy Doniger analyzes as the ‘bedtrick’ Tamar pulls off with Judah.56 In the biblical narrative, Tamar steals the show at his expense. ‘If the truth be told’, observe the coauthors of Tamar of the Terebinths on their website for their projected novelistic trilogy, ‘had Tamar not seduced her father-in-law, […] he would not have become the man that he became, the man who, with Tamar, produced the lineage of King David and Jesus’. Tamar’s sexual masquerade was so daring that much of the talmudic rabbis’ commentary on it amounted to ‘a kind of midrashic cover-up’, in the words of the filmmaker and critic Noah Millman, who further construes Tamar as an anticipator of modern Zionists: like Tamar, Zionism was not content to wait for redemption by a ‘divine husband’ but rather ‘was powered by the audacious resolve of the Jews to stop waiting, take matters into their own hands, and determine their own destiny despite rabbinic prohibitions against actively reentering history and “forcing the end”’.57 Judah, whom Sikorski and Silversher disclose will be the focal subject of their novel’s promised sequel, becomes at Gen 38:26 ‘the first man in the Bible to admit that he is wrong and that the woman (Tamar) is right. The implications of his choices echo through the annals of the history of the Middle East and continue to impact the way we see the world’.58 While Tamar of the Terebinths ends just prior to the seduction scene, which can be expected to unfold in the novel’s as-yet unwritten sequel, Tamar of the Terebinths does hint, unlike the Bible, that Yehuda began to feel a special sympathy or affection for Tamar long before his public exoneration of her after his unwitting impregnation of her. Such hints were evident, for example, when he defended her against slandering by her abusive father and, later, by her mother-in-law, Judah’s wife.59 Kolmar’s poem goes further, expressing in its last two stanzas the hope of Tamar, precoitally, that Judah might be drawn to her not merely through carnal ‘lusts’ but also through divine love, ‘spread[ing] his shadow over [her]’. However, of the three literary adaptations we have considered of the Judah-and-Tamar story, Goller’s play is the one that exploits most elaborately the non-biblical idea that Judah, long before his sexual encounter with Tamar, had begun harbouring conflicted but strong, in some instances conscious, feelings of attraction to Tamar—feelings that deeply troubled him because of his vow of absolute monogamy to Shuah. Goller’s play’s stage directions have Judah betray this emotional ambivalence, albeit latently, the first time he lays eyes on her onstage. This is when Tamar, in

136  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Judah’s tent in the opening act, in the presence of Judah’s dying wife, confronts the latter over the fact that she, Tamar, remains childless, yet yearning to bear children, after the deaths of her two husbands—Judah and Shuah’s oldest two sons: ‘He glares at Tamar with eyes in which hatred is but one of many emotions strangely commingled’ (p. 41).60 After she alternatingly argues with him, mocks and taunts him, and tempts him tantalizingly, ‘let[ting] her dark garment fall so that her white shoulders are just revealed’, and ‘wring[ing] her fingers over her white bosom revealed by the slipping of her garment’, Judah lifts his fist to her and orders her out of his tent, only to back down: ‘A troubled look creeps into Judah’s frowning eyes and remains there not to leave them again for long time’ (pp. 41, 44, 45). When she then ‘opens her gown with both hands’ and dares him to strike her bared breasts, his declared resistance to her temptation seems hardly convincing: Judah:—(with a painful but mocking simile) Think you, fool, that Judah can be snared by a woman’s tongue and a woman’s white breasts to the breaking of his vow—or even to the giving of his last son into your death-bed? (Shuah tries to lift herself and falls back). Tamar:—(hotly) Judah is strong and Judah is great, but the law of Israel is greater and stronger than Judah’s boasting! (p. 46) Later, what is most surprising is not the vindication of Tamar’s declaration about the superiority of Israel’s law to ‘Judah’s boasting’, but rather the extent to which Judah is shown to participate quite knowingly in Tamar’s seduction of him. It may be an open question how much, if at all, Goller may have been aware of, or taken any interest in, the depth-psychological theories of Sigmund Freud (who, having fled Nazi-controlled Austria, died in London on 23 September 1939, just three months after Goller’s death in Liverpool, on 22 June). Yet the lengthy scene of Judah’s roadside confrontation with Tamar-qua-‘zonah’ betrays in Judah a state of mind consonant with Freud’s famous theory of dreams as disguised fulfilments of an unconsciously suppressed or repressed wish, typically of a sexual nature.61 Whereas his biblical prototype, as if to parody Julius Caesar’s military boast of veni, vidi, vici, quite simply saw Tamar (as harlot), bargained with her (over payment), and (unintentionally) impregnated her (Gen 38:15–18), Goller’s Judah pauses on the roadside, unaware that Tamar, hidden nearby, is watching him. He then engages in a long, brooding soliloquy in which he confesses his obsessive thoughts about Tamar, ‘Day and night’, disclosing that she, ‘like a phantom of Lillit’, threatens to eclipse his memory of his deceased wife (p. 94). When Tamar appears before him in her zonah-disguise, he views her as a ‘Phantom’ sent by a ‘Lillit […] to tempt me from my oath [to Shuah]’, although, as he ‘regards her

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  137 with an insane curiosity’ (as the stage notes dictate), he acknowledges ‘How marvellous like to Tamar it is—even to the scornful eyes wherewith she mocks and spurns me’ (p. 96). As his soliloquy progresses, unaware that the temptress before him really is Tamar, he admits aloud (to himself? to the ‘phantom’-temptress? to Goller’s audience/reader?) that even as he gave Tamar as wife to his two oldest sons, ‘I loved you, Tamar. I loved the hair on your head and the little pink fingertips of your slim white hands […] I loved the longing in your eyes and the dark sadness in your heart, and I choked my love with the two hands of my soul so that it might not be a stumbling-block in the way of […my] oath […] to Shuah’ (p. 98). Yet, when this ‘phantom’ suddenly addresses him for the first time, Judah still insists that she is a ‘Lillit’ who ‘mimics’ Tamar’s voice (p. 99). Even after Tamar affirms her true identity (‘It is no phantom is near you’, ‘I am no pale phantom of a maddened brain! It is Tamar herself […] crying to you!’) and proclaims what she construes as her divinely, predetermined, eternal love for him (‘It was for you I was made from the Six Days of the Beginning when God mated the souls of all the world to be’, ‘O Judah! […] My love!’ [pp. 100– 101]), Judah, addressing her as ‘fair Zonah’, remains uncertain whether he is ‘mad’, and she, ‘a phantom’ (p. 102). The scene’s denouement hammers home the non-biblical insinuation that Judah, on some level of drunken consciousness or Freudian-seeming unconsciousness, recognizes Tamar as Tamar.62 Yet he is nonetheless content to persist in (mis)perceiving her as a ‘zonah’, ‘phantom’, or ‘Lillit’ in a manner reminiscent of the distortive mechanism of ‘displacement’ (Verschiebung) in Freud’s theory of dreamwork (Traumarbeit). This becomes clear as Tamar, who speaks no more for the rest of the scene, begins to perform a titillating zonah-dance consisting of what Goller’s script describes as ‘lascivious movements of her almost naked limbs’ (p. 102). In response, after blurting out that he is ‘perhaps sleeping and dreaming still’, Judah lets slip his recognition of Tamar, despite her veil: Now is Judah mad at last! For if I knew not the truth that you are but a phantom, I would swear on oath that—ah! your dance is the dance of Zonah but your limbs are the limbs of Tamar! So—so—so does she raise her arms and so does she sway her lovely form. So—so—so—stop! Are you not Tamar? No—no! Are you not—I mean—the—the phantom of her, eh? (p. 104) Judah, whose engagement in wish-repressive, Freudian-like displacement here is unmistakable (‘No—no! Are you not—I mean—the—the phantom of her, eh?’), proceeds to hand over to the veiled ‘zonah’ his cloak, staff, and signet as his pledge (cf. Gen 38:18), before he finally yields to her temptation at the scene’s close. Here, at the scene’s close, a Freudian-seeming terminology of ‘mad[ness]’, ‘dreaming’, and ‘hysteria’ comes to the fore:

138  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Judah: […] We both know full well that y’are but a phantom of Lillit—or of sleep—or perhaps I am still asleep and dreaming—dreaming both you and my mad self! (The invitation of the dance grows insistent. With a wild beckoning whirl the Zonah disappears into the pavilion. Her naked foot and leg, hold open the door. Judah stares, advances, halts, shows hysteria.) (suddenly) No! No! Not even from a phantom of Lillit-dreams shall it be said that Judah turns back! On! On! (Vanishes through the door after her. The door shuts) (p. 107). By the time this happens, it is difficult to imagine that Goller’s Judah on some level does not suspect, or is not perhaps aware, that the woman with whom he is about to have sex is in fact Tamar—even though later, in the play’s next and final part, before he is exposed as her impregnator by Tamar’s possession of his cloak, staff, and signet (cf. Gen 38:25), he will madly and persistently try to persuade himself and all others around him that, in effect, nothing could have happened between him and Tamar because she, he, and all else in the world are not real: ‘You think that this dark woman with the white face you all call Tamar is real’, he declares to his assembled brothers and friends. Ha-ha! ’Tis you all are bewitched! And ’tis I—who […] at last have hit on the truth [….] There is no Tamar and there is no Father Israel, no staff and no half-staff and no signet seal, no sun and no moon and no little stars, no earth and no flowers, no you and no me and no anything. Dreams, I tell you! Births—lives—loves—deaths—dreams— (excitedly)—dreams! (p. 132) Recurrent throughout part 3 of Goller’s play, particularly in rhetoric of Judah, the motifs of madness and dreaming reach their climax in his contention, dismissed by the other characters as suggestive of his loss of sanity, that all life consists of dreams. This notion, recurrently present in the Western tradition of thought from Plato’s myth of the cave up through Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s drama La vida es sueño (1635, Life is a Dream), functions as a form of oneiric distortion or displacement within the play’s context while seeming almost blasphemous from a tanakhic perspective, though Goller’s Judah might find mild support for his contention in Qoheleth’s cogitations about the futility or vanity of life (Eccl 1:1). To be sure, repression or suppression of the sort Freud wrote of is hinted at in passing in Tamar of the Terebinths, where Tamar is advised ‘to learn’, as her father already had learned, ‘to blank out the memory’ of his attempt to rape her.63 And in Kolmar’s poem, in proclaiming ‘O the harlot who I am now!’, Tamar seems to repress or suppress from her own awareness the fact that she is really not a whore. But nowhere in the literary reception of the Bible’s Jacob narrative is the non-biblical insinuation more forcefully made that Judah himself, that ‘lion’ of a man, knowingly had sex with his daughter-in-law but repressed that awareness, presumably to avoid his guilty conscience, until she exposed the truth. And he did so in a manner the founder of psychoanalysis would have readily recognized.

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  139 Notes 1 Speiser, Genesis, p. 299. 2 Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, p. 1539 / idem, Joseph and His Brothers, p. 1255. 3 See Ziolkowski, ‘Onan’. 4 Cf. both the negative self-comparison of Yhwh to a lion at Hos 5:14 in the harshness of his punishment of Judah and Ephraim, Israel’s southern and north kingdoms, for their infidelity to him, and the positive analogization of Judah’s namesake, Judas Maccabeus, at 1 Macc 3:4a, to a lion ‘in his acts [or deeds]’—Ιούδας/Judas being the Greek rendering of Yehuda/Judah. 5 B.Soṭah 10b. 6 Gen. Rab. 85:1, 8; T.Jud. 12:3; 13:2, 6; 14:6–8; Ginzberg, Legends, vol. 2, p. 200; and Keiter, ‘Judah […]’, col. 873. 7 Gen. Rab. 99:3; Tan Wa-yeḥi 14; and Dan; all cited by Keiter, ‘Judah […]’, col. 873. 8 Ambrose, Jos. 3.13; Patr. 4.17; Rufinus, Ben. Patr. 1.6; Cyril of Alexander, Glaphyra on Gen. 7; all quoted in Sheridan, Ancient Christian, pp. 237, 326, 327, 330. 9 Chrysostom, Hom. Gen. 62.3, 5; Ephrem, Commentary on Gen. 34.4; Cyril, Glaphyra on Genesis 6.1, 2; all quoted in Sheridan, Ancient Christian, pp. 243–244, 246. 10 See Ziolkowski, ‘Judah’, cols. 878–879, on Mann’s treatment of Judah. 11 It is possible though uncertain that he obtained semikhah (rabbinical diploma) requisite to being recognized as an ordained rabbi. See Sivan, Izak Goller, pp. 147, 170. My information on Goller’s life is drawn mainly from this article and Silverman, ‘Goller, Izak’. 12 Quoted from Jewish Chronicle (30 October 1931), p. 19, by Sivan, Izak Goller, p. 119. 13 See Sivan, Izak Goller, pp. 119–120, quote on 119. 14 The single figure named Shuah in the Hebrew Bible is a man, the sixth son of Abraham and Keturah (Gen 25:2; 1 Chr 1:32). However, in Jewish legend, Judah’s Canaanite wife is named Bath-shua, i.e., daughter of Shua (Ginzberg, Legends, vol. 2, pp. 32, 200). 15 Sivan, Izak Goller, p. 119. 16 This Lamech with a wife named Zillah is distinct from his namesake, Noah’s father, in Gen 5:25–31. 17 In the Tanakh, although Num 26:20 and 1 Chr 4:21 indicate that Shelah eventually had offspring and descendants, and hence that he married, he did not marry before his father’s sexual encounter with Tamar, as Goller’s Shelah contrastingly does. 18 Goller, Judah and Tamar, pp. 9, 11. 19 Schwartz, Lilith’s Cave, p. 5. 20 Schwartz, Lilith’s Cave, pp. 10, 28–28. 21 See Hirsch, Schechter, and Blau, ‘Lilith’, p. 87 22 Goller, Judah and Tamar, p. 14. This seems an exaggeration, since ʾm at Gen 38:9b is conventionally read to suggest that it was not in just one instance but ‘whenever’ (JPS, RSV, NRSV) Onan joined sexually with Tamar that he let his seed go to waste. According to T.Jud. 10:4, Onan was ‘with’ Tamar ‘for a year’ before he died. 23 Goller, Judah and Tamar, pp. 32, 33. Cf. T.Jud. 2:4. 24 See, e.g., Ginzberg: 2:108; and 1:404–406; 2:104–105, 198; 5:380 n.10 25 Goller, Judah and Tamar, p. 110. 26 At T.Jud. 12:8 Judah says that he never again went near Tamar for the rest of his life, yet one of the talmudic rabbis submits that Judah, once he had sex with Tamar, never again separated from her (B.Soṭah 10b). See Sivan, Izak Goller, p 119. 27 See Motté, ‘Esthers Tränen’, pp. 65–71. 28 Wolf, Tamar, p. 243. See also Motté, ‘Esthers Tränen’, pp. 66–67. 29 Here and elsewhere, LB = Luther Bibel. 30 Wolf, Tamar (1960), p. 293. See also Motté, ‘Esthers Tränen’, p. 67. 31 My information on Gertrude Kolmar’s life is drawn mainly from Zohn, ‘Poetry’; Langman, ‘Poetry’; Zohn and Kilcher, ‘Kolmar, Gertrud’; and Kühn, Gertrud Kolmar.

140  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 32 Ozick, ‘Foreword’ to Kolmar, Dark Soliloquy, p. viii. Analogies to Dickinson were also drawn, e.g., by Bridgwater, Twentieth-Century, p. xxiii; Zohn, ‘Poetry’, p. 26. 33 Bridgwater, Twentieth-Century, p. xxiii, emphasis in text. See also Langman, ‘Poetry’, p. 117. 34 Quotations from Langman, ‘Poetry’, pp. 117–118. 35 Kolmar, letter of 16 December 1941 to her sister Hilda, in Briefe, pp. 105–106 / My Gaze, pp. 87–88. In this letter Gertrud says that she owns ‘an old Luther Bible’ of 1854; the incomplete edition of Reuss’s translation, Die Bücher der Bibel, edited by Rahlwes, with illustrations by Lilien; Torczyner’s Die heilige Schrift; and a Hebrew Bible. 36 The first four of these poems are found in Kolmar, Weibliches Bildnis, pp. 67–72, 97. The fifth was first published in Woltmann, ‘Gertrud Kolmar’, pp. 180–181; see Brandt, Schweigen, p. 85. 37 Kolmar, ‘Die Jüdin’, in Weibliches Bildnis, pp. 34–35, quote on p. 34; translation mine. 38 Goldstein, ‘Gertrud Kolmar’, p. 268. 39 Quote from Langman, ‘Poetry’, p. 119. 40 I quote and translate the entire poem ‘Thamar und Juda’ from Kolmar, Weibliches Bildnis, p. 67. 41 Except where otherwise indicated, biblical quotations in our discussion of Kolmar’s poem are of the JPS version. 42 2 Sam 11:2; Sus 1:15–16. 43 In her afore-cited letter to her sister, Kolmar claims to be ‘less well versed in the New Testament’ than in the Tanakh: ‘I have read, if at all, always only the Gospels; Paul and the other epistles rarely, and hardly at all the apostle stories’ (Briefe, p. 106 / My Gaze, p. 88). 44 See Ginzberg, Legends, vol. 2, p. 33. 45 See Motté, ‘Esthers Tränen’, p. 69 46 Forestier, ‘Juda und Tamar’, lines 1–2. 47 Gobin, ‘Hibulb’. 48 Sikorski/Silversher, Tamar, p. 223; Judah and Tamar [website], https://judahandtamar​ .com/. 49 Sikorski/Silversher, Tamar, atop unpaginated verso of the book’s title page. 50 Cf. Ginzberg, Legends, vol. 2, pp. 106, 109, 112; vol. 5, pp. 354 n.281–355. 51 Sikorski/Silversher, Tamar, p. 21. 52 Sikorski/Silversher, Tamar, p. 53. 53 On the novel’s elaborations of the Tamar-Onan story, see Ziolkowski, ‘Onan’. 54 Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, p. 1539 / idem, Joseph and His Brothers, p. 1256. 55 See Ziolkowski, ‘Judah’, col. 879. 56 Doniger, Bedtrick, pp. 353–366. 57 Millman, ‘Tamar, Helen’. 58 Sikorski/Silversher website. 59 See Sikorski/Silversher, Tamar, pp. 79, 174. 60 Emphasis mine. Hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all italicization is in Goller’s text. 61 Freud, Die Traumdeutung, p. 123; idem, The Interpretation, p. 244. 62 The rabbinic, legendary ascription of the sexual indiscretion of Judah to intoxication seems supported here by his bodily movements, as dictated by Goller’s script (e.g., at this scene’s outset, ‘Judah stumbles to the large stone […] He broods’ [p. 94]; and, later, ‘Bends his eyes back to earth. Starts suddenly as from sleep’ [p. 98]; and still later, when he asks the ‘zonah’ to take him into her pavilion: ‘If you are a true Zonah, phantom, you will not grudge an hour’s drunkenness to a tortured brain?’ [p. 105]). 63 Sikorski/Silversher, Tamar, p. 63

Judah’s Afterlives in Modern Literature  141 Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Bridgwater, Patrick (ed.). Twentieth-Century German Verse. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1963. Die Bücher der Bibel. [Trans. Eduard Reuss.] Edited by F. Rahlwes. With illustrations by Ephraim Mose Lilien. Vols. 1, 6, 7. Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908–1912. Die heilige Schrift. 4 vols. ‘Neu ins Deutsche übertr’. Ed. Harry Torczyner with Naftali Hirts Ṭur-Sinai and Elias Auerbach. Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, 1935–1937. Forestier, George [pseud. of Karl Emerich Krämer]. ‘Juda und Tamar’. In idem (ed.), Biblische Gedichte. Bechtle Lyrik 16. Munich/Esslingen: Bechtle, 1968, p. 26. Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung. ‘Vierte, vermehrte Auflage’. Leipzig/Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1914. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. James Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards. The Penguin Freud Library 4. London: Penguin, 1976. Repr. 1991. Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. Trans. Henrietta Szold and Paul Radin. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909–1938. Repr. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Goller, Izak. The Passionate Jew and Cobbles of the God-Road: A Book of Poems. London: Whitehead Morris, 1923. Goller, Izak. A Jew Speaks! A New Book of Verse and Prose. Liverpool: T. Lyon, 1926. Goller, Izak. The Five Books of Mr. Moses: A Novel. London: Methuen, 1929. Goller, Izak. A Purim-Night’s Dream: A Phantasy of Esther, Queen of Mede [sic] and Persia, Some 2,400 Years Ago, in Rhythm, Rhyme and Fourteen Winks. London: Ghetto Press, 1931. Goller, Izak. Judah and Tamar: A Novel in Drama Reconstructing Genesis 38, 11–26. London: Ghetto Press, 1931. Goller, Izak. Modin Women: The Story of the Revolt of the Maccabees in the Land of Judea against the Greco-Syrian Domination in Rhythm, Rhyme, and Melodrama. London: Ghetto Press, 1931. Goller, Izak. First Chapter: A Summary of the History of My People from Abraham of Ur to Herzl of Budapest. Liverpool: Ghetto Press, 1936. Judah and Tamar: Song of the Terebinths Trilogy [website of Joy Sikorski and Michael Silversher]. https://judahandtamar​.com/. Kolmar, Gertrud. Dark Soliloquy: The Selected Poems of Gertrud Kolmar. Trans. Henry A. Smith. With ‘Foreword’ by Cynthia Ozick. New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1975. Kolmar, Gertrud. Weibliches Bildnis. Gedichte. Munich: Kösel, 1987. Kolmar, Gertrud. Briefe. Ed. Johanna Woltmann. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997. Kolmar, Gertrud. My Gaze Is Turned Inward: Letters, 1934–1943. Ed. Johanna Woltmann. Trans. Brigitte M. Goldstein. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Mann, Thomas. Joseph und seine Brüder. Constituting vols. 4–5 of idem. Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols. Berlin: Berlin/Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1960. Vols. 4–5: Joseph und seine Brüder. Mann, Thomas. Joseph and His Brothers. Trans. John E. Woods. New York, NY/London/ Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2005. Rowley, Paul. ‘Judah and Tamar’s Sin’. All Poetry, 9 March 2004. https://allpoetry​.com​/ poem​/529449​-Judah​-and​-Tamar​-s​-Sin​-by​-kirbysman Sheridan, Mark (ed.), Thomas C. Oden (gen. ed.). Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Old Testament II: Genesis 12–50. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002. Sikorski, Joy, and Michael Silversher. Tamar of the Terebinths. Judah and Tamar Trilogy: Book One. Idyllwild, CA: Whisper Voices, 2013.

142  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Sivan, Gabriel A. [né Godfrey Edmond Silverman] (ed.). Izak Goller: Selected Poems, Plays and Prose. London/Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012. Wolf, Friedrich. Tamar: Ein Schauspiel (written 1921, first published 1949), in Else Wolf and Walther Pollatschek (eds.), Dramen, 6 vols. Berlin: Aufbau, 1960. Vol. 1, pp. 237–296. Secondary Sources Brandt, Marion. Schweigen ist ein Ort der Antwort: Eine Analyse des Gedichtzyklus ‘Das Wort der Stummen’ von Gertrud Kolmar. Berlin: Christine Hoffmann, 1993. Doniger, Wendy. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Gobin, Andrew. ‘Hibulb Poetry Series features Paul Rowley’. TulalipNEWs​.com​, 9 December 2013. https://www​.tulalipnews​.com​/wp​/2013​/12​/09​/hibulb​-poetry​-series​ -features​-paul​-rowley/ Goldstein, Brigitte. ‘Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943): German-Jewish Poetess’. Modern Judaism 15.3 (October 1995), pp. 265–277. Hirsch, E. G., S. Schechter, and L. Blau. ‘Lilith’. In Isidore Singer (ed.), The Jewish Encyclopedia. 12 vols. New York, NY and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906. Vol. 8 (1904), pp. 87–88. Keiter, Sheila Tuller. ‘Judah (Son of Jacob) III. Judaism B. Rabbinic Judaism’. EBR 14 (2017), cols. 873–874. Kühn, Dieter. Gertrud Kolmar: A Literary Life. Trans. Linda Marianiello and Franz Vote. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Langman, Erika. ‘The Poetry of Gertrud Kolmar’. Seminar 14.2 (1978), pp. 118–132. Millman, Noah. ‘Tamar, Helen, and Love’s Ambition’. Jewish Review of Books, 7 December 2023. https://jewishreviewofbooks​.com​/bible​/15197​/tamar​-helen​-and​-loves​-ambition/ (accessed 15 December 2023). Motté, Magda. ‘Esthers Tränen, Judiths Tapferkeit’: Biblische Frauen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003. Schwartz, Howard. Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural [1988]. New York, NY/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Silverman, Godfrey Edmond [now Gabriel A. Sivan]. ‘Goller, Izak’. In EncJud 7 (2007), p. 743. Sivan, Gabriel A. [né Godfrey Edmond Silverman]. ‘Izak Goller (1891–1939): Zionist Poet, Playwright and Preacher’. Jewish Historical Studies 41 (2007), pp. 145–171. Speiser, E. A., trans. Genesis. AB 1. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964. Woltmann, Johanna, ed. ‘Gertrud Kolmar 1894–1943’. Marbacher Magazin 63 (1993). Ziolkowski, Eric. ‘Judah (Son of Jacob) IV. Literature’. EBR 14, cols. 876–882. Ziolkowski, Eric. ‘Onan (Person) IV. Literature’. EBR 22. Zohn, Harry. ‘The Poetry of Gertrud Kolmar’. Jewish Quarterly 24.1–2 (1976), pp. 26–28. Zohn, Harry, and Andreas Kilcher. ‘Kolmar, Gertrud’. In Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds), Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. 22 vols. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Vol. 12, p. 276.

9

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature Bradley C. Gregory

9.1 Introduction The Joseph story in Genesis 37–50 is often considered one of the literary gems of the Hebrew Bible and so has attracted the interest of great literary minds. Goethe called it a ‘most charming story’ and Tolstoy reckoned it the ‘most beautiful story in the world’.1 Modern biblical scholars have also been impressed by the aesthetic quality of the Joseph story. In fact, the narrative is so well developed and tightly interconnected that it would be difficult to excise any part of it without damaging the surrounding narrative. Consequently, modern scholars have become increasingly cautious about identifying the traditional Pentateuchal sources within this narrative, many opting instead to treat Genesis 37–50 as (mostly) a literary whole.2 It can, therefore, be read as a novella that traces the remarkable ‘rags to riches’ ascent of the lead character in the court of a gentile king, a literary motif paralleled in the books of Esther and Daniel. The novella-like quality of the narrative made it an ideal biblical episode for expansion and retelling.3 The story itself follows a classic narrative arc in which conflict and misfortune eventually lead to success and reconciliation. Favoured by his father as the son of the beloved wife Rachel, Joseph soon becomes the object of hatred and envy from his brothers. After Joseph tactlessly tells his brothers about two of his dreams in which they symbolically bow down to him, they (apparently excepting Reuben) plot to dispose of him. They strip him and throw him in a pit to die before changing their minds and selling him into slavery in Egypt. While there, he ascends the ranks in Potiphar’s house, only to be falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife and sentenced to prison. After some time, Joseph interprets a second set of dreams for the royal baker and cupbearer, which later leads to an opportunity to interpret a third set of dreams, these by Pharaoh himself. Joseph successfully deciphers the meaning of Pharaoh’s dreams about a coming famine and is promptly installed as the second in command over the whole land of Egypt. In a poignant turn of events, the famine has affected Canaan too and so Joseph’s brothers, except for Benjamin, have to journey to Egypt to acquire food. When they arrive, Joseph recognises them, but they do not recognise him; the narrator seems delighted to point out that the brothers bow down to Joseph as the vizier of Egypt. Yet, the denouement of the plot is delayed as Joseph subjects his brothers to a series of ordeals. First, they are all imprisoned on charges of being spies. Then Joseph holds Simeon captive and DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-10

144  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry insists the other brothers bring back Benjamin. After Judah finally persuades Jacob to let Benjamin go back to Egypt with them, Joseph throws a lavish feast in which he shows blatant favouritism to Benjamin. He then deigns to let them head back to Canaan, but he has his silver goblet surreptitiously placed in Benjamin’s sack in order to frame him. However, when the brothers do not abandon Benjamin to his fate in Egypt, as they did to Joseph so many years ago, Joseph realises they have changed and reveals himself, thus precipitating the reconciliation of the family. In a way, this resolution of the Joseph story stands in stark contrast to the story of Cain and Abel in which the act of fratricide is never fully repaired.4 As elegantly as the narrator has woven this tale, numerous gaps and puzzles remain which have been noticed and addressed by interpreters since antiquity. The approaches found in the early interpretation of the Joseph story have been studied by James Kugel and Niehoff Maren, among others.5 This kind of sustained and vigorous interpretation of the Joseph story has continued right up to the modern period in a variety of mediums and genres. To get a sense for how the Joseph story has been appropriated in contemporary fiction and poetry, we will examine in chronological order three literary works from the first half of the twentieth century: Henry Lawson’s poem ‘Joseph’s Dreams and Reuben’s Brethren: A Recital in Six Chapters’, Louis Napoleon Parker’s pageant play Joseph and His Brethren, and Thomas Mann’s enormous tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. After presenting each author’s approach to the Joseph story overall, we will focus on Joseph’s interactions with his brothers when they come to Egypt in search of food. The advantage of choosing this episode for a case study is that not only does it represent a climactic moment in the story, but it has been interpreted in starkly different ways. 9.2 Henry Lawson, ‘Joseph’s Dreams and Reuben’s Brethren: A Recital in Six Chapters’ (1904) Henry Lawson (1867–1922) was an Australian poet who came from humble beginnings. A child of divorced parents, he grew up in rural Australia and had little formal education. After finding some success as an author, he lived in Britain for a couple of years, but when he returned to Australia in 1902 his life was in a decline that would continue all the way until his death from a stroke in 1922. His marriage had come to an end, he was in and out of prison for failing to pay alimony, and he struggled with alcoholism and depression. Yet, he was accomplished enough that, when he died, he received the first state funeral for a writer in Australia and his reputation only increased in the midst of the New Criticism, reaching its high point in the 1960s.6 These features of his biography help to explain his approach to religion in general and the Bible in particular. Although his mother was raised Methodist, Lawson did not subscribe to orthodox Christianity and was sceptical of organised religion. Zaunbrecher traces the development of Lawson’s religious views from revelational religion in his early days to ‘his own form of religion in republicanism, socialism, and mateship’.7 He viewed Jesus not as divine, but as an ideal person who advocated for the marginalised and powerless. As his life spiralled downward after the

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature  145 turn of the century, Lawson turned frequently to the Bible as a source of comfort, especially stories that articulated the alienation and loneliness of life.8 In bridging the biblical world and his own, Zaunbrecher observes that, ‘His pen was at its most vitriolic when he saw unchristian behaviour in so-called Christians’.9 In 1904, just as his life was beginning to suffer a series of setbacks, Lawson published his poem, ‘Joseph’s Dreams’. In August of 1915 it reappeared in the Brisbane periodical Truth with a series of illustrations and under the expanded title ‘Joseph’s Dreams and Reuben’s Brethren: A Recital in Six Chapters’. This illustrated version with expanded title was then republished in book form in 1923. The poem is clever, comical, and subversive. He repeatedly casts the Joseph story with an Australian flavour with such flourishes as referring to someone as a ‘jackaroo’ in Chapter 2 or introducing a reference to ‘pork and kidney pie’ in the baker’s dream in Chapter 4. In his contemporising of the Joseph story, Lawson is sometimes shockingly acerbic. Perhaps in part because his marriage was faltering, he makes several misogynistic asides. In speaking of the Judah and Tamar story in Genesis 38, he says ‘And I would only like to say, In this most thankless task, Wives sell to husbands every day, And that without a mask’. In referring to Potiphar’s wife in Chapter 3, Lawson bitterly complains, ‘The missus told the self-same tale, And in the self-same way, As our enfranchised females do, In police courts every day’. However, Lawson’s most biting criticism is directed at Joseph himself, who is portrayed as a villainous scoundrel similar to some politicians in Australia. Although many readers are inclined to see Joseph as the hero of the story, for Lawson he becomes a cipher for powerful hypocrites who hide their wickedness behind a veneer of piety. For example, while Joseph’s claim that dream interpretation belongs to God (Gen 40:8) could be understood as a sign of humility, for Lawson it is disingenuous: And there was no interpreter, They said – and that was why Joe said that that belonged to God – But he would have a try. I’ve noticed this with “Christians” since, And often thought it odd – They cannot keep their hands from things They say belong to God. Lawson’s criticism of Joseph escalates further in the final two chapters. At the end of Chapter 5, Lawson seizes on Gen 41:55–57 to criticise Joseph for capitalising on the famine for his own profit and for never bothering to check on his aging father back in Canaan. His skewering of Joseph reaches a sarcastic crescendo in Chapter 6 when his brothers come to Egypt in need of food: ‘Twas noble of our Joseph then, The Governor of the land, To bait those weary, simple men,

146  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry With ‘monies’ in their hand; To gratify his secret spit, As only cowards can; And preen his blasted vanity, And strike through Benjamin. Lawson goes on to characterise Joseph as unnecessarily frightening the brothers, as serving them a feast only to make himself look good, and finally excusing his behaviour by attributing it all to God’s will. In the poem’s ‘Afterward’, he sums up Joseph’s character as a hypocritical, selfish tyrant. The reason for this unusual portrayal of Joseph is not difficult to understand. In Chapter 5, Lawson mentions a parallel between Joseph who rigged the system to enrich himself and the current politicians in Australia who do the same kind of thing. He returns to this theme in the ‘Afterward’: I’ve written much that is to blame But I have only sought to show That hearts of men were just the same Some forty centuries ago He goes on to bemoan that a consistent feature of human societies is that there will always be people who exploit dire circumstances for their own enrichment. In the face of such a rigged system, one must speak out and fight back even though, as the poem concludes, ‘Although, in Canaan or Out Back, We never reach the Promised Land’. As such, in the hands of Lawson the biblical story of Joseph becomes an occasion to settle scores against those he resented while also being transformed into a cautionary parable about the importance of socialism and ‘mateship’, values which Lawson especially prized. 9.3 Louis Napoleon Parker, Joseph and His Brethren (1913) A quite different rendering of the Joseph story can be found in the pageant play of Lawson’s contemporary, Louis Napoleon Parker (1852–1944). Parker was born in France, but his family travelled throughout Europe which afforded him a cosmopolitan education. He eventually settled in England and began teaching at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire in 1873.10 He is best known as the creator of the modern pageant play. According to Parker, pageant plays provided an opportunity for the whole community to participate in a shared experience in which their history could be celebrated and their hopes for their common future entertained. In Neo-Romanticist fashion, he hoped that pageant plays could ease class tensions and foster a sense ‘brotherhood’ among the community by focusing on their shared history.11 Although Parker’s goal of ‘brotherhood’ parallels Lawson’s view of the importance of ‘mateship’, the different roles their works played in trying to advance this value resulted in drastically different retellings of the Joseph story.

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature  147 In the classic English pageant play, the story normally concerned the history of the community, but in his prefatory note to Joseph and His Brethren, Parker notes that this play is merely an extension of that idea: from the history of a community to the history of some outstanding personality who is an important cultural figure. The published version follows the program of the performance at the Century Theatre in New York on 11 January, 1913.12 In the beginning of the play, Parker makes several important adjustments to the Joseph story to align it with the purpose of a pageant play. First, there is not just friction between the brothers and Joseph but among the brothers themselves. They mock, hurl accusations, and reproach one another. Thus, the problem at the outset is not so much Jacob’s favouritism of Joseph as it is a larger problem of communal discord among all the brothers. When a fight breaks out, Parker has Reuben situate their quarrel within the larger pattern of Genesis: ‘Are ye the brood of Cain, that each would have his brother’s blood…?’ (p. 8). Later, Parker will use this to explain why the brothers threw Joseph in a pit instead of attacking him directly: they wished to avoid the curse of Cain (pp. 21–22). Second, Joseph’s moral quality is enhanced; the colours of the coat itself are said to represent the various virtues of Joseph, including manhood and authority. The possible charge that Joseph is flaunting his status is avoided by having Reuben instead of Joseph report the dreams. Further, Jacob sends Joseph to see if everything is well with the brothers and the flocks, and no mention is made of his bringing a bad report. In fact, later Simeon falsely accuses Joseph of spying on them, which allows Parker to create a symmetry with Joseph’s accusation against the brothers in Egypt (p. 22). Even when the brothers pull him out of the pit, Joseph refuses to ‘tattle’ on them to the traders (p. 30). And, finally, when Joseph is in the pit he does not cry out in despair; he chants a pious psalm. This kind of calm under attack reappears when he is confronted by Potiphar. In a scene that echoes the trial of Jesus, Potiphar rages at him and strikes him across the face, but Joseph remains passive and accepts it (p. 86). A third important change at the beginning of the play is that Reuben says he will cherish Joseph just as Jacob does and then all the brothers, except Simeon, bless Joseph, an act Joseph interprets as already a fulfilment of his dreams (pp. 13–14). These character portraits of the brothers and Joseph set the stage for Act IV in which Parker narrates the ordeal of the brothers in Egypt. Parker skips the first trip to Egypt and resumes the narrative when the food has run out and it is now necessary to return to Egypt. Parker has the brothers briefly reiterate what had happened on the first trip to Egypt to fill in the gap. Yet a notable addition to the Genesis account is that Benjamin speaks up to persuade Jacob to let him go. Representing the ideal of ‘brotherhood’ at the heart of the pageant play, Benjamin says he is willing to go to Egypt ‘for my brothers’ sakes and for the sake of their children’ (p. 124). In Scenes II–III of Act IV, another layer of intrigue is introduced that is completely absent from Genesis. In Parker’s story, Potiphar’s wife had been in the caravan of traders who brought Joseph to Egypt, and so she knows his real identity behind his title ‘Revealer of Secrets’. She arranges a clandestine meeting with Simeon at midnight by the pyramids and then misleadingly tells him that Joseph

148  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry is indeed alive and captive in the Revealer’s house, making Simeon believe incorrectly that the Revealer and Joseph are different people. In a scheme designed to exact revenge on Joseph by proxy, she tells Simeon that, as soon as the Revealer gets Benjamin, the Revealer will then slay the brothers. She suggests that Simeon pre-emptively slay the Revealer and hands him a poisoned dagger. Through this plot device Parker introduces a classic motif of tragedy: in trying to free Joseph, Simeon will unwittingly kill Joseph. In the climactic scene, the brothers come to believe that the Revealer is honourable since he has not harmed Simeon but detained him in relative comfort. They also interpret Joseph’s administration of the grain supplies as a kind of deliverance that causes the people to rejoice. In order to telescope the action, Parker has the Egyptians become aware the cup is missing while the brothers are still at the banquet table and then the Egyptians erupt in anger. It is at this point that Simeon reaches for his dagger and cries out ‘Vengeance!’ (pp. 147–149). But, before he can be slain, Joseph reveals himself and immediately reassures them that they have nothing to fear because he is not in the place of God (which in Genesis does not happen until after Jacob has died in Genesis 50). Simeon is so distraught he even contemplates killing himself with the knife, but Joseph reassures him that all is well. The play ends with Jacob and the brothers in communal harmony in hailing Joseph and his authority, an authority which is warranted because he used it wisely and justly. To demonstrate this, the play closes with Joseph quoting Ps 113:7 and Prov 16:20: ‘He raiseth the poor from the dust; from the depths He lifteth up the needy. Oh, Lord of Hosts, happy is the man who trusteth in Thee!’ (p. 154). In sum, Parker retells the Joseph story in a way that incorporates extra dramatic elements as well as motifs from tragedy. Joseph’s character is reconfigured in ways to present him as a more ideal moral model. He also adds complexity to the relationships of the brothers among themselves. As such, the story of Joseph follows a narrative arc that moves from community discord to community harmony in which everyone benefits through the leadership of an ideal figure. The story of the pageant play thereby mirrors the desired effect of the pageant play. 9.4 Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder (1933–1943) By far the most extensive and complex retelling of the Joseph story, not only in the twentieth century but in any century, is Thomas Mann’s four-volume work, Joseph and His Brothers (German original, Joseph und seine Brüder). Although he began working on it in 1926, the four books were published between 1933 and 1943. Mann, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, is more widely known for Buddenbrooks (Translated on 1924), The Magic Mountain (Translated on 1927), and Doktor Faustus (1947), but he hoped that the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers would be received as his magnum opus. Despite Mann’s own estimation of the work, it never achieved the success of some of his other works. Certainly, one reason was that the tetralogy is overtly anti-fascist and appreciative of the Jewish people, and yet its publication nearly exactly coincided with the period of the Third Reich. Additionally, its unwieldy length (approximately 1,500

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature  149 pages), its numerous detours into historical or cultural excurses, and its espousal of a theology that was objectionable to many Christians also deterred readership.13 To read it most profitably requires familiarity not only with the Bible, but with other fields of knowledge such as Egyptian history and culture, rabbinic traditions, early Christian interpretation, the Quran, Persian poetry, mythic studies, the psychology of Freud and Jung, and the thought of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.14 The result is a rendering of Joseph that is a syncretistic hero, rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition but in many ways encompassing what Mann considers the essence of ‘Western civilization’. To appreciate why Mann invested this work with such significance, it is necessary to understand the role of myth in his thinking. The opening line of the prelude, titled ‘Descent Into Hell’, points to the fundamental concept of human history that Mann wishes to illuminate: ‘Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?’ (p. 3). Mann believed that there were eternal truths which have been expressed through human culture and religion farther back in time than we are able to perceive, but which keep emerging in various contexts. In this, he was drawing on the work of Alfred Jeremias, who had argued that there is a world religion that is internally unified and precedes its earliest known expression in Sumerian literature.15 Religion, therefore, is mainly a repackaging of the basic mythic structures which express the eternal truths about the world. Notably, for Mann, this was a source of hope since it provided the possibility of coordinating diverse religions and cultures and thereby reuniting a world embroiled in conflict around the common values of the basic mythic archetype, the supreme expression of which he found in Christianity.16 Around the time Mann began working on the Joseph tetralogy, he became convinced that literature ought to represent this mythic structure of reality rather than try to develop something new, and the tetralogy was conceptualised as an effort to do this.17 The upshot of this conception of myth is that religion, as well as the literature which seeks to give expression to it, will necessarily involve repetitions. These repetitions will appear as the repurposing of basic mythic structures but with variations.18 When humans grasp these repeating mythic representations of truth, there arises a deep self-knowledge that has the power to transform them, conforming them to their true nature.19 Central to the Joseph story for Mann was the motif of descent and ascent, or death and resurrection. This theme brings the Joseph story into alignment not only with the story of Jesus in the New Testament, but with myths such as Tammuz and Osiris. But within Genesis itself, the descents and ascents of Joseph are seen to parallel other patriarchal stories such as the Akedah in Genesis 22 and the exiles and restorations of Abraham and Jacob.20 The figure with whom Joseph is most clearly aligned in Mann’s work is Jesus, a typological reading with deep roots in the Christian tradition. So, to take just three examples, when Joseph is born, Bilhah runs to Jacob and tells him that ‘a child was born to us, a son given to us’, an obvious allusion to Isa 9:5, and then, when Jacob arrives, he finds Joseph ‘wrapped in swaddling clothes’, an obvious allusion to Luke 2:12 (p. 280). Similarly, Mann has Joseph in the pit for three days (pp. 468, 482) and likens it to a grave (p. 673) from which he emerges ‘with rock rolled

150  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry away’ (p. 1358; cf. Matt 28:2). Finally, at the climactic moment in which Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, he spreads his arms and says ‘the grave could not hold me’ and then invites them to touch him to see he is alive (pp. 1378–1379; cf. p. 1394), actions which echo Jesus’ encounter with his disciples after his resurrection.21 There are many other parallels that serve Mann’s thesis that mythic elements repeat through these sacred stories. Yet, Mann also creates contrasting elements to show that Joseph is an anticipation of Christ, but the latter is greater than the former. So, for example, while Jesus is betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, Joseph is sold to the traders for just 20 pieces of silver after the traders refuse their request for 30 pieces (pp. 497–498; cf. Gen 37:28). In the end, while Mann portrays Joseph as anticipating Christ, his ascent is only on the plane of the secular and social; spiritual leadership passes not through Joseph, but through Judah, and from there to Judah’s descendant Jesus.22 Interestingly, Mann saw a parallel between the early Church’s appropriating other concepts (e.g., the preexistent logos) for the historical figure of Jesus and his own layering onto the Joseph story various other instances of the grand mythic pattern of death and resurrection.23 All of this, of course, implies that there is a subtle relationship between a figure’s understanding of his own actions and the inevitable mythic repetitions of history and culture that are beyond his control. Throughout the Joseph story, Mann repeatedly portrays Joseph as being aware that everything that happens is ‘God’s story’ (p. 1298) or a ‘game’ that God is playing (p. 1491) and that the task of humanity is to recognise this and enter into it in order to play their parts well. To put it in terms of Mann’s own concrete context, the Joseph tetralogy presents a vision of human history that argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition (in a nondogmatic sense), the mainstay of ‘Western civilization’, is far superior to other metanarratives, whether Baalism in ancient Israel or the barbaric fascism of the Nazis.24 It is not that Mann believes we should return to an uncritical belief in myth, but that we can psychologise it and thus create a new version of the myth appropriate to the modern world. It is precisely this kind of ‘midrashic’ reworking and advancement of religious myth that Mann is trying to accomplish in the Joseph tetralogy.25 In the Joseph story, Mann sees a parallel with European modernity in that Egypt is a kind of ‘quasi-underworld’ in which confidence in their own cultural traditions has eroded.26 The figure of Joseph descends into this world and rises out of it; and in doing so he instantiates the superiority of the Judeo-Christian tradition in two overarching ways: the values of sexual virtue and personal forgiveness. The episode with Potiphar’s wife is the natural place for Mann to explicate the first, but the interactions between Joseph and his brothers in Genesis 42–45 provide the principal context for Mann’s articulation of the second.27 The biblical narrative in Genesis 42–45 is covered in Part VI of Mann’s fourth volume, Joseph the Provider (Joseph, der Ernährer), which he wrote while in exile in the United States during World War II. Part VI is tellingly titled ‘The Holy Game’, and indeed this serves as the organising theme of Joseph’s interactions with his brothers. When the latter arrive in Egypt, Joseph’s steward reminds him of the harm they did him, and Joseph startlingly replies, ‘Yes! The men I have to thank for all my happiness and glory here below!’ (p. 1297). The reason, Joseph

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature  151 explains, that he is not angry or seeking vengeance is because he realises this is all God’s story. He says, ‘God has shaped them to the good and to everyone’s favour, and one must look to the result at which He was aiming’ (p. 1297). Importantly, Joseph tells the steward he hopes his brothers do not recognise him, not so that he can better torment them, but because ‘all that is necessary, first as embellishment, as a way of giving shape to God’s story, and second, there is so much that must first be tested and discovered, so much to be sounded out, above all as regards Benjamin’ (p. 1298). It is clear, then, that Joseph’s motivation for how he treats his brothers is neither anger nor revenge, but a desire to play his proper role in the story God is unfolding. Over and over, Joseph and his steward will return to this concern in deciding how to proceed with the brothers. For example, after his first exchange with them, Joseph excitedly asks his steward, ‘How did I do? Did I manage passably well? Did I embellish God’s story in proper fashion? Did I provide festive details?’ (p. 1324). He then goes on to say that a person must have patience to ‘embellish’ God’s story in its proper time (p. 1325). After the brothers have gone back home to Canaan, it is a while before they return to Egypt with Benjamin, but when they do Joseph observes, ‘This story of God’s stood still for a while, and we have had to wait. But things have kept on happening, even when there seemed to be no story’ (p. 1344). Finally, after Joseph has revealed himself and the brothers return home to fetch Jacob and their families, they send Asher’s daughter, Serah, ahead to relay the news in song. Three times she makes reference to ‘life as God’s great poetry’ and that ‘it’s God that we must thank, for having played such a lovely prank’ (pp. 1396, 1399, 1402). Recognising his own role in God’s story allows Joseph to approach events with wisdom, magnanimity, and generosity. So whereas Lawson sees Joseph’s administration of the grain as almost diabolical, Mann sees it as the height of prudence ‘unlike any people had ever known’ (p. 1291) that mirrors God’s own dealings with the world (pp. 1292–1293). The strategy combined shrewdness with benevolence such that ‘even those hard hit by exploitation saw something heroic and divine in his mixing of severity and cordiality’ (p. 1291). Mann is keen to defend this perspective on Joseph as administrator against negative interpretations like that of Lawson, and so he returns in Part VII to devote a whole chapter to showing that Joseph deserves admiration, not condemnation, for his approach (‘The Rascal Servant’, pp. 1438–1447). Scholars have frequently observed that the way Mann describes Joseph’s approach bears a striking resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, a modern-day analogue of Joseph who was helping to save the world from the dark threat of Nazism.28 The wisdom and generosity of Joseph is also evident in the details of how he deals with his brothers. Because he intends to shed light on the situation rather than punish or take revenge on them, he decides to treat them ‘somewhere between strangers and enemies’ (p. 1302). In what follows, there are elements of justice but also benevolence. So, for example, he imprisons them for three days so they can decide who should be sent back to Canaan to get Benjamin and this parallels the three days the brothers had left Joseph in the pit; at one point he even furthers

152  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the parallel by describing their imprisonment as being ‘captives in their hole’ (p. 1324). Yet, Mann also draws a contrast in noting that ‘they were not cast into a prison, not banned to a hole, but simply confined to an out-of-the-way chamber’, with the clear implication that Joseph has given them a more comfortable three days than they gave him (p. 1319). Likewise, once Joseph decides to hold only Simeon and send the rest back home with grain, he emphasises that they must purchase the grain at the ‘merciless’ market rate (p. 1326). However, while the brothers were prisoners, Joseph fed them roasted goose and then, as they left for home, he gave them lamb and beer soup with raisins as well as plenty of provisions for the journey (pp. 1327–1328). Like Joseph, Mann would have the reader see in the unfolding of ‘God’s story’ that hardship can be endured because, as long as one plays one’s designated role, such hardship can be transformed into blessing.29 For example, when the brothers arrive in Egypt and are accused of being spies, Judah speaks up on their behalf ‘with the dignity of a man who has been tested’ (p. 1313). This reference to Judah’s humiliation in the Tamar story of Gen 38 and the lesson learned there recurs again later in the story. When the silver cup is found in Benjamin’s sack, the brothers begin to curse and denigrate him, but Judah insists that they should stand by Benjamin because, even if he is guilty, that only means that he has fallen to their level since they are guilty of something much worse in the way they treated Joseph (pp. 1368–1369). At the key moment when Judah offers to take Benjamin’s place, Mann tells the reader that he did so because ‘it was he who had endured the most in life, who best understood guilt’ (p. 1372). Judah realises that by taking Benjamin’s place he both fulfils his oath to Jacob to go surety for Benjamin and makes up in some small way for what he did to Joseph those many years ago (p. 1376). Indeed, one of the great ironies of Mann’s version of the story is that Judah had played the role of Judas when he sold Joseph to the traders for 20 pieces of silver, betraying him with a kiss (p. 497). But now at this moment he is the one sacrificing himself for a brother and, according to Mann, will bear the spiritual legacy of redemption that will culminate in Christ.30 Joseph himself grasps this point and in an expansion of Gen 50:19–20, he explains to Jacob later in Part VII: His decrees fulfil many functions, that is what makes them so marvellous. If He punishes, He means to punish, and the punishment carries its own serious purpose and yet is also a means for advancing some greater event. He seized you roughly, my father, and me as well, rending us apart, so that I died to you. He meant it and He did it. But at the same time He meant to send me here before you in order to save you…[and] that we might be reunited. That is what is most marvellous about how He wisely intertwines all things. We are hot or cold, but his passion is providence, and His anger farseeing goodness. (pp. 1424–1425) In sum, for Mann the Joseph story shows how the recovery of the religious myth that had animated ‘Western civilization’ was the best hope for humanity to know

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature  153 their own nature and to resist false narratives like those of the Nazis. As readers perceive the mythic realities, they can know who they are, find their own roles within that ongoing story, and in times of darkness they can know that ‘the downward motion never terminates in a final plunge but serves as a prerequisite for a new elevation’.31 The future will be like the past. Descent will lead to ascent. Exile will lead to restoration. Death will lead to resurrection. 9.5 Synthesis and Reception Exegesis Let us now pull together the salient points of how Lawson, Parker, and Mann render the Joseph story. In all three cases we see what Gadamer called a ‘fusion of horizons’, in which the concerns and questions any interpreter brings to a text are already conditioned by their own situation and so interpretation is always dialectical.32 While Lawson sees in the Joseph story a means to critique power, especially hypocritical power from the margins, Parker views it as a story about forging community unity under morally upright leadership. Mann, on the other hand, sees within the exile​-and-​resto​ratio​n/dea​th-an​d-res​urrec​tion dynamic of the story a template for articulating the fundamental myth which modernity has lost and the recovery of which is the best hope for humanity to live into their true nature. How might these twentieth-century readings assist in the interpretation of the Joseph story? To take one example, a prominent strand of modern biblical scholarship involves a debate over possible wisdom elements in the story. Since Joseph is the protagonist, viewing the text through a more or less sapiential lens almost invariably leads not just to a positive interpretation, but to the celebration of Joseph as someone to be imitated. Terence Fretheim’s introductory textbook for the Pentateuch is a representative example. Joseph is held up as an exemplar of the ‘wise governmental figure’ whose contributions lead to the ‘considerable wellbeing’ of ‘all people’, including ‘outsiders’; his faithfulness is seen in his ‘exemplary leadership’ which is consistently exercised for ‘the common good’.33 As we saw above, this is certainly a defensible reading of the Joseph story and can be found among biblical scholars such as Gerhard von Rad as well as among literary retellings such as that of Thomas Mann. However, these readings can sometimes overlook questions such as: Why did Joseph never try to contact his family? Why did he charge his brothers money for the grain? Did he consider how his actions toward his brothers might generate emotional distress in his father too? Were his actions completely ‘for the common good’ or was there an element of self-interest involved? Other portraits, whether the acerbic picture by Lawson or the overly idealised picture by Parker, alert us to the fact that Joseph may be a more ambiguous character than often supposed. Human relationships are often complex and, depending on their predispositions, different people are likely to invest different meanings and importance to a character’s various actions. Were one to explore the history of interpretation of the Joseph story leading up to the twentieth century, it would be evident that the interpretations of Lawson, Parker, and Mann are themselves new in some ways, but in other ways they are repurposing interpretive moves that have recurred over and over again, always

154  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry with variations appropriate to their own time. Our survey of twentieth-century readings of the Joseph story suggests that this elegant story continues to capture the imagination, to be a deep well from which new Josephs are continually drawn. Notes 1 Goethe is quoted in Mann, Sketch, p. 63. Tolstoy is quoted in Mitchell, Joseph, p. 1. 2 See Westermann, Genesis 37–50, pp. 18–25; Provan, Discovering Genesis, pp. 170–171. 3 Von Rad, ‘Biblische Joseph-Erzählung’, pp. 545–550. 4 See Levenson, Death and Resurrection, pp. 143–169. 5 Kugel, Traditions, pp. 437–499; idem, In Potiphar’s House; Niehoff, Figure of Joseph. 6 The biographical details of Henry Lawson’s life can be found in Eggert, ‘D. H. Lawrence’. 7 Zaunbrecher, ‘Henry Lawson’s Religion’, p. 309 8 Zaunbrecher, ‘Henry Lawson’s Religion’, pp. 312–313. 9 Zaunbrecher, ‘Henry Lawson’s Religion’, p. 317. 10 Witherington, ‘Louis Napoleon Parker’, pp. 510–520. 11 Hulme, ‘Historical Pageants’, p. 161. 12 In the discussion that follows all page numbers from the play refer to Parker, Joseph and His Brethren. 13 See p. xiii of the introduction by John E. Woods, the translator of Mann, Joseph and His Brothers. All page numbers in the following discussion refer to this edition. Among the ideas that orthodox Christians found objectionable was the idea that God was someone who was developing and dependent on humanity for the process of becoming, a concept which has some similarities with Hegel’s notion of Geist as well as the psychology of Freud. See White, Genesis of Fiction, pp. 163–167; Rohls, ‘Theologie’, pp. 100–103. 14 Jeffers, ‘God, Man, the Devil’, pp. 79–80; White, Genesis of Fiction, p 133. For a detailed commentary identifying the sources Mann employed, see Fischer, Handbuch. 15 Rohls, ‘Theologie’, pp. 91–92. The work in question is Jeremias, Handbuchs. 16 Scaff, ‘Religious Base’, pp. 77–81. 17 Elliott, ‘Thomas Mann’, p. 130. 18 Rohls, ‘Theologie’, p. 98. 19 Scaff, ‘Religious Base’, p. 78. 20 Jeffers, ‘God, Man, the Devil’, p. 80. In this approach there is a similarity to readings of the Joseph story by modern biblical scholars such as Jon Levenson (Death and Resurrection, pp. 111–169). In fact, Golka, in ‘Biblical Joseph Story’ (pp. 44–54), has argued that, beginning with von Rad, Mann’s understanding of these repetitions influenced German biblical scholarship to begin treating these as part of a literary and theological strategy rather than as signs of multiple sources. 21 For a more extensive list of parallels see Rohls, ‘Theologie’, 87–91. 22 Rohls, ‘Theologie’, pp. 101–102. 23 Rohls, ‘Theologie’, pp. 75, 88, 98. Whether Mann’s concept of a Redeemer was essentially Gnostic (so Jeffers, ‘God, Man, the Devil’, p. 80) or merely a distorted version of Protestantism (so Elliott, ‘Thomas Mann’, p. 130) need not be resolved here. 24 Jeffers, ‘God, Man, the Devil’, p. 81. 25 Wright, Genesis of Fiction, pp. 136–137. Later, on p. 147, Wright notes that Mann himself thought the term ‘midrash’ was an appropriate description of the work. 26 Pütz, ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, p. 160; Jeffers, ‘God, Man, the Devil’, p. 81 27 Jeffers adds a third: firm resistance to political, especially foreign, enemies. But in my view, the third can best be seen as a qualification of the second. As Jeffers pointedly argues, ‘Would Mann have us extend a Joseph-like forgiveness to “brother Hitler” and the other monsters who had killed 6 million of Abraham’s seed and all but destroyed Germany? Doctor Faustus, the novel he wrote next, cries out no. Forgiveness is a move

Joseph and His Brothers in Twentieth-Century Literature  155 God obliges us to make in circumstances like Joseph’s – among family and friends. But those who make deals with the Devil deserve hell: indeed, they are in hell already’ (‘God, Man, the Devil – and Thomas Mann’, pp. 81–83 [quote is from p. 83]). 28 Pütz, ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, p. 176. 29 Elliott, ‘Thomas Mann’, p. 129. 30 This irony is nicely noted by Elliott, ‘Thomas Mann’, p. 129. 31 Pütz, ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, p. 160. 32 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, especially pp. 350–386. 33 Fretheim, Pentateuch, pp. 93, 94, 100.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Lawson, Henry. Joseph’s Dreams and Reuben’s Brethren: A Recital in Six Chapters. Adelaide: Hassell Press, 1923. Mann, Thomas. A Sketch of My Life. Paris: Harrison, 1930. Mann, Thomas. Doktor Faustus (Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1947). English Translation: Doctor Faustus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. Mann, Thomas. Joseph and His Brothers. John E. Woods (trans.). New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Parker, Louis Napoleon. Joseph and His Brethren: A Pageant Play. New York, NY: John Lane Company, 1913. Secondary Sources Eggert, Paul R. ‘D. H. Lawrence, Henry Lawson and Single-Author Criticism’. The D. H. Lawrence Review 36 (2011), pp. 2–26. Elliott, Mark W. ‘Thomas Mann: Bible, Art and Salvation’. EJT 11 (2002), pp. 127–134. Fischer, Bernd-Jürgen. Handbuch zu Thomas Mann’s ‘Josephromanen’. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2002. Fretheim, Terence E. The Pentateuch. Interpreting Biblical Texts. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Revised Translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marhsall. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Golka, Friedemann W. ‘The Biblical Joseph Story and Thomas Mann’s Novel’. Bangalore Theological Forum 33 (2001), pp. 44–54. Jeffers, Thomas L. ‘God, Man, the Devil – and Thomas Mann’. Commentary. November (2005), pp. 77–83. Jeremias, Alfred. Handbuchs der altorientalischen Geisteskultur. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1929. Kugel, James L. In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Mitchell, Stephen. Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: A Biblical Tale Retold. New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 2019. Niehoff, Maren. The Figure of Joseph in Post-Biblical Jewish Literature. AGaJU 16. Leiden: Brill, 1997.

156  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Provan, Iain. Discovering Genesis: Content, Interpretation, Reception. Discovering Biblical Texts. Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans, 2015. Pütz, Peter. ‘Joseph and His Brothers’. In Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell (eds), A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004, pp. 159–179. Rad, Gerhard von. ‘Biblische Joseph-Erzählung und “Joseph-Roman”’. Die Neue Rundschau 76 (1965), pp. 546–559. Scaff, Susan von Rohr. ‘The Religious Base of Thomas Mann’s World View: Mythic Theology and the Problem of the Demonic’. Christianity and Literature 43 (1993), pp. 75–94. Westermann, Claus. Genesis 37–50: A Commentary. Translated by John J. Scullion, S.J. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986. White, Terry R. The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. Hampshire/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Witherington, Robert. ‘Louis Napoleon Parker’. The New England Quarterly 12 (1939), pp. 510–520. Zaunbrecher, Marian. ‘Henry Lawson’s Religion’. Journal of Religious History 11 (1980), pp. 308–319.

10 Moses as a Leader in TwentiethCentury Literature Stuart Lasine

10.1 Introduction During the war years of 1939–1943, three major works were published about the biblical prophet Moses. These are Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses: Man of the Mountain, Sigmund Freud’s The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion, and Thomas Mann’s novella, The Tables of the Law (Das Gesetz). All three authors reject the biblical testimony that Moses was an Israelite from the tribe of Levi. In their versions, Moses is not totally ‘Jewish’, to use Freud’s anachronistic term. A close reading of Hurston’s novel makes it clear that Moses is the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and an Assyrian prince. Freud’s Moses is an Egyptian aristocrat. Mann’s Moses is the result of Pharaoh’s daughter’s fleeting dalliance with a Hebrew slave. Unsurprisingly, these works have led scholars to ask why these writers chose to strip the biblical Moses of his fully Israelite identity at a time when Jews were being persecuted and exterminated. Moreover, at least one commentator on each of these three works has claimed that Moses’ leadership style echoes that of Hitler. After examining these claims, the chapter concludes by noting depictions of Moses as a left-wing leader. 10.2 Hurston’s Moses: Man of the Mountain Many commentators believe that in Hurston’s novel Moses’ ethnicity is an open question.1 However, Hurston makes it clear that Moses was not the baby son of Amram and Jochebed. Miriam falls asleep when she was supposed to be watching the baby basket. When she awakes ‘she has not the least idea of where he had gone, nor how’. She is then distracted from searching for her brother by the arrival of the newly widowed Princess. Later the Princess notices an oval object in the water. Rather than concluding that it held her brother, Miriam assumes that they ‘had forgotten the casket in which is kept the things for washing the Princess’ (pp. 26–28). After Miriam returns home and remembers her failure to watch the baby, she concocts the fantasy that the Princess found the infant and took it home. Her father Amram lists several valid reasons why his daughter’s tale is an example of ‘[raising] up our hope to the throne of truth’ (pp. 32–33). Jochebed suspects that Miriam is ‘trying to dodge a whipping’ by inventing this story, but she also wants

DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-11

158  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry to believe the tale. Miriam then embellishes her tale to encourage her mother. Soon the story becomes a legend which ‘grew like grass’ (pp. 29–30, 35). In the world of the novel, only unappealing characters such as Moses’ Ethiopian treaty-wife and the murmuring Hebrews criticise Moses for being Hebrew—or for being Egyptian.2 Moses tells Jethro that it does not matter to him whether his recently deceased Egyptian mother was his ‘actual’ mother, whether she adopted him from Assyria, or whether she found him on the Nile.3 What matters to Moses is that the Princess ‘was a real mother, loving and kind’ whom he misses very much (p. 110; cf. p. 59). One unique feature of Hurston’s Moses novel is that the Hebrews, Moses, and even the Pharaoh speak in an African-American dialect, at least some of the time.4 Moses repeatedly stresses the importance of communicating in ways his auditors will understand. When Moses meets Jethro, he is impressed when he hears Jethro ‘dropping into idiom of the simple people’, forcing Moses to do the same. Soon Moses ‘found it natural and easy to drop into the dialect of the people’ with Jethro and his fellow Midianites. He ‘talked it deliberately to put everybody at their ease’ and to be understood (pp. 88, 91–92; cf. pp. 98, 190, 204). Hurston’s Moses is difficult to pin down in many respects. As Britt puts it, he is ‘a magician who articulates Enlightenment principles, a peacemaker prone to bouts of violence, a charismatic leader who prefers solitary contemplation’. For Britt, this makes him a ‘postmodern Moses’.5 However, this understates the degree to which most people—now and in the ancient world—are capable of exhibiting contradictory traits and behaviours. Hurston contrasts Moses’ leadership style with that of dictatorial figures such as the two Pharaohs. The older Pharaoh orders the mass slaughter of Hebrew male babies. He also disarms the Hebrews. They cannot become citizens, participate in any religious activity, or join the armed forces (pp. 2, 20–21, 60–61). Both this king and later Pharaoh Ta-Phar employ ‘secret police’ and blame the ungrateful Hebrews’ grievances on the slaves themselves (pp. 4, 15, 134). Hurston makes it clear that the dictators are constrained by pressure from the nobles and ‘public opinion’ (pp. 61, 152, 156). Ta-Phar is also hampered by his envy toward Moses. Like Plato’s tyrants in their palatial prison-houses, the envious and beleaguered Ta-Phar is ‘locked up in his own palace and inside himself’ (p. 166).6 A number of characters view Moses as wanting to be king or dictator. For example, Hebrew slaves tell Moses, ‘You want to be everybody’s boss’. Their evidence is court gossip which claims that Moses is stirring up trouble because he is jealous of the Egyptian Prince Ta-Phar and wants to make himself a king. Aaron views his supposed brother in similar fashion (pp. 70, 132). After the exodus, the Hebrews want Moses to act like their idea of a leader, someone who is ‘supposed to look out for us and take care of us’ (p. 203). Even those more well-disposed toward Moses, such as Jethro and Zipporah, view Moses as having the makings of a king (pp. 122; cf. 95, 103–104, 107, 112). Hurston makes it clear that Moses has no secret desire to be a king. Jethro regrets that Moses ‘had no mission in life except to study’ (p. 112). As a youth, Moses had wanted to study nature and to gain occult knowledge. Like Plato’s philosopher-king,

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  159 young Moses would rather not descend into the Cave in order to lead people into enlightenment.7 Eventually Jethro and the Voice on the mountain convince Moses to accept the mission of liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Moses is aware that the secret knowledge he acquires from the Egyptian servant Mentu, his father-in-law Jethro, and the ‘Book of Thoth’ at Koptos can be a means of exercising power. Even before he travels to Koptos, Jethro considers Moses ‘the finest hoodoo man in the world’. Jethro points out that the secret powers which Moses might acquire at Koptos could come in handy in the future (pp. 75, 114–115, 118–119). These powers do prove invaluable when Moses orchestrates the plagues. Fortunately, in Moses’ hands scientific and occult knowledge does not become a tool of tyranny. Even many years later, Moses must repeatedly remind the people that ‘he had no wish to impose his will on others’. Nevertheless, they eventually offer Moses ‘a kingly crown’. Moses refuses the offer, reminding the people that ‘it’s pretty hard to find a man who wouldn’t weaken under the strain of power and get biggity and overbearing’ (pp. 248, 268, 283). Readers are also given insight into what Moses thinks being a leader should entail and what an ideal society would be like. Even when he is still in Egypt, Moses envisions ‘a nation where there would be more equality of opportunity and less difference between top and bottom’ (p. 75). Later, the Egyptian nobles fear that the ‘radical’ Moses ‘would have the common people talking about equality’. Moses believes that his ‘difficult mission’ is to put the people ‘on the right road’. With the ten commandments ‘men could be free because they could govern themselves […..] They had the chart and compass of behavior’. Looking back on his career, Moses believes that he has ‘taken from [the Israelites] the sorrow of serving without will, and [….] given them the strife of freedom’ (pp. 152, 214, 207, 233, 283–284). Hurston’s narrator tells us that the Israelites ‘felt lonesome and defenseless under this light pressure of leadership that Moses exerted’ (p. 247). Yet at crucial times the pressure Moses exerts as leader is anything but ‘light’. In Hurston’s version of the golden-calf story, it is solely Moses’ decision to ‘purge’ the nation all the evildoers and agitators, not sparing a soul who is guilty (pp. 238–239). In Exodus, Moses attributes to Yhwh the order directing the Levites to go through the camp, slaying their brothers, friends, and neighbours (Exod 32:27). There is no mention of anyone being more or less guilty than anyone else. In the novel, a thousand ‘leaders of the revolt’ are killed. In contrast, Exodus 32 makes no mention of ringleaders. Levites voluntarily allow themselves to be sacrificed by other Levites in order to calm Yhwh’s anger at the community.8 In the novel, it is Moses who decides that the ‘slave-minded cowards’ of the older generation must die in the wilderness, not Yhwh (pp. 258–259; cf. p. 266, and Num 14:22–23, 29–35). In fact, Moses tells the Lord that none of these people will enter the land. And it is Moses, not God, who decides that glory-seeking Aaron and his sons have to die ‘if Israel is to be great’, and it is Moses who kills him (pp. 274, 275; contrast Num 20:23–27). In all these cases, Hurston’s Moses believes that the deaths are necessary in order for his mission to be accomplished. Israel cannot become ‘a divided people’ (p. 238).

160  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry In a letter written six years after the publication of her Moses novel, Hurston views the biblical Moses as a violent dictator. She laments that ‘nobody seems to consider that the Hebrews did not [….] ask for that new religion that Moses forced on them by terror and death’. Moses was ‘responsible for the actual death of at least a half million of the people’. He ‘did not care a fig for those Hebrew people […..] the Hebrews were just so [sic] the available laboratory material’.9 In short, the Moses described in this letter ‘can be defined as the perfect enabler of an oppressive and unjust political regime’.10 Neither Hurston nor the authors I will discuss later mention the biblical Moses’ greatest act of mass violence, namely, his command that all male Midianite babies be exterminated (Num 31:17). This order is not issued by Yhwh. The fact that the Pharaoh of the oppression gave an almost identical order about Hebrew male babies—including Moses himself—is the clearest indication that Moses acts like a pharaonic dictator in this scene.11 In the Bible, Moses is often the agent through whom Yhwh’s violence is channelled. In Hurston’s novel, readers are occasionally led to wonder whether the Voice is actually a manifestation of Moses’ thoughts and commands. Even before going back to Egypt, Moses is able to create a mass of white smoke over the altar which ‘made the voice of the unseen Moses speaking behind the altar seem like the voice of God’ (p. 116). In a number of important scenes, Hurston limits or eliminates God’s role. I have already mentioned the golden-calf story, the forty-year wandering punishment, and the order that Aaron must die. The plagues in Egypt are also orchestrated and performed by Moses. Readers are told that Jethro taught Moses how to cause a plague of flies, and that Moses had turned water to blood, prompted a frog plague, and caused a cattle disease prior to his appearance at Pharaoh’s court. Moses tells Aaron that he will use his powers to outdo Pharaoh and ‘whip his head to the ground’. After the plague of locusts, Moses issues a warning to Pharaoh: ‘I have other tricks, as you call them in scorn, [….] Don’t make me use them to scourge you’ (pp. 112–113, 116, 147, 173). And after the Hebrews flee, it is Moses who parts the sea and collapses the waves, killing Egyptian army and Ta-Phar (pp. 191–194). 10.3 Freud’s ‘Historical Novel’ about Moses Freud began working on The Man Moses: An Historical Novel on August 9, 1934, ten days before Chancellor Hitler was elected president of Germany.12 Much of the material in the 1934 manuscript remains in the first two published sections of his study, which appeared in 1937. The final greatly expanded version of The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion was published in both German and English shortly before Freud’s death in 1939.13 Freud begins his study by explaining what he means by ‘historical novel’. His intention is to do a ‘character study’ on Moses. This would require reliable material, but Freud contends that we have nothing that can be considered reliable on the man Moses. The Hebrew Bible is a tendentious source which contains contradictions

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  161 and distortions. A character study of Moses would therefore be hopeless if ‘the grandeur of the figure did not offer a counterbalance to his remoteness and challenge one to new efforts’.14 Those efforts involve following possible clues in the biblical material and filling in the gaps by ‘the law of least resistance’. That is, one should prefer the assumption with the greatest probability, even though ‘truth is often very improbable’.15 Freud eventually dropped the term ‘historical novel’, telling a friend ‘I am no good at historical novels. Leave that to Thomas Mann’.16 By the time Freud wrote the third section of The Man Moses, he felt that he had discovered historical evidence to support his version of Moses’ career. He also believed that the correct way to interpret Moses traditions was to draw an analogy between the development of neurotic individuals and entire peoples, in this case, the Jews. Freud’s construction of the Moses story has a clear plot. Rather than being a ‘Jew’, Moses is an Egyptian aristocrat who is close to Pharaoh Akhenaten, if not a member of the royal house. He is also an enthusiastic adherent of Akhenaten’s new monotheistic religion. When Akhenaten dies and his reforms were abolished, Egypt no longer has anything to offer the disappointed and lonely zealot (pp. 126–127, 162). Moses therefore resolves to found a new kingdom with non-Egyptian subjects. Making a ‘world-historical’ decision, Moses comes to an agreement with the Semites over whom he had perhaps served as governor. He then installs himself at the pinnacle of this crowd of culturally backward ‘savage Semites’ (pp. 115, 127). He acts as an ‘enlightened despot’ whose teachings about monotheism are harsher than those of Akhenaten (pp. 124, 148). Eventually, these Semites view Moses as a tyrant. They rebel against his demands for holiness and instinctual renunciation and murder him.17 While the biblical Moses is said to be uniquely humble (Num 12:3), Freud’s Moses is ambitious, energetic, dynamic, passionate, and conscious of his great capabilities (pp. 126–127, 137, 162).18 Freud does find some aspects of the biblical Moses to be credible, especially his tendency to become easily enraged and quickly flare up. He points to Moses’ striking the Egyptian in Exod 2:11–14 as an example; however, in that passage the future prophet is not said to be enraged. Freud also speculates that some of the character traits attributed to God in the ‘early’ period either derive from memories of Moses or were introduced into God’s personality by Moses himself. These include a disposition to become jealous, severe, enraged, and unyielding (pp. 131–132, 217). That Freud views Moses as an authoritarian leader is also signalled by the verbs that he uses to describe Moses’ actions. Moses is repeatedly said to ‘force’ the Israelites to accept the commands he ‘imposes’ on them (pp. 115, 126, 148, 163, 198, 218, 231). He ‘stamps’ and ‘imprints’ his character upon them (pp. 213–214, 231–232). Moses simply puts himself at the head of this crowd of Semites, without any mention of resistance by the Hebrews. They are assumed to be entirely passive before this man of action. Freud emphasises that Moses—and his Levite followers—are far above this mass of wild immigrants. He ‘stoops’, ‘descends’, ‘lowers himself’, and ‘condescends’ to their level (pp. 112, 146, 217). For Freud, Moses is a parade example of the ‘great man’. Freud believes that it is impossible ‘to deny the personal influence of individual great men on world history’.

162  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry The ‘great man’ influences his fellow humans through his personality and through the idea he promotes. Sometimes the personality has an effect by itself. In the mass of humankind there exists a strong need for an authority whom one can admire, before whom one bows down, by whom one is controlled, eventually even abused (pp. 154, 216, 217).19 This need stems from yearning after the father. All the traits with which we endow the ‘great man’ are also ‘father traits’. These include ‘decisiveness of thought, strength of will, vehemence of deeds, but above all the autonomy and independence of the great man, his godlike unconcern, which may escalate into ruthlessness’. According to Freud, it was ‘undoubtedly a powerful father-paradigm who stooped down to the poor Jewish corvée workers in the person of Moses, in order to assure them that they were his dear children’ (p. 217; cf. pp. 195, 240). Freud views humanity as composed of a small number of culturally superior individuals capable of instinctual renunciation (like his Moses-figure) and the majority, who are undisciplined and undiscerning—and, at worst—’rabble’. In his 1914 paper on Michelangelo’s Moses statue, Freud claims that the artist created a Moses figure who is ‘superior’ to the Moses of history and tradition.20 Instead of smashing the tablets containing the ten commandments in anger, Michelangelo’s Moses resists the temptation to spring up in anger and take revenge. Standing in front of this statue, Freud remarks that he has always attempted to bear the ‘contemptuous-enraged look of the hero, as if he himself belonged to the rabble (Gesindel)’ at whom Moses’ eyes are directed. This rabble cannot hold fast to any conviction and can neither wait nor trust.21 In this case the rabble are ‘Jews’ (p. 149). In other contexts, Freud uses Gesindel to refer to other groups who exhibit uninhibited and undisciplined (if not destructive) behaviour. He contrasts himself and his fiancée with the ‘the common man’, the ‘Gesindel’ who enjoy life.22 He describes Nazis as rabble, as well as the Christian anti-Semites who called him ‘a miserable Jew’ on a train.23 Speaking more generally, ‘people, on the average and by and large, are miserable Gesindel’.24 The ‘masses’ are ‘indolent and lacking in understanding; they do not love instinctual renunciation’.25 Freud’s fundamental goal in The Man Moses is to explain why Jews have ‘gained the heartfelt abhorrence of all other peoples’ (p. 212).26 He points to the ‘particular character-traits that the Jewish people developed’, such as having a particularly high opinion of themselves due to their being their God’s chosen people. Their religion allows them to share in the grandeur of their one new God, which makes them superior to all other peoples. This religion also forced the Jews to advance in Geistigkeit (spirituality and intellectuality) and to increase the renunciation of instincts. It was not Yhwh who imprinted the Jews with the traits which attract so much hostility from others. It was Moses. In short, ‘it is this one man Moses who created the Jews’ (pp. 212–213, 231). 10.4 Mann’s Das Gesetz (‘The Tables of the Law’) Mann carefully studied Freud’s The Man Moses and on at least one occasion he and Freud discussed Moses in person.27 Mann’s conception of Moses is nevertheless

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  163 quite different from Freud’s. Mann’s Moses is only half-Egyptian. The Pharaoh’s second daughter is attracted to a Hebrew slave-labourer. She has him brought to her and teases his genitals so that he takes possession of her. The raped slave is quickly killed and buried (p. 644). Their child, Moses, is initially raised among the Hebrews and speaks in their dialect. After two years in a school for children of the elite, Moses goes back to his father’s ‘blood’ in Goshen. He soon kills an abusive Egyptian overseer. This account adds a number of details not present in Exod 2:11–14. Here the beaten Hebrew had ‘probably’ been indolent or unruly. Moses becomes pale and with ‘blazing’ eyes challenges the Egyptian, who then punches and flattens Moses’s nose. Moses then grabs the overseer’s rod and crushes his skull. Mann makes a point of flatly contradicting Exodus by saying that Moses had not even looked around to see if anyone was watching and by having Moses use a weapon to strike the Egyptian (p. 647). While Ziolkowski is correct that in some places Mann alters the biblical account ‘for no obvious reason’, in this case Mann’s changes serve to portray Moses as someone whose temper flares up easily and who is willing to use a weapon to violently kill an adversary.28 By making Moses indifferent to the possible presence of others, Mann removes the possibility that Moses looks around to see if anyone else will intervene before acting himself.29 Moses’ new broken ‘goat’s nose’ is a joking allusion to the fact that the future sculptor of Israel resembles the sculptor Michelangelo, whose nose was also broken in a dispute (p. 647).30 After his stay with the Midianite Jethro, Moses returns to Egypt. He is confident in his ability to pressure and defeat Ramesses. His confidence does not derive from his prowess as a magician or his relationship with Yhwh. It is based upon his ‘secret lustfulness-grandfather’ Ramesses’ knowledge that Moses is his daughter’s love-child. This plot requires Mann to overlook the biblical report that the Pharaoh who ordered the death of the Hebrew male babies died before Moses returned to Egypt (Exod 4:19; cf. 2:15). If Mann had acknowledged that biblical notice, Ramesses would be Moses’ great-grandfather, another generation removed from the scandal of Moses’ birth and less likely to be swayed by Moses’ identity. Mann’s narrator then dismisses the first nine plagues as natural phenomena which may not have substantially contributed to the final result.31 The killing of the first-born is perpetrated not by Yhwh or his angelic Destroyer (‫)תיחשמה‬, but by the human Joshua and his cohort, the ‘precautionary band of angels of death (Würgengel)’. In the novella, Joshua functions as both Israel’s military leader and the leader of a paramilitary death squad (pp. 656–657, 674; cf. Exod 12:23). After the demise of the Egyptian army in the sea, Moses seeks to form the mass of Hebrews into a pure and holy nation. Laws involving cleanliness, purity, diet, and sexuality are presented as Moses’ personal preferences. Although he supposedly loves his people, Moses believes that almost all of them have a desire to deceive and defraud others (p. 676). Mann’s narrator reports that ‘out of Moses’ breast God loudly commanded him to carve two tablets’ (pp. 684–685).32 Moses is forced to invent alphabetic language so that the commandments could serve as ‘a rock of human decency among all the

164  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry peoples of the earth’. After carving the commandments, Moses coats each letter with his own blood (pp. 686, 688). When Moses and Joshua return to the camp, they witness a degree of depravity far more extreme than what is implied by the biblical statement that ‘the people sat down to eat and to drink and rose up to play’ (‫ ;לצחק‬Exod 32:6).33 Some of the Hebrews are eating forbidden blindworms, publicly committing incest, or defecating in the camp. Moses then smashes the calf idol using one of the tablets and then the other (p. 690). After castigating Aaron for his folly, Moses calls for those who belong to the Lord to come to him. Mann distinguishes between those who fully embraced the apostasy and those who did not. Like Hurston, Mann introduces ringleaders who are primarily responsible (p. 691). Inventing ringleaders is a way of justifying the biblical slaughter of three thousand by making those slain into the most culpable. Most surprising is that Mann eliminates the Levites’ crucial role. Instead, God— whose voice here is merged with Moses’ voice—orders the death of the ringleaders, even if there are three hundred of them (p. 692).34 Moses does not attend the executions; as usual, the killings are Joshua’s affair. A final major change occurs in the novella’s final chapter. In Exodus, Moses is able to save Israel from destruction and renew the covenant. The old generation is not sentenced to die in the wilderness until they rebel and decide to return to slavery in Egypt (Num 14:4). In Mann’s version, God sentences the entire wilderness generation to death even before Moses asks God to maintain the covenant (p. 693; cf. Exod 33:13–17). Mann’s Moses and Joshua agree with God’s death order because it coincides with their own plans. When Moses brings down the second set of tablets, he calls them the ‘ABC of human behaviour’ and curses those who say that the commandments are no longer binding (pp. 693–694). Mann’s narrator begins by telling readers that Moses ardently loved order and inviolability because his birth was ‘disorderly’. Because his senses were ‘hot’, Moses longed for the spiritual, the pure, the holy, and therefore the invisible. Similarly, Moses forbids killing because he himself had flared up and killed.35 This explanation of Moses’ psychology has been rightly called ‘simplistic’; whether Mann intended it to be simplistic is unclear.36 How does Mann’s Moses view his followers? The Hebrews are described as prone to deceit and, in their personal behaviour, uncouth and swinish. These judgements are most often made by the narrator, but on several occasions Moses expresses similar opinions, both in directly quoted speech and free indirect discourse. To underscore this negative view of the people, Mann uses Gehudel and forms of the word Pöbelvolk as key words; together, these terms appear seventeen times. When Gehudel refers to a group of ordinary people, it can suggest filthiness and licentiousness.37 Mann’s narrator calls the Hebrews ‘brown Gehudel’, a crowd of miserable people who are asked by Moses to forego natural tendency to sing at enemies’ defeat. The Gehudel are the raw material of flesh and blood from which Moses must hew and chisel in order to form a people who are decent and holy (pp. 660, 663; cf. 661, 670, 672, 677, 682). On several occasions Moses (or the narrator characterising Moses’ views) uses the term Pöbelvolk to express his disgust at the people’s filthy ways, both in terms

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  165 of cleanliness and sexuality. This is what makes them rabble in these cases (pp. 672–674, 673, 677). This is most evident when Moses descends from the mountain with the first set of tablets. He brings this gift to the ‘wavering Pöbelvolk, his buried father’s blood’. When Moses sees the people defecating and committing incest in public and eating blindworms, he directly addresses the mob, calling them ‘you God-forsaken Pöbelvolk’ (pp. 684, 690; cf. 692). The manner in which Moses imposes order and holiness on this ‘formless humanity’ is illustrated by Mann’s frequently repeated references to Moses as ‘sculptor of the people’ (pp. 658, 646; cf. 671, 678).38 Moses had ‘a liking for his father’s blood as the stonecutter has a liking for the unformed block’ (pp. 642–643).39 Even Moses’ ‘extraordinarily thick wrists’ are the wrists of a stonecutter’. In fact, both Moses’ spirit and his wrists ‘yearned’ to craft something holy and decent out of the Hebrew rabble (pp. 662, 663).40 ‘Drilling’ and ‘boring into’ are just two of many forceful terms employed by the narrator to describe Moses’ activity as leader (p. 642). He ‘stamps’ the people with the holy invisible God, just as Freud’s Moses stamped Jews with their basic characteristics (pp. 22–23; cf. Freud, Moses, pp. 213–214, 231). Mann’s narrator tells us that Moses wants to chisel a holy figure of God from the ‘hopeless mass’ of Pöbelvolk. To do so, he ‘chiseled, blasted, fashioned, and smoothed the unwilling block’. He ‘gouged’ and ‘blasted’ them. He ‘jolted, found fault, quibbled, regulated their existence, and reprimanded them’ (pp. 662, 672, 677). While Moses outsources the use of most physical violence to Joshua and his strangling angels, Mann makes it clear that Moses was a dictatorial leader. 10.5 The Three Portraits of Moses as Leader and the Hitler Regime A number of Moses’ actions in Hurston’s novel have been viewed as dictatorial, if not fascist. Zeppenfeld notes that ‘Moses’ leadership increases in violence as the novel develops’.41 In the course of his mission, Moses ‘develops negative character traits’; in fact, he ‘seems fanatic in conducting his mission’. Thompson believes that ‘the means Moses employs to deliver his people, and the rhetoric with which he does so, fall within the parameters of fascist political theology’. Moses ‘forms his fascist State on the basis of a political theology centered on the charismatic leader’.42 Miriam and Aaron ‘lose their lives—moments eerily suggestive of political assassination—because they question Moses’s authority’.43 Thompson and a number of other scholars believe that Hurston consciously alludes to the Nazi regime in her novel. Wright is most tentative: ‘both the text itself and Hurston’s own personal and professional concerns suggest that she wrote with an eye to Germany’. She concludes that ‘there are reasonable grounds to argue that Hurston consciously drew on European events when describing the slaves’ plight’.44 Farebrother cites the fact that the slaves in Goshen are under surveillance by the secret police and made into ‘aliens’ in their own country as evidence of ‘striking parallels between the Third Reich and the slaves in Goshen’.45 Lackey goes further. He contends that Hurston makes ‘direct and not-so-subtle allusion to the Nuremberg Laws’, so that her ‘allusion to Nazi Germany [….] is very specific’.46

166  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Hurston’s 1945 letter about Moses as an oppressive leader emphasises how little we hear from the oppressed Israelites: ‘we have only a few sentences actually spoken, setting forth the sufferings of the muted people’. She then quotes parts of Num 17:12–13 in the KJV: ‘“Behold, we die! We perish. Shall we be consumed with dying?”’ and asks, ‘was there ever a more helpless or pathetic picture of terror and death before Hitler?’47 Her question implies that among the worst terror-mongers in history, Moses is second only to Hitler. In a 1933 letter, Freud declared that ‘our great master Moses was [….] a strong anti-Semite and made no secret of it. Perhaps he really was an Egyptian’.48 Schur, Freud’s personal physician, comments that ‘in speaking of the “anti-Semitism” of Moses Freud obviously had in mind the wrath which Moses unleashed against the Jews’ in the golden-calf incident.49 Freud’s remark appears more ominous when it is juxtaposed with Hitler’s view of Moses as an anti-Semite. According to Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, in 1942, Goebbels asked a group of invited actors which historical figure Hitler ‘deemed to be the greatest of all “the men who made history”’.50 The answer was Moses. According to Hitler, says Harlan’s Goebbels, Moses was ‘naturally’ not a Jew, as even the Jew Freud demonstrated. Moses knew that ‘the Jews lacked love for one another and constructed his laws on that basis […..] He systematically made the Jews into enemies of the other peoples’. Since ‘internally the Jews do not stick together, according to their nature—so did Hitler express it—Moses decided to hold them together through an external power’, namely, ‘the hate of the other peoples—the power of antisemitism’.51 On a more general level, Goldstein finds it disturbing that Freud adhered ‘to a model of group dynamics that juxtaposes the absolute authority of a powerful leader with a group subjected to his rule’ during the same ‘period in which Hitler [….] articulated the theory of his Führerprinzip’.52 Freud believed that authoritarian leadership was necessary in order for large groups to function, given the negative traits of the masses. This includes Mosaic and other father-centred leadership. As Adorno puts it, for Freud ‘the leader has to appear himself as absolutely narcissistic, and it is from this insight that Freud derives the portrait of the “primal father of the horde” which might as well be Hitler’s’.53 For a number of scholars, the relationship between Mann’s Moses and Hitler is clear. According to Ziolkowski, Mann’s Moses ‘emerges in many senses as a Hitler of the desert’, and Joshua’s ‘Würgengel go on to function essentially as Nazi SS troops’.54 For Britt, ‘Mann’s Moses is a dark parody of Hitler himself’.55 Lubich speaks of Mann’s ‘Janus-headed Moses-Hitler-configuration’, which results in a ‘double text about the people’s (mis)leader Moses-Hitler’.56 Boes concludes that Mann’s Moses is ‘at once Michelangelo and Hitler, artist and dictator’,57 and Assmann points out that even though Mann otherwise detested the Nazi’s ‘völkisch blood-(and soil-) terminology’, in the novella he intentionally employs it at every turn.58 Mann was commissioned to write the introduction to a volume designed to refute Nazi attacks on the biblical ten commandments.59 Mann ended up writing the Moses novella instead of an introduction. The preface was written by ex-Nazi Hermann Rauschning, who described his recollection of a conversation in which

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  167 Hitler fulminated against the ‘curse from Mount Sinai’ as well as Jewish and Christian ‘slave morals’. Hitler is quoted as declaring that it is ‘against the socalled ten commandments, against them we are fighting’.60 Another purported conversation between Hitler and a fellow anti-Semite is often cited by commentators on Mann’s novella.61 This is Eckart’s Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin (1924). Several of these commentators62 claim that Hitler refers to the Israelites as ‘Pöbelvolk’ in Eckart’s pamphlet, the term which Mann uses as a key word in Das Gesetz.63 This is incorrect. Eckart and his Hitler use Pöbelvolk to refer to the ‘mixed multitude’ who left Egypt with the Hebrews (Exod 12:38), not the Hebrews themselves. Eckart’s point is ‘the children of Israel have always let duped non-Jews do the most dangerous work’.64 His Hitler warns against another slaughter of the first-born, carried out by ‘raving masses’ led by Jews. In the original killing of the first-born, the reward which ‘the narrow-minded accomplices were able to reap from the Jews’ was to be labelled ‘“Pöbelvolk”, when they had previously been “dear comrades”’.65 Looking back at his novella, Mann admits being influenced by Heine’s portrait of Moses: ‘I did not give my hero the features of Michelangelo’s Moses but of Michelangelo himself, in order to depict him as an artist toiling laboriously over refractory human raw material’.66 Mann’s insistence on describing Moses as a sculptor echoes Mann’s view of Hitler as a disappointed artist.67 Lubich points to a 1933 political cartoon depicting Hitler as a heroic sculptor fashioning the German people. According to Lubich, Hitler is ‘the epitome of the failed artist’ and ‘wouldbe Michelangelo’.68 Having examined the relation between these three works and the Hitler regime, it is clear that the relation is strongest with Mann’s Moses. The connection is weakest in Hurston’s novel. However, in her 1945 letter, Hurston stresses the degree to which Moses ‘forced’ his laws and new religion on the people, who were merely ‘laboratory material’ to him.69 Her ‘lab rat’ analogy is more apt than Mann’s view of the people as formless raw material for his sculptor Moses; at least rats are alive and sentient. While all three works describe Moses as authoritarian to some extent, Freud puts a positive spin on his leadership style by calling Moses a benevolent despot. Hurston’s novel does not view ordinary people from an elitist perspective, as do Freud and Mann when they describe Moses’ followers as ‘rabble’. Hurston’s Moses has no illusions about common people, but he is not as condescending toward them as are Freud’s and Mann’s Moses-figures. Hurston’s Moses understands the Hebrews’ behaviour not in terms of their basic character but as the result of their situation as oppressed and disenfranchised slaves. Hurston supports this view by showing the humanity of the slaves when their babies’ lives are in jeopardy and by acknowledging the traumatic impact of that slaughter upon the children Aaron and Miriam, including the way that trauma affects their adult behaviour.70 We should also note one similarity between Hurston’s and Mann’s Moses. Both extol the value of the ten commandments. Hurston’s Moses believes that with the ten commandments ‘men could be free because they could govern themselves [….] They had the chart and compass of behavior’.71 Similarly, Mann’s Moses considers

168  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the commandments to be the ‘ABC of human behaviour’.72 Nevertheless, neither Mann nor Freud believes that the ‘rabble’ are capable of governing themselves without a strong authoritarian leader guiding them. 10.6 Moses on the Left Not all twentieth-century depictions of Moses invite comparison with right-wing authoritarian leaders. Moses is also invoked by writers on the left. In Lincoln Steffens’ Moses in Red (1926), the biblical exodus and wilderness wandering are portrayed as an example of a typical revolution.73 The Lord knew that ‘the old people who had known the conditions of slavery and the culture of Egypt’ would be of no use in the promised land and ‘went on with them only for the sake of Moses’. God ‘knew what the Russians have learned’. Only the children can go over, ‘and even they must first pass through the purifying experience of the natural conditions of the desert’.74 In his influential 1940 novel, Darkness at Noon, ex-Communist Arthur Koestler describes the fate of a formerly high-ranking Soviet official who is imprisoned and charged with treason. In his diary, the prisoner Rubashov writes that ‘history has taught us that [….] its human material is by nature sluggish: before every new stage of development the people must first be led through the wilderness for forty years—driven on with threats and enticements’. Otherwise, they might ‘stop to rest and entertain themselves with the worship of golden calves’.75 Like Mann’s Moses, Rubashov views the masses as merely ‘human material’ to be shaped by the revolutionaries. When Rubashov is about to be executed, he thinks of the Russian masses: ‘for forty years they had been driven through the wilderness [….] but where was the Promised Land? […..] Moses had not been allowed to set foot in the Promised Land either’. At least Moses had been permitted ‘to lay eyes on it’, but all that Rubashov ‘could see was wilderness and the darkness of the night’.76 He is thus worse off than Hitler, who lamented that, like Moses, he is only able to see the promised land from a distance.77 The justification for the suffering and eventual eradication of the wilderness generation given by Steffens and Koestler is basically identical to the explanations given by the authoritarian Moses-figures described by Hurston and Mann. As I noted earlier, to avoid Israel becoming a divided people, Hurston’s Moses decides that the older generation of ‘slave-minded cowards’ must be eliminated. In Mann’s novella, God sentences the adult members of the ‘stiff-necked rabble’ to death, and Moses agrees with this decision. Clearly, elements of the Moses story resonate with revolutions all along the political spectrum.78 10.7 Reception Exegesis When we compare the biblical ‘biography’ of Moses with the Moses figures sketched by Hurston, Freud, and Mann, several features of the biblical text stand out more clearly.79 All three works reduce or omit Yhwh’s pivotal role in the reported events. This striking difference highlights the importance of the character

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  169 Yhwh in the life of the biblical Moses. These fictional works can also prompt readers to see what is not in the Pentateuch. Post-biblical expansions of the stories draw attention to the gaps left in the narratives, as well as what is perceived to be problematic in the scriptural text. Like many midrashim, the literary works often respond to perceived problems or gaps through elaboration and even exaggeration, at times using humour to defamiliarise the biblical text so that readers can view the biblical narratives with fresh eyes.80 Roughly speaking, the biblical text offers the peshat (the ‘plain sense’), and these modern works of fiction are examples of derash, the extended or applied meaning of the text.81 The more that a given reader compares the novelistic versions of Moses’ life with the biblical text, the more that reader will be able to perceive what is, and what is not, stated in or implied by the Bible. For example, readers who return to the Bible after reading Hurston’s and Mann’s rich and detailed treatment of Miriam and Aaron’s animus against Moses’ Ethiopian wife may gain a new awareness of how very little the Bible says about this woman. They may then go on to recognise that the biblical biography of Moses omits other key features of modern biographies, especially the details of the subject’s private and personal life. These modern works present Moses as a person who possesses a variety of character traits and acts in a variety of ways. This invites readers to ask whether the same might be true of the biblical Moses. When some biblical scholars encounter what they perceive to be contradictory actions or statements by Moses, they often attribute the seemingly incompatible behaviours to different redactional levels of the text, rather than conceding that, as a complex but coherent character, the biblical Moses may exhibit as many inconsistent traits and behaviours as anyone in the scholars’ quotidian world.82 What is ‘in’ the text does not exist independently from a given reader’s actualisation of the text in the process of reading. Not all readers will be equally open to the process of defamiliarisation. Readers necessarily perceive the biblical Yhwh through the optic of their usual assumptions about their God and his prophets. An individual reader’s personality, theoretical stance, religious allegiances, expectations, values, and biases all influence how that reader will assess a given biblical personage. However, the fact that the works by Hurston and Mann make their fictionality clear gives readers an opportunity to suspend their ordinary assumptions in order to experience new ways of assessing the biblical Moses and his God. Notes 1 See, e.g., Zeppenfeld, ‘Zora’, p. 49. Wright claims that ‘like Sigmund Freud, […..] [Hurston] portrays a racially ambiguous liberator’ (Moses, p. 45; cf. p. 64). This is incorrect; Freud’s Moses is unambiguously Egyptian. 2 E.g., Moses, pp. 63–65, 189. Later, envious Miriam denigrates Moses’ wife Zipporah for her presumed ethnic identity, referring to her as ‘black Mrs. Pharaoh’ (pp. 242, 245). 3 Palace officials tell Jochebed that the princess was summoned home with her infant son ‘several months ago’, following the death of her husband (pp. 34, 37). No hint is given that they were lying to her.

170  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 4 See Zeppenfeld, ‘Zora’, pp. 50–51; Stringer, ‘Scripture’, p. 182; Britt, Moses, pp. 27, 33; Wright, Moses, pp. 78–79, 81–82. Even the old Pharaoh and Ta-Phar use that dialect. The old Pharaoh tells a visiting dignitary ‘you must be crazy in the head’ (Hurston, Moses, p. 50). Ta-Phar asks Moses: ‘you are still messing around with hoodoo, eh’ (p. 142). 5 Britt, Moses, pp. 33, 39. 6 Plato, Resp. 579b. 7 Plato, Resp. 519c–520e, 540a–b. 8 Exod 32:26–28. See Lasine, ‘Violence’, pp. 204–219. 9 Kaplan, Zora, pp. 529–530. 10 Lackey, ‘Moses’, p. 577. 11 Lasine, Divine Envy, pp. 70–77. 12 Grubrich-Simitis, Texten, p. 247. 13 In English the work is known as Moses and Monotheism. 14 Grubrich-Simitis, Texten, p. 248. 15 Grubrich-Simitis, Texten, p. 248. 16 Schröter, Briefwechsel, p. 886. 17 Gesetz, p. 149. Freud relies on Ernst Sellin for postulating that Moses was murdered. On the weaknesses of Sellin’s theory, see, e.g., Hendel, ‘Jews’, pp. 159–166. On the parts of Sellin’s argument not used by Freud, see Paul, ‘Freud’. 18 Freud explains contradictions in the portrayal of the biblical Moses by positing two figures named Moses who became ‘fused’ in Scripture (Moses, pp. 16, 141). One is the Egyptian aristocrat in whom Freud is interested; the other is the Midianite son-in-law of the priest Jethro, who served ‘a crude, petty […..] violent and bloodthirsty’ local volcano god named Yhwh (pp. 16, 151). 19 According to Freud, in viable mass groups ‘all individuals should be the same as one another, but they all want to be ruled by one person […..] who is superior to all of them’ (Massenpsychologie, p. 135). 20 S. Freud, ‘Michelangelo’, p. 198. 21 S. Freud, ‘Michelangelo’, p. 175. 22 S. Freud, Briefe 56–57; cf. Holt, ‘Authoritarianism’, p. 336. 23 E. Freud, Briefwechsel, pp. 142–143; S. Freud, Briefe, pp. 84–85. 24 E. Freud, Briefwechsel p. 11. 25 Freud, Zukunft, p. 328. In his letter to Martha, Freud acknowledges the role of poverty in the lives of the rabble (S. Freud, Briefe, p. 57; see Holt, ‘Authoritarianism’, p. 336). According to Prager (‘Freud’, p. 266), Freud’s portrayal of the poor ‘was a clumsy, and now offensive way of making the point about class difference’. 26 Friedman (‘Freud’, p. 145) contends that Freud has fallen into the ‘common trap of blaming the victim’. 27 Le Rider, ‘Joseph’, p. 65; Schur, Freud, p. 481. 28 Ziolkowski, Uses, p. 220. 29 Exod 2:12; see Lasine, Divine Envy, p. 28. 30 Cf. Hamburger, Gesetz, pp. 100–101. 31 Gesetz, pp. 654–655. 32 Mann never commits himself to the independent reality of the Hebrews’ god. Even Moses’ initial experience in the desert is described as breaking out from inside him as a ‘flaming external vision’ which reveals his inescapable mission (p. 641). 33 The verb ‫ צחק‬has a wide range of meanings, from smiling and laughing to playing, mocking, and behaving sexually. 34 The narrator begins the next chapter by saying that Moses had ordered the executions, not God. 35 Gesetz, p. 641. 36 Lauer, ‘Law’, p. 322. Later Mann’s narrator states that Moses’ birth was ‘disorderly’ because his father was not his father and his mother was not his mother (Gesetz, p. 643).

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  171 The narrator is creating the illusion of disorder and mystery here. The prosaic fact is that Mann’s Moses is given to adoptive parents by his birth mother. 37 See Hamburger, Gesetz, p. 102. 38 Mann even makes a point of the fact that baby Moses drank the milk of a stonecutter’s daughter (p. 685). 39 Mann does not clarify whether Moses views himself as a sculptor; the descriptions quoted here are made by the narrator. 40 ‘Thick’ is Mann’s preferred translation of ‘breit’ when used of Moses’ wrists (Horton, ‘Job’, p. 159). 41 Zeppenfeld, ‘Zora’, p. 52. 42 Thompson, ‘Socialism’, pp. 408, 411. 43 Thompson, ‘Socialism’, p. 410; cf. Zeppenfeld, ‘Zora’, p. 52. 44 Wright, Moses, pp. 67–68. 45 Farebrother, ‘Moses’, p. 342; cf. McDowell, ‘Forward’, p. xv. 46 Lackey, Novel, p. 134; cf. p. 145. 47 Kaplan, Zora, p. 531. 48 Quoted in Schur, Freud, p. 563. 49 Freud, p. 468. Yerushalmi (Moses, p. 117 n. 29) believes that the reference to Moses as an anti-Semite ‘is, of course, meant ironically’. Nevertheless, the fact that Freud couched Moses’ anger in racial terms is significant, given the climate of the times. 50 Harlan, Schatten, p. 96. Harlan’s account is one of several potentially unreliable testimonies concerning Hitler’s views on Moses and the Jewish faith. The reports of Eckart and Rauschning will be discussed below. In this case, we should keep in mind the fact that Harlan’s autobiography attempts to downplay his key role in directing antisemitic films such as Jud Süss (1940). 51 Harlan, Schatten, p. 97. 52 Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses, pp. 125–126. 53 Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory’, p. 126; cf. pp. 123–124. 54 Ziolkowski, Uses p. 221. 55 Britt, Rewriting Moses, p. 29; cf. p. 30. 56 Lubich, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, pp. 554, 566. 57 Boes, Thomas Mann’s War, p. 156. 58 Assman, ‘Mose’, p. 56. 59 Robinson, Commandments. For details on this project, see, e.g., Lauer pp. 319–322; Faber and Lehmann, ‘Introduction’, pp. vii–xi. 60 Rauschning, ‘Preface’, pp. xii–xiii. For different opinions on the reliability of Rauschning’s accounts, see Pilsworth, ‘Responses’, pp. 69–70. 61 Direct evidence of Hitler’s views on Moses and the Bible is also available. In a 1919 letter, Hitler writes that ‘the feeling of the Jew moves in the purely material; even more so are his thinking and striving. The dance around the golden calf becomes a pitiless battle over all those goods’ (Deuerlein, ‘Eintritt’, p. 203). In 1942, Hitler regrets that he, like Moses, can see the promised land only from a distance (Picker, Tischgespräche, p. 115). 62 E.g., Britt, Moses, p. 31; Lubich, ‘Fascism’, p. 562; Ziolkowski, Uses, pp. 1, 221. These scholars also take at face value Eckart’s claim that Hitler made the statements attributed to him in Eckart’s pamphlet. However, Eckart probably invented these conversations. See Scholder, Churches, p. 90; Steigmann-Gall, Reich, p. 18. 63 According to Lubich, ‘Fascism’, p. 562 n. 18, Mann responded to Jewish critics by explaining that he employed ‘Pöbelvolk’ merely because it was an archaic word from the Luther-Bible. 64 Eckart, Bolschewismus, p. 9. 65 Eckart, Bolschewismus, pp. 6–7. Luther’s use of Pöbelvolk in Acts 17:5 illustrates Eckart’s charge that the Jews employ rabble to commit violence. Surprisingly, neither Eckart nor Hitler mentions this passage.

172  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 66 Mann, Story, p. 16. 67 See Boes, War, p. 128. 68 Lubich, ‘Fascism’, pp. 559–561. 69 Kaplan, Zora, p. 529. 70 Hurston, Moses, pp. 12, 218, 264, 275. 71 Hurston, Moses, p. 233. 72 Mann, Gesetz, p. 693. 73 On Steffens’ elusive political position, see Wright, Moses, pp. 26–34. 74 Steffens, Moses, p. 124. 75 Koestler, Darkness, p. 88; cf. Lasine, ‘Violence’, pp. 225–227. Left-wing Catholic writer Wilfried Daim claims that Moses’ revolution justifies ‘liquidating’ deviationists such as the ‘fascist party’ who carried out ‘the counter-revolution’ of the golden calf and the later rebellion led by Moses’ cousin Korah (Daim, Christianity, pp. 51–54, 59–60; cf. Lasine, ‘Violence’, pp. 221–222). 76 Koestler, Darkness, p. 236. 77 See n. 60, above. 78 Moses and the exodus did of course play a role in earlier rebellions such as the American and French revolutions (Langston, Exodus, pp. 81–88, 141–144; Lasine, ‘Violence’, pp. 223–225). 79 On the Pentateuch as a biography of Moses, see Knierim, ‘Composition’, p. 409. 80 Mann folds an actual midrash into his narrative. This midrash involves the appropriateness of expressing joy at the drowning of the Egyptians (Mann, Gesetz, p. 660; b. Sanhedrin 39b). 81 The derash does not cancel or replace the peshat. As Rashi puts it, a biblical verse does not leave the realm of its peshat. See Rashi on Gen 37:17, 15:10; Exod 12:2; cf. b. Shabbat 63a, b. Yebamot 11b, 24a. 82 For example, Sommer, ‘Reflecting on Moses’, finds two contradictory portraits of Moses in Num 11, rather than the depiction of one complex individual. See Lasine, Weighing, pp. 65–66.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Eckart, Dietrich. Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir. München: Hoheneichen, 1924. Freud, Ernst L. (ed.). Sigmund Freud—Arnold Zweig Briefwechsel. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1968. Freud, Sigmund. Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. In Anna Freud (ed.), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13. London: Imago, 1940, pp. 73–161. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Der Moses des Michelangelo’. In Anna Freud (ed.), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. London: Imago, 1946, pp. 172–201. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Die Zukunft einer Illusion’. In Anna Freud (ed.), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14. London: Imago, 1948, pp. 325–380. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion’. In Anna Freud (ed.), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16. London: Imago, 1950, pp. 103–246. Freud, Sigmund. Briefe 1873–1939. Ernst and Lucie Freud (eds). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1980. Harlan, Veit. Im Schatten meiner Filme. H. C. Opfermann (ed.). Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn, 1966. Hurston, Zora Neale. Moses: Man of the Mountain. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991. Kaplan, Carla (ed.). Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2002.

Moses as a Leader in Twentieth Century Literature  173 Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. Philip Boehm (trans.). New York, NY: Scribner, 2019. Mann, Thomas. Das Gesetz. In Thomas Mann: Sämtliche Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1971, pp. 641–694. Mann, Thomas. The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus. Richard and Clara Winston (trans.). New York, NY: Knopf, 1961. Picker, Henry (ed.). Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier. Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976. Robinson, Armin L. (ed.). The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1943. Schröter, Michael. Sigmund Freud—Max Eitingon Briefwechsel, Zweiter Band. Tübingen: Edition Discord, 2004. Secondary Sources Adorno, Theodore W. ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’. In Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York, NY: Continuum, 1982, pp. 118–137. Assmann, Jan. ‘Mose gegen Hitler: Die Zehn Gebote als antifaschistisches Manifest’. Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 28 (2015), pp. 47–61. Boes, Tobias. Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Britt, Brian. Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text. London: T&T Clark, 2004. Daim, Wilfried. Christianity, Judaism, and Revolution. Peter Tirner (trans.). New York, NY: Ungar, 1973. Deuerlein, Ernst. ‘Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (1959), pp. 177–227. Farebrother, Rachel. ‘Moses and Nation-Building: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European’. Comparative American Studies 5 (2007), pp. 333–356. Faber, Marion, and Stephen Lehmann. ‘Introduction’. In Thomas Mann (ed.), The Tables of the Law. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2010, pp. vii–xiii. Friedman, Florence Dunn. ‘Freud, Moses and Akhenaten’. In Arnold D. Richards (ed.), The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010, pp. 144–159. Goldstein, Bluma. Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse. Zurück zu Freuds Texten: Stumme Dokumente sprechen machen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993. Hamburger, Käte. Thomas Mann: Das Gesetz. Vollständiger Text der Erzählung, Dokumentation. Dichtung und Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1964. Hendel, Ron. ‘Creating the Jews: Mosaic Discourse in Freud and Hosea’. In Gilad Sharvit and ‎Karen S. Feldman (eds), Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion. Berkeley Forum in the Humanities. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018, pp. 157–176. Holt, Robert R. ‘On Freud’s Authoritarianism’. The Psychoanalytic Review 101 (2015), pp. 315–346. Horton, David. ‘“An Acceptable Job”? The First English Translation of Thomas Mann’s Das Gesetz’. The Modern Language Review 105 (2010), pp. 149–170. Knierem, Rolf. 1985. ‘The Composition of the Pentateuch’. In Kent H. Richards (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers, 24. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985, pp. 393–415. Lackey, Michael. ‘Moses, Man of Oppression: A Twentieth-Century African American Critique of Western Theocracy’. African American Review 43 (2009), pp. 577–588.

174  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Lackey, Michael. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Langston, Scott M. Exodus Through the Centuries. Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Lasine, Stuart. ‘Levite Violence, Sacrifice, and Fratricide in the Bible and Later Revolutionary Rhetoric’. In T. Smith and M. Wallace (eds), Curing Violence: Religion and the Thought of René Girard. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995, pp. 204–229, 305–319. Lasine, Stuart. Weighing Hearts: Character, Judgment and the Ethics of Reading the Bible. LHBOTS. New York: T&T Clark, 2012. Lasine, Stuart. Divine Envy, Jealousy, and Vengefulness in Ancient Israel and Greece. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. Lauer, Gerhard. ‘The Law and the Artist in the Age of Extremes: On Thomas Mann’s Das Gesetz’. In Dominik Markl (ed.), The Decalogue and its Cultural Influence. HBM 58. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013, pp. 318–332. Le Rider, Jacques. ‘Joseph et Moïse Égyptiens: Sigmund Freud et Thomas Mann’. Savoirs et Clinique: revue de psychanalyse 6 (2005), pp. 59–66. Lubich, Frederick A. ‘“Fascinating Fascism”: Thomas Manns “Das Gesetz” und seine Selbst-de-Montage als Moses-Hitler’. German Studies Review 14 (1991), pp. 553–573. McDowell, Deborah E. ‘Forward: Lines of Descent/Dissenting Lines’. In Zora Neale Hurston (ed.), Moses: Man of the Mountain. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991, pp. vii–xxii. Paul, Robert A. ‘Freud, Sellin and the Death of Moses’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75 (1994), pp. 825–837. Pilsworth, Ellen. ‘Four Responses to Nazism’. Journal of the British Academy 9 (2021), pp. 59–72. Prager, Jeffrey. ‘Reading Freud Anew’. Society 57 (2020), pp. 265–268. Rauschning, Hermann. ‘Preface—A Conversation with Hitler’. In Armin L. Robinson (ed.), The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1943, pp. ix–xiii. Scholder, Klaus. The Churches and the Third Reich, Volume 1: Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions, 1918–1934. John Bowden (trans.). Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1988. Schur, Max. Freud: Living and Dying. New York, NY: International Universities Press, 1972. Sommer, Benjamin D. ‘Reflecting on Moses: The Redaction of Numbers 11’. JBL 118 (1999), pp. 601–624. Steffens, Lincoln. Moses in Red: The Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: Dorrance, 1926. Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Stringer, Dorothy. ‘Scripture, Psyche, and Women in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain’. Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 5 (2016), pp. 182–201. Thompson, Mark Christian. ‘National Socialism and Blood-Sacrifice in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain’. African American Review 38 (2004), pp. 395–415. Wright, Melanie J. Moses in America: The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative. AAR Cultural Criticism Series. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminal and Interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Zeppenfeld, Julia. ‘Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain: Rewriting the Biblical Exodus Narrative from an African American Perspective’. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 43 (2018), pp. 45–62. Ziolkowski, Theodore. The Uses and Abuses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations Since the Enlightenment. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016.

11 From Passion to Politics in the Literary Reception of Samson Brian Britt

11.1 Introduction The reception of the Samson story in contemporary literature follows centuries of retellings that echo the vivid, puzzling narrative of Judges 13–16. In Jewish tradition, disapproval of Samson’s sexual conduct tends to outweigh pride in his strength, although many modern interpretations link Samson to Zionist aspirations.1 For Christians, the New Testament approval of Samson in Hebrews 11 contributes to a generally (but not uniformly) positive appraisal of Samson.2 Combining strength and weakness, cleverness and foolishness, Samson offers literary authors great latitude in how to depict and appraise the Nazirite judge. The contradictory elements of the Samson narratives help explain its rich and various interpretation history. Contemporary literary depictions of the story draw from this textual breadth and its legacy of reception, and their modern social and political preoccupations bring new insights to the tradition. This chapter begins with a brief synopsis of the text and its premodern reception, followed by discussion of selected contemporary literary sources from African American, Zionist, and Israeli contexts. Shaped by histories of marginalization, conflict, and the search for self-determination, these modern renderings of the Samson story go beyond popular retellings and images of Samson as a strong man whose desire for foreign women leads to his downfall. In different ways, the sources discussed here depart from other versions of the Samson story by connecting familiar episodes and tropes from the received Samson story, particularly around identity and politics, to retellings that suggest ways of rereading the biblical text itself. My discussion benefits from two guides that address and contribute to the reception of Samson in their own right: Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon, by Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper; and Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson, by David Grossman. Both books present original discussions of little-discussed texts, from African American and Israeli literatures respectively. Black Samson traces literary and non-literary reception of Samson from eighteenth-century sources in which Samson was a common name for free and enslaved African Americans, through abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, down to contemporary authors that include Richard Wright and Nikki Giovanni. Lion’s Honey discusses DOI: 10.4324/9781003280347-12

176  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry a number of modern Israeli sources with a close reading of the biblical Samson through the eyes of a celebrated Israeli author. Retellings of the Samson story take many forms, echoing the wide range of episodes and details of the biblical account. From his divinely aided birth as a Nazirite to his death by suicide attack in Judges 13–16, Samson’s story features riddles, feats of extraordinary strength, sexual passion, and military conquest. Wide-ranging studies of the reception of Samson include David Gunn’s Judges and Erik Eynikel and Tobias Nicklas’s collection, Samson: Hero or Fool? In modern popular culture, Samson becomes an icon and stereotype for physical strength, like Hercules. This essay identifies two features of contemporary Samson retellings of the Samson story that complicate this stereotype: his suicide attack and the place of affect in his characterization. Drawing from the biblical depiction of Samson as a boundary-crossing or boundary-inhabiting figure, these modern retellings of Moses magnify and invent the emotional experiences of Samson, particularly the shame and anger that arise from his relationships with women, and often direct that emotion in a political direction. Steve Weitzman and Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher identify boundaries and borders as crucial elements of the Samson story. For Weitzman, the setting of the story in the shephelah region represents a border territory between peoples, with Samson’s riddles and sexual relationships serving as features of ‘border fiction’, in which riddles and the stories connect ‘linguistic ambiguity and the ambiguities of the frontier’.3 Like Weitzman’s treatment of the biblical Samson, Gillmayr-Bucher’s survey of literary retellings of the story centres on Samson’s otherness and locates boundaries within Samson himself: ‘One of the reasons for his otherness lies in his own ignorance of boundaries of well-established identity and otherness. Because Samson frequently transgresses such boundaries, he becomes more and more a lonely hero’.4 As Gillmayr-Bucher, along with Gunn, richly demonstrate, modern literary portraits often linger on Samson’s emotional turmoil.5 Such is also typically the case in African American, Zionist, and Israeli literary treatments of Samson, but there the affective energy of the hero often also finds political expression, particularly in violence. 11.2 Synopsis, Scholarship, and Premodern Reception The four chapters dedicated to Samson’s life in Judges 13–16 are packed with extraordinary episodes. His miraculous birth to a barren woman and designation as a Nazirite involve an angel whose name cannot be known because it is ‘too wonderful’ (13:18 NRSV, ‫ ;פלאי‬echoed in the ‘wonders’, ‫ומפלא‬, of v. 19). Samson’s subsequent feats of physical strength and his use of riddles mix with his marriage to a Philistine against the background of conflict between the Israelites and the Philistines. For Samson, the personal is always political, and his acts of lust, might, and revenge are framed in terms of a divine plan to engage the Philistines (14:4). The story peaks in Judges 16 when he falls in love with Delilah (16:4), and the familiar sequence of events that follows masterfully blends the personal and the political, strength and weakness, blindness and insight, until the culminating murder-suicide

Literary Reception of Samson  177 in the temple of Dagon (16:28–31). And while divine approval for Samson’s final act can be interpreted as implied, it is not explicit. Samson embodies several contradictions; J. Cheryl Exum describes him as ‘comic and tragic, hero and fool’, ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘terrorist’, among other things.6 These contradictions recur in a wide variety of literary receptions, but like commentary in general, they concentrate and displace the complexity of the biblical text into particular areas, including the characterization of Samson and the scene of his murder-suicide. Reception of the Samson story reflects the story’s complexity, supporting ‘ethnic pride for the early rabbis, typological interpretation for theologically minded Christians, and a favourite tale for pious children inclined to hero worship’.7 The women of the story always figure prominently, since, as Exum demonstrates, ‘[t]he story of Samson is a story about women’.8 Unsurprisingly, Delilah is increasingly marked as a treacherous and voluptuous temptress responsible for much of Samson’s downfall, including his suicide, which is increasingly seen as more a noble last act than disgraceful suicide-murder.9 From early religious reception down to contemporary literature, the passion of Samson is typically linked to his relationships with women. Early interpretations of the story waver on its religious meaning and tend to focus on Samson’s physical strength and the moral meaning of his relationship with Delilah. Christian reception of Samson includes the favourable mention of Samson among other judges as well as David, Samuel, and the prophets in Hebrews 11, a group ‘who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight’ (11:33–34). This selective version of Samson helped shape Christian reception in the direction of favourable typological comparisons with Christ and appraisals of his actions as heroic.10 11.3 Premodern Literary Reception Less concerned with moral and religious interpretations, early modern retellings of the Samson story tend to focus on details of the biblical story. Elaborating biblical plot and character, these texts typically personalize and naturalize the story, drawing attention to Samson’s passion and the drama of his final act. This humanized passion emerges through elaboration of biblical episodes, as in Samson’s dying monologue in Gomez’s Sanson Nazareno (1982): I die for Israel’s sake and before all else for the sake of your true, ineffable Name. I offer myself to death in order that my people may be redeemed upon this day from the harsh dominion of the Philistine, a judgment wrought on tyranny itself; let the Hebrew nation shake off the yoke, let it enjoy this triumph through my own blood;

178  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry grant Israel salvation, Lord, let my life be a holy offering, a brilliant, shining lamp.11 The Samson of Gomez’s poem sins, repents, and carries out his murder-suicide in grandiose terms, blending personal melodrama with a political theology defined by liberation from Philistine ‘tyranny’. The connection between affect and politics is already clear in this seventeenth-century source by a Jewish (Marrano) author. In Don Quixote, Cervantes drew from a medieval tradition of pitting Samson against Hercules by depicting Sansón Carrasco as a trickster who challenges Quixote, a self-described Hercules figure, to a series of contests based on the twelve labours of Hercules.12 Cervantes’s reworking of the Hercules-Samson contest features Carrasco/Samson’s use of verbal skills (‘similes and puns’) in his broader effort to outwit Quixote/Samson and bring him back from his imaginary world.13 In this way, Cervantes builds on the biblical tradition of Samson’s riddles in his depiction of Samson/Carrasco as a foil to the delusional Quixote/Hercules. Like Samson’s, Carrasco’s trickery navigates boundaries, in this case between imagination and reality rather than Israelite and Philistine territory. Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1925), in the tradition of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, stages a blind Samson who laments and recounts the tragic events of his life.14 Like both these Greek plays, Samson Agonistes takes place after the hero has fallen to a life of agony. Through monologue, dialogue, and commentary from observers, these texts recall and reflect on the heroes’ tragic stories. Samson Agonistes evokes Milton’s own experience of blindness, but it pulsates with rage toward Dalila, ‘That specious monster, my accomplished snare’.15 And ‘She sought to make me traitor to myself […] I yielded, and unlocked her all my heart, / Who, with a grain of manhood well resolved, / Might easily have shook off all her snares; / But foul effeminacy held me yoked / Her bond-slave. O indignity, O blot / To honour and religion!16 When Dalila fails to persuade Samson to reconcile, she concludes that his rage is worse that ‘winds and seas’: ‘I see thou art implacable, more deaf / To pray’rs than winds and seas. Yet winds to seas / Are reconcil’d at length, and sea to shore: / Thy anger, unappeasable, still rages / Eternal tempest never to be calm’d’ (pp. 41, 960–64). In addition to providing an influential model for the role of passion, particularly as women arouse it in men, Milton’s Samson Agonistes focuses on Samson’s feelings and experiences, presented largely through monologue and commentary, with complexity and detail that anticipate modern characterization. Secondly, Milton entertains the role of religious doubt in the final lines of his poem: ‘All is best, though we oft doubt, / What the unsearchable dispose / Of highest wisdom brings about, / And ever best found in the close’.17 While Milton makes it clear that a divine hand controls the life and death of Samson, the doubt about supernatural events that would become increasingly typical in religious thought and biblical literature has a clear foothold in Samson Agonistes.18 Samson’s intense passion becomes the titular focus of Alfred de Vigny’s ‘La Colère de Samson’ (1992). Though Samson tries to contain his anger like fire in a temple, it eventually breaks out and destroys him:

Literary Reception of Samson  179 Toujours mettre sa force à garder sa colère Dans son cœur offensé, comme en un sanctuaire D’où le feu s’échappant irait tout dévorer; Interdire à ses yeux de voir ou de pleurer, C’est trop! — Dieu s’il le veut peut balayer ma cendre. J’ai donné mon secret; Dalila va le vendre. — Qu’ils seront beaux, les pieds de celui qui viendra Pour m’annoncer la mort! — Ce qui sera sera!19 In Frank Wedekind’s 1914 play on Samson (Simson oder Scham und Eifersucht), it is shame rather than anger that consumes the protagonist. In contrast to portraits of a masculine Samson undone by Delilah, Wedekind’s focus on Samson’s shame feminizes him: Wedekind’s drama, according to Gillmayr-Bucher, explicitly connects ‘shame and honour’ to masculinity: After his defeat Samson considers himself as a woman. From his point of view, his success and superiority, his ability to control the whole situation are constitutive for his masculinity. Once he is blinded he envies Delilah mostly for her ability to take control and to enjoy it […] In Samson’s self perception gender is reversed: he is the woman, Delilah is the man.20 Gender and gender reversal preoccupy modern retellings of the Samson story, particularly in relation to his intense passion. In the African American, Zionist, and Israeli sources to be discussed below, this passion extends to a collective, political scale. If modern literature tended to isolate Samson as a tragic protagonist, these sources would also echo the political focus of the biblical story. 11.4 African American Reception of Samson The name Samson was common among free and enslaved Africans in North America, and the story of Samson, like so many biblical sources, supported multiple interpretive and political stances. While the name certainly came to support racist stereotypes of strong Black men, from a boxer identified as a ‘Black Samson’ to a 1974 genre film with the same name, the figure of Samson also figured in antislavery and anti-racist cultural expressions.21 In fact, many of the sources noted by Junior and Schipper centre on Samson’s last act, the destruction of the temple that killed his captors and himself. In the first known reference to Samson by an enslaved African, Boyrereau Brinch lamented his conscription into the Revolutionary War by citing the last scene of Samson’s life: ‘I contemplated going to Barbadoes [where he was first enslaved] to avenge myself and my country, in which I justified myself by Samson’s prayer, when he prayed God to give him strength that he might avenge himself upon the Philistines, and God gave him the strength he prayed for’.22 An anonymous nineteenth-century poem that imagines a day when ‘Black Samson, dumb and bound,

180  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry / Shall raze each slave-pen to the ground’ connects Samson’s final act directly to slavery.23 Later, Howard University President Jeremiah Rankin memorialized Frederick Douglass by imagining God’s designation of Douglass as a Samson-like destroyer of slavery: ‘I will set this Samson of Freedom in your temple of Dagon, and his tawny arms shall yet tumble its columns about the ears of the worshipers’.24 Junior’s and Schipper’s Black Samson surveys Samsons that include racist depictions of African American men; fantasies of violent political revenge; and images of women as Samson. Like the biblical Samson who wears shackles as a captive labourer (Judg 16:21), Black Samsons evoke slavery, abolition, and continuing struggles for justice and self-determination. In the broad range of sources they analyse, Junior and Schipper demonstrate the depth of the Black Samson tradition as a ‘haunting analogue for the hope and horror of race relations in the United States’.25 Abolitionist renderings of Black Samson influenced later uses of Samson for social justice. The spiritual ‘If I had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down’ retells the biblical story in detail, and, in an influential 1927 recording by Blind Willie Johnson, it becomes a political inspiration for radical change in Richard Wright’s 1938 story, ‘Fire and Cloud’.26 The story’s main character, Reverend Taylor, quotes the song when he decides to march with the communists in his community.27 After enduring a beating by a racist group, the story’s protagonist, Reverend Taylor, imagines revenge by citing a popular song about the Samson story: ‘Gawd, ef yuh gimme the strength Ahll tear this ol buildin down! Tear it down Lawd! Tear it down like ol Samson tore the temple down!’28 Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man also invokes Samson in the context of African American debates on communism, with the novel’s protagonist resisting the option of violence in favour of an indirect form of resistance recommended by his grandfather to ‘overcome ’em with yess, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction’.29 In an essay on the novel, Ellison explained, ‘Samson, eyeless in Gaza, pulls the building down when his strength returns; politically weak, the grandfather has learned that conformity leads to a similar end, and so advises his children’.30 Less violent and more subtle than the revolutionary spirit of communist activists, Ellison’s protagonist suggests a more covert but no less political version of Samson. In his Faulknerian novel A Different Drummer (1959), William Melvin Kelley compares a family patriarch, known as the African, to Samson within the frame of an oral tall tale: Can’t a story be good without some lies. You take the story of Samson. Might not all be true as you read it in the Bible; folks must-a figured if you got a man just a little bit stronger than most, it couldn’t do no real harm if you make him a whole lot stronger. So that’s probably what folks hereabouts did;’ take the African, who must-a been pretty big and strong to start and make him even bigger and stronger.31 At the slave auction where his size and strength amaze all onlookers, the African manages to decapitate the auctioneer with his chains and escape. Only much later,

Literary Reception of Samson  181 after a long manhunt, is the African shot dead, and he dies while trying to kill his infant son in his arms.32 Thus introduced as an embroidered legend, Kelley’s story of the African echoes broader African American associations with Samson’s extraordinary strength and determination to resist enslavement. In her 1972 poem ‘Mothers’, Nikki Giovanni imagines her mother in the political tradition of the Black Samson: ‘her hair was three-quarters her height / which made me a strong believer in the samson myth / and very black’.33 Junior and Schipper note how the poem’s connection between Samson’s hair and the mother’s ‘describes the moment that the child identifies as racially and politically Black. The child associates the long hair with the biblical figure that she recognises as a mythological Black hero’.34 Through creative reworking of a centuries-long history of reception, Giovanni’s Samson blends traditional elements of strength and hair with the astonishing gesture of imagining Samson as a Black woman. In contrast to Wedekind’s feminized Samson, Giovanni’s is powerful, political, and inspirational. In the scene where the daughter marvels at her mother’s long hair, the mother teaches her a poem about the moon ending with the lines ‘god bless the moon / and god bless me’. The poem concludes: i taught that to my son who recited it for her just to say we must learn to bear the pleasures as we have borne the pains.35 Giovanni’s transformation of Samson into a Black mother replaces the story’s violent ending with the joy of family survival. Far from the details and context of the biblical Samson, Giovanni’s poem recognizes the story of Samson as part of a tradition with social and political implications. 11.5 Zionist and Israeli Literary Reception of Samson For Jews in Palestine and Israel, Samson performed the role of a symbol of manly power and strength associated with elite military units, body-building clubs, and even the programme to develop nuclear weapons.36 But as David Grossman points out, Israeli uses of Samson evince a kind of anxiety that leads sometimes to exaggerated dependence of force and the fear of losing it at a moment’s notice; he describes ‘the well-known Israeli feeling, in the face of any threat that comes along, that the country’s security is crumbling—a feeling that also exists in the case of Samson, who in certain situations seems to shatter into pieces, his strength vanishing in the blink of an eye’.37 The novel Samson the Nazirite (1924–1927) by Vladimir Jabotinsky represents one of the most substantial and influential modern novels about Samson, portraying him as a psychologically complex and tragic figure with competing Philistine and Israelite identities. When a Levite sees Samson drinking wine, a violation of his Nazirite vow, Samson replies, ‘In Zorah I am a Nazarite, and in the land of Ephraim also, but here [in Philistia] I am not I’.38

182  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry The Levite later prays for this strong youth who seems to have ‘two hearts in his breast’: ‘Help Thy Nazarite, Samson, to live his two lives, each at its own time and in its own place, and both to Thy glory’.39 Like the depiction of Moses and Jesus in such literary works as Schiller’s Die Sendung Moses and Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Jabotinsky’s Samson is an exceptional figure torn between two parts of himself, the Philistine and the Israelite. The novel follows the biblical outline fairly closely, though it typically naturalizes the supernatural elements of divine intervention and superhuman strength, leaving Samson, as Exum notes, the ‘master of his fate’.40 Yet like so many tragic and modern literary heroes, Samson’s greatest challenges come from within himself, divided between his Israelite tribe of Dan and Philistia. As a Nazirite judge, Samson provides wise and fair rulings to his people. He is a master of argumentation and riddles, a riveting entertainer, and an unmatched military strongman. Yet he is completely unable to control his passion for women. After a jealous rage at his Philistine wife Semadar dissipates, his ‘every muscle and nerve, from his head to his head, was perishing of desire’ for her.41 When he later discovers she has remarried, ‘a hundred men seemed to seize his throat in their strangling grasp, a hundred to wrench at his hair, and a hundred more to be striking him over the head’.42 This split within Samson’s psyche and commitments drives the plot of the novel to its violent conclusion. Known for his ‘revisionist’ version of Zionism, Jabotinsky (1880–1940) defended the use of force in colonizing Palestine, for example in his 1923 essay ‘The Iron Wall’: ‘Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators’.43 This recognition of Palestinian claims suggests a version of Zionism based more on colonial ambition than biblical mandate or racism, a position that may also inform Jabotinsky’s novel. While not explicit, Jabotinsky’s novel evokes the conflict between Zionists and Arabs through Samson’s border-crossing adventures, battles, and reflections on them: The native has many idols, but the holiest among them is a stone in a ditch that marks out his field from his neighbor’s […] The ditch in the fields is a pledge of peace and should never be crossed. Neighbors can agree so long as each remains at home, but trouble comes as soon as they begin to pay each other visits […] It is a sin for men to mix what the gods have separated.44 Of course, no one crosses these boundaries more than Samson himself, and the trouble of the novel, like the conflicts of Jabotinsky’s time, relates directly to such boundaries. But more than the conflict between Israel and Philistia, the novel turns on internal Israelite conflict, particularly when the Philistines threaten Judah because of the Danite Samson. Richly elaborating the scene in Judg 15:9–13, Jabotinsky’s assembly scene brings the conflict to a peak when a prophet labels Samson a

Literary Reception of Samson  183 foreigner: ‘Judah raises its hand against Dan, Dan against Judah. The brothers will devour each other like the beasts of the forest, and the uncircumcised will triumph. But you, false judge—you have crawled into your hole like a stinking polecat!’45 The Judahite envoy Dishon elaborates that: his ways are not yours and that he has the mind of a foreigner. And why? Because his blood is not your blood! What reasonable man still believes the fable that an angel came to her one spring night and told her she would bear a son. It is not usual for angels to come to honest women at night in a lonely place by a well.46 From that point forward, the Israelites and Samson himself begin to wonder whether he is really one of them. It is not until long after his relationship with Delilah leads him to defeat, blindness, and Philistine captivity that he discovers his biological father was Israelite.47 Like Goethe’s Faust, Jabotinsky’s Samson is a divided person whose two natures struggle with each other.48 And, like Schiller’s Moses, divided between Egyptian and Hebrew identities, Jabotinsky’s Samson faces a choice—his identity is not dictated by birth but by his decision to side with Israel against the Philistines.49 And like other modern heroes, it is the choices Moses and Samson make between their divided natures that make them heroic. Like most of Jabotinsky’s novel (and many other modern biblical novels), supernatural biblical elements give way to naturalistic, especially psychological explanations of events. Of course, the biblical story is already rich with human motivation and passion, and though his birth is clearly framed as divinely aided, his extraordinary death is not explicitly tied to a miracle—Samson’s plea for divine help is not answered directly in the narrative (Judg 16:28–30). In literary reception, this scene is associated with Samson’s passionate nature. The intensity of Samson’s final scene is so great that Jabotinsky frames it with the device of a letter from an Egyptian visitor to the Philistine harvest festival in Gaza. With the voice of an urbane tourist describing the sights and events of an exotic journey, the letter writer relates a scene of Samson entertaining the crowd and a subsequent public confrontation between him and Delilah/Elinoar that triggers his violent rage: ‘His face was slowly turning crimson; a great vein stood out almost black upon his forehead and his mighty neck seemed to have doubled its thickness’.50 Samson’s violent rage leads to the destructive violence that kills him and most of those around him. Milton similarly depicts Samson’s demise from a distance, through the vivid report of a messenger to Samson’s father Manoah. Jabotinsky’s novel was also the main source for the 1935 feature film by Cecil B. DeMille: in 1935, Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights from him for $2,500 (approximately $50,000 in 2021 dollars), and Cecil B. DeMille made the book into a 1949 movie, starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr.51 As Richman notes, the novel has drawn critical acclaim from politically diverse critics, including Grossman, who describes the novel as ‘wonderful’.52 The characterization of Samson in Jabotinsky’s novel, with its emphasis on personal power, intelligence, and intense passion, animate contemporary Zionist

184  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry interpretations of the story, in spite of the biblical text’s emphasis on divine sovereignty.53 Grossman identifies a ‘certain problematic quality to Israeli sovereignty that is also embodied in Samson’s relationship to his own power. As in the case of Samson, it sometimes seems that Israel’s considerable military might is an asset that becomes a liability’.54 Rachel Harris makes a related point in her analysis of Israeli literature that associates Samson with contemporary soldiers. Unlike earlier Israeli portraits depicting Samson as a national hero, literary depictions from the late twentieth century typically portray Samson as an ‘anti-hero’ with ‘ambivalence towards both the expectations of a soldier and his duties’.55 11.6 Conclusion The modern literary reception of the Samson story takes many forms, but in the texts discussed here, biblical details and background give way to conventions of genre and contemporary concerns. Influential retellings by Cervantes, Milton, Vigny, Wedekind and others focus on Samson the individual, placing biblical concerns with divine power and justice and Israelite religion in the background. Yet the biblical text’s preoccupations with borders, gender, and the limits of human power feature prominently in literary reception. These issues surface variously in modern literary forms, and in African American, Zionist, and Israeli reception, they connect closely to political histories of group identity. If some literary portraits of Samson typically elaborate the main character’s life story, motivations, and development, others ask what Samson’s story means for the group he represents. The African American, Zionist, and Israeli retellings of the Samson story presented here stand apart from the tragic and heroic conventions of premodern and romantic literature. In doing so, these texts combine the modern and the biblical in particular ways that acknowledge biblical ambiguities of personal and military conflicts across borders of ethnicity and gender. Even those retellings that celebrate Samson’s dying act as heroic also recognize the passion and weakness that precede it and make the biblical text so compelling. The biblical narrator’s reticence on Samson’s actions and character leaves literary authors free to explore the stories’ dynamics of gender, politics, piety, and psychology. And the new scholarly interest in Samson reception, in the work of Gunn, Grossman, Juniors, and Schipper reflects an awareness that the reception of Samson has expanded since Milton’s time to become one of the most familiar biblical figures in popular culture, adaptable to a range of new social and political realities.56 These retellings preserve the focus on passion and gender from earlier literary reception, but they follow the biblical text’s awareness of Samson’s broader political context. For these sources, the violence of Samson’s final act, in which ‘those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life’ (Judg 16:30), becomes far more than an act of personal revenge. Samson’s last act reflects a pattern in Judges that Mieke Bal associates with gender-associated social disruption: ‘The book is full of murder […] And murder, in this text, is related to gender’.57 Blinded, incarcerated, shorn and humiliated by Delilah, Samson musters the strength and guile to an unprecedented act of murder-suicide.

Literary Reception of Samson  185 An article comparing Grossman and Jabotinsky in a clinical psychology journal explains Samson’s motive for suicide through analysis of the authors’ personalities. According to Netta Schoenfeld and Rael D. Strous, Grossman’s Samson suffers from ‘repetition compulsion syndrome’ and ‘antisocial personality disorder’, while Jabotinsky’s Samson is a heroic figure who lives up to the Zionist imperative to defend the Jewish people with force if necessary.58 Putting aside their use of clinical psychology for literary analysis, the authors’ conclusions suggest that Grossman’s and Jabotinsky’s beliefs and backgrounds determine their portrayal of Samson’s last act. In fact, both authors depict Samson’s murder-suicide as an act of passion resulting from a life of crossing borders in war and love. And far from a literary diagnosis of either author’s psyche, Their article, ‘Samson’s Suicide’, only illustrates the risks of personalizing the political in the Samson story. These risks overlook the political theology of Judges, which retells inherited stories of Samson and other legendary figures according to the ideology of a monarchy governed by divine commandments. With the other six books of the Deuteronomistic history, Judges shows deep concern for securing territorial boundaries. The biblical focus on borders contributes to modern literary portraits of Samson as a divided self, as Gillmayr-Bucher argues. But in the case of the African American, Zionist, and Israeli retellings described here, attention returns from Samson’s psyche to broader social and political conflicts. And while borders define ancient and contemporary conflicts in distinct ways, the biblical story of Samson and its literary retellings blur these boundaries and the claims of identity and rule they seek to define. Notes 1 Gunn, Judges, pp. 172–174; Grossman, Lion’s Honey, pp. 88–90. 2 Gunn, Judges, p. 172. 3 Weitzman, ‘The Samson Story as Border Fiction’, p. 168. 4 Gillmayr-Bucher, ‘A Hero Ensnared’, p. 46. 5 Gillmayr-Bucher, ‘A Hero Ensnared’, p. 50. 6 Exum, ‘The Many Faces of Samson’, pp. 17, 25. 7 Gunn, Judges, p. 171. 8 Exum, ‘Samson’s Women’, p. 61. 9 Gunn, Judges, pp. 211–220, 222–227. 10 Gunn, Judges, pp. 174–183. 11 Enriquez Gomez, ‘Sanson Nazareno’, p. 173. 12 Armas, ‘Hercules and the Statue Garden’, p. 68. 13 Armas, ‘Hercules and the Statue Garden’, p. 71. 14 Schöpflin, ‘Samson in European Literature’, p. 184. 15 Milton, Samson Agonistes, p. 12, line 230. 16 Milton, Samson Agonistes, p. 17, lines 401, pp. 407–412. 17 Milton, Samson Agonistes, p. 58, lines 1745–1748. 18 See Gunn, Judges, pp. 183–184. 19 Alfred de Vigny, ‘La Colère de Samson’, p. 142. 20 Gillmayr-Bucher, ‘A Hero Ensnared’, p. 45. See Wedekind: ‘Durch meine Blindheit sind wir so vertauscht, dass ich das Weib bin, und dass du der Mann bist’ (Wedekind, Simson, p. 45).

186  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 21 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, pp. 8–9, 105–107. 22 Brinch, The Blind African Slave, or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 159, cited in Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 4. 23 ‘A Curse on Virginia’, in Redpeth, Roving Editor, p. 254, cited in Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 10. 24 Rankin, ‘Tribute by the Rev. J. E. Rankin, D. D., President of Howard University’, p. 33., cited in Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 42. 25 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 10. 26 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, pp. 58–62. 27 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 61. 28 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 61. 29 Ellison, Invisible Man, cited in Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 65. 30 Ellison, Invisible Man, cited in Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 65. 31 Kelley, A Different Drummer, p. 9; Faulkner, ‘Uses of Tradition’, pp. 539–540. 32 Kelley, A Different Drummer, pp. 16, 24. 33 Giovanni, ‘Mothers’, p. 114. 34 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, p. 89. 35 Giovanni, ‘Mothers’, p. 115. 36 Grossman, Lion’s Honey, pp. 88, 90. 37 Grossman, Lion’s Honey, p. 89. 38 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 25. 39 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 49. 40 Exum, ‘Samson and his God’, pp. 261, 264. 41 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 151. 42 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 158. 43 Jabotinsky, ‘The Iron Wall’, n.p. 44 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 131. 45 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 245. 46 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 247. 47 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 323. 48 Faust’s ‘two souls’ monologue expresses an interior divide between one that ‘holds fast with joyous earthly lust / Onto the world of man with organs clinging’ and the other that ‘soars impassioned from the dust, / To realms of lofty forebears winging’ (Goethe, Faust, p. 27, lines 1114–1117). 49 Schiller, Die Sendung Moses, p. 389. 50 Jabotinsky, Samson, p. 343. 51 Richman, ‘Jabotinsky’s Novels’, n.p. 52 Grossman, Lion’s Honey, p. 17. 53 Stern, ‘Social Life’, pp. 12–13, 17–18. 54 Grossman, Lion’s Honey, p. 88. 55 Harris, ‘Samson’s Suicide’, p. 81. 56 See Gunn, Judges, p. 188. 57 Bal, Death and Dissymetry, p. 1. Bal elaborates to argue that ‘the impression of extreme violence that the book makes is due less to the political struggle that seems to be at stake—the conquest—than to a social revolution that concerns the institution of marriage, hence, the relations between men and women, sexuality, procreation, and kinship’ (Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, p. 5). 58 Schoenfeld and Strous, ‘Samson’s Suicide’, pp. 200–201.

Literary Reception of Samson  187 Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Anonymous. ‘A Curse on Virginia’. In James Redpath (ed.), Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in Southern States. New York, NY: A.B. Burdick, 1859, p. 254. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, T. Smollett, Martin C. Battestin, and O. M. Brack. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Enriquez Gomez, Antonio. ‘Sanson Nazareno’. In T. Oelman (ed.), Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century: An Anthology of the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez and Miguel De Barrios. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982, pp. 164–165. Giovanni, Nikki. ‘Mothers’. In The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. New York, NY: William Morrow, 1996, pp. 114–115. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Walter Arndt (trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1976. Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir). ‘The Iron Wall’. The Jewish Herald (South Africa), 26 November, 1937. Originally published in Russian as ‘O Zheloznoi Stene’, Rassvyet 4 November 1923. http://www​.mideastweb​.org​/ironwall​.htm (accessed April 2023). Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir). Samson. Cyrus Brooks (trans.). New York, NY: Judaea, 1986. Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Last Temptation of Christ. P. A. Bien (trans.). New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998. Kelley, William Melvin. A Different Drummer. New York, NY: Anchor, 1959. Milton, John. Samson Agonistes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925. Rankin, Jeremiah. ‘Tribute by the Rev. J. E. Rankin, D. D., President of Howard University’. In Helen Douglass (ed.), In Memoriam: Frederick Douglass. Philadelphia, PA: J.C. Yorston, 1897, pp. 32–37. Schiller, Friedrich. Die Sendung Moses. In Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe 17. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1970, pp. 377–413. Vigny, Alfred de. ‘La Colère de Samson’. In Les destinées, A. de Vigny, publié à titre posthume en 1864, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade: Gallimard, 1864, pp. 140–142. Wedekind, Frank. Simson, Oder, Scham Und Eifersucht: Dramatisches Gedicht in Drei Akten. München: G. Müller, 1920. Winter, Kari J. (ed.). The Blind African Slave, or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Wright Richard Wright. ‘Fire and Cloud’. In Uncle Tom’s Children. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 2004, pp. 157–220. Secondary Sources Armas, Frederick A. de. ‘Hercules and the Statue Garden: Sansón Carrasco’s Ekphrastic and Imperial Contests in Don Quijote II.14’. In Jason McCloskey and Ignacio López Alemany (eds), Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2013, pp. 68–84. Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Cho, Paul. ‘Biblical Samson, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and Modern Terrorism’. In Mark Elliott and Michael Legaspi (eds), Annual of the History of Biblical Interpretation/ Jahrbuch für Auslegungsgeschichte der Bibel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, in press.

188  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Exum, J. Cheryl. ‘Samson and his God: Modern Culture Reads the Bible’. In eadem, Samson and Delilah: Selected Essays. HBM 87. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2020, pp. 256–279. Exum, J. Cheryl. ‘Samson’s Women’. In eadem, Fragmented Women: Feminist Subversions of Biblical Narratives. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1993, pp. 61–93. Eynikel, Erik M. M., and Tobias Nicklas (eds). Samson: Hero or Fool? The Many Faces of Samson. TBN 17. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Faulkner, Howard. ‘The Uses of Tradition: William Melvin Kelley’s “A Different Drummer”’. Modern Fiction Studies 21 (Winter 1975–76), pp. 535–542. Gillmayr-Bucher, Susanne. ‘A Hero Ensnared in Otherness? Literary Images of Samson’. In Erik Eynikel and Tobias Nicklas (eds), Samson: Hero or Fool? The Many Faces of Samson. TBN 17. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 33–51. Grossman, David. Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson. Stuart Schoffman (trans.). New York, NY: Canongate Books, 2006. Gunn, David M. Judges Through the Centuries. Wiley-Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Harris, Rachel S. ‘Samson’s Suicide: Death and the Hebrew Literary Canon’. Israel Studies 17 (2012), pp. 67–91. Junior, Nyasha, and Jeremy Schipper. Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020. Richman, Rick. ‘Jabotinsky’s Novels, and How They Relate to His Politics’. Mosaic (August 25, 2021). https://mosaicmagazine​.com​/response​/israel​-zionism​/2021​/08​/jabotinskys​ -novels​-and​-how​-they​-relate​-to​-his​-politics/ (accessed April, 2023). Schoenfeld, Netta, and Rael D. Strous. ‘Samson’s Suicide: Psychopathology (Grossman) vs. Heroism (Jabotinsky)’. Israel Medical Association Journal 10 (2008), pp. 196–201. Schöpflin, Karin. ‘Samson in European Literature: Some Examples from English, French and German Poetry’. In Erik Eynikel and Tobias Nicklas (eds), Samson: Hero or Fool? The Many Faces of Samson. TBN 17. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 177–196. Stern, Nehamia. ‘The Social Life of the Samson Saga in Israeli Religious Zionist Rabbinic Discourse’. Culture and Religion (2018). https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/14755610​.2018​ .1444653 Weitzman, Steve. ‘The Samson Story as Border Fiction’. BibInt 10 (2002), pp. 158–174.

12 A Different Kind of Harvest Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth Mary F. Brewer

12.1 Introduction David Curzon discusses poetic responses to the Bible as a form of midrashim.1 Midrash refers to rabbinic interpretations of the Hebrew Bible dating to c. the second century ce, which add layers of meaning to biblical stories by filling in the many gaps within scripture. The rabbis created dialogue and scenarios, and attributed motives and meanings to biblical texts, that overall enshrine a hegemonic perspective. Feminist theorists and creative writers have established a distinctive interpretive lineage that may be considered woman-centric midrashim, and, as Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer note, the Book of Ruth represents a ‘particularly fruitful’ story to accord a feminist reading because it addresses a plethora of concerns that are traditionally associated with women: relationships of marriage and family, childbirth and childlessness, widowhood, and woman as ‘other’ in a patriarchal world.2 Ruth tells the story of an Israelite woman, Naomi, who emigrates to Moab with her husband and two sons to escape famine. Following their deaths, she decides to return to Bethlehem. Her sons’ widows, Ruth and Orpah, are Moabite women, whom Naomi invites to return to their family homes. Orpah agrees, while Ruth chooses to follow Naomi. Once in Israel, Ruth gleans in the field of Naomi’s kinsman Boaz to feed herself and Naomi. Boaz affords her special privileges and offers her his protection while she works. Naomi urges Ruth to seek a marriage with Boaz, even sending her out to spend the night with him on the threshing floor. Following this event, Boaz and Ruth marry. Ruth gives birth to a son, Obed (identified as the grandfather of Kind David), and, at the end of the story, the widowed Naomi regains a purpose in Israelite society by undertaking to raise Obed. Ruth is one of only two books in the Hebrew Bible to be named for a woman, the other being Esther. Unlike Esther, Carol Meyers points out, Ruth is almost entirely a woman’s tale.3 Richard Bauckman categorises Ruth as women’s literature, not because it was necessarily compiled by a woman (which cannot be proven), but because the narrative voice is female.4 Nevertheless, traditional Jewish interpretations harness Ruth to promote messages that reinforce heteropatriarchal gender roles, frequently marginalising Ruth in favour of Boaz. One Orthodox commentary explains that:

DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-13

190  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry No one had more right to feel that she was a failure than Ruth, scrounging in the fields for her next meal. Boaz could not have attached much significance to his attempts to make her life easier. But God viewed them differently. As the Midrash puts it, had Boaz only known that [God] would consider his generosity to Ruth important enough to write into scripture, he [sic] would have given her a sumptuous banquet. (Tanach) From this, it is argued that Ruth’s story demonstrates ‘man’s potential for greatness’.5 Thus, Boaz becomes a representative male subject, who moves to the centre of a divine scheme that is assumed to be a constituent element of the narrative. This devalues the feminine by confining Ruth’s function in the narrative to enabling male importance. Similarly, Michael Kaufman harnesses Ruth’s character to reinforce gender norms. He describes Ruth as an exemplar of natural feminine modesty, reserve, and piety. He identifies Ruth’s greatest accomplishment as her ‘decision to pursue Boaz’.6 Kaufman reconciles this pursuit with Ruth’s modesty by linking it to her piety. He removes the possibility of a sexual motive by emphasising Boaz’s advanced age, eighty, thereby eliminating him as a likely object of desire. Moreover, he assumes that Boaz possesses knowledge of Ruth’s motive – identified as a pious desire to alleviate Naomi’s suffering.7 Even in secular writing that is ostensibly more liberal in its aims, Ruth’s identity has been frequently sublimated. Consider Isaac Asimov’s The Story of Ruth. Asimov accepts a common rabbinic view of Ruth as a response to Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s drive to exclude foreign wives from the Israelite community. Gerda de Villiers recaps their central argument. She picks out the term ‘holy seed’ (Ezra 9:2) as eliciting notions of Israel as a chosen people, whose identity is determined at conception, and therefore, failure to keep separate from other nations constitutes a sin.8 Pace the prophets, Asimov adapts Ruth as a lesson in how we should value people based on their virtues rather than how much they resemble us: ‘It is, by right, a tale of tolerance for the despised, of love for the hated, of the reward that comes with brotherhood. By mixing the genes of making, by forming the hybrid, great men will come’.9 The sad irony is that he replicates the gendered ‘othering’ of Ruth and Naomi. Asimov co-opts Ruth’s tale as part of a Western canon that values universality in meaning, but which serves as code for privilege. By failing to note how gender and ethnicity intersect in Ruth’s story, Asimov marginalises her just as Orthodox commentators do. This chapter addresses contemporary fictional responses to Ruth that offer examples of woman-centric midrashim, with a focus on Tessa Afshar’s In the Field of Grace (2014) and Eva Etzioni-Halevy’s The Garden of Ruth (2006).10 I explore how the novels represent a dynamic process of re-creation that enables an ancient text to resonate with diverse contemporary readerships, and which partly resides in each novelist’s personal experience. Afshar refashions Ruth’s story through a Christian lens, while Etzioni-Halevy writes from a Jewish perspective. The essay

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  191 also references Marlene van Nierkerk’s Agaat (2006, Published on 2004), which offers a post-colonial rendering of Ruth within the context of apartheid South Africa. Ruth forms a minority strand of Agaat, but it amplifies some aspects of Afshar’s and Etzioni-Halevy’s approach to Ruth, as well as the connection between gender, ethnicity, and land. My aim is to demonstrate how the novels respond to the politics of difference inherent to Ruth; that is, I address how they prompt the reader to reconsider the perspective of the source text, its cultural and moral norms, especially regarding gender and ethnic difference. 12.2 Liberating Ruth The Garden of Ruth has been positively received for how it reconnects a modern Jewish readership with an ancient Torah tale. For Elissa Strauss: Those who are well acquainted with the stories of the Torah, as well as those people whose bar or bat mitzvahs signalled the end of their relationship with the tales, will enjoy flipping through these pages. And although mostly fantasy, it is satisfying to compare the ancient struggles of women to those of today. […] Ruth and Osnath are relatable, nuanced and curious women, making this fictional bridge to the Torah rewarding.11 Etzioni-Halevy builds a bridge to the Torah by radically reworking Ruth so that it resonates with a progressive gender politics. The novel is divided into two parts: one, set in the time of the prophet Samuel, introduces the reader to Samuel’s fictional niece Osnath. Osnath is intellectually precocious and fiercely independent. After she finds a fragment of parchment detailing Ruth’s life story, she becomes obsessed by the mystery surrounding Ruth’s relationships with men. The second part relates the material in Ruth’s scroll, which provides answers to Osnath’s questions. The two halves are linked by the women’s common romantic experiences and their struggles to negotiate their positions in a patriarchal society. Etzioni-Halevy makes Ruth into an engaging story for contemporary women by freeing her from the pedestal of Orthodox femininity. Women’s active sexuality, which is essentially absent from the biblical tale and eliminated as a possibility in traditional interpretations of Ruth, is affirmed. The novel resists canonical shaping by, as one reviewer describes it, offering a ‘brazen rendering of the biblical material [that] breathes fire into a ripping good saga’.12 Laura Quick advises reading Ruth as paradigmatic of what she calls ‘Woman Strange’, the embodiment of ‘otherness’.13 In Torah, the meaning of ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ frequently signifies a woman of ‘loose morals, devious charms and deviant religious convictions’, whose sexuality threatens male hegemony.14 Robert L. Cohn comments on the Moabites as being among the principal representatives of the ‘other’, with their ethnic otherness supplemented by the rhetoric of sexuality due to Moab’s ancestry emerging out of the incestuous union between Lot and his daughter.15 As a Moabite woman, then, Ruth is inherently associated with aberrant sexuality, for, as Cohn posits, the Torah also records how Moabite women have a history of seducing Israelite men.16

192  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Judaism shares with Christianity the belief that the expression of sexuality should be enclosed within marriage, but, unlike Christianity, it has never associated sexuality itself with sin. The Church Fathers amplified the New Testament’s sexual ascetism to present sex as a necessary evil for procreation.17 Judaism, though concerned about the dangers of ‘Woman Strange’, nevertheless posits sex as a holy act, ordained by God. It is incumbent upon Jews to be ‘fruitful and multiply’ (Gen 1:28), and no shame attaches to enjoyment in doing so. Etzioni-Halevy embraces Judaism’s life-affirming view of human sexuality in her retelling of Ruth, but she subverts the containment of women’s sexuality by representing sexual desire and its fulfilment as a natural and positive part of female identity per se, whether within or outside marriage. Ruth identifies herself as a sensual woman; she recalls her attraction to Mahlon as rooted in a meeting of ‘minds and hearts’ as well as ‘the arousal of my senses’ (Garden of Ruth, 161). Ruth speaks the famous pledge to Naomi, but she admits that she is no less keen ‘to join and embrace my lover’ as to go with Naomi and the Israelite God (Garden of Ruth, 195). The novel attempts to recuperate ‘Woman Strange’ by presenting women’s sexual indiscretions as something that they can count upon God to forgive. Osnath feels ‘no more than a flicker of remorse for having sex with David outside marriage’,18 ‘[f]or she knew the Lord to be a God of justice but also of mercy and forgiveness’, especially for an act that was due to ‘the depth of the love overflowing in her heart’ (Garden of Ruth, 37). Osnath’s husband does not hold her to a sexual double standard, and Boaz overlooks Ruth’s liaison with Mishael, her married lover who in part is what lures her to Israel. The men’s pragmatic responses to the question of sexual discipline reflects how the novel departs from the source text’s fairy-tale version of romance, offering a more plausible account of male-female relationships. This is carried through in Ruth’s mixed motives for marrying Boaz. Ruth continues to be involved with Mishael, even after Boaz publicly announces their betrothal. Her heart remains divided, but she is savvy enough to know that she needs the social and financial redemption that Boaz can offer her, and, through her, Naomi. The novel does not shy away from the sometimes-unpalatable things that women must do to survive given their relative powerlessness in patriarchal society. Naomi tutors Ruth on how to manipulate Jewish religious law and Boaz’s lust to secure him as a kinsman redeemer. In the Bible, Ruth’s appearance is not noted, although rabbinic commentary usually assumes that she is beautiful. Leila Leah Bronner argues that the beautification of exemplary women in the Bible aims to show them as ‘perfect creations of a perfect creator’,19 and, in the case of Ruth, she must appear as a fit ancestress to King David.20 Nonetheless, Naomi values Ruth’s beauty for how it can be harnessed to seduce Boaz. She encourages Ruth to transgress expectations of female modesty by providing scented oils and a dress ‘purposely cut so that it fitted my form more tightly than was seemly, making my breasts protrude in an uncouth manner’ (Garden of Ruth, 221). On the threshing floor, Ruth lets her ‘dress slide off partway to bare that which should have been covered’. When Boaz reaches out to her, Ruth feels a strong sexual response: ‘Without my being aware of it, lust for him had been

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  193 simmering inside me; and now I felt it suddenly erupt, making me yield to his’ (Garden of Ruth, 223). Ruth acts as a liberated woman who knows what she wants and is not afraid to take it. Even though it remains uncertain that her nearer kinsman will allow Boaz to redeem her, Ruth has sex with him for her own pleasure in the moment. Ruth and Naomi’s relationship also appears more believable; their close relationship wavers between intense affection and high tension: ‘Naomi and I ate our way through the grain I had collected in Boaz’s fields. In the same measure as the grain diminished, so did the grudge she held against me increase’ (Garden of Ruth, 235). Naomi blames Ruth for their impoverishment due to her continuing fascination with Mishael. Only after Ruth’s marriage is the relationship with Naomi repaired, but, even then, an undercurrent of tension remains. Under the chuppah, Naomi embraces the couple and as Ruth caustically observes, participates in ‘sharing our happiness as if it were her own’. In one sense their happiness is synonymous, because the marriage means Naomi’s financial security (Garden of Ruth, 249). Even so, Naomi acts to disenfranchise Ruth by laying claim to Obed, sparking further resentment: ‘I truly believe that she would have preferred to suckle him herself, had she been able to do it. And only because her sagging breasts were as empty as a drunkard’s pouch of silver did she lay him reluctantly to mine’ (Garden of Ruth, 261). These fraught scenarios represent another substantial departure from traditional interpretations of Ruth. Athalya Brenner discusses unity and fidelity as essential components of Naomi and Ruth’s relationship; in their mutual struggle for survival, Naomi does her duty by Ruth through brokering her marriage to Boaz, while Ruth ‘goes one step further’: ‘She is actually motivated not only by duty and obedience, but also by love for her mother-in-law’.21 Garden of Ruth introduces manipulation and competition into the mix. Acts of kindness are performed, but they are balanced against self-interest, and this contributes to how the novel extends Ruth beyond romance into realism. Ruth has no voice in the last chapter of the biblical tale, at the end of which Naomi appears to take Obed. Etzioni-Halevy’s Ruth is made of sterner stuff and refuses to cede her maternal rites. The novel fills in the blanks of what happens to Ruth after Obed’s birth. Ruth reports that her life with Boaz was blessed: they ‘lived off the fat of the land’ (Garden of Ruth, 263). Obed thrives with his parents, and the couple go on to have two daughters. Ruth ends her story by saying, ‘my cup was flowing over and I wanted nothing more’ (Garden of Ruth, 263). In contrast to the Bible story, where Ruth fades away at the end, Osnath’s discovery of her scroll suggests that her inspirational story will be passed on through generations of Jewish women. Women stand out in the novel because of their intellect and initiative. Although Ruth utilises her sexuality to win Boaz, her wisdom affords her a certain amount of power and satisfaction in their relationship. Boaz will defer to Ruth because she was ‘one of the few females he knew who could read and write, and the only one who had the ability to compose poems’; as such, ‘no woman could measure up to me’, Ruth records: ‘When I opened my mouth, it was always with wisdom; thus he

194  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry could not disregard my notions, as so many husbands did their wives’ (Garden of Ruth, 251). Similarly, Osnath’s education and resourcefulness allow her to solve the mystery surrounding Ruth, despite Eliab’s objections and repeated attempts at obstruction. Osnath is descended from female scribes; her mother and grandmother were proficient in transcribing the Torah – and they passed this notable skill to her. Roland Boer comments on the ideological function of the scribe, on ‘how closely power, writing, and masculinity are tied together’ in the preservation and circulation of stories identified as sacred.22 Garden of Ruth creates space for femininity in this equation. By adapting Ruth against the grain of traditional commentaries, Etzioni-Halevy demythologises its gendered and ethnic prescriptiveness. It makes an important contribution to contemporary woman-centric midrashim by showing how women can be the authors of their own lives, even within the restricted terms of patriarchy. 12.3 Ruth Contained In contrast to Garden of Ruth, where the importance placed on women’s literacy is related to their empowerment, Afshar’s Field of Grace accords value to Ruth’s voice insofar as it encourages religious devotion. Afshar ranks among the most popular and celebrated writers in the niche genre of women’s historical religious fiction. Her novels refashion biblical stories through a blend of action and romance. Heroines experience dramatic rescues, while relationships evolve according to the conventions of ‘sweet’ romance stories that offer readers a happy-ever-after ending, but, in Afshar’s case, with an inspirational twist. Afshar employs the Hebrew story of Ruth as a charter to forward her own Evangelical Christian beliefs. Writing about how American film retells the story of David, Kevin M. McGeough observes different patterns of fidelity; that is, fidelity can be defined on literary terms or on the basis of what matters most to the intended audience.23 He notes a marked difference between mainstream and Christian independent films, with the latter deviating from the expectations associated with Hollywood adaptations of Bible stories into historical epics.24 Just as Christian films demonstrate little if any desire for fidelity of a literary nature or historical nature, Christian publishing shows the same drive to retell bible stories in a way that mirrors the ‘journey of an American evangelical Christian’.25 On Afhsar’s website, she relates: ‘In my novels you will find laughter and tears. You may find love stories that capture your imagination. But my dearest hope is that by the last page, you are closer to God, and closer to your true self’ (‘Meet Tessa’). Afshar’s aim to spark or reinforce faith is made overt in the Epilogue, in which the plot fast forwards from the period of Judges to the time of King David. David extolls the value of Ruth’s megillah for ‘another Ruth somewhere who needs to be encouraged. Another Naomi who needs to turn back to God’ (Field of Grace, 281). Responses to Afshar’s novel on Goodreads suggest that it is being received mainly in line with the author’s objectives. Reviews by women note how the way

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  195 in which Afshar fills in the blanks in Ruth’s story resonates with their Christian beliefs: it leads them to a new appreciation of the biblical story and inspires them to return to it by encouraging an identification with Ruth. Some reviewers even perceive a divine hand at work in Afshar’s composition. Afshar gestures toward her novel as an amplification of the Hebrew bible, not merely a fictional endeavour, by updating Ruth’s lineage to include Jesus. She ends the novel by enumerating the descendants of Ruth and Boaz, finishing with Jacob, who is named as ‘the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ’ (based on Matt 1:2–16)’ (Field of Grace, 283). In the Hebrew Bible, genealogies are intended to verify the contents as based in history. Afshar adopts this strategy; she roots the novel’s religious teachings in the lived experience of people who are presumed, by those who read the Bible literally, to be historical figures in receipt of divine revelations, and in this way, she attempts to substantiate the veracity of her novel’s religious message. Like Garden of Ruth, Field of Grace retains the narrative skeleton of the biblical tale, but Afshar’s adaptation does not mount a challenge to canonical interpretations. It does, however, make some alterations to traditional gender perspectives. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer explains that biblical characters are often re-aligned with audience expectations to increase their appeal and render them subject to the reader’s moral evaluation: ‘This “naturalisation” is strongest when it comes to love. Characters are made to conform to our contemporary expectations and common perceptions about personal relationships’. This is clearly the case with Afshar’s novel, and it is best exemplified by the romantic backstory she supplies for Boaz.26 The novel begins by recounting the relationship between Boaz and his first wife Judith. In the Prologue, Boaz appears as a man out of his time, who is partially reconstructed. For example, he does not objectify women. His attraction to Judith is based on her competence as a shepherdess, and only afterwards does he notice her ‘beautiful black eyes’ and ‘midnight-dark hair’ (Field of Grace, 8). He marries for love rather than dynastic or financial reasons. He refuses polygamy in favour of sexual faithfulness, even when Judith suggests he take another wife. He unashamedly displays emotion as he watches Judith slowly decline in health and then die. These character facets and choices serve to modernise his masculine persona, rendering Boaz more akin to the protagonists of contemporary romantic fiction. Women receive a contemporary gloss as well, but the novel is more concerned with what women can achieve spiritually than politically. Ruth’s first husband, Mahlon, recognises her intelligence, and he provides her with parchment to write. Yet, the import of her megillah is celebrated by David for the way it captures a model of ‘extraordinary faith’ (Field of Grace, 279), which in the case of women entails obedience to male authority – earthly and divine. Afshar’s adaptation offers a complex blend of the moderately progressive and traditional conservatism regarding gender. David recalls that he knew Ruth in her old age, when she was still capable of training him to use her slingshot, with which he killed Goliath (Field of Grace, 276); this act allows the Israelite army to defeat the Philistines, identified as the enemy of God. On the surface, this reads as

196  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry progressive, but there is an alternative way to read this scenario in which women are tools for accomplishing a religious patriarchy’s objectives. Mostly, Afshar’s Ruth displays the traditional feminine qualities that are enshrined in canonical interpretations. She is loving, faithful and compassionate (Field of Grace, 240), as well as docile and restrained in speech – all to a saintly degree. She quietly accepts Dinah’s insults, responding to her mistreatment by caring for Dinah when she becomes ill from drink. Her romance with Boaz plays out within the terms of a conventional gender binary, in which he appears as the hero who rescues the woman in trouble. In contrast to Garden of Ruth, the relationship between Ruth and Boaz is idealised. While the novel hints at a physical attraction between them, their bond is primarily spiritual: ‘Boaz found himself fascinated by that quality of clinging faith that seemed to seep out of her every action’ (Field of Grace, 98). Similarly, Ruth falls in love with his goodness: ‘She was struck by Boaz’s brilliance in handling the human heart’ (Field of Grace, 105). She describes him as an ‘ordinary looking man of middle-years’, who becomes extraordinary only through prayer (Field of Grace, 85). Though sexual passion is allowed after marriage, the possibility that visiting Boaz on the threshing floor could be code for sex is rejected; in line with conservative readings, the act becomes another testament of Ruth’s faith. Ruth’s actions never transcend the bounds of recognisable and acceptable femininity from a male perspective; instead, she moulds herself within patriarchal confines. Alicia Besa Panganiban calls attention to the theology of hidden presence in Ruth; God receives relatively few mentions, and yet traditional commentaries assume that God is acting behind the scenes.27 In Garden of Ruth, the strength of Ruth’s and Osnath’s faith enables them to productively respond to the challenges they face in a male-dominated world, and the novel maps how each woman works to create her own successes and happiness. In Field of Grace, God, identified as an ever-present masculine figure, dominates Ruth’s life. Ruth takes no credit for her accomplishments; she understands her life as managed by a fatherly God on her behalf. She prays for God to ‘[g]uide my steps to the field of your choosing’, and he leads her to Boaz’s field (Field of Grace, 69). God is routinely invoked throughout the novel and intervenes in characters’ lives: as Boaz tells Ruth, ‘Chance is God’s way of showing up without an announcement’ (Field of Grace, 151). By attributing social phenomena to divine action, Afshar closes off a more nuanced reading of scripture. As Jennifer L. Koosed notes, if the existence of chance is allowed, it raises some radical and disturbing theological questions about how life proceeds for the righteous compared to the sinner;28 this is especially problematic from an Evangelical Christian position that ascribes to God a plan for his human creations. To underscore that everything is part of a divine plan, Afshar introduces miracles into Ruth’s story. In an invented scenario, Ruth and Naomi’s caravan is ambushed by thieves in the desert. Just at the point where Ruth is about to be attacked, a ‘male lion with an enormous mane appeared out of the darkness’ (Field

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  197 of Grace, 58). The lion leaps over the back of the bandit’s horse and tears out his throat. The other bandit flees in terror. In Jewish symbology, the lion is associated with power and protection,29 which Christianity borrows and connects with Jesus.30 In Garden of Ruth, there is no doubt that the reader is encountering the God of the Torah, who is ‘faceless, formless and invisible’ (Garden of Ruth, 247). Afshar’s use of miracles emerge out of a utilitarian approach to Ruth, in which the story is mined for revelations about Christ. Afshar reads Ruth in relation to her belief in the New Testament’s story of Jesus as the son of God and redeemer of humankind. Thus, when Ruth testifies to her faith in God, the reader is meant to take this as a reference to the Christian God, who is both Father and Son, rather than the strictly singular Hebrew God. Rabbinic interpretations consider Ruth to be a convert to Judaism. Field of Grace strips Ruth of the Jewish identity she would otherwise acquire in the biblical narrative. In keeping with Christian theology, the novel paradoxically represents Ruth’s place in Boaz’s household as proof that God accepts Gentiles.31 Even Boaz is rewritten as a Christian. His theology echoes Christian tenets. He refers to God overcoming death (Field of Grace, 217), which reflects the idea that Jesus overcomes death through the Resurrection.32 Jesus even appears to Boaz to report that Judith and his children are in Heaven (Field of Grace, 229). Ruth also has a vision of Jesus as she hovers between life and death following Obed’s birth. She is transported to heaven, where Jesus’s appearance is heralded by a trumpet (as in 1 Thess 4:16). Given the author’s Middle Eastern origins, it is surprising how much her description of Jesus tallies with the Western stereotype of him as a white European. Ruth describes him as a ‘man clothed in a long robe of dazzling white with a golden sash around His chest’: His hair glowed like alabaster in the eerie light. White like wool, immaculate as fresh snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, piercing with intelligence and understanding. His face shone like the sun in full strength. He was beautiful and fearsome at once. Absolute glory shone round about Him. (Field of Grace, 250) At the end of Ruth’s vision, another miracle occurs; she is healed and awakens to her life with Boaz. Kates and Twersky Reimer observe that it is interpretive traditions more than biblical texts that leave women feeling excluded.33 Field of Grace merges with religious interpretations of Ruth that leave not only the feminine identified with ‘otherness’, but also Jewishness. For Christians to view stories in the Hebrew Bible through their own religious lens to see what spiritual ideas might be gleaned is commonplace and unobjectionable. However, by tying Ruth’s importance to the coming of Christ, Afshar doubly ‘others’ her in one of the few biblical narratives that offers an avenue into a Jewish woman’s perspective.

198  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 12.4 Negotiating Gender and Ethnic Difference Donna Nolan Fewell argues that Ruth renders the past as a place that can be ‘revisited, reconstructed, reimagined. If the past can be reimagined, then so can the present and the future’.34 For van Niekerk, the ‘act of remembering is potentially revolutionary as it creates fertile ground for imagining alternative future narratives of cultural identity’.35 Agaat employs narrative elements from Ruth to interrogate the potentialities of relationships between women across cultural difference, or as van Niekerk phrases it, ‘the workings of power in intimate relationships’.36 Agaat tells the story of a white South African woman, Milla, who ‘adopts’ a black girl, christened Agaat (from the Greek agathos, meaning good [Agaat, 406]). Cheryl Stobie recounts the narrative elements borrowed from Ruth to tell their story: ‘a woman, her husband, a shared boy-child and a younger, outsider woman who is instructed by the older woman. Imagery of sleeping at the feet of another is used, and […] questions of sacrifice, good, evil and redemption are raised’.37 However, van Niekerk radically reorders these elements. It is the older woman Milla (associated with Naomi) who marries, while the younger woman Agaat (associated with Ruth) provokes terminal gender trouble in Milla’s marriage when she is brought home. The older woman Milla gives birth, and the younger, barren woman Agaat alienates the affections of Milla’s son Jakkie, even miming suckling him. The male is excluded from the uncovering of feet, as it is Agaat who lays across Milla as she sleeps to symbolise their emotional intimacy. The women’s reconciliation, which comes as Milla lies dying at the end of the novel, is expressed in religious imagery that includes Agaat’s repetition of Ruth’s pledge to Naomi (Agaat, 561). Even more than Garden of Ruth, Agaat illustrates the complexities and paradoxes of relationships between women where power is unevenly distributed and within the context of a male- and white-dominated society. In both narratives, religion serves as a key vector for machinations of power, as it does in the source text. Milla is driven to take Agaat out of her desperation for a child, but she masks this by justifying it as a religious impulse, observing that she is only doing what ‘everyone is always preaching about’ – to love thy neighbour as thyself (Agaat 400). Mieke Bal describes how the modifier ‘sacred’ refers both to the framework within which myth is used and the effect it has in justifying the values of a narrative and assigning respectability to it.38 Bal discusses how bible stories function like myths in that they have been received as ‘charters for social action’, and, as such, these stories of the past are interpreted as calling for particular forms of behaviour in the present.39 Here I set out how Milla perversely harnesses biblical discourse to coerce Agaat into accepting her position within apartheid. Ruth’s ethnic difference renders her as the ‘other’ within Israelite society. In Garden of Ruth, Ruth reflects on how Naomi’s friends objectify her as ‘the Moabite’, and a variety of micro-aggressions make her feel like ‘an outcast in their midst’ (Garden of Ruth, 209). As a result, though she no longer feels herself to be a Moabite, neither can she identify as an Israelite. Only after her marriage is Ruth ‘no longer deemed a stranger in Bethlehem’ (Garden of Ruth, 250).

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  199 Agaat’s blackness also positions her as the ‘other’, but, in the context of apartheid, she is vulnerable to far greater vulgarities than the slights endured by Ruth; for example, Milla’s husband views her as akin to a ‘baboon’ (Agaat, 140). Raising Agaat as Protestant forms part of Milla’s mission to ‘humanise’ her (Agaat, 142– 43, 374), but rather than offering an opening into community, the South African Church reinforces Agaat’s less-than-human position within the white social order, as evidenced when she is confirmed. She is dropped off at ‘the mission church in Suurbraak’, while Milla and her family attend the white church in Swellendam (Agaat, 247). Agaat’s induction into Christianity involves the priest telling her to ‘shoulder her cross cheerfully in the service of her guardians and her masters’ until she ‘meekly’ leaves this life (Agaat, 472). Thus, Christianity itself is part of her cross by virtue of reinforcing her alienation from white South Africans as well as black. Agaat copies Milla’s treatment of her in her relations with other black workers on the farm. Sent to treat the children for worms, Agaat describes them as ‘wild things’ and threatens to treat them like animals if they do not behave in a more ‘civilised’ manner: ‘If I come again, then I’ll dip the whole lot of you wholesale with a forked stick behind the deck in the sheep-dip, the Lord knows what kind of pestilences are hatching here!’ (Agaat, 240) Just as Ruth genuinely embraces the Israelite God, Agaat accepts some Christian tenets, but both characters retain elements of other belief systems. Agaat engages in pantheistic rituals: like Etzioni-Halevy’s Ruth, she inhabits a position of cultural hybridity regarding religion. Jean Rossman and Stobie suggest that Agaat’s deviation from Milla’s monotheistic Calvinism positions her as a potential threat,40 because ‘in her mimetic replication of Milla’s culture, language and religion, [she] may introduce an element of strange-ness and difference in her re-signification and appropriation’ of them.41 Indeed, Milla’s neighbours gossip about how Agaat’s incorporation into Milla’s household ‘“subtly undermines community values”’ and defeats “‘the ends of the political policy of the authorities’” (Agaat, 531). In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks comments on the relation between language and oppression and relates how American slaves claimed English as a space of resistance. They transformed the oppressors’ language by rupturing white English, using the vernacular to ‘speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination’.42 Likewise, Agaat ruptures biblical discourse not only by blending Christianity and paganism, but also by translating bible stories and religious hymns through the prism of a black woman’s experience under apartheid. Ironically, by gifting Agaat with Christian rhetoric, Milla gives her the tools for questioning the morality of the colonial order that uses religion to justify the subjugation of blacks and the theft of their land and its attendant wealth. Agaat’s ability to undermine the white order from within is shown when Jakkie adopts her alternative world view. Agaat repeatedly relates the story of her and Milla’s lives as a fairy tale, one that encapsulates the moral darkness at the centre of patriarchy and apartheid. Milla suffers at the hands of her abusive husband, while Agaat, repeatedly raped as a child, is ‘rescued’ into racism. Unable to accept the status quo, Jakkie chooses to exile himself from his country.

200  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Milla comes to identify Agaat as her conscience and even as an emanation of God: And at present God is vengeful as in his youth, and it feels a whole lot more honest. Indeed, he has become a woman. He is now named Agaat (Agaat, 226) Most significant though is her decision to will the farm to Agaat. As Reinhardt Fourie points out, both the land and the gendered body become the site ‘for the contestation of identity and power’ in the novel.43 Milla’s family claim a blood relation to the land: ‘Grootmoedersdrift had been her ancestral land for generations back in her mother’s line’,44 but Milla severs the connection between whiteness and land when she cedes her power over it to Agaat. The rejection of the link among gender, ethnicity, land, and religion is conveyed also through the changes in the terms of the Covenant. Besides the conventional notion of a Covenant between God and humanity, it also refers to the connection between a people and the land, mediated by the divine, which is personified in Milla and Agaat’s personal covenant. Milla brings Agaat home on the Day of the Covenant; historically, it marked the defeat of the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 and was declared a public religious holiday by the white National Party in 1952. In 1994, the democratic government renamed it the Day of Reconciliation, making it about racial and national unity. The shift in the national mindset is presaged by the progressive unfolding of Milla and Agaat’s emotional bond, as their covenant, originally scripted according to colonialist ideology, is rewritten as one based in mutuality and hope. For Cohn, the biblical Ruth demonstrates how the other ‘enriches and transforms us’:45 Ruth’s diversity gives life and strength to Israel by giving rise to the golden age of David’s reign.46 Caspi and Havelock offer a similar analysis based on the theme of ḥesed (principal meaning, kindness), which Ruth embodies. Although Ruth never ceases to be a Moabite, through her choices, she changes what it means to be a Moabite.47 Agaat resembles Ruth in inviting the reader to imagine alternative valuations of ethnic and religious difference, which lead toward a possibility of greater equality among women across difference. Garden of Ruth also offers the reader this opportunity. Ruth says: ‘My own gods no longer care for me, nor I for them, but the Lord had gathered me into his fold’ (Garden of Ruth, 247). Rather than embracing monotheism, Ruth transfers her allegiance to a deity that has shown her more favour than Chemosh. She admits that Moab still holds attraction for her because she has been lonely among Naomi’s people. Thus, even as a convert, she remains a hybrid figure, and the novel celebrates Ruth as woman and immigrant. Whereas Agaat and Garden of Ruth challenge the intolerance of ethnic difference that runs through the source texts and canonical readings, Field of Grace ultimately condones it. Afshar softens ethnic and religious difference before disregarding them. Ruth’s alien status is acknowledged; for example, when Ruth tries to help a woman lift a heavy jar, the reaction is hostile: ‘“Stay away from me,

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  201 Moabite,” she screeched’ (Field of Grace, 66). Such prejudice quickly dissipates though, and most difficulties Ruth faces get attributed to mundane motives, such as Dinah’s sexual jealousy. Most important, Boaz’s lack of concern about her ethnicity in place of emphasising her steadfast faith (read Christian) contributes to her successful, if contradictory, assimilation into Israelite society. For Afshar’s polemical aim to be realised, there can be no doubt that Ruth’s heathen identity is purged, but, for her too to be a convincing symbol of Christian faith, Ruth must also be purged of her Jewishness. Even though Agaat transplants Ruth to twentieth-century South Africa and a Christian milieu, the story retains a Judaic provenance. Neither Milla nor Agaat privilege New Testament teaching over Hebrew scripture; moreover, Agaat is associated with Jewishness. She is positioned among the Jews of the Exodus. Milla listens as Agaat leads black workers in the field in a song that expresses the sorrows and joys of Israel: ‘Do like, Lord, unto me!’ she proclaims (Agaat, 196), in yearning for the freedoms of the promised land. Milla describes Agaat as resembling a Jew at the wailing wall, but with this difference, ‘the promised land is hers already’ (Agaat, 568), although she is not yet aware of Milla’s will. The way in which Afshar reconstructs the Hebrew story of Ruth, co-opting it to reimagine the principal characters as faithful to Christ, instantiates a version of replacement theology. In the Epilogue, King David meditates on the unlikely possibility of his covenant with God lasting because of his failure to follow God’s ways, but he signals a future miracle that could ‘bring forth a kingdom of righteousness and peace’ (Field of Grace, 280).48 This claim, combined with the metaphorical Baptism of Ruth and Boaz, replicates classic supersessionist ideology, whereby a New Covenant with Christ makes the Mosaic Covenant redundant. Not only does Ruth’s Jewishness become irrelevant to her story, but the faith she adopts in the Hebrew Bible is represented as religiously out of date. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat’s poem ‘A Handmaid’s Tale (Ruth)’ begins by reminding the reader that it is time for ‘a different kind of harvest’. Ruth prays that the child she carries will be born into a world in which people no longer feel the need to ‘distinguish / Israel from Moab’. Kates and Twersky Reimer argue that it is imperative for women to redefine traditional readings of Bible stories to create a space in which women feel they can belong by bringing their own questions and points of view to the hermeneutic process.49 On the one hand, Field of Grace shows that, while foregrounding female selfhood may appear as a progressive response to Ruth, this does not always suffice to produce a politics of difference that challenges the practice of canonical masculinisation and ethnic othering that characterises the source text and so much of its traditional exegesis. On the other hand, the way in which Etzioni-Halevy and van Niekerk adapt Ruth amply and engagingly fulfil this imperative. Garden of Ruth and Agaat redefine Ruth in such a way that the narratives offer a space in which women might glean a different kind of harvest from Ruth, one that recognises and honours intersectional differences.50

202  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 12.5 Reception Exegesis The three novels explored in this chapter engage with many of the same religious issues that appear in biblical scholarship. Each novel in some way reflects on Ruth as a source of religious instruction, especially concerning acts of loving kindness, the meaning of redemption, how marriage and family are aspects of the sacred, and the connection between land and people. At the same time, using a variety of literary methods, the novels retell Ruth to reveal different aspects of the book that have often been overlooked or downplayed in received criticism. Van Niekerk’s employment of Ruth reveals the tragic elements of the story that are usually left in the background by Jewish and Christian theologians. Agaat significantly alters our view of Ruth as a pastoral romance by calling attention to how Ruth’s family is fractured and defined by loss. The novel reveals how family can be both a source of care and devotion as well as exploitation by those with whom we are most intimate, and it helps us to see how this is also acknowledged in the biblical story. Afshar allows Ruth to be a human character, who displays complex emotions and needs, despite harnessing the story to foreshadow the Christian Messiah, and this humanisation allows the reader to identify more easily with her. Even more so, however, Etzioni-Halevy succeeds at enabling the reader to empathise with Ruth by putting flesh on the bones of the religious cipher that Ruth so often appears to be in traditional exegesis, offering us a rare portrait of a biblical woman whose sexual nature is embraced. Ruth is refashioned to highlight her intelligence, courage, diplomacy, self-respect, and independence of spirit – all of which would have been needed to make the journey from Moab to Israel, both literally and metaphorically. In this way, Garden of Ruth returns Ruth to her rightful place at the centre of the narrative. Notes 1 Curzon, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 2 Kates and Twersky Reimer, ‘Introduction’, pp. xviii–xix. 3 Meyers, ‘Returning Home’, p. 85. 4 Bauckman, ‘Book of Ruth’, p. 30. 5 Sneerman, Tanach, p. 1705. 6 Kaufman, Women in Jewish Law and Tradition, p. 60. 7 Kaufman, Women in Jewish Law and Tradition, p. 60. 8 De Villiers, ‘Foreigner in our Midst’, p. 3. 9 Asimov, ‘Lost in Translation’, p. 169. 10 Henceforth abbreviated as Garden of Ruth and Field of Grace. 11 Strauss, ‘Historical Novel’, p. B3. 12 Anon, ‘The Garden of Ruth’, n.p. 13 Quick, ‘Book of Ruth’, p. 56. 14 Quick ‘Book of Ruth’, p. 56. She draws upon the connections made between the ‘other’, foreignness, and illicit sexuality by Camp in Wise, Strange and Holy (p. 29) and BrennerIdan in The Israelite Woman (p. 122). 15 Cohn, ‘Overcoming Otherness’, p. 165. 16 Cohn, ‘Overcoming Otherness’ (p. 165) draws upon the following biblical references to describe the Moabite Other: Gen 19:36–37; Num 25:1–2; Deut 23:4.

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  203 17 For example, in Against Jovinianus, Jerome glosses Matthew’s praise of men who ‘have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’ (12:19) by asserting that ‘Christ loves virgins more than others’ (n.p). 18 The reference is to King David, but at this stage in the narrative he is yet to take on his royal title. 19 Bronner, ‘Thematic Approach’, p. 161. 20 Bronner, ‘Thematic Approach’, p. 168. 21 Brenner, ‘Naomi and Ruth’, pp. 83–84. 22 Boer, Earthy Nature, p. 60. 23 McGeough, ‘The Problem with David’, p. 5. 24 McGeough, ‘The Problem with David’, p. 10. 25 McGeough, ‘The Problem with David’, p. 10. 26 Tiemeyer, In Search of Jonathan, p. 24. I am grateful to Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer for allowing me to read a chapter of her monograph in advance of publication. 27 Panganiban, ‘Theology of Resilience’, p. 185. 28 Koosed, Gleaning Ruth, p. 79. 29 For example, see Jacob’s blessing in Gen 49:9 and Isa 31:4. 30 For example, Matt 1 locates Jesus along the human family tree of Judah, whereas in Rev 5:5, Jesus is described as ‘lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David’. 31 Koosed, Gleaning Ruth, p. 128. 32 For example, in Acts 2:24, Peter says, ‘It was impossible for death to keep its hold on him’. 33 Kates and Twersky Reimer, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. 34 Fewell, ‘The Ones Returning’, p. 27. 35 As quoted in Buxbaum, ‘Remembering the Self’, p. 85. 36 As quoted in de Cock, ‘Found in Translation’, p. 18. 37 Stobie, ‘Ruth’, p. 61. 38 Bal, Lethal Love, p. 4. 39 Bal, Lethal Love, p. 4. 40 Rossman and Stobie, ‘Chew me until I bind’, p. 23. 41 Rossman and Stobie, ‘Chew me until I bind’, p. 22. 42 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, p. 170. 43 Fourie, ‘Identity’, p. 48. 44 Fourie, ‘Identity’, p. 24. 45 Cohn, ‘Overcoming Otherness’, p. 181. 46 Cohn, ‘Overcoming Otherness’, p. 176. 47 Caspi and Havelock, Women on the Biblical Road, p. 171. 48 As recorded in Luke 1:32, Jesus, deemed to be the heir to David’s throne, will inherit the throne of David: ‘He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David’. 49 Kates and Twersky Reimer, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. 50 I would like to thank Angela K. Smith for her comments on an early draft of this chapter and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer for her very helpful suggestions on the final draft.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Afshar, Tessa. In The Field of Grace. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014. Asmov, Isaac. The Story of Ruth. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Etzioni-Halevy, Eva. The Garden of Ruth. New York: Plume, 2007. Niekerk, Marlene van. Agaat. Trans. Michiel Heyns. Portland, OR: Tin House, 2006. Scherman, Rabbi Nosson. (ed.). Tanach. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 2012. St. Jerome. Against Jovivianus. Against Jovinianus. (biblehub​.c​om) Accessed Aug. 8, 2022.

204  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Secondary Sources Afshar, Tessa. ‘Meet Tessa.’ Meet Tessa Afshar | Inspirational Historical Fiction Author. Accessed May 13, 2022. Anon. ‘The Garden of Ruth’. Kirkus. Reviews Issue Sept. 15, 2006. The Garden of Ruth | Kirkus Reviews. Accessed February 15, 2023. Asmov, Isaac. ‘Lost in Non-Translation’. The Tragedy of the Moon. London: Coronet Books, 1975, pp. 163–174. Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. Barenblat, Rabbi Rachel. ‘A Handmaid’s Tale (Ruth).’ Velveteen Rabbi. Untitled (blogs​.c​ om). Accessed Aug. 12, 2022. Bauckman, Richard. ‘The Book of Ruth and the Possibility of a Feminist Canonical Hermeneutic’. BibInt 5 (1997), pp. 29–45. Boer, Roland. The Earthy Nature of the Bible: Fleshly Readings of Sex, Masculinity and Carnality. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Brenner, Athalya. ‘Naomi and Ruth’. In Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Ruth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993, pp. 70–84. Brenner-Idan, Athalya. The Israelite Woman: Social Role and Literary Type in Biblical Narrative. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Bronner, Leila Leah. ‘A Thematic Approach to Ruth in Rabbinic Literature.’ In Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Ruth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, pp. 146–169. Buxbaum, Lara. ‘Remembering the Self: Fragmented Bodies, Fragmented Narratives in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat’. JLS 29.2 (2013), pp. 82–100. Camp, Claudia V. Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible. JSOTS 320 / Gender, Culture, Theory 9. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Caspi, Mishael Maswari, and Rachel S. Havrelock. Women on the Biblical Road: Ruth, Naomi, and the Female Journey. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996. Cock, Leon de. ‘Found in Translation’. Sunday Times (South Africa), Sept. 28, 2007, p. 18. Cohn, Robert L. ‘Overcoming Otherness in the Book of Ruth’. In Ehud Ben Zvi and Diana V. Edelman (eds), Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period. LHBOTS 456. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 163–181. Curzon, David. ‘Introduction’. In David Curzon (ed.), Modern Poems of the Bible: An Anthology. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994, pp. 3–27. Fewell, Donna Nolan. ‘The Ones Returning: Ruth, Naomi, and Social Negotiation in the Post-Exilic Period’. In Katherine E. Southwood and Martien A. Halvorson Taylor (eds), Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible. LHBOTS 631. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 23–40. Fourie, Reinhardt. ‘Identity, Gender and Land in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat’. English Academy Review 33.1 (2016), pp. 38–56. Goodreads. ‘In The Field of Grace’. In the Field of Grace by Tessa Afshar | Goodreads. Accessed May 13, 2022. Halvorson-Taylor, Martien A., and Katherine E. Southwood. ‘Introduction.’ In Katherine E. Southwood and Martien A. Halvorson Taylor (eds), Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible. LHBOTS 631. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 1–5. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge, 1994. Kates, Judith A., and Gail Twersky Reimer. ‘Introduction’. In Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer (eds), Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1994. Kaufman, Michael. The Women in Jewish Law and Tradition. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995.

Contemporary Women Novelists Respond to Ruth  205 Koosed, Jennifer L. Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. Lawton, Wendy. ‘Fiction Reviews.’ Publisher’s Weekly Review, May 12, 2014. LexisNexis. McGeough, Kevin M. ‘The Problem with David: Masculinity and Morality in Biblical Cinema’. Journal of Religion and Film 22.1 (2018), Article 33. https://digitalcommons​ .unomaha​.edu​/jrf​/vol22​/iss1​/33 Meyers, Carol. ‘Returning Home: Ruth 1:8 and the Gendering of The Book of Ruth’. In Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Ruth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993, pp. 85–115. Panganiban, Alicia Besa. ‘Theology of Resilience Amidst Vulnerability in the Book of Ruth’. Feminist Theology 28.2 (2020), pp. 182–197. Quick, Laura. ‘The Book of Ruth and the Limits of Proverbial Wisdom’. JBL 139.1 (2020), pp. 47–66. Rossman, Jean, and Cheryl Stobie. “‘Chew Me Until I Bind:” Sacrifice and Cultural Renewal in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat’. JLS 28.3 (2012), pp. 17–31. Stobie, Cheryl. ‘Ruth in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat’. JLS 25.3 (2009), pp. 57–71. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1080​/02564710802349389 Strauss, Elissa. ‘A Historical Novel about Ruth, Minus the Sappiness; Fiction’. The Forward, Feb. 16, 2007, p. B3. LexisNexis. Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia. In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan between the Bible and Modern Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Villiers, Gerda de. “‘The Foreigner in our Midst” and the Hebrew Bible.’ HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 75.3 (2019), pp. 1–7.

13 Bathsheba Innocent Victim or Cunning Schemer? Hugh Pyper

13.1 Introduction ‘Bathsheba: innocent victim or cunning schemer?’ was an essay topic that I regularly set for an undergraduate course I taught entitled ‘The Adventures of King David’. It points to the polarities that are to be seen in readings of the life of a character who surfaces twice in David’s story in the books of Samuel and Kings, at two crucial junctures in the history of the Davidic monarchy: the train of events that lead to the birth of Solomon in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 and the drama surrounding Solomon’s anointing as David’s successor in place of Adonijah in 1 Kings 1 and 2. In both cases, the biblical narrator is reticent as to Bathsheba’s motivations and emotional reactions. The reader assumes there is a hidden thread that connects the character’s two main appearances, but the path which that thread follows is obscure. Are we to assume that she is consistent, so that her motivation in one case sheds light on her motives in the other, or is the implication that she has undergone change in the intervening years? The mystery is only deepened by the fact that the writers of the books of Chronicles simply omit the narratives involving her from their account of David’s life. Only once, in 1 Chron 3:15, do they mention the mother of Solomon, but give her the name Bathshua. This leads to the question as to why the writers of Samuel and Kings choose to include the two episodes involving Bathsheba as a named character, but only these two stories. What ideological points are they making, and what have they suppressed? After all, between these episodes a series of drastic and traumatic events for David and his household have occurred which must have deeply affected Bathsheba. After her secret liaison with David, her husband Uriah is killed, and her first child dies to atone for David’s sin. How do these events affect her? Here at least there are brief mentions of her but, after the birth of her second son, Solomon, Bathsheba is submerged in the wider story until the very end of David’s reign. The logic of the story requires that she must have been present or at least affected by all the tumultuous events of the rest of David’s life, including the fatal rivalries between his sons. Aside from these major political events, she must have been involved in the politics of the court. As David’s final wife, she became part of an already established household where his previous wives must have developed a modus vivendi with each other. Here too there are unanswered questions that a novelist can explore. DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-14

Bathsheba  207 Does she arrive as the naïve young latecomer, with the shadow of these two deaths and her adulterous affair hanging over her, having to win the respect and recognition from his existing wives, who all have the advantage of priority?1 Or does Bathsheba arrive in the household armed with the prestige of the new favourite of the king and one who holds a particular power over David? The literary critic Harold Bloom’s tongue was only partly in his cheek when he identified Bathsheba as the author of the Book of J in contrast to the silenced Bathsheba of Chronicles. He argued that the J material in the Pentateuch bore the mark of an author who combined female intuition and intelligence with an intimate knowledge of David’s court in retelling of the origin stories of Israel.2 Who would be a better candidate for this role than Bathsheba? It is no wonder then that Bathsheba becomes a focus of interest for later interpreters seeking to find a coherent account of David’s reign. Sara Koenig provides a fascinating overview of the historical development of the various interpretations of her character.3 Focusing more explicitly on the ways in which interpreters have sought to reconcile the two narratives involving Bathsheba, Brent Nessler argues that this is often achieved by taking one of the stories and its characterisation as the baseline against which the other is interpreted. For instance, those who see Bathsheba as the innocent and naïve victim of David’s seduction may then interpret her role in the conspiracy to place Solomon on the throne as her equally naïve compliance with Nathan’s scheming. Alternatively, others see in 1 Kings a cunning Bathsheba who ensures her own position as Queen Mother by conspiring with Nathan to deceive David. They then interpret her bathing on the roof in 2 Samuel 11 as the first move in a grand scheme on her part to gain power for herself and her offspring by seducing David and bearing his child.4 Nessler’s own preference is for a third way which argues that there is a coherent character development between the two narratives where Bathsheba shows what he terms ‘dynamic resilience’ through undergoing trauma and recovery, although, as we have seen, her response to the traumas of David’s reign is unrecorded in the biblical text and can only be inferred. Nessler’s conversation partners are all biblical scholars and commentators, but his insights are just as applicable to the readings found in literary retellings of the story. Indeed, we might expect novelists to be particularly interested in tracing the development of a character such as Bathsheba in the wider narrative of David’s rise and his succession. Questions of her motivation and what shapes her response to the events that she is caught up in are novelistic questions. As Ilse Müllner points out, for the novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Bathsheba provides the material for an intriguing study of a woman’s motivation and morality as she negotiates her survival in a patriarchal world. The stories that introduce Bathsheba explicitly involve secrecy and conspiracy, surreptitious meetings and clandestine messages. Innocently or calculatedly, she is absorbed into a world of court intrigues, where reputations, authority, and, in the end, survival itself perilously hang on who knows what and who might reveal what to whom. These stories also cry out to be read as romance, where the passionate impulses of the individual are set against the constraints of custom and religion.

208  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry They are also stories of violence, sexual exploitation, trauma, and repression which expose questions of victimhood and the cost of survival. In order to explore this, I will look at the figure of Bathsheba as she appears in four modern literary treatments of the biblical account: Marek Halter’s Bethsabée ou L’Éloge de l’adultère; Torgny Lindgren’s Bat Seba; Allan Massie’s King David: A Novel; and Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord. In each case, Bathsheba as a character provides the author with an entrée into exploring aspects of the story not made explicit in the Bible but which open up for the modern reader questions of the individual psychology of the characters and their implications for the broader political interest of the story. 13.2 Marek Halter, Bethsabée ou L’Éloge de l’adultère We begin with Marek Halter’s short novel. Bathsheba appears in the title of the book, along with the rather unexpected subtitle ‘The Praise of Adultery’, a decidedly non-biblical sentiment, one might think, which already raises expectations that there will be a degree of subversion of the biblical story. This is in line with Halter’s wider work. Born in 1936 in Warsaw, Halter was taken by his family to Moscow as they fled the Warsaw ghetto and then to Uzbekistan. Returning to Poland in 1946, the family sought a visa for France where they arrived in 1949, and there he received his education. Having first trained as a painter, Halter became a prolific novelist, essayist, and activist for peace in the Middle East. A major concern of his is to explore the ways that young Jewish women can find resources to lead full and independent lives within the literature and traditions of Judaism. A quotation inside the back cover of Bethsabée speaks to this: One day I asked myself whether if the absence of the feminine view of the Bible was not at the origin of all the misunderstandings which underlie so many questionings and debates among men. So I tried to reread the Bible through its women. In short order, everything changed. Historical events found their place again, the seeming falsehoods disappeared. By the time Betsabée appeared in 2006, Halter was already well known, particularly in France, for his series of novels which retold the lives of key biblical women from their perspective, an interest he later expanded to include women from the New Testament and the Islamic tradition. These novels have been widely translated, but for some reason no English version of the Bathsheba novel seems to have been published. Marek puts Bathsheba’s experiences at the heart of the novel as she is torn by conflicting loyalties and contradictory emotions. At the beginning of the novel, she is angry with Uriah who, she feels, has abandoned her, putting his military duties before his obligations as a husband. On reflection, she concedes that her anger is unfair to a man who has been unfailingly kind to her and transfers her hatred to David, the king who has demanded that Uriah stay at his post in Rabbah. She eagerly awaits Uriah, only to be disappointed time after time when the longed-for letter from him tells her of yet another delay in his return.

Bathsheba  209 Hearing a noise in the street, she rushes out only to see David, the hated king, riding by. She is overwhelmed by his beauty and presence and unable to utter her plea that he should permit Uriah to return to her, but their eyes meet, and, though no words are spoken, this is a fateful moment. It is also, of course, nowhere to be found in the source material. By including it, Halter sets up the later encounter recorded in 2 Samuel 11 in a novel way. Bathsheba is not introduced as the passive and possibly entirely innocent object of David’s gaze from his palace roof; she has already entered into a passionate and conflicted relationship with him. In order to provide a context where Bathsheba can confide her feelings and witnesses who can assess her reactions to events, Marek adds two important characters: her brother Jeremiah, who is a scribe, and her maidservant. They bring her the gossip that the king has fallen for a woman he has only glimpsed. Bathsheba is tormented by her memory of the king’s gaze and decides to bathe herself in order to cleanse her flesh, but the effect is the opposite. She longs all the more for David, and the thought strikes her that rumours abound that the king takes pleasure in spying on the women of the city from the palace. These thoughts are interrupted when she sees from her window a young woman being stoned in the street as an adulteress. However, Bathsheba cannot shake the fantasy that she is being watched by the king or deny the pleasure this thought gives her. A message arrives from the palace, brought by the king’s servant: an invitation to dine with the king. Her servant tries to dissuade her, and Bathsheba herself resents the assertion of power implicit in the king’s assumption that she can simply be summoned. She pleads illness, but the king persists, sending her gifts. Bathsheba cannot deny her desire, but a key point in Halter’s retelling is her insistence when she eventually agrees to go to the king that in doing so, she is obeying herself, not him. Halter seeks to break down the duality of the desiring male and the desired female and the power difference between the king and a mere woman. Who has seduced whom in this scenario? David and Bathsheba are the archetypal man and woman in this instant, ‘equal and unique in the happiness of their love’ (p. 57). Even then, Bathsheba raises with David the case of the woman stoned in the town, a fate she deserves to share. When David assures her that she will not face any such fate, she points out that he is the king. His laws should apply to all, but where is the justice in a law that brings such suffering to people? David does not reply, but later Bathsheba gives her own justification for the adulterous relationship. She recalls that it is written that a woman’s desire shall be for her husband. Whoever she desires, therefore, is her husband and her master. David is her true husband in a way Uriah could not be. Nevertheless, she refuses to return to the palace until she becomes aware that she is carrying David’s child. Bathsheba continues to resist, but then becomes aware she has fallen pregnant. She makes a second visit to David, imagining she can remain aloof, but her desire is reawakened. Still, she tells him she must return to Uriah’s house, even though the punishment for a woman pregnant by someone other than her husband is death. David protests this is God’s law, not his. She goes, but David arrives himself secretly at the house three nights later. After a night of passion on the balcony where she used to bathe in David’s sight, David drops a hint that if Uriah was to

210  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry return, she should greet him as his wife, and Bathsheba realizes that this might afford a way of covering up her illicit pregnancy. At the same time, she guesses that David has already found a way to ensure Uriah’s return. She is left alternately blaming the two men and herself for this situation. Uriah does return, and they share a passionate moment, but Uriah stops short of sleeping with her and returns to the palace, where David all but orders him to sleep with his wife. Uriah refuses out of loyalty to his comrades in the field, and David writes the fatal letter to Joab. Bathsheba is left wondering why Uriah has not come back to her. Is he no longer attracted to her, or has he guessed the truth? Uriah does return, however, to explain that he is burning with desire for her which his duty prevents him from fulfilling, all the time holding the letter for Joab. Bathsheba recognizes he is still unaware of the truth. He leaves for the front, and soon the news comes of his death in battle. Bathsheba mourns Uriah, but then is summoned by David to learn her destiny. She asks him directly whether he had Uriah killed, and David answers that Uriah endured the fate of any soldier who had to die for his king. Bathsheba understands that David has simply brought about what she had so often wished for, knowing that she cannot resist her desire for him. She and David are married, but Nathan publicly confronts David with his tale of the stolen lamb. David acknowledges his fault but insists that his motives were not evil, but driven by love. Indeed he seems to shift the blame to Yhwh for making Bathsheba so beautiful. The sentence has been passed, however, and their child is destined to die. Bathsheba suffers terribly throughout her pregnancy and will not leave the child when it is born. Seven days later he dies. Bathsheba’s attendants are worried that she too will die of grief. Surprisingly, it is Nathan who visits her and explains that it is for God to decide who lives or dies. He knows who is innocent and who is guilty and she will live to be the mother of the next king. She is reconciled to David and falls pregnant with another child. The novel ends with the birth of Solomon, with no reference to the later events around his enthronement. Halter’s treatment of Bathsheba is interestingly doubleedged. By seeking to assert her autonomy and the reality and significance of her desire, he implicates her in the network of deceit that eventually leads to the murder of Uriah and the death of her son. Although they do suffer the awful consequences of their actions, the message seems to be that they are exonerated by their desire which overrules their duties and their consciences. One could even infer that Uriah deserves his death because he puts duty over desire. 13.3 Torgny Lindgren, Bat Seba Perhaps the most widely read novel in which Bathsheba is the eponymous heroine is the Swedish novelist Torgny Lindgren’s Bat Seba, first published in 1984. An English translation entitled Bathsheba was published in 1988. The book bears the intriguing epigraph, ‘To my children. This story was the first I heard in my life. Now I have told it to you’. This seems to align Lindgren and his children with a lineage of storytellers stretching back to the days of King David, though it is

Bathsheba  211 surprising, to say the least, if this story of adultery and murder was really the first Lindgren ever heard.5 Given the title of the novel, the reader may be disconcerted by how marginal Bathsheba is in its early chapters. It begins with the scene of David’s first sight of Bathsheba from the roof where Lindgren introduces a witness, David’s boy servant Shaphan. Bathsheba is described as something like a child of nature, perhaps even as an angelic presence, innocently inspiring desire and desiring herself. As soon as David sees her, he summons her and she comes to him. The conversation when they meet introduces the theological question that resonates through the novel: ‘What is the nature of the Lord?’, which here Bathsheba asks of David when he begins to pray. He answers, ‘He is like me’. He goes on to describe God as boundlessly loving, but adds that love is the most appalling uncertainty. In a characteristic twist to the story, Lindgren then reintroduces Shaphan who witnesses the lovemaking between the king and Bathsheba but is seen by the king who orders him to be killed after his eyes have been gouged out. This capriciously cruel king is the one who reveals the nature of God. This is typical of the liberties Lindgren allows himself with the story, where the intrinsic cruelty is graphically heightened. In his version of the plot against Uriah he is sent back to the front, not as the heroic warrior bearing an unthinkable order but as a maddened and physically castrated sacrifice. Again, the question of the nature of a God who seemingly forgives David for this but exacts his vengeance on the innocent child Bathsheba bears is thrust on the reader. If we then turn to the end of the novel, where David is on his deathbed, we find him asking the same question of Bathsheba: ‘What is the nature of the Lord?’ This time Bathsheba answers ‘He is like me. He is exactly like me’. With his dying breath, David acknowledges this and tells her, ‘You are perfection, Bathsheba. Your perfection is your greatest flaw’. The movement of the story is encapsulated in these two exchanges, and the reader is prompted to revisit Bathsheba’s progress in order to try and pin down what Lindgren is implying about the nature of God. The novel is too complex to summarise adequately here, but some key incidents stand out where Lindgren embellishes the biblical narrative in interesting ways. As the story progresses, the extent of Bathsheba’s influence on events becomes more and more apparent, rather as the reader of the book of Samuel is reminded at key points that God has been at work in the narrative even though he is often not explicitly mentioned. To take one significant example, in Lindgren’s narrative Bathsheba develops an obsession with Absalom as the chosen one, while at the same time becoming jealous of his beautiful sister Tamar, knowing that David is fascinated by the younger woman. When Bathsheba learns that Amnon too is sick with desire for Tamar, she acts to bring about their union, using her network of loyal contacts and reassuring them that as a king’s son, Amnon is above the law and that royal seed works by different rules; as in Egypt, it can be kept pure by marriage between siblings. The plan of seduction that in the Bible is proposed by Amnon’s friend Jonadab is dreamt up by Bathsheba and fed to him by her servant. After the plan is put in action and

212  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Amnon rapes and rejects the girl, it is Bathsheba who arranges that she should take refuge with Absalom. There is an odd but telling addition to the story. Absalom teaches Bathsheba to shoot with a bow. During the lesson, Bathsheba feels that she has only to step back into Absalom’s arms, but, when she does, he rejects her. Typically, Lindgren widens the scope of transgressive eroticism in a story which is already steeped in it. Bathsheba’s prowess with the bow is used only once, in a scene where she asks David whom he would choose if not Absalom, and he answers, ‘Solomon’. One of his servants has overheard them, and Bathsheba takes her bow and shoots him in the back. This has echoes with the first scene where Shaphan is also killed for overhearing. The resonances go deeper, however. There is a slightly puzzling passing comment in the very first page of the novel where Shaphan notices a woman bathing and the King’s evident immediate desire for her. ‘The distance of a bowshot, thought Shaphan, without really knowing why’. Lurking here is the ancient metaphor of love as an arrow of the gods that can pierce and destroy and the myth of Diana, the goddess who has Actaeon killed for the crime of looking on her bathing, a suggestive parallel to David’s spying on Bathsheba which triggers the subsequent train of events. The whole novel is oblique and allusive, but this may be a clue to a reading where Lindgren uses Bathsheba to assimilate the God of the Bible with the beauty and cruelty of the classical deities, who themselves can be consumed by lust and who take vengeance on those who spurn them and discard the objects of their desire without a thought when a new fancy takes them. At the very end of the book, Bathsheba is in control. The final two sentences of the book read: ‘And Bathsheba ruled the kingdom for seven years. During her time the army was equipped with horses and chariots from Erech of Shinar: 4000 horses’. This typically enigmatic ending is a clear parody of the style of the brief summaries of reigns in the biblical text. 13.4 Allan Massie, King David A rather different view of Bathsheba emerges in the Scottish novelist Allan Massie’s King David. Here, as in the many novels based on David’s life, Bathsheba is one of many ancillary characters, but the apparent contradictions in her portrayal still have to be dealt with, and she provides scope for the novelist to build a fuller picture of David’s motives. In this version, David sees Bathsheba and summons her despite knowing that she is Uriah’s wife and Achitophel’s granddaughter. The twist is that Massie represents her as reluctantly married to Uriah at her grandfather’s command, Uriah being one of Achitophel’s many secret agents. She resents and distrusts her grandfather and her husband, who has no regard for her pleasure. With her, David experiences what he knows is to be his last great love, one of equal surrender to each other in contrast to the element of reserve in each of his other wives. When Bathsheba finds herself pregnant, she first suggests that she will find a way to do away with the child. David forbids this but proposes that he will summon

Bathsheba  213 back Uriah so that he can sleep with her and thus conceal the adulterous origins of the child. Bathsheba reluctantly consents. Uriah arrives and proves to be an arrogant boor who David dislikes intensely, although he has to respect his military accomplishments. David flatters him and hints as broadly as he can that Uriah should take the reward of a night with Bathsheba. Uriah gets drunk and remains in the palace, explaining the next day that he felt duty-bound to refrain from sex and expressing contempt for all women. Massie’s characterisation of him is a good example of writers softening the critique of David and Bathsheba’s actions by villainizing Uriah. David sends a message to Joab, unbeknownst to Bathsheba. He does not order Uriah’s death but relies on Joab’s intuition allowing him to take the hint. When the news comes back from Rabbah that Uriah has been killed in the battle, David is relieved, but Bathsheba is sure that her grandfather suspects both that Uriah was not the father of her child and that David has organized his death. Nathan arrives to denounce David, but in this version he does not specify the death of the child as punishment. However, the child does fall ill, and Bathsheba blames David for his death: ‘I had rather have been stoned to death for adultery that that this should happen’ she tells him, and thereafter there is a coldness between them as she finds it impossible to forgive him. Massie takes this incident as the explanation for the change in Bathsheba’s character. Thereafter she does exert considerable influence over David despite the cooling of their relations as she seeks to promote her son Solomon’s claims to the throne. In particular, she tries to turn David against Absalom. When Absalom kills Amnon, Bathsheba encourages David to send Absalom into exile, even though his love for his son has never diminished. ‘I was powerless against Bathsheba’, David records, ‘for she had a capacity to disturb me and an ability to make my life wretched that were too strong for me’ (p. 193). David’s mind is changed by his encounter with the woman of Teqoa, but Bathsheba remains implacably opposed to Absalom’s return to the palace, so David agrees that Absalom will be permitted to return to the city, but not to see David’s face or enter the palace. Yet David is torn, despising himself for being subject to a woman’s will, and arranges a secret meeting with Absalom who shows him the pitiable wreck that is Tamar. David tells his son that he has wronged him and reproaches himself for his weakness in listening to Bathsheba’s counsel. Absalom is restored to favour, and David learns that there is a growing resentment in the kingdom over Bathsheba’s influence over him. He is aware of her determination that Solomon will be king after him rather than Absalom, but refuses to name his heir, preferring to maintain the tension between the two rival camps. He appoints Absalom as governor of Judah, sending him to Hebron, and also arranges for Bathsheba and Solomon to remove themselves to Shiloh. Achitophel, however, continues to foment trouble between David and Absalom. The motivation for this is put down to his resentment of David’s power, but also, and this suggestion is put in Bathsheba’s mouth, because he had an unconfessed incestuous passion for Bathsheba herself; a rather odd addition to the biblical account. After Absalom’s rebellion is defeated and his beloved son killed by Joab,

214  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry David goes into a decline. He hears the outcry that signals the proclamation of Adonijah as king, but interestingly, Massie omits the scene where Bathsheba and Nathan remind him that he has sworn that Solomon would follow him. There is no such oath in Massie’s version. Instead, Jonadab reports to the bedridden king that Bathsheba has acted unilaterally, bringing Solomon to the Ark of the Covenant and ordering the priests to announce that David has appointed Solomon as his successor. David’s account ends here, but there is a brief epilogue to the novel written by Ahimaaz, son of Abiathar, which tells us that, among the many former associates of David that Solomon turned against, he banished his own mother from the palace because she supported Adonijah’s request to be given Abishag, to which she replied that he, Solomon, was a child of sin. For Massie, the character of Bathsheba becomes a useful device to account for some of the oddly contradictory actions of David in his later years. When he seems inconsistent, it is because he is torn between his own inclinations and his vulnerability to Bathsheba’s schemes to ensure her son’s succession. Massie gives her a much more prominent role in the story, both as a conspirator in her own right and as her grandfather’s agent as they seek to promote Solomon. Her own change of heart with regard to David is a response to the trauma of losing her child and the deeper and still hidden trauma of her relationship to her grandfather. 13.5 Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord The final version of Bathsheba to be discussed is that to be found in Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Secret Chord. This is an account of David’s life written from the point of view of the prophet Natan,6 picking up on the hints in 1 Chronicles 29 and 2 Chronicles 9:29 at the existence of a history in his hand. Batsheva enters the story in Chapter 9. Natan, arriving to meet David as usual, is warned by a servant that David is with a woman and not just any woman: the wife of Uriah. Natan is shocked when he learns of this uncharacteristic act but also aware of the corrosive effect even the rumour of such a thing could have on David’s power. He confronts David directly with the accusation, and David brushes it off as a momentary aberration which will have no consequences. He explains that he happened to glimpse the woman bathing by chance, at a time when he was feeling trapped in the palace, seemingly forbidden by his generals from joining in the fight for Rabba. Natan warns him that he has heard of this through servants’ gossip, and it is only their loyalty that prevents it becoming common knowledge. It is not until Chapter 13 that Batsheva’s story is taken up again. David joyfully tells Natan of his successful completion of the siege of Rabba which has made him think of the need to build a temple for Yhwh, and also of his new wife, Batsheva. Natan tells him the parable of the rich man and the poor man’s lamb, and David accepts his punishment. Only after that does Natan meet Batsheva for the first time. He is struck by her beauty, but also her youth, as she nurses the child born from the adulterous affair. Both she and David confront Natan with his prophecy that this child will die and ask if there is any hope. Natan tells them that his fate is sealed, and indeed the child dies after a week of fever.

Bathsheba  215 Natan moves out of the palace but some months later is surprised to be visited unannounced by Batsheva, who tells him that she is pregnant once more. She tells him she is afraid, both of him and of the king. Natan asks why she should fear David, and she angrily points out that he had her forcibly taken from her house to be debauched and then abandoned. Brooks thus differs from the majority of other novelists in rejecting the romanticisation of the encounter in 2 Samuel 1. Her Batsheva is not a seductive and passionate woman out to get David or a naïve young woman dazzled by the glamour of the great King, but a vulnerable and angry victim of sexual exploitation. The point is made all the more clearly by Natan’s reaction to her outburst. He is sceptical, asking whether she could not have found somewhere private to bathe rather than flaunting herself, to which she indignantly explains that privacy was exactly what she was seeking when she took to the roof and that she has regretted her actions every day. Natan becomes aware that he had violated her himself in thinking of her rape by David as an act of seduction. Batsheva recounts how she kept recalling the punishment of women for adultery and feared for herself, but now realizes that she should have been fearing for Uriah’s life, not her own. The reason she has come, however, is to seek reassurance that this new child will live. At first reluctant to speak, Natan is seized with a vision where he sees the child as a beautiful young man, the city filled with new houses and crowned with a white-and-gold temple. ‘He will be king’, he tells Batsheva (p. 259), and she recognizes that matters will have to change between herself and the king if this is to become true. Natan persuades David to let him become a mentor to the boy, and he and Batsheva become allies in the promotion of Shlomo’s claims. Batsheva and Natan are involved together at the request of Tamar’s mother Maacah in trying to persuade David to act justly in response to Amnon’s rape of his half-sister. Batsheva explains her need to placate Maacah, who is quick to sense any slight from Batsheva, especially as Maacah is the daughter of a king. Natan reflects on the surprisingly easy relationship he now has with Batsheva, due mainly to their common devotion to Solomon but also to his respect for her intelligence and her growing maturity, which sees her seek to build a positive relationship with David for the sake of her son. This is a character which develops. At the end of David’s life, Batsheva takes charge of his sickroom, deciding who can and cannot have access to the king. When news comes of Adoniyah’s attempted seizure of the throne, Natan tells Batsheva to remind David of his promise to her after her first son died. She denies that any promise was made, but Natan tells her she must say what is necessary for Solomon’s sake. Bathsheva is hesitant to lie to the king. Instead she asks who he wishes to succeed him, and Natan, driven by his vision, asks David if he has really chosen Adoniyah. David then swears that Solomon will be his successor. Brooks thus gives us a Bathsheba who is a survivor of sexual assault who finds a crucial ally in negotiating the politics of the court to ensure that she and her son will survive after David’s death. She is very different from the sexually charged Bathsheba that Marek offers, the haunted and embittered victim of Massie or the victorious but isolated demi-goddess in Lindgren’s account.

216  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 13.6 Conclusion Are there then any commonalities between these different Bathshebas? In her study of the characterisation of Bathsheba in film adaptations, Johanna Stiebert draws on Katie Edwards’s analysis of the use of Eve in advertising to describe what she calls the ‘Eve-ing’ of Bathsheba.7 She points out that Bathsheba is generally presented as more active, colluding and liberated than the biblical account suggests, but her power depends on her sexual allure and she shows little solidarity with other women. In the end, this reinforces rather than subverts the message that women are finally dependent for status and influence on harnessing themselves to powerful men. Could the same can be said for any of these novelisations? Halter’s Bathsheba is an embodiment of the power of female sexuality, but that is conceived in terms that are finally set by the measure of David’s sexuality. They become as one, but on his terms, much as the character seeks to assert her independence. Bathsheba remains defined by her relationships to men in this and in the other adaptations: wife of Uriah, daughter of Eliam, mistress and then wife of David, mother of Solomon. For any novelist drawn to the books of Samuel and Kings, it is hard to resist the charisma of David, which persists across the centuries. Geraldine Brooks claims in an afterword to The Secret Chord that David is the first character in literature whose story is told from childhood to old age (although it should be noted that he lacks any birth narrative). She also confesses that her favourite accounts of his reign are ones which ‘accept David’s character in all its dazzling contradictions’. Bathsheba’s character in all these adaptations, different as they are, is conceived in ways that help the novelist account for at least some of the contradictions in David’s character. Indeed, this tendency has spilled out much further that literary adaptation. In the world of management studies, there is a recognized phenomenon known as ‘the Bathsheba syndrome’, where successful leaders seemingly unaccountably commit ethical violations.8 Although the phenomenon is named after Bathsheba, it is David’s behaviour that is actually under scrutiny in order to account for the propensity of successful leaders to engage in self-destructive breaches of ethical standards. One could argue that Lindgren takes this further and uses both David and Bathsheba to foreground the contradictions in God’s character or in the fabric of human existence, if we prefer that. Could one devise a theodicy based on the premise that the biography of the biblical God is a prime exemplar of the consequences of ‘the Bathsheba symptom’? That might be an intriguing project. What these four examples among many show, however, is that the enigmas of the biblical account of Bathsheba remain, no matter how many attempts have been made to explain them. How we judge her—‘innocent victim or cunning schemer?’— says more about us as readers than it does about her. Notes 1 Among them several have a claim to privileged status: Michal, daughter of Saul and so, in some eyes, the one who confers legitimacy on David as Saul’s successor; Ahinoam,

Bathsheba  217

2 3 4 5

6 7 8

the mother of David’s firstborn son, Amnon; Maacah, herself the daughter of a king, and mother of Absalom; and Abigail, who shows superior diplomatic skill during David’s clash with Nabal. Bloom, Western Canon, 4–5. Koenig, Bathsheba Survives. Nessler, ‘Tracing’. Gunn, in ‘David and Bathsheba’, discusses the various expedients adopted by the authors of children’s bibles to the problem of explaining this story to children, especially where the authors are keen to promote so-called ‘family values’ in a Christian or Jewish context. Throughout the novel, Brooks avoids the conventional English spelling of the names of the characters, preferring a quasi-phonetic transcription of the Hebrew. Stiebert, ‘Eve-ing of Bathsheba’, drawing on Edwards’ Admen and Eve. See, for instance, Ludwig and Longenecker’s ‘Bathsheba Syndrome’.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Brooks, Geraldine. The Secret Chord. London: Abacus, 2016. First published by Viking, New York, 2015. Halter, Marek. Bethsabée ou L’Éloge de l’adultère. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2005. Lindgren, Torgny. Bathsheba. Trans. Tom Geddes. London: Collins Harvill, 1988. First published as Lindgren, Torgny. Bat Seba. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1984. Massie, Allan. King David: A Novel. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. Secondary Sources Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1994. Edwards, Katie Admen and Eve: The Bible in Contemporary Advertising. Bible in the Modern World 48. Sheffield: Phoenix, 2012. Gunn, David. ‘David and Bathsheba in Children’s Bibles and Adult Novels’. In Dan W. Clanton and Terry R. Clark (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 63–82. Koenig, Sara M. Bathsheba Survives. London: SCM Press, 2019. Ludwig, Dean C., and Clinton O. Longenecker. ‘The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful Leaders’. Journal of Management Ethics 12 (1993), pp. 265–273. Müllner, Ilse. ‘Blickwechsel: Batseba und David in Romanen des 20. Jahrhunderts’. Biblical Interpretation 6 (1998), pp. 348–366. Nessler, Brent. ‘Tracing Bathsheba’s Metamorphosis through the Lens of Trauma and Recovery’. JBL 142 (2023), pp. 91–109. Stiebert, Johanna. ‘The Eve-ing of Bathsheba in Twentieth Century Film’. The Bible and Critical Theory 10 (2014), pp. 22–31.

14 Reimagining Abishag Retelling Her Story Thea Gomelauri

14.1 Introduction Sacred texts, similar to other literary works of any genre, are full of gaps—in stories, biographies, laws, and details. These gaps speak of what’s left unsaid and are open to multiple interpretations. They can be seen in various ways. In verse, gaps can hold profound silence, a moment of reflection, a poetic licence. Gaps invite readers to become a part of the narrative, to interpret and engage in poetic imagination. Gaps in the writings tease the mind and provoke the heart. Gaps offer breaths between the lines, allowing thoughts to unfold in their own ways. Sometimes authors of sacred literature deliberately create gaps by omitting material for dramatic effect. Sometimes gaps exist because readers are temporally, linguistically, and culturally removed from the text. Gaps formed by the lack of cultural contexts make readers seek unrestrained understanding of those customs, traditions, and norms which are left unexplained. Through such exercises, the stories and lives of literary heroes and heroines gain new dimensions. When readers engage in active attention, they connect the dots and bridge the divide. They add their own meaning and truth to the narratives. Robert B. Chisholm called a gap-filling in biblical narratives a ‘sanctified imagination exercise’.1 He noted that ‘many of the gaps we perceive in a story would not have been present for an ancient Israelite audience, for ancient readers would have intuitively understood nuances of their language and aspects of their culture better than we do’.2 The retelling of sacred texts invites exploration and unveils multiple layers of wisdom and inspiration. It sparks conversations and offers fresh perspectives. The Hebrew Bible readers, removed from the environment in which these texts were born, should consider the following questions when reading the ancient texts. Who filled the gaps in biblical narratives? When? How many layers of the gap fillers were applied to the original texts? What was the intention of those who engaged in such rewriting exercises?3 14.2 History of Interpretation of the Abishag Narrative The biblical story of Abishag and King David is full of gaps and mysteries. We shall see over the next few pages how these gaps have been filled in and exploited by the literary world which reimagined Abishag’s life. DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-15

Reimagining Abishag  219 In the Bible, Abishag is a silent character of uncertain status and unknown background. However, the story of this seemingly minor character impacted and continues to inspire scholarship beyond Biblical Studies. Abishag’s story is linked with the two greatest kings of Israel—David and Solomon—and the crown prince of ancient Israel—Adonijah. This mysterious young woman appears in the narrative of 1 Kings 1–2. The sacred text introduces Abishag in four verses with 50 Hebrew words: King David was now old, advanced in years; and though they covered him with bedclothes, he never felt warm. His courtiers said to him, ‘Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, to wait upon Your Majesty and be his sokhenet and let her lie in your bosom, and my lord the king will be warm’. So they looked for a beautiful young woman throughout the territory of Israel. They found Abishag the Shunammite and brought her to the king. This young woman was exceedingly beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and waited upon him; but the king was not intimate with her. (1 Kgs 1:1–4, Revised Jewish Publication Society) The biblical narrative describes Abishag as a ‘beautiful young woman’ who is a ‘virgin’. Her role is ‘to stand’ before the king and ‘minister’ him. It sounds like a straightforward description of her duties, but she is said to have become a sokhenet to the king.4 This mysterious word sokhenet translated in the above passage as ‘attendant’, is a hapax legomenon.5 It forms fertile ground for the greatest manipulations. It offers limitless options for an imaginative interpretation of Abishag’s relationship with Kind David. The meaning of sokhenet holds the key to interpreting the ambiguous relationship between Beauty and the King. Forgotten knowledge of this crucial keyword became an endless source for retelling and reimagining the Abishag story.6 This ‘sanctified imagination exercise’ resulted in the depiction of Abishag from the lowest status of a slave girl, a victim of sexual abuse, and a pre-electricity heating blanket to the lofty state of a queen, an administrator of King David’s household, and even to the prototype of the Virgin Mary according to St Jerome’s letter addressed to Nepotian (394 ce).7 Tracing the history of the first non-biblical retelling of the Abishag narrative leads to the first-century historian, Josephus, who reimagined Abishag’s relationship with King David. He found it necessary to clarify the silent details of the biblical story for his readership. Josephus filled the gaps in the biblical narrative in order to remove any ambiguity casting a shadow over King David’s reputation and legacy. Christopher Begg, an expert in Josephus’ reworking and reframing of biblical text, identifies several innovative interpretations in his adaptation of 1 Kgs 1:1–4. He notes that ‘Josephus modified and adapted 1 Kgs 1:1–4 terminologically, stylistically, and contextually’.8 Josephus’ most important innovative interpretation was his suggestion of the meaning of the ambiguous word sokhenet. He explained it in the following way: ‘she [Abishag] merely slept in the same bed with him [David] and kept him warm’ (emphasis added). It is unclear how Josephus arrived at this

220  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry conclusion. Despite the lack of any philological and contextual support, the pious Church Fathers (except for St Jerome who interpreted the narrative allegorically) and the ancient biblical commentators accepted Josephus’ retelling of the Abishag story. Thus, Josephus’ interpretation became the ‘canon text’ for the Abishag narrative and entered into all biblical commentaries and textbooks. At the other end of the gap-filling exercise, St Jerome’s extraordinary imaginative skills led to a mystical reading of the story adding a spiritual dimension to the text. In his letter addressed to Nepotian, St Jerome implores him to ‘listen to the mystical teaching of the sacred writings’. Then he proceeds: Who, then, is this Shunamite, this wife and maid, so glowing as to warn the cold, yet so holy as not to arouse passion in him whom she warmed? (emphasis added) Let Solomon, wisest of men, tell us of his father’s favourite; let the man of peace recount to us the embraces of the man of war. ‘Get wisdom’, he writes, ‘get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. Forsake her not and she shall preserve thee: love her and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her and she shall promote thee. She shall bring thee to honour when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee’.9 St Jerome suggests that the person of Abishag refers to highly desirable biblical Wisdom: ‘even the very name Abishag in its mystic meaning points to the greater wisdom of old men’.10 St Jerome continues: Let Wisdom alone embrace me; let her nestle in my bosom, my Abishag who grows not old. Undefiled truly is she, and a virgin forever for although she daily conceives and unceasingly brings to the birth, like Mary she remains undeflowered.11 St Jerome’s interpretation of the Abishag story as the personification of the divine Wisdom stands in a starting contract with the lowly status of a maid-nurse ascribed to her by Josephus. Given the ambiguity of the Abishag story and the multiplicity of its interpretation, most biblical scholars avoid dwelling on this passage in their works. For example, Whybray’s detailed study of 1 Kings 1–2, which stretches over 118 pages, mentions Abishag three times only, while the biblical text mentions her by name five times.12 In Whybray’s book, Abishag does not even make a minor character. The feminist biblical scholarship, in contrast to the traditional interpretation of Abishag as David’s ‘hot-water bottle’, reimagined her story as patriarchal power abuse and portrayed it as the first recorded case of child sexual abuse.13 Some scholars went as far as renaming the Abishag narrative the ‘failed rape attempt’.14 According to their claims, Abishag was spared from rape only because of King David’s frailty and impotence. Not all female scholars agreed with such a radically different retelling of the Abishag narrative. For example, instead of casting her as a victim of patriarchal abuse, Adele Berlin lifted Abishag from her lowly state of a ‘hot-water bottle’ (as

Reimagining Abishag  221 depicted by Josephus) and promoted her to the honourable position of the last wife of King David.15 Robert Alter infuses the Abishag narrative with new meaning through his novel translation.16 By rendering sokhenet as ‘familiar’, Alter fills the textual gap with the previously unused word. He presents a new image of Abishag—the one who is ‘familiar’ to the king. This biblical interpretation takes the Abishag story to a new level and steers her life towards realms unfamiliar to traditional biblical commentators. The most recent and substantial study of Abishag by Daniel Bodi presents her as the ‘Administrator of King David’s House’.17 Nonetheless, biblical scholarship is still working on deciphering the meaning of the word sokhenet to give a meaningful explanation of Abishag’s mysterious presence at the royal court and her enigmatic role in its affairs. 14.3 Creative Interpretation: Retelling Abishag’s Story in Fiction and Poetry Multiple options for filling the gaps in the Abishag narrative provided an open source for wild artistic imaginations and creative readings. Abishag’s enigmatic presence at the royal court of Israel has inspired the production of an astonishingly wide range of literature.18 This short story written in 50 Hebrew words attracted not only the attention of biblical scholars but also artists, poets, novelists, playwrights, composers, historians, physicians, and scientists.19 The interpretation of the biblical story of Abishag contributed to multiple academic fields from Literature, History, Arts, and Classics to Psychology, Sexology, Anthropology, and the Life Sciences.20 Details of Abishag’s pre- and post-royal lives, which are omitted in the Bible, have been reimagined and retold through twelve fully fledged biographical novels which expand on the biblical story written on sacred parchment with a few lines.21 The Abishag narrative also gained particular popularity through Hollywood movies, Opera, over 28 stage plays, a musical album, over 200 poems, and more than 25 paintings featured in prestigious museums. There is even a perfume line offering a scent of Abishag: ‘Abishag—Biblical Bouquet—A Fragrance of Antiquity’, a limited-edition commission sold in the museum shop of the Museum of Israel in Jerusalem in the 1990s.22 Émile Zola,23 Joseph Heller,24 Aldous Huxley,25 Leonard Cohen,26 Itzik Manger,27 Vladimir Nabokov28 and many other renowned writers referenced Abishag in their works, reimagining her fate through the characters of their novels.29 The most surprising aspect of Abishag’s literary life is that she is the most cited biblical character in the occult and sex-cult30 practices involving a secret elixir of life also known as the Philosopher’s Stone.31 The term ‘Shunamitism’, which has entered the medical lexicon, was coined after Abishag’s perceived role in King David’s life.32

222  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 14.4 Retelling Abishag’s Story by Male Poets 14.4.1 Jacob Glatstein’s ‘Abishag’

The Polish-born Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971), an emigrant to the United States, was the most celebrated Yiddish poet. Before he died in 1971, he founded the introspective group of Yiddish writers, and published thirteen volumes of poetry, in addition to many novels and plays. Glatstein developed a sophisticated, individualistic, and ironic style, sparkling with wit and innovations of language. He believed in experimentation in poetry and used biblical allusions effectively. His poem ‘Abishag’ brings the concerns of nature, body, and sexuality to a literary tradition notable for the absence of these themes.33 Glatstein captures essential points of the biblical story. The poem compresses David’s life into a few intense lines. The reader can recognise that David is king because songs were sung by and of him. His greatness is rooted not only in the power of his sword but the truth of his words, ‘there must be songs steeped in more truth than my sins’. It was his power with words that made him king. Glatstein articulates the encounter between David and Abishag through a profound appreciation of language. In his work, the old king and young maiden are made equal by their mutual ability to speak to each other. The poem is named after Abishag, but the leading character is David. Abishag is given a single repetitive line as a refrain. Gladstein wrote and spoke with an imperative voice. He demonstrated Abishag’s steadfastness through her repetitive responses. At first, David tells Abishag: Shout in the streets—King David isn’t dead yet. All King David wants is some sleep, but they won’t let him alone. Adonijah and his gang shout the crown from my grey head. The fat Bathsheba blesses me with eternal life and watches over my last words with a sly smile. Abishag soothes him with a refrain ‘Sleep, my king. The night is still. We are all your slaves’, but a stanza later David is ready to relinquish the throne by throwing his ‘crown into the street—up for grabs’. Abishag’s answers constantly deflect David’s attention from his distress: ‘Sleep a while, my king. The night is dead. We are all your slaves’. Galchinsky suggests that Glatstein’s David speaks ‘in the tradition of the patriarchal poet, once the spirit of the children Israel, but now addressing a powerless audience’.34 The poet patronises Abishag with the adjectives used after every refrain: ‘Abishag. Small, country-girl Abishag’, and again, ‘Abishag. Small, sad Abishag’. The most striking line, which condenses the fifty-word biblical narrative, comes in the third stanza. It describes Abishag as ‘a tiny kitten thrown in the cage of the old toothless lion’—King David. But Abishag’s replies to King David’s anguish remain unchanged. Even though Glatstein gives a voice to Abishag, it is not a dialogue even between unequals. Her replies to King David are a formality, even a lie, ‘for though Abishag is indeed his slave, all are not: she is the only one’.35

Reimagining Abishag  223 Rest, my king. The night is still. We are all your slaves. Go to sleep, my king, it’s almost dawn. We are all your slaves. Glatstein’s poem is a secular prophecy. His masterful variation of the refrain which always ends with the phrase ‘we are all your slaves’ suggests that, at the crossroads of life, even a powerful sovereign can find himself at the mercy of a slave. In Yiddish literary circles, Glatstein’s Abishag was considered ‘the finest Yiddish poem of recent times’.36 Glatstein’s retelling of Abishag’s story does not differ significantly from Josephus’ version. Even though the poet gives Abishag the power of speech, he limits her ability to speak from her mind. Glatstein’s Abishag is no longer a silent woman as she is in the biblical narrative, but repetitive formulaic words put in her mouth by the author effectively mute any expression of feelings. 14.4.2 Jacob Fichman’s ‘Abishag’

Jacob Fichman (1881–1958) was a Russian-born poet who remained an adherent of the classical lyric tradition which was reflected in biblical poems, and elegies. His poem ‘Abishag’ is written from a female perspective.37 Unlike Glatstein’s literary work, this poetic rendering of the story of Abishag features a single female character. The absence of King David’s voice and Abishag’s lament makes the reimagined narrative a monologue, devoid of any relational elements. The poem, written in two-line stanzas, suppresses the poet’s voice. Fichman’s Abishag laments about her ‘wasted age’ while living in a ‘castle of splendour’. She compares the days of her life with silently fallen leaves. In contrast to Glatstein’s Abishag, Fichman’s maiden is a self-focused character who misses the simple pleasures of life. I waste my teeming age. I do not know When crops grow golden and the earth brings forth. In castle splendor, in imperial purpose, A locust wilderness devours my bloom. Fichman’s poem does not add any imaginative details to the Abishag’s character. It gives her a voice to channel her sorrows and resound her lament loudly. At the end of the poem, Abishag makes a single reference to David who continues playing music in his heart. But when night find sleepless and my eye pierces the darkness of the frozen castle, Like a bird in its morning next, a world then stirs, The king’s heart plays upon the fiddle strings. As Schwartz and Rudolph note, in the short couplets of a female voice, ‘Fichman empathetically conveys the bittersweet passion of the young girl for the king’.38

224  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 14.4.3 Leon Titche’s Abishag’s Lament

The narrative poem of Leon Titche (1939–2018) is the longest poetic piece written about the story of Abishag. The author borrows the title of Itzik Manger’s well-known poem Abishag’s Lament in the Yiddish language. However, the reader would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful connection between this work stretched over 103 pages and the biblical narrative recorded in 1 Kgs 1:1–4, save for a few lines directly quoting from the Bible. The narrative poem deals with the biblical figure of Abishag as a leitmotif, set in both past and present. The bulk of the scenes take place in the Deep South of the United States, beginning in the 1960s and concluding in the twenty-first century. The lines quoted from the sacred text are mixed with various biblical characters (Cain, Jacob, etc.) who have never been previously associated with this story. It remains unclear what the author’s intentions are with such an unlikely constellation of biblical characters from various narratives and different eras. Long after the exultation of Cain Long after Jacobus’s redemption from this hirsute.

(Titche, p. 3)

Titche reimagines a depressed Abishag. Despair, abandonment, and helplessness set the tone of the narrative poem as the most frequently used words. The author plunges Abishag ‘into the abyss of despair’ where she pleads for her innocence (Titche, p. 4). Titche’s Abishag lacks the beauty and grace that the biblical author bestows to her. The reader encounters a woman with a ‘silent expression of despair, abandoned, unable to traverse even level ground without stumbling’ (p. 5). Abishag’s lament is not heard because there is no one to whom to convey the actuality of despair. The author stresses the contrasts between Abishag and King David by declaring him dead before he departed from this world. and lo, she slept, but not like the dead king.

(Titche, p. 33)

Furthermore, Abishag is portrayed as a revenging character who rejoices in the death of King David as it marks her liberation. Now King David was old, he was, In tears, and when his body was carried away by the servants She mourned him not, but rejoiced, And in that rejoicing she discovered her freedom.

(Titche, p. 76)

Reimagining Abishag  225 This longest narrative poem claiming to express Abishag’s lament is a disappointing reading from both prosaic and poetic perspectives. The author does not engage in creative conversation to convey imaginative views of the main characters of the story. Titche’s Abishag is a slave girl, but the author misses the point—slaves did not gain freedom after the death of their owners. Titche’s work adds little if any value to the Abishag narrative in a fictional literary world. The author attempts to present what appears to be a poorly written work in an unusual, unconventional layout with asymmetrically scattered lines. The motivation of the author is unclear. The reader is left pondering whether Titche tried to attract readers’ attention by borrowing the title of another famous poem. It might be one of the most meaningless literary pieces ever written about the biblical story of Abishag. 14.4.4 Robert Frost’s ‘Provide, Provide’

The American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963) was highly honoured for his literary works. The poem ‘Provide, Provide’ was first published in 1934 as part of his collection A Further Range. Randall Jarrell extravagantly praised the poem as ‘an immortal masterpiece full of the deepest, and most touching moral wisdom’.39 The repetition of the word ‘provide’ in the title immediately emphasises the central theme of the poem—providing for oneself or securing one’s future. However, the repetition also suggests an urgency, almost as if urging or commanding to provide. In contrast to Glatstein, Fichman, and Titche, Frost does not mention the names of the biblical characters in the poem title. He does not even reference any detail of the biblical story in the poem except a single reference to Abishag.40 The poem reflects on human desires and the relentless pursuit of material wealth and security. ‘Provide, Provide’ in its essence presents a radically different imaginative approach to the poetic retelling of ancient texts. It is written in rhymed couplets, contributing to its rhythmic and almost sing-song quality. The rhyme and metre create a steady, controlled pace, which contrasts with the potentially chaotic and unpredictable nature of life that the poem addresses. In the 21 lines that follow, the poet contemplates on hard truth about human life and its transitory nature. All human endeavours, no matter how grand, are subject to decay and disappearance over time. Abishag is mentioned in the first four short lines only once. She is presented as someone who once was a ‘picture pride of Hollywood’.41 However, in her old age, she finds herself to be poverty-stricken, ugly, and friendless. The former ‘Miss Hollywood’ has no other option but to scrub the steps of a public building on her knees. The witch that came (the withered hag) To wash the steps with pail and rag, Was once the beauty Abishag, The picture pride of Hollywood.42 What went wrong with Abishag? How did she fall from grace to such a lowly state? Frost hints that ‘virtue does not ensure a good end. A person can fall from

226  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry goodness; a good person can fall into disrepute’.43 The sixth stanza conveys the harsh truth about life, reminding the readers that the memory of previous achievements does not last long. It cannot keep ‘the end from being hard’.44 Abishag’s fate, that of a forgotten, destitute old charwoman, is precisely the ‘fate’ that the poem is counselling to avoid. The author makes his recommendation in a series of five imperative sentences. The first advice to avoid the fate is to die early! But those who are predestined to die late should make up their minds to die in state. The reader immediately realises that this is not an option—death whether early or late is predestined. The irony increases in the next piece of advice which advises the reader to make the whole stock exchange their own! The poet seems to suggest that compromising one’s principles or even engaging in morally questionable actions is justified in the pursuit of a comfortable life. Laurence Perrine points out that while Frost makes recommendations about how, if possible, to avoid Abishag’s fate, he employs irony throughout the poem to lead to the answer. The next piece of advice is equally unrealistic. The poet suggests that it is better to go down dignified, even if surrounded by bought friendship than to face the end alone like Abishag who will with little doubt die unnoticed and be buried without ceremony. How can one protect oneself from such an end when none of the suggested remedies seems realistic or doable? Laurence Perrine suggests that Frost’s answer has been overlooked because it is given to a reader inconspicuously. Instead of giving this opinion an imperative tone, the poet makes it closer to being a hint, not even a suggestion. And unlike most nineteenth-century poets, the author does not place it in the climactic final stanza of the poem. Frost uses the common words with the lowest syllable count.45 It is uttered so quietly that most readers miss it. Some have relied on what they knew; Others on simply being true.46 What worked for them might work for you.47 Frost’s ‘Provide, Provide’ referring to Abishag’s fate offers a contemplative work which delves into the complex issues of human life, mortality, and the pursuit of success. It reveals a somewhat cynical perspective on the compromises individuals may make in their quest for security and the transient nature of worldly achievements. Frost masterfully uses the ambiguous biblical story of Abishag to emphasise a transitory nature of beauty and riches and to reimagine a better world in which a dignified end is available to those who are ‘simply being true’. 14.5 Retelling Abishag’s Story by Female Poets 14.5.1 Louise Glück’s ‘Abishag’

Considered one of America’s most talented contemporary poets, Louise Glück (1943–2023), the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the 2020 Noble Prize

Reimagining Abishag  227 laureate, penned one of the most poignant creative poetic pieces of Abishag’s story. She dedicated her attention to this biblical narrative at the early stage of her literary career and recreated the imaginative version of Abishag’s life.48 Glück takes liberties with the biblical text and turns it in several new directions. She pays attention to the absence of important details in the Bible. The poetess fills those gaps by introducing new characters such as Abishag’s father and Abishag’s suitors.49 The author depicts Abishag ‘between men’ through the lenses of the imagined father-daughter conversation.50 Glück’s midrash-like work transforms the silent Abishag into the speaking subject in a first-person narrative poem, but the only man Abishag converses with is her father. So that my father turned to me saying How much have I ever asked of you to which I answered Nothing

(Glück, p. 87)

In the first part of the poem, the decision of Abishag’s father defines her future. Abishag’s dutiful and brave answers condemn her to a fate which becomes the source of her recurring dream. In the second part of the poem, Glück transfers the decision-making power to the female character. Now Abishag has a choice but in the dream only. Glück imagines Abishag in the presence of her suitors where she, and not her father, has a decision-making choice. I hear my father saying Choose, choose. But they were not alike and to select death, O yes I can believe that of my body.

(Glück, p. 88)

Interestingly, a perspective of Abishag’s mother is entirely omitted to emphasise male dominance over the lives of women. Morris notes that Abishag’s description does not register any emotional response or psychological traits.51 The most striking point of Glück’s retelling of Abishag’s narrative lies in its association with another biblical narrative—the Binding of Isaac (Gen 22:1–19). The author employs well-known biblical terminology to reveal her intimate thoughts about Abishag’s fate: ‘binding me I cannot be saved’ (Glück, p. 88). Glück explores the biblical narrative through naming and association. In her version of the Abishag story, a young girl is sacrificed by her father for a higher purpose similar to Abraham’s intention to sacrifice his son Isaac. Glück’s poem reveals a critique of patriarchy. Even though she leaves her readers with the melodramatic tones of suicidal desperation, in a larger sense, Glück’s literary work illustrates the human need to believe that choice is possible and, even when it is not, to transfigure reality to make it seem possible.

228  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 14.5.2 Ruth Whitman’s ‘Translating for Jacob Glatstein’

Ruth Whitman (1922–1999), a famed translator of Yiddish poetry, tried conscientiously to ‘open a window on the text, and sometimes she came near to succeeding’.52 The title of Whitman’s poem suggests Glatstein’s influence on her reflection about Abishag. However, when studied in juxtaposition with Glatstein’s ‘Abishag’, Whitman’s nuanced reading reveals significant differences. The poetess’ choice of the title indicates her wish that her work should be read vis-à-vis Glatstein’s imaginative retelling of the biblical narrative. Metaphors and verbal images in both poems reveal how differently Whitman and Glatstein interpret the Abishag story and how she seeks to correct the ‘original’ author. To begin with, Whitman counters Glatstein’s dramatic description of characters who portrayed David as a ‘toothless lion’ and Abishag as a ‘small kitten thrown in the cage’.53 Whitman negates these diminishing depictions with nuanced references. She uses a dignified language to counter deeply rooted perceptions about the constantly mocked relationship between King David and Abishag. For Whitman, the non-carnal relationship between King David and Abishag is a matter of David’s conscious decision. He did not enter her.

(Whitman, p. 115)

The author’s nuanced choice of words—‘he did not’ as opposed to ‘he could not’— sets the record straight. This quietly spoken single monostich in the heterometric poem, separated from the preceding and following lines by extra spaces, screams at a reader. Unlike Glatstein, neither Abishag nor King David speaks in the first-person narration. Whitman focuses on Abishag’s inner beauty and describes her as ‘intelligent and kind’ (p. 115). In contrast to Glatstein, Whitman’s Abishag is not a slave girl. She is King David’s co-conversationalist. King David might be affected by insomnia, but he is not a ‘toothless’ man. And since he was sleepless He told her what He was thinking. The poetess begins recounting David’s life since ‘he was a boy’ (Whitman, p. 115). The following eighteen lines describe his life in a nutshell. In listing King David’s multiple tribulations and sorrows, Whitman masterfully replicates the most frequently used biblical technique—repetition—to mark the point of the utmost significance. She displays King David’s intimate feelings and reveals his greatest regrets: was betrayed by a son, a son

(Whitman, p. 116)

Reimagining Abishag  229 The author does not specify who the ‘betrayer’ is. It is left to readers’ interpretation whether she is referring to Amnon or Absalom or both by invoking the word ‘son’ twice.54 Whitman’s final reference to King David’s life is not a statement but a question mark: how songs still came to him

(Whitman, p. 116)

The poem ends with Abishag’s image as a silent and compassionate listener to David’s confessions. Abishag, brought to warm old King David, is herself warmed by his poems. Whitman’s ‘Translating for Jacob Glatstein’ counters Glatstein’s creative retelling of the Abishag narrative. It tries to reclaim the original biblical text as closely as possible. 14.6 Conclusion The ambiguous narrative and gaps in the biblical text about Abishag present countless possibilities for its creative retelling. The literary world produced a large corpus of Abishag-Apocrypha by imaginative exercises of sacred texts. The wide range of literary works presents Abishag’s fate in contrasting and often contradicting light—from a constant lament and feelings of despair to the sympathy and satisfaction that come from doing acts of kindness. Glatstein grants Abishag the gift of speech through which she enters into the conversation with King David, but the poet immediately limits her self-expression by pre-defined repetitive phrases which do not express her true feelings. Fichman presents Abishag from a female perspective and conveys her bittersweet passion. Titche’s Abishag is trapped in a cage and dreams of freedom. Frost uses the Abishag reference to deliver life lessons. Louise Glück introduces extra-biblical characters in Abishag’s story. She depicts her as the maiden who is obedient to her father’s wishes to the point of self-sacrifice, drawing a parallel with the Binding of Isaac. Finally, Whitman reframes Glatstein’s imagination of the Abishag narrative and restores the biblical text even if partially. All poets surveyed above reimagine the Abishag narrative and retell her story through their creative impulses and limited understanding of the complex biblical texts. The story of Abishag remains one of the most ambiguous biblical narratives. Abishag, a young beautiful virgin from the village of Shunem, continues to inspire and challenge the imaginations of the literary world. She invites bright minds to unravel her mysteries by reimagining Abishag and retelling her story. Notes 1 Chisholm, Interpreting, p. 70. 2 Chisholm, Interpreting, p. 69.

230  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 3 Sternberg, ‘How’, pp. 115–122. 4 The meaning of the Hebrew word sokhenet is uncertain. 5 The masculine form of this noun is recorded in Isa 22:15 in relation to Shebna’s status. See further Rowley, ‘Hezekiah’s’, p. 103; Gray, I and II Kings, p. 611; Ganzel, ‘Isaiah’s’, p. 480; Hays, Death, p. 225; Avigad, ‘Epitaph’, p. 137. 6 Fishelov, ‘Biblical’, p. 25. 7 Stahlberg, Sustaining, p. 122; St Jerome, ‘Letter to Nepotian’, 52:4. 8 Begg, ‘Josephus’, pp. 85–108; Feldman, Josephus’s, p. 235. 9 Prov 4:5–9. 10 Jerome, 52:4. 11 Jerome, 52:4. Emphasis added. 12 Whybray, Succession, pp. 155–156. 13 Schetky, Child, p. 26; Schroer, Toward, p. 92. 14 Scholz, Sacred, p. 136; Wright, David, p. 7; Bells, Helpmates, p. 45. 15 Berlin, Characterization, pp. 69–85; Frymer-Kensky, Reading, p. 202. 16 Alter, David, p. 7. 17 Bodi, Abishag, p. 1. 18 Baumgarten, ‘Abishag’, pp. 58–59. 19 Jeffrey, Dictionary, pp. 33–34. 20 Baumgarten, ‘Abishag’, p. 135. 21 Myers, Abishag, 1899; Schütz, Avishag, 1990; Lotan, Avishag, 2002; Dimock, Abi, 2004; Vandervelde, Abishag, 2007; Evans, Abishag, 2009; Burg, Avishag. 2011; Fraase, Abishag, 2011; Grampa, Abishag, 2011; Gilliland, Comfort, 2014; Barnes, The Story, 2020; Howard, Avishag, 2023. 22 The Abishag couture line of a perfume production offering a perfume a pomade, a soap, and a sachet of Biblical herbs. https://ayalamoriel​.com​/blogs​/smellyblog​/16965983– abishag. 23 Zola, Doctor, 1894. 24 Craig, Tilting, 1997. 25 Huxley, After, 1950. 26 Morley, Immoral, 1972. 27 Manger, World, 2002. 28 Pifer, Vladimir, 2003. 29 Koplowitz-Breier, ‘Power’, pp. 21–36. 30 Laurent, Magica, 1934; Walker, Sex, 1970; Waldemar, Mystery, 1960; Blavatsky, Isis, 1997. 31 Robinson, Medical, p. 547; Kottel, Medicine, p. 234; Redgrove, Roger, p. 322. 32 Trimble, 5,000, p. 417. 33 Glatstein, Jacob. ‘Abishag’, p. 210. 34 Galchinsky, One, p. 244. 35 Galchinsky, One, p. 244. 36 Galchinsky, One, p. 241. 37 Fichman, ‘Abishag’, p. 79. 38 Schwartz and Rudolph, Voices, p. 5. 39 Jarrell, Laodiceans, p. 41. 40 Lea, ‘Making’, p. 276 41 Abel, ‘Frost’s Provide’, p. 24. 42 Abel, ‘Frost’s Provide’, p. 24. 43 Perrine, ‘Provide’, p. 35. 44 Perrine, ‘Provide’, p. 35. 45 Perrine, ‘Provide’, pp. 37–38. 46 Emphasis added. 47 Abel, ‘Frost’s Provide’, p. 24.

Reimagining Abishag  231 48 Louise Glück wrote another poem about King David, namely, ‘A Parable’. See Glück, First Four Books of Poems, 195–196. 49 Morris, Poetry, pp. 79–80. 50 Kosofsky, Between, p. 81. 51 Morris, Poetry, p. 81. 52 Hine, Critic, p. 45. 53 Glatstein’s reference to ‘toothless lion’ refers to David’s sexual impotence, in line with many biblical commentators. 54 This is the only repetition of words in the entire poem.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Barnes, Ted. The Story of Abishag. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2020. Burg, Avraham. Avishag. Or Yehudah: Devir, 2011. Dimock, Herb, and Gil Matthew. Abi: More than Nurse to King David. Eddy Publishing, 2004. Evans, Carla. Abishag. Clifton Springs, Victoria: Carla Evans, 2009. Fichman, Jacob. ‘Abishag’. In Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolph (eds), Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York, NY: Avon Books, 1980, p. 79. Fraase, Edward. Abishag: The Half-Wife. Durham, CT: Strategic Book Group, 2011. Frost, Robert. A Further Range. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co, 1936, p. 213. Gilliland, Debbie. To Comfort a King. Leeds, England: Emerald House Group, 2014. Glatstein, Jacob. ‘Abishag’. In David Curzon (ed.), Modern Poems on the Bible: An Anthology. Translated from the Yiddish by Richard J. Fein. Philadelphia and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 2010, p. 210. Glück, Louise. The First Four Books of Poems. New York, NY: Ecco Press, 1995, pp. 87–88. Grampa, Ed. Abishag: The Half-Wife. New York, NY: Eloquent Books, 2011. Howard, Adam. Avishag. Nashville, TN: House of Howard Publishing, 2023. Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer. London: Chatto & Windus, 1950. Lotan, Yael. Avishag. New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2002. Manger, Itzik, and Leonard Wolf. The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose. New Haven: Yale Uni Press, 2002. Myers, Francis. Abishag, the Shunamite: A Tale of the Time of Solomon, King of Israel, and Sesonchis, King of Egypt. London, 1899. Schütz, David. Avishag. Jerusalem: Keter, 1990. St Jerome. ‘A Letter to Nepotian’. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W.G. Martley (transl.). In Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Second Series 6. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1893. Titche, Leon. Abishag’s Lament. Mellen Poetry Press, 2000. Vandervelde, Isabel. Abishag. Xlibris Corp, 2007. Whitman, Ruth. Laughing Gas: Poems New and Selected, 1963–1990. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 115–116. Zola, Émile. Doctor Pascal, Or, Life and Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus, 1894. Secondary Sources Abel, Darrel. ‘Frost’s Provide, Provide’. The Explicator 46 (1988), pp. 24–26. Alter, Robert. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2000. Avigad, Nahman. ‘The Epitaph of a Royal Steward from Siloam Village’. IEJ 3.3 (1953), pp. 137–152.

232  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Baumgarten, Murray. ‘Abishag: The Body’s Song’. In (ed.), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 56–71. Baumgarten, Murray. ‘Abishag’. In David H. Hirsch and Nehama Aschkenasy (eds), Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984, pp. 127–141. Begg, Christopher. ‘Josephus’ Retelling of 1 Kings 1 for a Graeco-Roman Audience’. TynBul 57.1 (2006), pp. 85–108. Bells, Alice Ogden. Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994. Berlin, Adele. ‘Characterization in Biblical Narrative: David’s Wives’. JOTS 7.23 (1982), pp. 69–85. Blavatsky, H P, and Michael Gomes. Isis Unveiled: Secrets of the Ancient Wisdom Tradition, Madame Blavatsky’s First Work. Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Pub. House, 1997. Bodi, Daniel. Abishag: Administrator of King David’s Household. HBM 93. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2021. Chisholm, Robert. Interpreting the Historical Books: An Exegetical Handbook. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2006. Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit, Mich: Wayne State University, 1997. Feldman, Louis. Josephus’s Interpretation of Bible. Hellenistic Culture and Society 27. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Fishelov, David. ‘Biblical Women in World and Hebrew Literature’. In Paula E. Hyman and Dalia Ofer (eds), Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jerusalem: Jewish Women’s Archive–Shalvi Publishing, 2006, pp. 1–41. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva Simone. Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories. New York, NY: Schocken, 2002. Galchinsky, Michael. ‘One Jew Talking: Jacob Glatstein’s Diminished Imperative Voice’. Prooftexts 11.3 (1991), pp. 241–257. Ganzel, Tova. ‘Isaiah’s Critique of Shebna’s Trespass: A Reconsideration of Isaiah 22.15– 25’. JSOT 39.4 (2015), pp. 469–487. Gray, John. I & II Kings: A Commentary. OTL. London: SCM, 1977. Hays, Christopher B. Death in the Iron Age II and in First Isaiah. FAT 79. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Hine, Daryl. ‘Critic of the Month: II: Several Makers: Poets and Translators’. Poetry 113.1 (1968), pp. 35–59. Jarrell, Randall. ‘To the Laodiceans’. The Kenyon Review 14.4 (1952), pp. 535–561. Jeffrey, David L. A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992. Koplowitz-Breier, Anat. ‘The Power of Words: The Biblical Abishag in Contemporary American Jewish Women’s Poetry’. Studies in American Jewish Literature 37.1 (2018), pp. 21–36. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985. Kottek, Samuel S. Medicine and Hygiene in the Works of Flavious Josephus. Studies in Ancient Medicine 9. Brill: Leiden, 1994. Laurent, Emile, and Paul Nagour. Magica Sexualis: Mystic Love Books of Black Arts and Secret Sciences. NY Falstaff Press, 1934. Lea, Sydney. ‘Making a Case, or, Where Are You Coming From?’ New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 12.3 (1990), pp. 267–279. Morley, Patricia A. The Immoral Moralists: Hugh Maclennan and Leonard Cohen. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1972. Morris, Daniel. The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction. Columbia and London: University of Missouri, 2006.

Reimagining Abishag  233 Perrine, Laurence. ‘Provide, Provide’. The Robert Frost Review 2 (1992), pp. 33–39. Pifer, Ellen. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Redgrove, H. Stanley. Roger Bacon, the Father of Experimental Science and Mediaeval Occultism. London: William Rider & Son, 1920. Robinson, William J. Medical and Sex Dictionary. New York, NY: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1933. Rowley, Harold Henry. Men of God: Studies in Old Testament History and Prophecy. London: Nelson, 1963. Schetky, Diane H., and Arthur H. Green. Child Sexual Abuse: A Handbook for Health Care and Legal Professionals. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel, 1988. Scholz, Susanne. Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2010. Schroer, Silvia. ‘Toward a Feminist Reconstruction of the History of Israel’. In Luise Schottroff, Silvia Schroer, and Marie-Theres Wacker (eds), Feminist Interpretation: The Bible in Women’s Perspective. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998, pp. 83–176. Schwartz, Howard, and Anthony Rudolph (eds). Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York, NY: Avon Books, 1980. Stahlberg, Lesleigh Cushing. Sustaining Fictions: Intertextuality, Midrash, Translation, and the Literary Afterlife of the Bible. LHBOTS 486. New York, NY: T & T Clark, 2008. Sternberg, Meir. ‘How Narrativity Makes a Difference’. Narrative 9.2 (2001), pp. 115–122. Trimble, John F. 5,000 Adult Sex Words & Phrases. North Hollywood, CA: Brandon House, 1900. Whybray, Roger Norman. The Succession Narrative: A Study of II Samuel 9–20; I Kings 1 and 2. London: SCM, 1968. Waldemar, Charles. The Mystery of Sex. London: Elek Books, 1960. Walker, Benjamin. Sex and the Supernatural: Sexuality in Religion and Magic. London: Macdonald & Co, 1970. Wright, Jacob L. David, King of Israel, and Caleb in Biblical Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

15 Reception of Daniel in Novels Jason M. Silverman

15.1 Introduction The Book of Daniel is set within the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian Empires, a period often now referred to as the ‘long sixth century (bce [c. 626–484])’.1 This is due to significant continuities in Babylonia in this timeframe. Scholars have long been aware, however, that the book’s depiction of the political history of the period is skewed at best.2 Indeed, critical scholarship maintains a consensus that the apocalypse derives from the Seleucid-era Levant and that the cycle of stories likely circulated independently before their collection into the extant forms.3 For those committed to the book as something more than a religious novella, this poses difficulties, especially if they are dedicated to an ostensibly literal reading of the text—as a strain of Fundamentalist and Evangelical Protestants are wont to do.4 Further, a number of other biblical texts relate directly or indirectly to the same historical period, and these texts provide ready-made and long accepted interpretations of the period’s events. Nonetheless, awareness of extra-biblical sources for this time period have percolated into the public consciousness, not least through the well-known museums in London, Paris, and Berlin. The Cyrus Cylinder, in particular, has achieved public notice, impacting popular culture already in the early twentieth century through Intolerance (1916) and more recently through a public museum tour in the United States.5 Novelists interacting with the Book of Daniel, therefore, have access to material which promises to fill in the gaps in its episodic narrative but which does not harmonise with it. A number of strategies are available to the author: ignoring the historical information wholesale, adjusting the biblical narrative to fit with known historical details, or an attempt to harmonise the two. This chapter treats three recent novels that take different approaches to retelling Daniel, though all three are strongly controlled by religious motivations: Shlomo Kalo’s The Chosen (‫רחבנה‬, 1994, English trans. 2015), Mesu Andrews’ Of Fire and Lions (2019), and Joseph R. Chambers’ Nebuchadnezzar, the Head of Gold (2009). All three are ostensibly set in the long sixth century.6 According to his own autobiography, Kalo (1928–2014) was a concentration camp survivor.7 Originally a microbiologist, Kalo turned into a reclusive Israeli New Age-cum-messianic Jewish spiritual leader and author.8 Andrews (1963–) is an Evangelical novelist who largely expands on female characters from biblical narratives. She describes DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-16

Reception of Daniel in Novels  235 her own method as attempting to use fiction to hold together ‘facts and Truth’.9 The third author is Joseph R. Chambers (1936–), a premillennial dispensationalist preacher at a nondenominational church who is prolific in writing dispensationalist tracts.10 This novel is one of his two forays so far into self-professed fiction.11 The Chosen retells the story from Daniel’s point of view (though told through third-person pronouns, which can lead to confusion over which character is being referenced at any given time). The narrative proceeds mostly in a continuous timeline, though heavily interspersed with long passages evoking divine love. Of Fire and Lions takes the point of view of Daniel’s wife. The narrative frequently jumps back and forth between times, with numerous flashbacks and intimations of future events. Lastly, the book Nebuchadnezzar, the Head of Gold purports to be a ‘love story’ and biography of King Nebuchadnezzar II, though it is clearly written to bolster the Danielic account. It begins with Nabopolassar and ends with the fall of Babylon under Belshazzar. The style is wooden and unaccomplished, with excessive adjectives and adverbs and dialogue almost wholly comprising exposition. Daniel was from early on received as a prophet, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.12 Unsurprisingly, the novels all treat him accordingly. All three novels presume the Hebrew canon, making reference to other prophetic texts, the psalms, and historiographical writings. Indeed, all three novels quote the received biblical text, though in different manners. Kalo frequently reprints entire passages more or less verbatim from Daniel. Kalo wishes to expand on the stories within a canonical narrative and with his unique spiritual philosophy. Kalo opens his work with a disclaimer that he is not interested in presenting an ‘academic treatise’ but rather in ‘the Spirit’. For him, this appears to mean treating Daniel as a perfect spiritual being—indeed, one of 36 messiahs13—and thus the received text as sacrosanct. Andrews begins every chapter with the citation of a verse (in NIV), either from the relevant Danielic story being retold or from elsewhere in the canon. These appear to function largely like ‘prooftexts’, as is common in Evangelical discourse. She even appends a devotional reading guide to the novel. In some ways she is spared from having to interpret the text’s difficulties by choosing to focus on a completely extra-biblical character (Daniel’s wife), creating space for creativity without challenging the text. She does, however, explicitly justify this through asserting that ‫ סריס‬does not necessarily indicate eunuch status.14 Chambers periodically quotes verses within the dialogue (in KJV). Chambers is concerned to demonstrate the historical veracity of the biblical account, presumably with the aim of strengthening his premillennial dispensationalism. It also appears he primarily wishes to bolster his historical authority to his acolytes though the book; the writing often comes across as a bad undergraduate history essay rather than a novel. All three novels presume that a plethora of scriptural scrolls was circulated in Daniel’s time. Kalo has the exiles present a Torah scroll written by Joshua son of Nun to King Darius (who already knew who Joshua was!).15 Andrews has Daniel instrumental in collating Judean records.16 Both Daniel and his wife also pray the Shema while trying to gain courage for the lion’s den.17 Furthermore, like Josephus, Andrews has Cyrus read about himself in Isaiah, motivating him to support the return and rebuilding of the temple.18 Taking the fetishisation of the written

236  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry word to an extreme, Chambers routinely refers to the Samarians and Judeans as ‘The people of the scrolls’ or ‘scroll lovers’ and Yhwh as the ‘God of the Scrolls’. This simultaneously appears to inscribe the literal scriptures into earliest history while effacing Judaism; instead of admitting a separate religious tradition associated with the Hebrew Bible by naming it, calling the Judeans and Samarians ‘people of the scrolls’ allows a projection of the expected audience’s worldview into the narrative. Scholars also tend to over-textualise and scripturalise monarchic and Second Temple Judean practice, but these novelists essentially assume that the canon developed exactly as a surface reading of the canonical books would suggest (with texts being written at the time of the events they purport to describe) and in a nearly universally literate society. 15.2  S  uperficial Engagement with Near Eastern Political History but not Material Realities All three novels show a vague awareness of the Ancient Near East, though all reveal a lack of historical understanding concerning the details. This means that while some names and places are mentioned, they are often misunderstood and appear as Orientalising details or as pseudo-scholarly name-dropping. For example, Kalo mentions Marduk and Bel as Babylonian gods, without realising the latter is merely the standard title for the former;19 Andrews knows that the Medians worshipped Mithra but confuses it with the later Roman-era Mithracism;20 and Chambers has Ashurbanipal boast that he can speak ‘Chaldean, Akkadian, and Scythian’.21 Everyone seems to know there was a processional street in Babylon, though no one is aware of its name ‘Ay-ibūr-šabû’.22 Surprisingly, the Ištar Gate is not prominent in their depictions, despite its fame.23 Of course, the most famous structure of Babylon, the Hanging Gardens, appear in all three narratives, in all built by Nebuchadnezzar for his Median wife.24 No doubt this derives from the classical tradition of the seven wonders of the world.25 The archaeology for it, however, is difficult, and it is probable that it never existed. While Gates has indeed proposed that one structure of the Neo-Babylonian Northeast Palace was the site of the Hanging Gardens, Dalley has famously argued that the entire tradition has mistaken the gardens of Nineveh for Babylon.26 Yet again, Bichler and Rollinger have argued it was mere Greek fantasy.27 Nearly the only sign in Kalo of extra-biblical political knowledge is that Nebuchadnezzar was the second of that name.28 As a rule he invents the name of officials he needs for his story. The other two authors are aware of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Median kings who do not appear in the biblical narrative, though no one is particularly keen to notice where this history contradicts Daniel’s. Chambers is aware of Nabonidus but has him de facto abdicate the throne so Belshazzar can reign.29 Andrews knows of Neriglissar, an unnamed heir of Nebuchadnezzar, and Nabonidus, though she misses Labashi-Marduk and is unclear of the relations between these kings. Chambers is aware of Amel-Marduk (see below). Neither is their understanding of politics particularly profound. Chambers has Ashurbanipal hunt wild lions with King Cyaxares of Media and admit that Cyaxares

Reception of Daniel in Novels  237 was a better hunter.30 It is highly improbable the Assyrian king would share such a performative event with another monarch, much less admit to being anything less than supreme.31 Chambers also posits Nabopolassar was a reluctant rebel against the Assyrians.32 While Chambers’ clear admiration for empire was likely an attitude of elites in the long sixth century, his depiction of Napolassar as restrained appears more calculated to vilify dissent against divinely chosen authority—by implication preachers like the author himself. Kalo’s Darius has a beloved goldfish pond that seemingly blinds him from the scheming of his satraps.33 Andrew’s Daniel is able to thwart a threatened coup by Nabonidus during Nebuchadnezzar’s madness by sending him to campaign against Egypt.34 The idea of a military distraction seems reasonable until one considers that providing a pretender with direct control of an army is ill-advised. Further, the logistics of a military campaign and the number of troops who would notice the absence of the king but the presence of the potential pretender strains credibility (not to mention a lack of another attested Egyptian campaign until Cambyses). The authors vaguely know Herodotus, or at least his legacy (e.g., MedianLydian truce, Herodotus Book I; Cyrus’s ruse in diverting the Euphrates, I.189– 91);35 the classics are better known than Assyriology. The character to catch the novelists’ interests most, however, comes from a conflation of the lost works of Berossos and Ctesias: Nebuchadnezzar’s wife, Queen Amytis.36 All three authors are fans of Amytis (though Kalo calls her ‘Temior’), and make her well-connected to the biblical characters and politically quite powerful. Andrews makes Daniel’s wife (Abigail, also known as Belili) a close personal friend of the queen. For both Protestant authors she also becomes a Yhwh-ist.37 In Andrews’ tale, the queen is instrumental in converting Nebuchadnezzar to Yhwh.38 Andrews also has this friendship prove instrumental in turning Cyrus’s favour towards the Judeans.39 Chambers also has close personal bonds between Amytis and Daniel’s family. Further, in Chambers’ formulation, the queen is a main driver of political history. The marriage of Nebuchadnezzar and Amytis created ‘the first world empire’ by uniting Babylon and Media(!).40 Chambers even has Amytis briefly crowned as regent and later collude with Neriglissar in his murder of her son and his taking of the throne!41 While it is most likely that the Persian queens had significant social standing, as well as economic and social power,42 practically nothing is known of the Neo-Babylonian royal women.43 Amytis likely caught the novelists’ imaginations due to the implied close relationship between Nebuchadnezzar and Amytis fitting modern sensibilities and tropes of royal romance. All the authors display complete ignorance of the historical geography or material culture of Babylon. Kalo seemingly simply could not care less about the historical setting, with his description of the travel from Jerusalem to Babylon and the latter’s famous ziggurat showing no resemblance at all to the Syrian desert, Euphrates Valley, or the Etemenanki of Marduk.44 While Andrews knows the Marduk temple was called Esangila, she thinks his main cultic statue was visible—and even shown to—non-priests.45 Strict purity rules governed access to NeoBabylonian temple sacral areas, just as in the Jerusalem temple.46 The novelists’ palaces all have hard marble floors, despite the complete lack of any marble in

238  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the region.47 Chambers randomly drops in details seemingly to wow his intended audience with his ‘knowledge’ of the region, though this clearly has no relation to material realia. For example, he repeatedly has feasts include foods that would not be introduced to the region until more recent eras, including some from the Americas.48 Wax or clay tablets appear to be unknown to the authors, only scrolls. Kalo even suggests that illuminated scrolls already existed and that Hebrew script was more complex than cuneiform!49 While writing was of course important in both relevant empires, and parchment used for Aramaic script, it was not used for cuneiform nor in the excessive copies imagined by all authors. This ignorance of the material culture frequently leads to the anachronistic details noted above; the anachronism is especially egregious in Chambers’ account, which seemingly reflects a Republican fantasy of America. Those familiar with premillennial dispensationalist speculations will recognise tropes of said rhetoric in his description of Babylon as a ‘One World Empire’ comprising ‘international citizens’.50 Not only is he obsessed with ‘free trade’ (e.g., the ‘World Traders and Caravans Building’), he invents a ‘Babylon News Agency’, has a Fundamentalist college established by the exiles in Babylon, and describes the government as based in a palace that looks like the US Congress (‘rotunda’, ‘cupolas’).51 One might wonder then if it is not sufficient for the Bible to literally support Chambers’ world view; the wider historical context must also. This strongly contrasts with other historical novels of similar time-periods that are not preoccupied with the Danielic text, such as those by Gore Vidal or Mary Renault.52 15.3  T  wo Problematic Danielic Kings: Belshazzar and Darius the Mede There are two very well-known historical foibles in the political history of the narrative cycle in Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar’s heir being King Belshazzar and the conqueror of Babylon being Darius the Mede. None of the novels quibble with their historicity, though they are more or less creative in their attempts to deal with them. 15.3.1 Belshazzar

There was never a King Belshazzar ruling over Babylon, despite the Danielic narrative.53 The Neo-Babylonian kings were Nabopolassar (626–605 bce), his son, Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 bce), his son Amīl-Marduk (562–560 bce), Nebuchadnezzar’s son-in-law Neriglissar (560–556 bce), Neriglissar’s son LabašiMarduk (556 bce), and, finally, the unrelated Nabonidus (556–539 bce).54 The last ‘native’ king of Babylon, Nabonidus, did have a son named Belshazzar who ruled as deputy while Nabonidus was on campaign to the Transjordan and northwestern Arabia, though the cuneiform sources that mention him are very clear to indicate that Nabonidus was still the king.55 Kalo merely follows Daniel and directly calls Belshazzar Nebuchadnezzar’s heir.56 Andrews at least attempts to finesse the text by reading ‘father’ as ‘forefather’ (Dan 5:2, 11, 13, 18).57 She makes Nabonidus Nebuchadnezzar’s son-in-law, who serves as regent when the king is away on

Reception of Daniel in Novels  239 campaign.58 Chambers is aware of Nabonidus, but makes him de facto abdicate due to excessive interest in temples; he does not notice that Nabonidus indeed returned to Babylon to defend it against Cyrus59—indeed, it was captured by Cyrus, though Nabonidus’ fate is unknown.60 15.3.2 Darius the Mede

The character of Darius the Mede, who appears in Daniel between Belshazzar and Cyrus, is a king entirely unknown to history.61 It is somewhat ironic as well, given that the real king Darius (I) made a point of declaring himself a Persian in his inscriptions.62 Kalo simply makes Darius the Mede the uncle of Nebuchadnezzar’s Median wife, and the Chaldeans just let him into the city.63 Chambers will presumably deal with this in the announced sequel Darius, Wings of Silver.64 This lack of veracity has done nothing to stem a flood of unfounded speculations intended to salvage the historicity of the text, usually by positing some sort of double-name.65 Andrews adopts the theory that Cyrus’s general Gubaru was given a throne name of Darius, in her interpretation under the vassalage of Cyrus.66 This, of course, rescues the order of Darius before Cyrus as well as justifies the late biblical trope of ‘the Medes and Persians’.67 In an afterword to the novel, Andrews explicitly states she chose the Gubaru theory as the most plausible because the biblical text must be true.68 While a Gubaru is indeed attested as Cyrus’s general who prepared the city for his peaceful entry as king, he was never installed as a vassal king; indeed, he died only one year or 13 months after the conquest.69 In fact, a brief experiment with vassal kingship is attested, but with Cambyses II, Cyrus’s son, as the king of Babylon.70 Thus, the fact there was a homonymous governor of Babylon until the reign of Darius does nothing to salvage the theory.71 15.4  Depictions of Passages from Daniel 15.4.1 Daniel 1 / Deportation and King’s Food

Daniel 1:1 dates the deportation of Daniel and his three friends to the third year of King Jehoiakim of Judah. This has long posed a conundrum, as, according to 2 Kings 23–24, Nebuchadnezzar only besieged Jerusalem after Jehoiakim’s death, three months into the reign of his son, Jehoiachin.72 Babylonian Chronicles date this siege to 597 bce.73 Even though the biblical sources are, in fact, contradictory on the timeline and number of deportations, none of them support a deportation during the date in Daniel. Jeremiah 52:28–30 has three deportations, and the novelists all seem to understand multiple deportations, though the dates and chronologies do not all align.74 Kalo does not include explicit dates in his narrative, but he has the exile of Daniel and the three youths happen after the destruction of Jerusalem’s walls.75 Although Daniel’s father is made an officer in the Jerusalemite court, the king remains unnamed. This destruction, however, is before Zedekiah’s rebellion, which Kalo narrates much later.76 In this version Zedekiah—not Jehoiachin—is later rescued from prison by Daniel. Zedekiah dies in Daniel’s house, and Daniel sends his

240  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry body to Jerusalem for burial.77 Andrews has Daniel and his friends deported in 605 bce, thus the accession year of Nebuchadnezzar. She cites this as according to Dan 1:1, understanding the vague notice of Jehoiakim’s submission for three years (2 Kgs 24:1) as consonant with this, and later interpreting 2 Kgs 24:2 as mercenary armies of Nebuchadnezzar.78 It is Daniel who (successfully) pleads for Jehoiachin’s life in her story, resulting in his mere imprisonment.79 Chambers invents a non-attested Neo-Babylonian policy for dealing with Levantine polities clearly designed to defend the Biblical narrative—one rebellion has a puppet king, a second royal exile, and the third city destruction.80 Chambers has Nebuchadnezzar send Ashpenaz to Jehoiakim to surrender educated youth and the temple choir (!) for Babylon, also dated to 605.81 He has Jehoiakim travel to Babylon to visit Nebuchadnezzar’s statue.82 He also oddly doubles rebellions, by having Nebuchadnezzar arrest and replace Jehoiakim with Jehoiachin on his way to Egypt, and then replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah on his way back, both dated to 594.83 The destruction of the city is dated to 586.84 Interestingly, somewhat like the Chronicler’s ‘myth of the empty land’, Gedaliah is entirely ignored in these novels. Another difficulty in Daniel 1 has been the diet—water and vegetables—adopted by Daniel and his friends, as this has no clear precedent in extant dietary texts.85 Kalo interprets this as obeying the pre-Noahic ban on bloodshed and thus meat, and he has Daniel and his friends continue this practice throughout the novel.86 Andrews provides no reason for the refusal of meat and later in the novel reveals Daniel did not maintain the practice. This appears to result in gout or diabetes.87 Chambers ignores the description of the diet as water and vegetables, glossing it as merely kosher.88 One wonders if this is a strategy for avoiding any suggestion that his readers ought to follow similar diets. 15.4.2 Daniel 2 / Statue Dream

The first vision interpretation story in Daniel, the dream of the multi-metal statue, is accepted as narrated in the biblical text, though each author deals with it variously. The Danielic text does not directly state why Nebuchadnezzar demands both a narration of the dream as well as its interpretation, though verse 9 implies doubt concerning the veracity of their interpretations.89 Kalo posits that Nebuchadnezzar merely forgot the dream, and thus needed the diviners to retell it for him.90 He heightens the drama by having the other diviners already executed by the time Daniel and his friends hear about the king’s demand.91 Verse 13 rather only states that the executions were imminent. Later in the novel, Kalo also applies the silver age to Belshazzar’s reign.92 This, of course, contrasts with the typical interpretation of the metals as kingdoms rather than merely individual kings.93 Andrews’ narrative is restricted to the scene from Daniel’s home, i.e., verses 17–19.94 She focuses on Daniel’s prayer and the concern his wife has for his safety. In her version, neither Daniel, his friends, nor his wife are certain that Yhwh will reveal the dream to Daniel. She does later invent a scene at the court of Darius where another statue is suggested (in the retelling of Dan 6), before Daniel convinces the

Reception of Daniel in Novels  241 king that it would be too expensive and wasteful. This leads to the law restricting any worship at all.95 Chambers made this vision the basis of his purported series of books. He posits that the story of the dream and Daniel’s interpretation of it became an instant favourite story that spread throughout the entire Ancient Near East (calling it the ‘Epic of Nebuchadnezzar’),96 but somehow also reviving the popularity of Gilgamesh. He makes this story so popular—and so believed—that it convinces King Cyaxares of Media to join in the Babylonian campaign against Egypt and for the Egyptians to retreat.97 This is mystifying, as the Egyptians defeated the Neo-Babylonians in each attempt at conquest, and there is no evidence of Median involvement in the campaign.98 15.4.3 Daniel 3 / Fiery Furnace

A noticeable aspect of the narrative of Chapter 3 is the complete absence of Daniel (in both the Masoretic Text and Greek)—with the narrative concerning the three other named Judean youths: Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael. This is entirely explicable in the historical-critical view of the book’s development, but it raises questions in a narrative reading of the text, following just after Daniel’s elevation in the empire. All three novelists, therefore, invent reasons why Daniel was not thrown into the furnace. Kalo has a high official of Nebuchadnezzar collude with the king to have Daniel out of the country at the time, so he would not need to be at the event at all.99 Andrews and Chambers rather have Nebuchadnezzar grant Daniel an exception; the former does not say why, and the latter has it as a result of the king’s decision in the previous chapter.100 A key move in traditional Christian exegesis of Dan 3:25 has been to see the fourth figure as a manifestation of Jesus.101 While it is unsurprising, then, that two of the three novelists see the fourth man in the furnace to be the Son of God, it is Kalo and Chambers who do so.102 Andrews is willing to be vaguer on its divine identity. This fits, however, with her treatment of Belili as a lapsed Yhwh-ist, through whose eyes the story is told. Chambers adds a plot point where the guards who died throwing the three youths into the furnace are honoured as martyrs by both the Babylonians and the four Jewish youths.103 He gives this a hilariously capitalist twist by having the location of the furnace and statue, the plain of Dura, being turned into an official tourist attraction.104 15.4.4 Daniel 4 / Nebuchadnezzar’s Madness

The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness is of particular interest to all three authors. Two themes in the novelists’ treatments appear. First is the explanation of how the gap in Nebuchadnezzar’s ability to reign was handled, and the second is in the results of the experience. All interpret 4:13, 22’s ‘seven times’ (‫ )שבעה עדנין‬as seven years away from the throne (which agrees with the Old Greek, Josephus, and Jerome).105 Kalo has Daniel, as royal minister, tell the royal council to cover up his absence and

242  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry wait for the king for seven years, as his dream had indicated this, and they all agree.106 Andrews invents a secret walled estate in Borsippa where Belili, Daniel, and Amytis hide out while caring for Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel maintains order by inventing military campaigns to explain the king’s absence.107 In Chamber’s version, Amytis rules in Nebuchadnezzar’s stead, with Daniel’s assistance. The queen mother cares for Nebuchadnezzar until Amytis brings him back to his senses.108 The effect of Nebuchadnezzar’s repentance is also emphasised and elaborated by all. Andrews focuses on Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion and on Daniel’s spite; she depicts Daniel as struggling to serve and to convert the king because of Daniel’s personal hatred of the king’s violence and pride.109 Remarkably, Andrews may be aware of 4QNabonidus, as she later has Darius suspicious of Daniel for turning both Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus into oxen.110 Nebuchadnezzar comes back with ambitious social-welfare concerns in both Kalo and Chambers. He addresses poverty and repays forced labourers for their wages.111 Kalo has Nebuchadnezzar embark on a massive and anachronistic series of public-welfare laws, as well as to divorce all of his wives and send away his concubines (except ‘Temior’ and the mother of Belshazzar).112 15.4.5 Daniel 5 / The Writing on the Wall

Though all writers accept Belshazzar’s status as king, he receives seriously bad press. Kalo depicts him as a rabid anti-Semite, instigating a pogrom against the exiles. This makes the feast merely a result of Belshazzar’s contempt for Daniel and his people.113 He comes to his deserved end by being murdered by one of his own guards, whose parents had been evicted due to Belshazzar’s new, harsher policies.114 In Andrews’ narrative, Daniel was no longer in the royal service, and he had to be summoned to Belshazzar in the middle of the feast. She largely follows the biblical text (though she explicitly calls Nebuchadnezzar Belshazzar’s forefather), though she has Daniel refuse to pardon Belshazzar and he stays by the king only by force.115 She also indicates that he is unloved by his subjects, for example with rumours that Belshazzar murdered his father.116 Chambers is the least abusive of Belshazzar, being content with a basic description of Belshazzar as a sexually wanton populist and using this to garner support for his rule.117 15.4.6 Daniel 6 / Lions’ Den

Chambers does not treat the story of the lions’ den; presumably it will be in the predicted book on Darius. The sensitivities of the two authors who do tell the story are quite stark in their respective versions. While Andrews uses the scene to emphasise Daniel’s and Belili’s struggles to be strong and have sufficient faith, Kalo’s Daniel is entirely serene. Kalo follows the text closely for the basic story, though he makes the idea of the lions’ den the idea of a single satrap. He also has one satrap stubbornly support Daniel. This satrap’s father had been healed by a miracle Daniel performed earlier

Reception of Daniel in Novels  243 in the novel.118 Kalo uses Isa 65:25 to demonstrate that lions treat humans according to their ‘spiritual worthiness’. He invents a story in Daniel’s childhood where his saintly father removes ticks from wild lions in ‘Ein Gedi; these lions come to them seeking their assistance.119 This dramatically reduces the implied risk in Daniel’s continual prayer, as it implies that even outside this encounter lions pose the faithful no threat. Andrews’ retelling is tied up with her theory of Darius being a vassal king for Cyrus.120 Indeed, she claims that execution by lions was a favourite of Cyrus.121 In this version, the situation is caused by the king’s desire to replace the Akītu festival with one unifying the entire empire (and not just dedicated to the local Babylonian Marduk). As indicated above, the satrap’s original idea had been to build another statue, tricking the king by not mentioning Daniel’s habit of daily prayer. Rather than pure sympathy, Darius is afraid to kill Daniel because Cyrus is fond of Daniel’s wife, Belili, as she had been friends with his aunt, Queen Amytis.122 15.4.7 Danielic Visions

Ironically, the dispensationalist author shows little interest in the vision chapters of the book. This is presumably due their being dated to the reigns of later kings and the planned series. Both Kalo and Andrews, however, intersperse some of them within their narratives, usually as their date formulas would imply. On the one hand, towards the end of his narrative, Kalo reproduces large sections of Dan 8; 10; and 12 interspersed with snippets from Jeremiah and some narrative exposition.123 The main point for him is that another character of his, Avarnam—another, non-Israelite descendant of Abram from another community in Babylonia—received the same visions as Daniel did, as both were one of 36 messiahs, the chosen.124 Andrews, on the other hand, primarily focuses on Daniel’s discussion of the received visions with his family; sometimes he even receives the vision while they are around.125 However, the vision concerning Jeremiah’s 70 years in Daniel 9 is the most important for her narrative. She has Daniel provoke the vision by praying about the passage after having read it.126 More importantly, however, she has Daniel retain his understanding of the 70 as a literal 70-year period, and thus he expects the return to happen in his lifetime.127 Daniel therefore spends a significant amount of effort near the end of her story seeking to arrange the exiles’ return. Nonetheless, it is Belili (now going by Abigail) who suggests Sheshbazzar (whom Andrews has made her son-in-law) to Cyrus as a suitable leader.128 She ends the novel by appealing to the Zerubbabel story in 1 Esdras and to Ezra 1:11. 15.5  Two Shared Themes: Family and Religion Two themes appear as concerns of all three authors, despite their different approaches to their books. The first is an assumption of a modern nuclear family. The second is to treat Judeans and Yhwh-ism as extremely successful.

244  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 15.5.1 Nuclear Family

All three novels display a concern for a modern nuclear family, although the religious differences show clearly between the family imagined by Kalo and the two Evangelical authors. This familial presentism makes the one ancient element of family life—domestic slaves—appear all the more jarring for all the authors’ matter-of-fact depiction of it. All three novels depict Daniel’s family as possessing slaves (typically called servants), though the relationship between the family and the slaves is generally depicted as warm. Kalo’s religious philosophy makes his vision of the nuclear family more ascetic than typical. While he valorises the love between Daniel and his wife, Nejeen, the author implies the relationship is essential asexual. Sexual abstinence appears to have been part of the spiritual teaching he advocated.129 His vision of the ideal spiritual family is monogamous but described in language evoking the mystics.130 His Daniel has no children. However, it is worth noting that one of the results of Nebuchadnezzar’s repentance in his vision is that he becomes all but monogamous. Nebuchadnezzar dismisses all but one of his wives and concubines besides ‘Temior’, the exception being Belshazzar’s mother, who is demoted to a status of maidservant to Temior; she is retained because her son is the heir, though why this matters is not made explicit.131 Andrews makes Daniel the patriarch of a massive family with 32 grandchildren.132 Her familial narrative is more complex, as she has Daniel first take a Babylonian wife (Zakiti) under duress from the king;133 he finally marries the novel’s protagonist (Abigail cum Belili) after his first wife dies. Nonetheless, the evangelical idea of a nuclear family with a quiescent wife periodically punctuates the prose.134 Drama between Belili and her children is a main driver of drama in the text, and Andrews includes reflection on this point in the ‘reader’s guide’ at the end. While Daniel explicitly requires both wives to worship only Yhwh,135 Andrews allows her characters to display doubt and fear (both Daniel and Belili), unlike Kalo’s characters who are consistently serene and unflappable. Chambers also prominently includes nuclear families in his narrative. He opens with the close relations between Nabopolassar and his wife and son as well as between Ashurbanipal and his daughter.136 The latter is so strong that Ashurbanipal dies of grief when his daughter dies.137 Cyaxares’s display of proper nuclear family life convinces the Medes to rebel against the Assyrians.138 A major driver in his narrative is the love between Nebuchadnezzar and Amytis (whom he calls ‘Amy’), one that prevents any secondary wives or concubines.139 They even go on a honeymoon and have a private family funeral for the death of Nabopolassar.140 Both the queen mother and Amytis are instrumental in caring for Nebuchadnezzar when he goes mad and for bringing him back to the throne.141 His peculiarity is a penchant for describing royal women as perceived as goddesses—this includes Ashurbanipal’s daughter Zakutu (named after her famous grandmother), and Nabonidus’s mother.142

Reception of Daniel in Novels  245 15.5.2 Rampant Conversion to Yhwh-ism

A notable feature of all three novels is a tendency to have well-connected worshippers of Yhwh all over the Near East, as well as the conversion of significant characters. Kalo makes Nebuchadnezzar a full-on worshipper of Yhwh and pro-Judean, even before the madness episode.143 He has a community of non-Mosaic descendants of Abraham living in an invented location in Mesopotamia.144 More interestingly, he makes Nebuchadnezzar’s chief military commander convert, become circumcised, move to Jerusalem, open a hostel for pilgrims to the temple mount, and become known as Saint Isaac.145 Andrews makes her characters even more connected. She has Sheshbazzar (who is Daniel’s son-in-law) serving in Esangila as a scribe and Zerubbabel serving in the bodyguard of Astyages, Cyrus, and Gubaru.146 Her character Belili becomes a priestess of Mithra, and thus becomes associates of the Median king and good friends with Nebuchadnezzar’s Median wife, Amytis.147 Belili is able to convert Amytis to Yhwh; and Amytis in turn converts Nebuchadnezzar after his madness.148 Ultimately it is Belili’s connections to Cyrus that makes him willing to return the Judeans.149 The Samarian Queen Zakutu, wife of Sennacherib, is one of the known Assyrian queens and has garnered much interest due to her Yhwh-istic name, Naqi’a.150 Chambers has her secure the Assyrian throne through prayer.151 Chambers takes Zakutu as a licence to give Ashurbanipal a homonymous daughter, who attempts to convert Ashurbanipal.152 This Zakutu and her slave even pray for Assyria after reading the minor prophets that the Samarians are sharing around the empire.153 Similarly, biblical characters pop up around the empires in political positions. He has a monument to Jonah in Nineveh, Queen Amytis convert, Nebuchadnezzar attack Jerusalem due to the treatment of Jeremiah (whom the king and queen also visit on a family holiday), and even has Ezekiel officiate at the queen mother’s funeral.154 15.6 Conclusions The demands of novels for coherent narrative are, of course, different to the evidential and theoretical coherence demanded by a historian. The novelist cannot hedge about probabilities or evidence in the way a historian would like; they must make decisions in a similar way to how filmmakers must invent mise en scène. Nonetheless, the paucity of engagement with historical-critical work (of the biblical text or the historical situation) in these three novels is striking. This is not as true for some other novels dealing with the same material (see below). For Kalo this indifference would seem to derive from his New Age-inspired concern for an ahistorical, spiritual archetype. For the other two authors, all historical data must be subservient to a verbatim, inspired biblical text. This may not produce the most satisfying historical, literary, or theological constructions, but it no doubt appeals to their intended audiences.

246  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Readers interested in the reception of Daniel in novels might be interested in comparing the three books discussed here with others.155 Seemingly another Jewish author has self-published via Amazon a novel on Daniel called For the Sake of His Name (2017). Two more authors have been greatly inspired by the royal couple of Nebuchadnezzar and Amytis. Historical novelist Tracey Higley offers a story, Garden of Madness, focused on Nebuchadnezzar’s madness that includes Daniel as a character. Zimbabwean-New Zealand author Deborah McDermott was also inspired by the story of Amytis to offer her take on Nebuchadnezzar and the early parts of Daniel in And the Lion Roared No More (2018). Another dispensationalist author, the co-author of Late, Great Planet Earth, offered a novel of Daniel in 1985 called A Light in Babylon. One of the endorsements of Chambers’ book comes from Timothy LaHaye, of Left Behind infamy, who has his own co-authored series, Babylon Rising, dealing with the Danielic narrative (but set in the modern world). A completely different, more allusive engagement with the characters of Daniel can be found in Robert Silverberg’s science-fiction novel set in contemporary times, Shadrach in the Furnace. The biblical scholar familiar with the text of Daniel and its problems will find little new in terms of exegetical decisions in these three novels, even though each has a particular perspective that adds considerable fictional material. Additional characters, relationships, and events not narrated in Daniel, other biblical books, or historical sources are provided, but the gaps in the narrative provide ample scope for this. Further, the surface-level reading of the text is unlikely to surprise or stimulate, nor is the reconstruction of the assumed long-sixth century background. One notable lack in all three novels, however, is any engagement with the various Greek versions of Daniel and the extra stories found therein, despite the Greek additions’ explicit upping of the religious ante.156 This is no doubt due to the general neglect of all the additional Greek stories in both Jewish and Christian traditions (outside liturgy). If there is any critical spark to be found in these three novel’s treatments of Daniel, perhaps it is how they highlight the poverty of insight that comes from ignorance of ancient social and material realia (as discussed above). Notes 1 2 3 4 5

E.g., Jursa, Aspects, p. 4. For a concise summary of the problems, see, e.g., Willis, ‘Reversal’. Collins, Daniel, p. 29. E.g., Marsden, Fundamentalism, pp. 51–52, 54, 60–61; Leone, ‘Semiotics’. See D. W. Griffith, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (USA, 1916), one story of which concerns the fall of Babylon to Cyrus, the intertitles of which directly appeal to the Cyrus Cylinder. On the British Museum and Iran Heritage’s tour of the USA in 2013, see, for instance, the special summer 2013 issue of Fezana Journal, which included letters from the director of the British Museum and from then President George W. Bush. 6 A number of other novels utilising Daniel exist. These include Nathan Zach’s ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’ (Hebrew), Carol C. Carlson’s A Light in Babylon, Cliff Keller’s For the Sake of His Name, Deborah McDermott’s Roared No More, Tracey L. Higley’s Garden of Madness, and a stupid modern thriller about a biblical archaeologist who

Reception of Daniel in Novels  247 finds Nebuchadnezzar’s statues, Tim Lahaye and Greg Dinallo’s Babylon Rising series. Much more interesting is Robert Silverberg’s Shadrach in the Furnace. 7 Kalo, Athar. 8 For a brief discussion of his life, see Sadan, ‘Gospel’. 9 ‘Ancient history—the ‘facts’—oftentimes conflict and can be controversial even among Bible-believing scholars. I try to read enough resources to find a golden thread of agreement in the facts. Those are the building blocks I use, applying creative fiction as the mortar that holds both facts and Truth together’. From https://mesuandrews​.com (accessed 28 March 2023). 10 Paw Creek Ministries’ website lists a large number of tracts on dispensationalist subjects. www​.pawcreek​.org​/about​-us/ (accessed 28 March 2023). 11 Earlier, the co-author of the famous dispensationalist book The Late Great Planet Earth also published a novel on the life of Daniel (Carlson, A Light in Babylon). 12 See, for instance, the overview in: Smith-Christopher et al. ‘Daniel’; Netzer, ‘Dānīāl-e Nabī’. 13 Kalo, Chosen, p. 490. 14 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 383–384. She appeals to Potiphar having a wife in Genesis (37:36, 39:1). 15 Kalo, Chosen, p. 455. 16 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 145. 17 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 332, 352. 18 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 368. Cf. Josephus, Ant 11.5. 19 Kalo, Chosen, p. 138. 20 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 111; earlier she had claimed they used sacred prostitutes, p. 85. 21 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 20. 22 Tintir V line 64 (George, Topographical, p. 67). 23 Andrews knows it exists, though (p. 7). 24 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 396–397; Andrews, Fire and Lions, has them all around the city (p. 45); Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 2, 86, 136. 25 Berossus is the origin of the claim Nebuchadnezzar built them for his Median wife (BNJ 680 F 8a apud Josephus). For the Greek sources, see: de Breuker, ‘Berossos’, § ‘Hanging Garden’; Haubold et al (eds), World. 26 Gates, Ancient Cities, p. 185; Dalley, ‘Nineveh’; eadam, ‘Why Did Herodotus?’; Foster, ‘Hanging Gardens’, p. 209. 27 Bichler and Rollinger, ‘Hängende Gärten’. 28 Kalo, Chosen, p. 176. 29 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 278–279. 30 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 13. 31 E.g., Watambe, ‘The King’; Wagner-Durant, ‘Narration’. 32 E.g., Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 6–7. His spelling of the royal name also varies. 33 Kalo, Chosen, p. 459. 34 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 247–249. 35 Truce: Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 173. Euphrates: Kalo, Chosen, p. 482; Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 285. 36 Berossos, Babyloniaca, 680 F8a, F9b; Ctesias, Persica, 688 F9a. See Kuhrt, Persian Empire, pp. 44 and 588. 37 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 260; Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 176, 179. 38 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 260. 39 E.g., Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 364–367. 40 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 2. 41 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 272–277. 42 Brosius, ‘Achaimenid Women’.

248  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 43 Cf. Fink, ‘Invisible’. See also a forthcoming massive project comparing (kingship and) queenship across all first-millennium bce empires, edited by Melanie Wasmuth. 44 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 27–82. 45 E.g., Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 17, 48. 46 E.g., Waerzeggers, ‘Babylonian Priesthood’, p. 66. 47 E.g., Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 103; See Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization, pp. 101–102. The only locally available stone was limestone, and this was used sparingly. Mudbrick was of course much more widespread. 48 E.g., Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar: bananas (pp. 2, 113), pineapple (p. 167), wild turkey (p. 41). For attested foods in Mesopotamia, see Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization, pp. 64–65, 69–70, 86–89. 49 Kalo, Chosen, p. 190. He, of course, does not specify if he means paleo-Hebrew or Aramaic script. 50 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 129. 51 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 115 (rotunda), p. 133 (cupolas), p. 146 (‘World Traders and Caravans Building’), p. 196 (Babylon News Agency), p. 256 (‘scroll college’ offering ‘Doctorate of the Scrolls’). 52 Compare, Vidal, Creation, which treats the rise of Cyrus with clear knowledge of the scholarship on the Persian empire at his time, is aware of Nabonidus and the tradition in Ezra of the return to Jerusalem, but does not even mention Daniel, and Renault’s Persian Boy which does similar for Alexander. 53 E.g., Collins, Daniel, pp. 32–33. 54 For a handy overview, see Jursa, ‘Neo-Babylonian Empire’. 55 See Beaulieu, Reign, pp. 185–197. It must be emphasised, however, that despite the way it is often cited, the name of Belshazzar does not appear in the extant versions of the three narrative cuneiform sources for the fall of Nabonidus, merely ‘the king’s son’: Verse Account of Nabonidus col ii, line 20 (Kuhrt, Persian Empire, p. 76); Nabonidus Chronicle (Glassner, Chronicles, p. 235); Cyrus Cylinder line 3 (Finkel, ‘Cyrus Cylinder’, p. 4). 56 Kalo, Chosen, p. 410. 57 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 9. She also implies Belshazzar murdered his father, without naming said father. 58 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 173, 185. 59 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 278–279. 60 Nabonidus Chronicle Col 3 line 17 on his capture. For the traditions concerning the fates of Nabonidus, see Silverman, Persian Royal, p. 219 n. 22. 61 E.g., see the discussion in Collins, Daniel, pp. 30–32. 62 See all of his titularies, where he is ‘a Persian, son of a Persian’. 63 Kalo, Chosen, p. 448. 64 As announced inside the cover as second in a series called ‘battle of the gods’. 65 For an overview, see Collins, Daniel, 29–33, 253; for an example of another, recent, unconvincing proposal see Baliński, ‘Nabonidus’ 66 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 268, 282, 292. A theory propounded very soon after the cuneiform texts were found. For a debunking of the theory (along with several others) see already Rowley, Darius the Mede; for an example of an evangelical, scholarly defence of this theory (though not the first), see Whitcomb, Darius the Mede. 67 She further underlines this by having Daniel suggest a guard comprising soldiers from Media and Persia (p. 281). 68 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 384–385. 69 Both the invasion by Gubaru and his death as narrated in the Chronicle of Nabonidus (Grayson, Chronicles, pp. 110–111; Glassner, Chronicles, pp. 237–238). The Chronicle gives the death as 3 Arahsamnu, but the year is missing. 70 Zawadzki, ‘Cyrus-Cambyses’; Waerzeggers, ‘Babylonian Kingship’, p. 184. 71 On attested governors, see Stolper, ‘The Governor’.

Reception of Daniel in Novels  249 72 2 Chr 36, however, has Nebuchadnezzar exile both Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin. Jer 27:20 and Est 2:6 call him Jeconiah. Collins, Daniel, pp. 130–133. 73 Grayson, Chronicles, no. 5 (ABC 5) = Glassner, Chronicles, no. 24 (p. 231), Rev. lines 11–13, says Nebuchadnezzar captured the city of Yehud on 2 Adar Nebuchadnezzar 7 (= 16 Mar 597 bce). Cf. Miller and Hayes, History, p. 408. 74 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 144, appeals to Jer 52 for three exiles. 75 Kalo, Chosen, p. 25. 76 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 327–393. 77 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 469–478. 78 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 21, 27. 79 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 144. She briefly notes Jehoiachin’s release from prison by Amīl-Marduk (without naming Nebuchadnezzar’s heir by name), though she has Neriglissar later kill him and the three youths in his takeover (pp. 152–153). 80 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 111. 81 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 127, 115. 82 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 172. 83 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 182, 175. 84 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 201. 85 Collins, Daniel, pp. 141–143. 86 Kalo, Chosen, e.g., pp. 96, 480. 87 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 61, 306. 88 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 131–132. 89 Collins, Daniel, p. 157. 90 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 248–250. 91 Kalo, Chosen, p. 253. 92 Kalo, Chosen, p. 444. 93 Collins, Daniel, pp. 166–170. 94 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 75–83. 95 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 317–318. 96 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 157. 97 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 159, 161. 98 For the evidence concerning Nebuchadnezzar’s Egyptian campaigns, see Kahn, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’. Not to mention the difficulty of the Median Federation overall. See, recently, Gopnik, ‘Median Federation’. 99 Kalo, Chosen, p. 297. 100 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 129–130; Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 172. 101 E.g., Collins, Daniel, p. 190. 102 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 325–326; Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 177, 180. Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 134, rather has a son of the gods. 103 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 179. 104 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 181. 105 Collins, Daniel, p. 228. 106 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 396–397. 107 It is referenced several times. E.g., Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 210–211, 236. 108 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 215–216, 230–237. 109 Andrews, Fire and Lions, e.g., pp. 218, 271. 110 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 312. She does not seem aware of the (Greek) traditions of Cyrus exiling Nabonidus, however. 111 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 248. 112 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 408–410. 113 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 431–433, 445. 114 Kalo, Chosen, p. 447. 115 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 6–10. 116 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 9.

250  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 117 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 282. 118 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 458–461. 119 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 464–466. 120 She seems to see this as the divided kingdom from Dan 2/7; Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 301. 121 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 296. 122 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 348. 123 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 485–489. 124 Kalo, Chosen, p. 490. 125 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 78–79, 83. She largely envisions this as in a trance state. 126 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 154. 127 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 206. Cf. Sanders, ‘Daniel’. 128 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 370. 129 Mentioned as part of his teaching by Persico, ‘A little about Shlomo Kalo’; Sadan, ‘The gospel’. 130 E.g., Kalo, Chosen, pp. 360–361. 131 Kalo, Chosen, p. 410. 132 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 4. 133 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 115. 134 E.g., Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 252. 135 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 139, 181. 136 E.g., Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 6, 11–12. Also, Cyaxares, p. 38. 137 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 36. 138 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 42. 139 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 62. 140 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 74, 116. 141 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 216, 223, 230–232. 142 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 14, 71, 280 143 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 357–358. 144 Kalo, Chosen, pp. 303–318. 145 Kalo, Chosen, p. 415. 146 Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 277. 147 E.g., Andrews, Fire and Lions, p. 140. 148 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 218–260. 149 Andrews, Fire and Lions, pp. 364–370. 150 On Assyrian royal women, including Naqi’a, see Svärd, Women and Power. 151 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 17. He also relates this to Jonah and a supposed monument to him in Nineveh. 152 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, pp. 17, 25, 27. 153 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 25. 154 Chambers, Nebuchadnezzar, p. 179 (Amytis converts), p. 201 (attack), p. 252 (visit), p. 255 (funeral). 155 Opera fans might be interested to check out Verdi’s Nabucco and Benjamin Britten’s Fiery Furnace. 156 For a discussion, see Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah, pp. 23–152, esp. 26.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Andrews, Mesu. Of Fire and Lions. New York, NY: WaterBrook, 2019. Chambers, Joseph R. Nebuchadnezzar, the Head of Gold. Crane, MO: HighWay, 2009. Carlson, Carole C. A Light in Babylon. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1985.

Reception of Daniel in Novels  251 Higley, Tracey L. Garden of Madness. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2012. Kalo, Shlomo. The Chosen. Philip Simpson (trans.). Jaffa: DAT Publications, 2015. Lindsey, Hal, and Carole C. Carlson. The Late, Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. McDermott, Deborah. And the Lion Roared No More. Auckland: Daystar Books, 2018. Renault, Mary. The Persian Boy. London: Longman, 1972. Silverberg, Robert. Shadrach in the Furnace. Indianapolis, IN: Bobs-Merrill, 1976. Vidal, Gore. Creation. New York, NY: Random House, 1981. Secondary Sources Baliński, Aleksander. ‘Nabonidus – Darius the Mede’. Anabasis: Studia Classica et Orientalia 10 (2019), pp. 279–282. Bichler, Reinhold, and Robert Rollinger. ‘Die Hängenden Gärten zu Ninive—Die Lösung eines Rätsels?’ In Robert Rollinger (ed.), Von Sumer Bis Homer. Festschrift Für Manfred Schretter Zum 60. Geburtstag Am 25. Februar 2004. AOAT 325. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005, pp. 153–218. Breuker, Geert de. ‘Berossos of Babylon (680)’. In Ian Worthington (ed.), Brill’s New Jacoby. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Brosius, Maria. ‘Achaimenid Women’. In Elizabeth Donnelly Carney and Sabine Müller (eds), The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World. London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 149–160. Collins, John J. Daniel. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993. Collins, John J., and Peter W. Flint. The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. 2 vols. VTS 83. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Dalley, Stephanie. ‘Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled’. Iraq 56 (1994), pp. 46–58. Dalley, Stephanie. ‘Why Did Herodotus Not Mention the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?’. In Peter Derow and Robert Parker (eds), Herodotus and His World: Essays from a Conference in Memory of George Forrest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 171–189. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/acprof​:oso​/9780199253746​.003​.0010 Fink, Sebastian. ‘Invisible Mesopotamian Royal Women?’. In Elizabeth Donnelly Carney and Sabine Müller (eds), The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World. London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 137–148. Foster, Karen Polinger. ‘The Hanging Gardens of Nineveh’. In Dominique Collon and Andrew George (eds), Nineveh: Papers of the XLIXe Recontre Assyriologique Internationale, London, 7–11 July 2003, vol. 1. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1995, pp. 207–220. Gates, Charles. Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome. 2nd edition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. George, A. R. Babylonian Topographical Texts. OLA 40. Leuven: Peeters, 1992. Glassner, Jean-Jacques. Mesopotamian Chronicles. SBLWAW 19. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2004. Gopnik, Hilary. ‘The Median Confederacy’. In Touraj Daryaee (ed.), King of Seven Climes. A History of the Ancient Iranian World (3000 bce–651 ce). Irvine, CA: Jordan Center for Persian Studies, 2017, pp. 39–62. Grayson, A. K. Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles. Texts from Cuneiform Sources 5. Locust Valley, NY: JJ Augustin, 1975. Haubold, Johannes, Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Robert Rollinger, and John Steele (eds). The World of Berossos. CLeO 5. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013. Jursa, Michael. Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC: Economic Geography, Economic Mentalities, Agriculture, the Use of Money,

252  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry and the Problem of Economic Growth. Veröffentlichungen Zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Babyloniens Im 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. 4; AOAT 377. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2010. Jursa, Michael. ‘The Neo-Babylonian Empire’. In Michael Gehler and Robert Rollinger (eds), Imperien und Reiche in der Weltgeschicte: Epochenübergreidende und globalhistorische Vergleiche. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014, pp. 121–148. Kahn, Dan’el. ‘Nebuchadnezzar and Egypt: An Update on the Egyptian Monuments’. Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 7.1 (2018), pp. 65–78. https://doi​.org​/10​.1628​/hebai​ -2018​-0005 Kalo, Shlomo. Athar. Philip Simpson (trans.). 3rd edition. Jaffa: DAT Publications, 2016 (2001). Kuhrt, Amélie. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. London: Routledge, 2009 (2007). Leone, Massimo. ‘The Semiotics of Fundamentalist Authoriality’. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (2013): pp. 227–239. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11196​-012​ -9304-7 Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Miller, J. Maxwell, and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. London: SCM, 1986. Moore, Carey A. Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 44. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Netzer, Amnon. ‘Dānīāl-e Nabī i. in Biblical and Popular Traditions’. Encyclopædia Iranica 6 (1993). Persico, Tomer. ‘A Little about Shlomo Kahlo’. Blog. ‫( לאה תאלול‬blog). April 2010. [in Hebrew] Accessed 29 Mar. 2023. https://tomerpersico​.com​/2007​/06​/22​/shlomo​-kalo​ -brief/ Potts, Daniel T. Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations. Athlone Publications in Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. London: The Athlone Press, 1997. Rowley, H. H. Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006. Originally published 1935. Sadan, Tsvi. ‘The Gospel According to Shlomo Kalo’. The Times of Israel (blog). September 3, 2014. https://blogs​.timesofisrael​.com​/the​-gospel​-according​-to​-shlomo​-kalo/ Sanders, Seth L. ‘Daniel and the Origins of Jewish Biblical Interpretation’. Prooftexts 37.1 (2018): pp. 1–55. Shai, Eli. ‘Spiritual Enlightenment of the Immodest Teacher’. Ha’Aretz Book Supplement 365 [Hebrew]. February 23, 2000, edition. Silverman, Jason M. Persian Royal–Judaean Elite Engagements in the Early Teispid and Achaemenid Empire: The King’s Acolytes. LHBOTS 690. London: T&T Clark, 2019. Smith-Christopher, Daniel L., et al. ‘Daniel (Book and Person)’. In EBR 6. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013, pp. 86–135. Stolper, Matthew W. ‘The Governor of Babylon and Across-the-River in 486 b.c.’. JNES 48.4 (1989): pp. 283–305. Svärd, Saana. Women and Power in Neo-Assyrian Palaces. SAAS 23. Helsinki: NeoAssyrian Text Corpus Project, 2015. Waerzeggers, Caroline. ‘The Babylonian Priesthood in the Long Sixth Century bc’. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 54.2 (2011): pp. 59–70. Waerzeggers, Caroline. ‘Babylonian Kingship in the Persian Period: Performance and Reception’. In Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers (eds), Exile and Return. BZAW 478. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015, pp. 181–222. Wagner-Durand, Elisabeth. ‘Narration. Description. Reality: The Royal Lion Hunt in Assyria’. In Elisabeth Wagner-Durand, Barbara Fath, and Alexander Heinemann (eds), Image–Narration–Context: Visual Narration in Cultures and Societies of the Old World.

Reception of Daniel in Novels  253 Freiburger Studien Zur Archäologie & Visuaellen Kultur 1. Heidelberg: Propylaeum, 2019, pp. 235–272. Watanabe, Chikako E. ‘The King as a Fierce Lion and a Lion Hunter: The Ambivalent Relationship between the King and the Lion in Mesopotamia’. In Laerke Recht and Christina Tsouparopoulou (eds), Fierce Lions, Angry Mice and Fat-Tailed Sheep: Animal Encounters in the Ancient Near East. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2021, pp. 113–121. Whitcomb, John Clement. Darius the Mede: A Study in Historical Identification. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959. Willis, Amy C. Merrill. ‘A Reversal of Fortunes: Daniel among the Scholars’. Currents in Biblical Research 16.2 (2018): pp. 107–130. Zawadzki, Stefan. ‘Cyrus-Cambyses Coregency’. Revue d’Assyriologie 90.2 (1996): pp. 171–183.

16 Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner: Examining Literary Retellings of Hosea 1–3 Kirsi Cobb

16.1 Introduction ‘Go, take to yourself a promiscuous woman’ (Hos 1:2b). This infamous phrase begins the relationship between the prophet Hosea and his faithless wife, Gomer, whose marriage is meant to symbolise the ‘adulterous’ behaviour of the nation of Israel towards her God. Considering the number of academic and other interpretations/retellings of this marriage, Hosea 1–3 tells us remarkably little about the intimate details of Hosea and Gomer’s lives. They have three children to whom God/Hosea gives somewhat ominous names (1:3–9), followed by a prophecy that seemingly reverses them (1:10–2:1). In the poetic section of Hosea 2, God/Hosea threatens Israel/Gomer with various punishments due to her faithlessness, including sexual violence (2:3, 10) and death (2:3). The passage, however, ends with a description of a blissful reunion between husband and wife (2:14–23, cf. 1:10– 2:1). In Hos 3:1, God commands the prophet to take an ‘adulterous’ wife, possibly Gomer or another woman, as a continued symbol of Israel’s fortunes, leaving the exact state of Hosea’s marriage(s) uncertain. Hebrew narratives are notoriously terse and invite the reader to imagine the simplest links between narrative components to much more complex issues.1 In fact, this act of imagination may well be part of the appeal of biblical narratives. In her study of the reception history of Bathsheba, Sara Koenig aptly notes, ‘[n]o story can include every single detail, and a text that buttons up every answer and possibility is no longer really a story; it is something else, more akin to a dictionary entry than a narrative’.2 It is this call to imagine and to question that creates the complex realm that is biblical interpretation, taken up in all retellings or interpretations of Hebrew narratives. In this chapter, we will focus on three retellings of the HoseaGomer story: Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love (English), Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Gimpel the Fool’ (Yiddish/English), and Milton Steinberg’s The Prophet’s Wife (English). The selection of authors is intentionally diverse and intends to include three very different readings. The first of these is Francine Rivers, whose Christian romance novel Redeeming Love has sold over three million copies since its publication in 1991 and been translated into more than 30 languages.3 Rivers relocates the story to the Californian Gold Rush in the 1850s, where the role of Hosea is played by a pious farmer, Michael Hosea, and the role of Gomer by Angel, a prized prostitute DOI: 10.4324/9781003280347-17

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  255 in the local brothel. In Rivers’ words, Redeeming Love bears ‘a similarity to the path many of us take from brokenness to redemption and wholeness in Christ’.4 This statement among others illustrates the distinctly Christian lens through which Rivers views the Hosea-Gomer narrative. In contrast, the other two retellings are by Jewish authors, both written relatively soon after the Holocaust. The Prophet’s Wife was authored by Milton Steinberg, a conservative Jewish-American Rabbi and a prolific author, speaker, and theologian. Among his many writings, he produced two works of fiction: As a Driven Leaf (1939) and The Prophet’s Wife. The latter novel is a retelling of the lives of Hosea and Gomer set in eighth century bce Israel. Sadly, Steinberg never finished The Prophet’s Wife as he passed away before its completion in 1950. In 2010, The Prophet’s Wife was finally published in its unfinished form with a foreword from Ari Goldman and comments from Norma Rosen and Rabbi Harold Kushner. The last retelling is a short story titled ‘Gimpel the Fool’ by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer was a Polish-born American Jew and well-known for his essays, novels, and short stories, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. Writing in his native Yiddish, he gained wider fame through the English translations of his work. First among these was his novel The Family Moskat (1950), soon followed by perhaps his most famous short story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ (1953). Set in pre-war Poland in the imaginary shtetl of Frampol, the narrative follows Gimpel, a man duped by the villagers to marry a promiscuous woman called Elka. With the Hosea-Gomer story presumably as a loose reference,5 the narrative leaves an air of ambiguity around Gimpel: is he merely gullible or in possession of deeper wisdom? In the following, we will analyse these three contributions and focus on three distinct areas where the details in Hosea 1–3 are often vague: the backstory of Gomer and Hosea, the reasons for Gomer’s transgression and how (if at all) Gomer is ultimately redeemed. Rather than study the biblical text and evaluate whether the author of the retelling got the story ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we wish to offer an evaluation of how these works construct their differing visions of Hosea-Gomer, what these constructions might mean to their potential readership, and ultimately how they give us new insights into one of the most notorious marriages in the Hebrew Bible.6 16.2 The Backstory In Rivers’ Redeeming Love, the two protagonists meet by passing in the imaginary town of Pair-a-Dice, when a farmer named Michael Hosea comes to town on errands. There God points out the woman Michael is to marry: a woman of incredible beauty yet, as Michael describes her, ‘a soiled dove’ (loc. 740). She is Angel, the prized prostitute of the local brothel. Angel entered the world of human trafficking at the tender age of eight when, after her mother’s death, she was sold to a man called Duke for his sexual pleasure (loc. 489–636). Eventually Angel became a prostitute and finally escaped from Duke to California, only to find herself back in prostitution to avoid starvation (loc. 672-684, 1606–1620, 3743).

256  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry After seeing Angel in Pair-a-Dice, Michael attempts to persuade her to marry him and gains her hand while she is semi-conscious: as Angel attempts to end her life, Michael rushes in, pays for her, and marries her in a quick ceremony. Angel is only partially aware of what is happening, and Rivers writes that Angel ‘would agree to wed Satan himself if it would get her out of the Palace [the brothel]’ (loc. 1419). To Michael’s instruction to simply say yes to his proposal, she manages to reply, ‘Why not?’ (loc. 1419). Although the readers gain a brief glimpse into Michael’s past (loc. 3333–3369), the spotlight is undoubtedly on Angel and her troubled history. This is contrary to Steinberg’s The Prophet’s Wife, where, unlike the name of the novel, the focus is on Hosea. Written largely from Hosea’s point of view, the story follows Hosea through his childhood with two unruly brothers and a pious father. While Israel has fallen into idolatry, the father attempts to raise the two older brothers in the ways of God. Having failed, the father educates Hosea but keeps him at a distance, afraid to get too attached (loc. 690–698). Hosea, in turn, feels deep compassion towards his father and absorbs his teachings. As Hosea grows up and eventually trains as a scribe, he meets a beautiful young woman called Gomer at a religious festival (loc. 827–961), falls in love and proposes marriage (loc. 1237). However, Gomer makes it clear that, although she respects Hosea, she does not love him (loc. 1282–1291). An orphan under the custodianship of her less-than-honourable step-uncle Charun, Gomer tells Hosea that Charun is ‘ready to sell me to anyone, it matters not how foul or ugly, if only his price is met’ (loc. 1227). The uncle is currently in negotiations with a man named Othniel, who Gomer notes is not only old but lusts after her and ‘is forever trying to lay his hands on’ her (loc. 1226–1235). While Hosea loves Gomer and feels compassion towards her plight, for Gomer the marriage is a generous and perhaps even a preferable means of escape, although not of her own choosing. Steinberg’s reading presents Gomer as a woman trapped in the patriarchal system that holds her hostage (loc. 1218–1300).7 Rather than being unchaste, Gomer vehemently denies her involvement with other men prior to the marriage (loc. 1603–1635, 2938–2980). However, no such claims can be made for Gomer’s equivalent Elka in Singer’s ‘Gimpel the Fool’: she is the town’s pregnant loose woman with a child already in tow, whom the villagers pass off as a virgin and marry off to Gimpel (pp. 5–7). Gimpel has misgivings about the marriage but ultimately accedes since in his mind he would at least be the master of his own house and one cannot ‘pass through life unscathed’ (p. 5). Four months later, Elka gives birth to a baby whom both Elka and the village schoolmaster argue is simply premature (pp. 7–9). In the end, as Gimpel notes, ‘they argued me dumb. But then, who really knows how such things are?’ (p. 9). The story gives only some brief details about Gimpel’s background: he was an orphan who was pawned off to the village baker (p. 4). He grows up to be the town simpleton and is made constant fun of by the villagers since he is ‘easy to take in’ (p. 3). Regarding Elka, she is also an orphan but, unlike Gimpel, she has been widowed and divorced (p. 7). She is also shrewd, promiscuous and has a ‘fierce tongue’ that is enough to scare the villagers (pp. 5–6, 15–16). Reminiscent of the oft-categorisation of women as either saints or sinners or as

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  257 madonnas or whores,8 Elka begins as a sinner/whore but by the end transitions into a more saint-like figure. Singer’s reading of Elka comes perhaps closest to the biblical equivalent of an ‫אׁש�ׁת זנונים‬, ‘a promiscuous woman’ (Hos 1: 2b). As has been noted by Phyllis Bird and others,9 the root ‫ זנה‬most likely refers to both pre- and extramarital sexual activity and in the case of the abstract plural noun to habitual behaviour rather than an occupation. In Rivers’ reading, Gomer/Angel is a professional prostitute, which would be in line with her view that in Hosea 1–3 Gomer is described as a temple prostitute in service of the god Baal.10 What makes River’s reading of Angel troubling, though, is not Angel’s profession but Rivers’ equation of the state from which Angel needs to be ‘redeemed’ with the sinful state from which humanity needs salvation in the evangelical Christian interpretation. Contrary to Elka, who seems to sleep with other men free-willingly, the sexual sins that are committed in Redeeming Love are not by Angel but against her. Although in the companion study Rivers admits that Angel is not guilty of the wrong men have done to her, she still ascribes to Angel an innate state of sinfulness which in Redeeming Love is reflected in some of Angel’s choices to which we will later turn.11 The most sympathetic portrayal of Gomer is presented in Steinberg’s The Prophet’s Wife. Here it is made clear that she is not promiscuous; rather, she is ruled over by an uncle who does not have her best interests at heart. Although issues are raised regarding Gomer’s headstrong, even passionate character as well as the suitability of the marriage (loc. 632–659, 1350, 1400, 1419–1427, 1548), she is ultimately not a man-eater or a ‘soiled dove’, but a young woman caught in a patriarchal system with few options. While this does not make Gomer into a woman without fault, it does make her into a more understandable, even relatable character. Regarding the backstory, what is further intriguing about Steinberg’s and Singer’s works is that neither mention the involvement of God in the marriage of Hosea and Gomer. Unlike in Rivers’ novel, God does not tell Hosea to marry a woman, unchaste or virginal. We can only speculate for possible reasons for this. In Steinberg’s volume Basic Judaism, published three years prior to his death, he notes, ‘Hosea […], out of capacity for forgiveness he found in himself, leaped to the dazzling vision of a God in-exhaustible in mercy’.12 In The Prophet’s Wife, Steinberg describes Hosea likewise feeling both pity and rage before what seems to be his first public address as a prophet in the prologue of the novel (loc. 118). If we allow these two readings to inform one another, God’s command to marry a promiscuous woman could be understood proleptically: as Gomer became unfaithful after the marriage, the description of Gomer as ‘promiscuous’ could be part of Hosea’s later understanding and God’s involvement in the events projected in retrospect.13 In ‘Gimpel the Fool’, some of Singer’s inspiration seems to stem from the Babylonian Talmud (Pes. 87a–b) where Hosea is understood as a comical, inept prophet who is taught a lesson by God in divine mercy through his marriage to a promiscuous woman.14 However, while Gimpel has retained some of his amusing characteristics, any direct involvement by God in the marriage has been removed.

258  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry While God’s absence in Steinberg’s novel might have been at least in part due to his theological leanings, one might wonder if another part could be the times in which Steinberg and Singer were both writing.15 Neither author experienced the Holocaust directly; yet, both works could be reflections of Singer’s and Steinberg’s battles to understand God’s (lack of) involvement in the lives of the Jewish people during the Nazi regime. In Basic Judaism, Steinberg describes God as ‘the Liberator of men and their societies’, of which the first example is God as ‘the Power working within individuals and peoples’.16 Perhaps The Prophet’s Wife is an example of this ‘working within’, where God inspires people to action as he presumably will do with Hosea and has done with the prophet Amos, who makes a surprise appearance (loc. 1959–2731). For Singer, ‘God is a silent God’ and our understanding of him ultimately ‘guesswork’;17 however, this does not stop Singer from musing on such issues in his writings. In ‘Gimpel the Fool’, Gimpel embodies both great naivety and strong belief, which ultimately sustains him.18 Perhaps Gimpel’s simplicity and faith, as well as Steinberg’s description of God as the Power, are the authors’ endeavours to fathom the unfathomable, reaching out for answers while not giving into platitudes. 16.3 The Reason for Gomer’s Sin In Singer’s ‘Gimpel the Fool’, the motives for Elka’s promiscuity are never explicitly revealed. We only know that she was promiscuous before and after her marriage to Gimpel. During one such an encounter, Gimpel comes back from the bakery to find another man sleeping in his bed with Elka (p. 10). Not wanting to wake the baby, Gimpel sleeps in the bakery and in the morning asks a rabbi for advice. When Elka is called, she strongly denies that she has been unfaithful to Gimpel and even the townspeople take her side (p. 11). Eventually Gimpel concludes that Elka might have made a mistake and ‘[y]ou cannot live without errors’. Alternatively, Gimpel thinks that he was ‘seeing things’ and, if so, he is ‘doing her an injustice’ (p. 12). Gimpel resolves to inform the rabbi he ‘made a mistake’ and after a long separation is finally allowed to return home (pp. 12–14). Meanwhile, Elka gives birth yet to another child and Gimpel resolves always to believe what he is told, reasoning ‘What’s the good of not believing? Today it’s your wife you don’t believe; tomorrow it’s God Himself you won’t take stock in’ (p. 12). Elka’s character remains one-dimensional and stereotypical of the saint/sinner dilemma mentioned earlier. The focus of the story is rather on Gimpel’s responses. Even though Elka swears and curses at him and threatens a divorce ‘ten times a day’ (pp. 9–10), Gimpel cannot ‘get enough of her’ (p. 9). In fact, Gimpel claims that ‘[a]nother man in my place would have taken French leave and disappeared. But I’m the type that bears it and says nothing. What’s one to do? Shoulders are from God, and burdens too’ (p. 10). Even after the first act of adultery, Gimpel wants to be angry but finds that he cannot be really angry at his wife (p. 12). Gimpel’s chosen path is that of a husband who bears and believes regardless of his wife’s conduct and in this way is reminiscent of a more traditional reading

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  259 of Hosea 1–3, where the character of Hosea/God is often described as that of a broken-hearted man married to a wanton wife.19 If in Singer’s description Elka is a shrewd vixen, the same cannot be said of Rivers’ portrayal of Angel in Redeeming Love which on closer inspection ambiguates the question of Angel’s culpability. As noted earlier, what is problematic in Rivers’ interpretation is the equation of the state from which Angel needs to be ‘redeemed’ with the sinful state of humanity. This is reflected in some of Angel’s choices, an example of which is Angel’s acceptance of blame for a sexual assault committed by her husband’s friend, Paul. In the story, Angel has decided to leave Michael’s farm, and Paul offers her a lift back to Pair-a-Dice, only to notify her later that he needs ‘payment’ for his trouble. In the book, Angel taunts Paul, which fuels his anger, and finally Paul pushes her to the ground and assaults her (loc. 2619–2702). Later, Michael feels hurt not only at Paul’s but also at Angel’s betrayal (loc. 2807–2821). Paul even quips at Angel how she would like it if she could call the assault ‘rape’ while Angel is described as knowing ‘she had no defence’ (loc. 5138). Towards the end of the novel, Angel is even pictured talking with the somewhat reformed Paul about whether she even knew if she could say ‘no’ to his advances, eventually concluding that ‘she had allowed it to happen’ (loc. 6673). Regardless of Angel’s inner qualms, it is interesting that the description of the assault itself betrays this version of events. Although Rivers narrates Angel as taunting Paul and even has her climb down from the carriage in seeming readiness of the ‘payment’, when Paul commits the deed, he is described as grabbing Angel’s arm, throwing her ‘a hundred feet off the road, into the shadows of a thicket’. Paul is recounted as ‘rough and quick, his sole desire to hurt and degrade her’ (loc. 2685). Although Rivers might have wanted to shift some blame on Angel, Rivers’ portrayal of the rape itself leaves little doubt of the person responsible. Rather worryingly, by portraying Angel as accepting fault, Rivers enforces an interpretation prevalent in rape myths20 and purity culture,21 that the victim could have with ‘appropriate’ behaviour prevented the assault. Victims are thus made to accept at least part of the blame, whether this is in the form of, for example, what they wore, what they said, or what they did or did not do.22 Such teaching is harmful as it excuses perpetrators from full responsibility and reinforces the myth of what Johanna Stiebert calls the ‘real’ rape, that is, ‘[i]f there are no indications or evidence of concerted struggle (such as screaming, fending off, fighting, biting) and no signs of injury (such as scratches, bruises, or tearing) then whatever took place was not rape’.23 Putting the bar for rape as low as possible for perpetrators, victims such as Angel are silenced for fear of not fitting the image of the ‘ideal rape victim’ and being judged for something they did, or did not, do. In Steinberg’s version of the story, Hosea and Gomer already have one child when Hosea’s handsome yet recalcitrant brother Iddo comes to stay with them (loc. 1630–1908). Hosea’s duties as a scribe take him away for a long trip (loc. 1910) and, when he finally returns, Hosea discovers Gomer and Iddo together in bed, naked and asleep (loc. 2747–2757). Hosea trembles and weeps, ‘tears flooding his eyes, grief shuddering through him like some deep tide beneath the sea’ (loc. 2757). He orders Gomer out of the bed and, when Iddo awakes, Iddo attempts to

260  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry de-escalate the situation by saying ‘it is not as bad as it appears’ and that ‘it has not been often’ (loc. 2774). However, this reviles Hosea even more: he calls Gomer a ‘[w]hore’ and Iddo a ‘[r]utting beast’, who had already ‘taken women without number’ and had to also take Hosea’s wife, his ‘only one’ (cf. 2 Sam 12:1–12) (loc. 2782). Hosea threatens them first with stoning and then with burning, which he declares is the lawful penalty for incest. However, as Hosea’s rage abates, he becomes unsure of what to do: the public burning of his wife and brother is for him unthinkable as is for them to escape scot-free (loc. 2806–2812). He decides that they must be punished as ‘[t]he law requires it’, but later (loc. 2832). Afterwards, Hosea struggles with his inability to doom Iddo and Gomer to death, especially Gomer as she ‘had been precious to him’ (loc. 2849). Because of his inability to act, Hosea becomes ‘less in his own eyes’ and thinks himself ‘a weakling’ (loc. 2849). He decides to divorce Gomer quietly and, as Iddo eventually escapes, Hosea is relieved from Iddo lording Hosea’s ‘weakness’ over him (loc. 2858–2876). Regarding her reasons for adultery, Gomer confesses to Hosea that she thought she loved Iddo in her childood and found him attractive even later. During his visit, Iddo looked at Gomer with desire and spoke words of love ‘like fire’ (loc. 2963). In Hosea’s absence, Iddo ceaselessly asked Gomer to come to him, and she states that, ‘a desire was kindled in me, not a desire for him so much as to know what would befall a woman with a man like him. I fought against it but it was too strong for me, and so I went’ (loc. 2963). While she regrets the affair, Gomer says she has ‘no regrets, only gratitude’ towards Hosea. In fact, ‘if gratitude and reverence, too, be love’, Gomer asserts that she has always loved Hosea and him only (loc. 2989). In this way, Steinberg has succeeded in portraying both Hosea and Gomer as sympathetic characters. Hosea is truly a broken-hearted man, where his so-called ‘weakness’ or ‘softness’ (which we might understand as love and concern especially for his wife) prevents him from fulfilling the requirements of the law (loc. 2849, 2885, 2919–2928).24 Gomer is not a wanton vixen, but a woman whose circumstances have trapped her into a marriage where she can respect her husband; however, her more sensual side goes unfulfilled.25 Rosen suggests that, ‘[i]n endowing Gomer and Hosea with warm hearts and deep feelings, Steinberg has run full tilt against the hardness of the Bible text’.26 While Hosea 1–3 could be read as unyielding in its damnation of Gomer/Israel and justification of harsh punishments, Steinberg has taken the patriarchal confines of the text and sketched a narrative that endears both Hosea and Gomer as feeling and understandable characters. Although I would be more hesitant than Rosen about Steinberg’s inclinations for women’s liberation,27 I would agree that compared to the wanton wife in ‘Gimpel the Fool’ and the tortured soul of Angel in Redeeming Love, Steinberg balances love and (lack of) agency in ways that leaves the reader questioning whether Gomer could ever find true fulfilment in the patriarchal culture of her time. 16.4 Redeeming Gomer In Steinberg’s The Prophet’s Wife, Hosea divorces Gomer following the adultery (loc. 3091–3148). However, as Gomer is pregnant and severely ill, Hosea arranges

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  261 for her care (loc. 3250, 3282–3309). After the birth, Gomer pleads Hosea to take the baby and leaves to establish herself in a brothel (loc. 3404–3414). After the return of Iddo, she becomes Iddo’s concubine (loc. 3449). The manuscript ends on a tantalising cliff-hanger when a rebellion rises against the royal house and, as one of the defenders of the palace, Hosea could avenge himself against Iddo, who is part of the invasion (loc. 3523–3621). The actual ending Steinberg had in mind is lost to time, although possible suggestions have been described by Kushner and Rosen in their comments at the end of the book. Intriguingly, they offer two completely different readings. While Rosen pictures Hosea and Gomer reconciling, leading to the start of Hosea’s prophetic ministry with Gomer and the children by his side,28 Kushner’s vision is far less amicable. While Hosea’s experience with Gomer helps him discern the depths of God’s pathos, a vision which will eventually evolve to include God’s restoration and even forgiveness of Israel, Gomer has simply burnt the bridges too many times for Hosea to feel anything more than pity towards her. As Kushner notes, ‘what is possible for God is beyond the reach of Hosea’.29 If Steinberg’s notion of both Hosea’s and God’s forgiveness in Basic Judaism can be held as an indicator for the ending of The Prophet’s Wife, then it seems that Rosen’s ending is closer to the one Steinberg might have intended. However, even Rosen is dissatisfied with her conclusion since her version gives Gomer agency in her redemption, presumably as she willingly leaves with Hosea to start the ministry. In this way, Gomer ‘loses the drama of a sinner’s redemption, and she and we lose the text’s explanation of the miseries of Jewish history as punishment for sin’.30 I am not convinced this is entirely the case as Hosea would still need to relinquish his demands for justice; however, Gomer’s chance to play the repentant sinner is somewhat diminished as she chooses a life with Hosea. Yet, even then, she decides on a lesser of two evils: Gomer still lacks complete agency over her fate.31 It is indeed possible, as Rosen further notes, that the Hosea-Gomer relationship is an image not only of the love but also the ‘darkness’ in humanity’s relationship with the divine: ‘God cannot live without the love of the people, however betrayed by them, nor can the people ever love God as much as God requires them to’.32 Such is the dance between Hosea/God and Gomer/Israel, where both end as the ultimate tragic characters. Hosea/God is never able to get the love he desires, and I would argue Gomer/Israel cannot truly choose the life she wishes to live. As Hosea 1–3 and Steinberg’s version are both riddled with the inequalities of patriarchy, it seems that in this Hosea/Gomer or God/Israel dance there are no winners, just two characters pursuing something they ultimately cannot reach.33 Even if Rosen’s reading leaves us with a somewhat redeemed Gomer, the redemption of Elka in ‘Gimpel the Fool’ has to wait till the afterlife or at least the moment of her death. It is only on her deathbed that Elka confesses her deception: none of Gimpel’s children are his (p. 17). After the mourning period, a ‘Spirit of Evil’ visits Gimpel and entices him to take revenge on the people of Frampol for deceiving him all his life. As Gimpel is afraid of God’s judgment, the spirit declares that there is no God or afterlife, only ‘a thick mire’ (p. 18). Gimpel decides to reciprocate by baking bread that is defiled. However, at the last minute Gimpel

262  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry has a dream of his wife, who declares, ‘You fool! Because I was false is everything false too? I never deceived anyone but myself. I’m paying for it all, Gimpel. They spare you nothing here’ (p. 19). Sensing that his ‘Eternal Life’ hangs in the balance, Gimpel destroys the bread (p. 19). He then shares his wealth among his children and leaves Frampol. During his travels he learns that ‘there were really no lies. Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn’t happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year’ (p. 20). He becomes something of a wandering wise man, telling stories and dreaming about Elka who has been transformed: ‘her face is shining and her eyes are as radiant as the eyes of a saint, and she speaks outlandish words to me [Gimpel], strange things’ (p. 20). She comforts Gimpel, ‘weeps upon my [Gimpel’s] face’, and promises that they will be together (pp. 20–22). Gimpel concludes that ‘[n]o doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world’ (p. 22). When the time of his death comes, Gimpel will depart happily since ‘[w]hatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived’ (p. 22). According to Ruth Wisse, ‘[m]odern Jewish humor grows from the tension of having to reconcile a belief as absolute as Elijah’s with an experience of failure as absolute as that of the priests of Baal’.34 Referring to Elijah’s/God’s defeat of the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, Wisse has beautifully described the tension in the so-called schlemiel (little man), the enduring fool of Yiddish literature, in the postHolocaust era. Although, for Singer, Gimpel was not a little man in accordance with earlier Yiddish traditions as these were usually victims,35 his depiction of Gimpel is still humorous yet ambiguous. After the Holocaust it seems that something about the portrayal of the little man has shifted.36 In fact, as a type of the wise fool, the story of Gimpel might be part of Singer’s musings to address, however indirectly, the atrocities of the Holocaust by showing us a literary world that is far from straightforward. While Gimpel can be laughably naïve, at the same time, as Gimpel states himself, he does not think himself a fool.37 Rather than being the simple village idiot, there are times when Gimpel shows agency in choosing to hope or believe despite evidence. At times he even decides to believe to make his tormentors desist or spare others.38 Gimpel’s faith has a dignity that after all his suffering comes back to him in visions and dreams.39 He discovers that there were indeed no lies: truth is subjective and faith better than doubt.40 As Singer himself noted, ‘[m]an is born to free choice, to believe, to doubt, or to deny. I choose to believe’.41 In a world filled with tyranny and ambiguity, Gimpel likewise chooses to live by certain assumptions,42 which for him are love, faith, goodness, and the ‘true world’ in the thereafter.43 But what about Elka? In Gimpel’s dream, the reformed Elka is part of the ‘true world’ and having transferred from sinner to saint, she takes on a pious quality akin to that of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8.44 However, unlike the complexities of Gimpel’s character, Elka remains a means to a message. She is so evil, in fact, that only death can transform her. As such, the new Elka remains stereotypical of the ‘good woman’ trope where her goodness is viewed through the lens of her husband whom her good deeds benefit.45 Death is a high price for redemption and, even then, she is a side-show in the bigger drama that is ‘Gimpel the Fool’.

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  263 If Elka can only be redeemed in death, Angel in Rivers’ Redeeming Love endures several atrocities to attain redemption in life. By the time Angel meets Michael, she has endured sexual slavery and human trafficking, among others, all or some of which could have left her as a traumatised character. Traumatic events are famously defined by Judith Herman as those which: overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning […] Traumatic events are extraordinary [...] because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life […] traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death.46 In Angel’s young life these requirements are met several times over, and some events, such as her reoccurring nightmares (loc. 1883), the presence of triggers like her fear of the dark (loc. 1896–1928), and hypervigilance (loc. 1433–1665; 1896–1912) could be seen as traumatic responses (loc. 3445, 3516, 3865).47 For a trauma victim to start her journey of recovery, she needs to be empowered. According to Herman, ‘[s]he must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery’.48 While others can assist, they should not attempt to ‘cure’ or coerce her. In Redeeming Love, Angel is, however, constantly denied agency. As noted earlier, Michael marries Angel while she is semi-conscious, after which he whisks her off to his farm to recover. While Michael nurses Angel, he quite literally strips Angel of autonomy:49 he takes her clothes since these are not appropriate for a farmer’s wife (loc. 1558) and calls her Mara instead of Angel to describe her supposed bitterness (loc. 878, 1433). Ultimately, Angel is completely dependent on Michael for all her needs including food and shelter (loc. 1501). Overall, as noted by Samantha Field, ‘ignoring consent is an essential facet of both Micheal [sic] and God’s character’.50 This conclusion is reminiscent of interpretations that view at least aspects of God’s and/or Hosea’s behaviour in the biblical book as abusive;51 however, because Rivers has set Michael up as a self-sacrificing image of Christ and Angel as the sinner to be saved, in Redeeming Love acts of coercion and domestic abuse are understood as signs of loving-kindness and part and parcel of Angel’s journey of redemption. The endgame for both Rivers and the author of Hosea seems to be Angel’s, or Gomer/Israel’s, loving submission to the man in her life. In the book of Hosea, this is achieved by God wooing Israel back to himself, resulting in renewed wedding vows (Hos 2: 14, 20). In Redeeming Love, Angel becomes slowly aware of Michael’s love for her and, after a conversion experience and even starting a ministry among prostitutes, she eventually returns to Michael to be his wife. Intriguingly, Rivers gives us a glimpse of an alternative path for Angel. In the beginning of the book, what Angel really wants is independence. She dreams of getting the money she is owed from the brothel and purchasing a cabin in the woods to live as a free agent (loc. 1589). However, in the book this dream is ultimately labelled as a whisper from Satan (loc. 1589, 2038, 2237).52 In the study companion, Rivers notes that Angel ‘would never have been happy as a recluse’.53 While it is certainly true that healing from trauma needs to take place within safe relationships,54 to have

264  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Angel find happiness in submission to a man rather than as a free woman remains questionable.55 As Israel can only find happiness with God and Gomer with Hosea, so Angel’s dreams of freedom are drowned out among the theological gongs of male headship. To keep the parallels between the book of Hosea, Angel’s only possible option is to return to her spouse. For contemporary readers, this especially presents a quandary since it pictures an abused woman returning to her abuser.56 Such a message is not only theological troubling, but it potentially encourages women to stay in abusive relationships since, as noted earlier, Michael’s efforts are depicted as necessary for Angel’s redemption and Angel’s bid for freedom deemed a temptation. For Angel, Gomer and Israel, true happiness is found if they accept their proper place in the patriarchal order, and independence is an illusion best to be avoided. 16.5 Conclusion In her companion study, Rivers uses a famous poem by John Donne to describe some of the sentiments in Redeeming Love. She quotes, ‘Batter my heart, threepersoned God [...] Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new’.57 While this poem is used by Rivers to describe the ‘paradoxes’ of love,58 ‘Batter my heart’ was also used by Gracia Fay Ellwood as the title of her 1988 essay, where she analysed the violent marriage imagery in the Hebrew Bible. For Ellwood, the God who batters is not something to admire.59 Ultimately, it seems that bigger concerns, such as how Rivers understands the nature of God, violence, and marriage, dictate how she reads the biblical book of Hosea. Harking to the infamous debate whether God/ Hosea should be seen as loving or abusive in the biblical narrative, while Rivers finds God/Hosea loving, others may find him reprehensible. In comparison to Singer’s ‘Gimpel the Fool’ and Steinberg’s The Prophet’s Wife, it is intriguing that Rivers is the only author that has consistently kept God in the story. In both Singer’s and Steinberg’s works, God is mostly or even completely absent as an active agent, which could perhaps at least be in part explained by the authors writing soon after the Holocaust. Singer takes his inspiration from the Babylonian Talmud and presents Hosea/Gimpel as a comical character with a wanton wife, where his description of Gimpel as both gullible and wise leaves the reader pondering about the values of dignity, goodness, and faith. Sadly, his depiction of Elka/Gomer remains stereotypical, where she starts as a classic bad woman and is redeemed only in the thereafter, where she is presented as something akin to a saint, giving hope and comfort to her husband. In both cases, there is little depth to Gomer and her character is never explored bur instead viewed through the lens of her husband and as means to his story arc. Where Singer’s portrayal of Gomer is somewhat one-dimensional, Steinberg has succeeded in adding depth and emotion to both characters. Steinberg depicts Hosea as a young man in love and consequently struggling with his compassion versus fulfilling the requirements of the law. Gomer is a free-spirited woman who marries Hosea out of desperation; however, while she respects and admires Hosea, she has no passion for him. The consequent adultery might also be seen in this

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  265 light: it is Gomer’s attempt to fulfil her sensual side while confined in a marriage she chose as the best of a bad situation. In this way, both Hosea and Gomer are trapped: Hosea by his love for Gomer and respect for the law and Gomer by a patriarchal society that denies her full agency. Of the three authors chosen for this project, I found Rivers’ interpretation the most troubling. Rivers has filled in the narrative gaps in ways that result in victim blaming where Angel/Gomer is somehow responsible, among others, for a sexual assault by her husband’s friend. At least in Singer’s reading Gomer is consistently either a saint or a sinner, giving Singer the space to ponder on other issues even if this is at the expense of the female character. Of the three authors, Steinberg was perhaps the most sympathetic towards not only Hosea but also Gomer while maintaining the patriarchal confines of the narrative. As the novel is unfinished, we can only speculate as to how Steinberg would have ended his story. However, what all the authors have demonstrated is that our interpretations of biblical narratives are creative exercises in gap-filling. How these gaps are filled depends largely on the interpreter’s context, time, and theological commitments. Koenig is quite right when she notes that, ‘[a]s much as biblical scholars might eschew “popular” interpretations of the biblical text, those retellings have the power to shape people’s views about the content of the Bible’.60 As testified by Steinberg’s fame, Singer’s Nobel prize, and Rivers’ more than three million copies sold, engaging with popular works on Hosea 1–3 becomes not only a necessary but an important endeavour to engage readers of the Bible in new and imaginative ways. Notes 1 Sternberg, Poetics, pp. 186–187. 2 Koenig, Bathsheba, p. 3. 3 Law, ‘Bestselling’. 4 Rivers, Companion, loc. 2861. 5 Hennings, ‘Gimpel’, pp. 11–19; Sherwood, Prostitute, pp. 74–76. 6 See Exum, ‘Editorial’, p. vii. 7 Cf. Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3696–3705. 8 Bate, ‘Women’, p. 213. Bate understands Singer’s ‘dual visions of woman’ to have Kabbalistic undertones. 9 Bird, ‘Harlot’, 75–94; Sherwood, Prostitute, n. 4, pp. 19–20; Sakenfeld, Wives, pp. 96–98. 10 Rivers, Companion, loc. 2015. 11 Rivers, Companion, loc. 198, 462, 1474, 1507, 1853; eadem, Devotional, loc. 800, 994. 12 Steinberg, Basic Judaism, p. 5. 13 For a summary of this view and associated references, see Rowley, ‘Marriage’, pp. 210– 211. 14 Sherwood, Prostitute, pp. 44–47, 74–76. 15 See, also, Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3726–3735. 16 Steinberg, Basic Judaism, p. 48. 17 Singer and Burgin, Conversations, p. 93. 18 See Friedman, Singer, pp. 189–192; Mambrol, ‘Gimpel’, and Blocker and Elman, ‘Interview’. For an interpretation that sees Gimpel’s ability to believe as a commentary on some of the Jews’ inability to believe in their possible extinction, see Alexander, Singer, p. 146; cf. Wisse, Schlemiel, pp. 65–67. 19 Hennings, ‘Gimpel’, pp. 11–19; cf. Sherwood, Prostitute, pp. 54–57.

266  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 20 Stiebert, Rape, loc. 1539–1764. 21 Cross, ‘Purity’, pp. 21–39; Shore, ‘Redeeming’. 22 Stiebert, Rape, loc. 1529–1612. 23 Stiebert, Rape, loc. 1612. 24 See, also, Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3708, 3718. 25 See, also, Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3718, 3736. 26 Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3737. 27 Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3742. 28 Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3744–3762. 29 Steinberg, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3663. 30 Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3762–3771. 31 Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3771. 32 Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3771. 33 See, also, Rosen, ‘Unfinished’, loc. 3780. 34 Wisse, Schlemiel, p. 59. 35 Flender, ‘Art’, pp. 67–68. 36 Flender, ‘Art’, p. 68; Wisse, Schlemiel, pp. 58–69; Feuer, ‘Sclemiel’; Alexander, Singer, p. 145. 37 Singer, ‘Gimpel’, p. 3. 38 See Siegel, ‘Gimpel’, p.163–173; Wisse, Schlemiel, pp. 61–64. 39 Kazin, ‘Saint’, p. 64. 40 Hadda, Singer, p. 124. 41 Blocker and Elman, ‘Interview’. 42 Blocker and Elman, ‘Interview’; Siegel, ‘Gimpel’, p. 167; Wisse, Schlemiel, pp. 65–66. 43 See Wisse, Schlemiel, pp. 60–69. 44 Clasby, ‘Vision’, p. 96. 45 See also Beck, ‘Misogyny’. For a more sympathetic depiction of Singer’s use of female characters, see Bate, ‘Women’, pp. 209–219. 46 Herman, Trauma, p. 33. 47 Cf. Herman, Trauma, pp. 32–56; Field, ‘Non-Consensual’; eadem, ‘Family’. 48 Herman, Trauma, p. 133. 49 See also Field, ‘Non-Consensual’; Shore, ‘Redeeming’. 50 Field, ‘Introducing’ [her italics]; cf. eadem, ‘Moral’; Shore, ‘Redeeming’. 51 See, e.g., Exum, Plotted, pp. 101–128; Graetz, ‘God’, pp. 126–145; Weems, Battered; Yee, ‘Hosea’, pp. 299–308; Cobb, ‘Reading’, pp. 112–133. 52 Cf. Field, ‘Boots’; Shore, ‘Redeeming’. 53 Rivers, Companion, loc. 708; cf. eadem, Devotional, loc. 933–943. 54 Herman, Trauma, p. 133. 55 See also Venarchik, ‘Toxic’; Shore, ‘Redeeming’. 56 Field, ‘Abuser’; Blyth, Rape, pp. 53–54. 57 Rivers, Companion, loc. 1286. 58 Rivers, Companion, loc. 1286. 59 Ellwood, ‘Batter’, loc. 251–289. 60 Koenig, ‘Bathsheba’, p. 422.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Rivers, Francine. Redeeming Love. Oxford: Lion Hudson, 1991/2013, Kindle Edition. Singer, Isaac B. Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories. Classic ed. New York, NY: Goodreads Press, 2021, Kindle Edition.

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  267 Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Family Moskat. Translated by A. H. Gross. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. Steinberg, Milton. The Prophet’s Wife. Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 2010, Kindle Edition. Secondary Sources Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer. TWAS 582. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1980. Bate, Nancy B. ‘Judaism, Genius, or Gender: Women in the Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer’. In Grace Farrell (ed.), Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York, NY: G. K. Hall, 1996, pp. 209–219. Beck, Evelyn T. ‘I. B. Singers Misogyny’. June 18, 1979. https://lilith​.org​/articles​/i​-b​ -singers​-misogyny/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Bird, Phyllis A. ‘“To Play the Harlot”: An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor’. In Peggy L. Day (ed.), Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989, pp. 75–94. Blocker, Joel, and Richard Elman. ‘An Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer’. Commentary November (1963). https://www​.commentary​.org​/articles​/isaac​-singer​/an​-interview/ (accessed 21 March 2023) Blyth, Caroline. Rape Culture, Purity Culture, and Coercive Control in Teen Girl Bibles. London: Routledge, 2021. Clasby, Nancy T. ‘Gimpel’s Wisdom: I. B. Singer’s Vision of the “True World”’. SAJL 15 (1996), pp. 90–98. Cobb, Kirsi. ‘Reading Gomer with Questions: A Trauma-Informed Feminist Study of How the Experience of Intimate Partner Violence and the Presence of Religious Belief Shape the Reading of Hosea 2:2–23’. In Karen O’Donnell and Katie Cross (eds), Feminist Trauma Theologies: Body, Scripture & Church in Critical Perspective. London: SCM Press, 2020, pp. 112–133. Cross, Katie. ‘“I Have the Power in My Body to Make People Sin”: The Trauma of Purity Culture and the Concept of “Body Theodicy”’. In Karen O’Donnell and Katie Cross (eds), Feminist Trauma Theologies: Body, Scripture & Church in Critical Perspective. London: SCM Press, 2020, pp. 21–39. Ellwood, Gracia F. Batter My Heart. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 282. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1988/2017, Kindle Edition. Exum, J. Cheryl. ‘Editorial Preface’. In J. Cheryl Exum (ed.), Retellings: The Bible in Literature, Music, Art and Film. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2007, pp. vii–viii. Exum, J. Cheryl. Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Feuer, Menachem. ‘I.  B. Singer on the Schlemiel (a.k.a. “Little Man”)’. Schlemiel Theory June 24, 2013. https://schlemielintheory​.com​/2013​/07​/24​/i​-b​-singer​-on​-the​-schlemiel​-a​ -k​-a​-little​-man/ (accessed 21 March 2023) Field, Samantha. ‘Redeeming Love Review: Introducing Michael’. Aug. 22, 2016. http:// samanthapfield​.com​/2016​/08​/22​/redeeming​-love​-review​-introducing​-michael/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Field, Samantha. ‘Redeeming Love Review: Non-Consensual Marriage’. Sept. 19, 2016. http://samanthapfield​.com​/2016​/09​/19​/redeeming​-love​-review​-non​-consensual​ -marriage/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Field, Samantha. ‘Redeeming Love Review: These Boots Are Made for Walking’. Jan. 9, 2017. http://samanthapfield​.com​/2017​/01​/09​/redeeming​-love​-review​-boots​-made​ -walking/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Field, Samantha. ‘Redeeming Love: Family Love’. Sept. 11, 2017. http://samanthapfield​ .com​/2017​/09​/11​/redeeming​-love​-family​-love/ (accessed 24 March 2023)

268  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Field, Samantha. ‘Moral Relativity’. June 5, 2018. http://samanthapfield​.com​/2018​/06​/05​/ redeeming​-love​-moral​-relativity/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Field, Samantha. ‘Redeeming Love: The Abuser Wins’. June 21, 2018. http://samanthapfield​ .com​/2018​/06​/21​/redeeming​-love​-the​-abuser​-wins/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Flender, Harold. ‘Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Art of Fiction No. 42’. The Paris Review 44 (1968), pp. 53–73. Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Isaac Bashevis Singer. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1988. Graetz, Naomi. ‘God Is to Israel as Husband Is to Wife: The Metaphoric Battering of Hosea’s Wife’. In Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to The Latter Prophets. FCB 8. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995, pp. 126–145. Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Hennings, Thomas. ‘Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” and The Book of Hosea’. The Journal of Narrative Technique 13.1 (1983), pp. 11–19. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1992/2015. Kazin, Alfred. ‘The Saint as Schlemiel’. In Grace Farrell (ed.), Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York, NY: G. K. Hall, 1996, pp. 61–65. Koenig, Sara M. Bathsheba Survives. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. Koenig, Sara M. ‘Bathsheba in Contemporary Romance Novels’. In Susanne Scholz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 407–423. Kushner, Harold S. ‘Conflict of Heart and Mind’. In Milton Steinberg (ed.), The Prophet’s Wife. Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 2010, loc. 3623–3687 of 3827, Kindle Edition. Law, Jeannie O. ‘Bestselling Novel “Redeeming Love” to Be Turned to Movie Produced by Roma Downey’. The Christian Post, May 1, 2020. https://www​.christianpost​.com​/news​ /bestselling​-novel​-redeeming​-love​-to​-be​-turned​-to​-movie​-produced​-by​-roma​-downey​ .html (accessed 14 March 2023) Mambrol, Nasrullah. ‘Analysis of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool’. Literary Theory and Criticism, May 25, 2021. https://literariness​.org​/2021​/05​/25​/analysis​-of​ -isaac​-bashevis​-singers​-gimpel​-the​-fool/ (accessed 27 March 2023) Rivers, Francine, with Karin S. Buursma. A Path to Redeeming Love: A 40-Day Devotional. Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2020, Kindle Edition. Rivers, Francine, with Angela Hunt. Redeeming Love: The Companion Study. Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2020, Kindle Edition. Rowley, Harold H. ‘The Marriage of Hosea’. BJRLM 39/1 (1956), pp. 200–233. Rosen, Norma. ‘Unfinished Lives’. In Milton Steinberg (ed.), The Prophet’s Wife. Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 2010, loc. 3687–3784 of 3827, Kindle Edition. Sakenfeld, Katherine D. Just Wives? Stories of Power & Survival in the Old Testament & Today. Louisville, KY / London: Westminster John Knox, 2003. Sherwood, Yvonne. The Prostitute and the Prophet: Reading Hosea in the Late Twentieth Century. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Shore, Emily. ‘Is Redeeming Love Redemptive or Redundant Religiosity?’ Jan. 24, 2022. https://emilybethshore​.info​/is​-redeeming​-love​-redemptive​-or​-redundant​-religiosity/ (accessed 24 March 2023) Siegel, Paul N. ‘Gimpel and the Archetype of the Wise Fool’. In Marcia Allentuck (ed.), The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press / London: Feffer and Simons, 1969, pp. 159–173. Singer, Isaac B., and Richard Burgin. Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. Steinberg, Milton. As a Driven Leaf. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1939.

Victim, Vixen, Saint and Sinner  269 Steinberg, Milton. Basic Judaism. San Diego, CA / New York, NY / London: Harcourt, 1947/1975. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. Stiebert, Johanna. Rape Myths, The Bible, and #MeToo. Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2020, Kindle Edition. Venarchik, Anna. ‘“Redeeming Love”: Evangelicalism’s Toxic Patriarchal Tale Gets the Hollywood Treatment’. Daily Beast, Jan. 19, 2022. https://www​ .thedailybeast​ .com​ / redeeming​-love​-evangelicalisms​-toxic​-slut​-shaming​-tale​-gets​-the​-hollywood​-treatment (accessed 24 March 2023) Weems, Renita J. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995. Wisse, Ruth R. The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago, IL / London: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. Yee, Gale A. ‘Hosea.’ In Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (eds), Women’s Bible Commentary. 20th anniversary ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, pp. 299–308.

17 Singing Scripture On the Reception of Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship Lyrics David Davage

17.1 Introduction The poetry of the Psalms has had great impact on the theological processing in both Jewish and Christian traditions. Throughout time, communities of faith have turned to this canonised anthology of prayers in search for language to express a wide range of emotions and needs, and, in so doing, interpretations, commentaries, and rewritings have been produced that have come to differ quite substantially from one another. Indeed, this is to be expected. Scholars working on the function of canonical literature often emphasise that the ideologies of communities of faith inevitably shape how they both view and (re)construct their canons.1 While it is certainly true that communities will attempt to align their ways of living to them, the biblical texts themselves rarely speak on their behalf, simply because they were not written by them.2 The act of interpreting biblical texts will, therefore, always include creative acts of aligning them to the desired way of living formulated by the transmitting communities. James A. Sanders describes this dynamic as a tension between a canon’s stability and adaptability: ‘Repetition requires that the tradition be both stable and adaptable. Minimally speaking, it is the nature of canon to be “remembered” or contemporized’.3 Building on these insights, Terje Stordalen introduces the notion of a canonical ecology consisting of a canonical body, canonical commentaries, and a canonical community. In his view, canonical commentaries can be seen as ‘interpretations that are authorized to redefine the commonly accepted view of the meaning of the scriptures’,4 that is, as tools to enable a canonical body to adapt to new contexts without challenging its stability. Proceeding from these observations, the aim of this chapter is to explore how the above-mentioned repetition is materialised in what can best be defined as part of the canonical ecology: rewritings of the canonical body. More specifically, I shall focus on contemporary rewritings of Psalms 1, 16 and 42 for performative purposes in three projects belonging to protestant evangelical canonical communities: Sons of Korah, Shane & Shane, and The Psalms Project. These projects, which will be further introduced below, have been selected based on scope and shared aims—the ambition to faithfully render the canonical text in an updated musical form.5 More specifically, they speak about the need to worship ‘biblically’, and are all part of what Lesther Ruth and Swee Hong Lim call ‘Contemporary Praise Worship’.6 In their recent study, they map DOI: 10.4324/9781003280347-18

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  271 out its history as a confluence of two liturgical theologies—‘Praise & Worship’ and ‘Contemporary Worship’—and, in order to frame the ensuing study, a brief summary of their work will be provided. 17.2 Contemporary Praise & Worship 17.2.1 Praise & Worship

According to Ruth and Lim, the roots of Praise & Worship is to be found in a ‘revelatory experience’ of a pastor named Reg Layzell. He was invited to preach for a week at a church in Abbotsford, Canada, in January 1946, but it did not start well:7 By Wednesday morning Layzell was desperate. Fasting, he arrived at the church early that morning and began to pray. Feeling sorry for himself, he begged God for some kind of blessing […] Around noon a Scripture verse came to mind as he was praying: ‘But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel’ (KJV). He did not remember the exact verse reference (Ps. 22:3) at first, but accepted the verse as a gift from God nonetheless.8 He started to praise, invited the congregation to do likewise, and, as the service began, Layzell experienced what he would later describe in terms of revival, a confirmation ‘that he had understood this scriptural promise correctly’.9 The verse came to be seen as a divinely revealed key and, when read together with Hebr 13:14 (‘By him [Christ] therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name’, KJV), the theological foundation for Praise & Worship had been laid. God was believed to have had: (1) commanded his people to praise, regardless of human feelings or emotions, and (2) promised that when they did so, they would experience God’s divine presence. Praise thus had a ‘causal instrumentality with respect to God’s presence’,10 and this basic insight would be used as an overarching framework for biblical interpretation. In the period between 1965 and 1985, four major emphases emerged: 1) First, a distinction was made between praise and worship, in the sense that the former constituted a prerequisite for the latter. Ps 100:4 provided a ‘biblical model’: starting with thanksgiving and a sacrifice of praise, the congregation was to move into the presence of God in worship.11 There is thus a significant spatial undercurrent to this stream, ‘worship as sacred space and worship as praise’,12 and the emphasis on praise came to marginalise other expressions. In his influential Let Us Worship, for example, Judson Cornwall writes that ‘Prayer, then, ceases being merely a pleading for mercy and becomes the praising of our merciful God’;13 2) A second emphasis was on an idea that ‘Praise & Worship was a corporate musical enterprise’.14 Linked to the idea of drawing near the presence of God, Levitical priests became models in what was referred to as a Davidic ‘biblical’ ‘order of worship’ based on readings of especially 2 Sam 6(:17) in light of Acts 15:16 and Am 9:11–12 (‘the tabernacle of David’).15 In this view, their

272  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry main task was to ‘usher or lead people into God’s presence’,16 a place characterised by ‘intimacy’.17 Musically, this was often accomplished by uninterrupted musical flows (‘to help a church sense God’s presence’),18 and David came to be emphasised as a prototypical worshipper and songwriter, connecting the ‘proper outward liturgical behavior [often by reference to his behaviour in 2 Sam 6, my comment] and inward liturgical disposition’;19 3) Third, the presence of God was understood as divine activity. In Praise & Worship, God was redeeming, healing, delivering, and saving from sin, and this called for active response: ‘to feel affectively and to express physically were expected responses from all worshipers’.20 Verses from Psalms were often used to justify practices such as lifting hands, clapping, dancing, falling on one’s knees, etcetera; 4) Fourth, and permeating the previous three, was an emphasis on biblical texts: ‘Praise & Worship was approached as a biblically derived, God-given pattern of worship’.21 In this ‘biblical theologizing’ (a ‘liturgical biblicism’),22 the Psalms had a primary place, since they were believed to provide the ‘root ideas’,23 and the mode of interpretation was well in line with Pentecostal hermeneutics at the time—fragmentary (placing little emphasis on historical or literary contexts, cf. the use of Ps 22:3 as proof text), transhistorical (minimising discontinuities between contemporary and biblical historical contexts), and restorational (aiming to ‘restore’ the found biblical patterns).24 17.2.2 Contemporary Worship

In some contrast to Praise & Worship, the main theological emphasis of ‘Contemporary Worship’, rooted in the early nineteenth-century Methodists, was not ‘praise-to-presence’, but ‘overcoming-the-gap’ between the church(es) and the culture(s) in which it existed.25 At the core was a distinction between form and content based on, in particular, 1 Cor 9:22b: ‘I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some’ (NRSV). Consequently, it had ‘a degree of liturgical iconoclasm’26—an evangelistic pragmatism where continuous creativity was emphasised as a means to fulfil the ‘Great Commission’ (Matt 28:16–20) in different contexts.27 Put differently, the core of ‘Contemporary Worship’ was the conviction that worship had to be reshaped to appeal to different groups and, when related to an emerging tendency to speak of ‘generations’ as having distinct experiences and perspectives, churches started to focus on how to overcome a specific ‘youth-gap’.28 To a large extent, this meant a renewal of modes of expression, as well as an emphasis on excellence (services had to be as good ‘as anything the world has to offer’).29 Ultimately, ‘Contemporary Worship’ came to be seen as a method to reach the unreached, with a stress on the ability to ‘adapt to native conditions’30: ‘Worship must be expressed in the “heart language” of the target subculture if its members are really to see it, to appropriate it, and to be involved in it’.31 It is in this context that ‘Contemporary Worship’ came to be associated with a certain style of worship (pop/rock ensembles).32

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  273 17.2.3 An Important Counter Current

If the confluent streams of Contemporary Praise & Worship can thus be described as emphasising ‘praise’ as a means to enter into God’s presence and generating new songs attempted to appeal to a young generation,33 one effect was that the Psalms were rarely sung or read (at least not in their entirety) in worship contexts. Moreover, older hymns were deemed out of fashion, and this came to be challenged by another current, often called the ‘Retuned Hymn Movement’.34 As described by Bruce H. Benedict and Lester Ruth, it began in the 1980s and was ‘focused around writing new tunes to forgotten hymn texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’,35 originating among young adults with Reformed University Fellowship. Staying with the pop/rock genre, the movement aimed to provide theological alternatives to the ‘commodification’ of songs in Contemporary Praise & Worship.36 More specifically, these hymns tended to focus on Jesus Christ and his redeeming work, especially that work accomplished through his atoning death on the cross, […] [the] sense of utter human dependency upon the grace of God, the reliability of that grace for salvation and daily discipleship, and need for and hope of changed lives through that grace. Likewise the hymns will presume the reliability of the biblical witness to God’s saving activity for humankind and the necessity for Christians themselves to witness to and offer this salvation of the gospel.37 Two aspects are worth noting as relevant for the analysis below. First, since the content was provided by already composed lyrics, possibilities to impact the message was limited. When needed, rather than rewriting the inherited lyrics, composers added new parts: [M]odern composers are more reflective about the act of worship itself and more likely to utilize statements of praise, worship, and adoration directly addressed to God (or Jesus) as prayer. It is striking, for example, in how newly appended choruses will directly pray in a way the original lyrics did not, or will intensify the prayer element.38 Second, while Contemporary Worship tends to use colloquial language, the rewritten hymns often retain archaic English.39 17.3 The Three Projects Based on this summary of the theological currents of Contemporary Praise & Worship, I will, in the remainder of this study, analyse the rewriting of Psalm 1, 16 and 42 by Sons of Korah, Shane & Shane, and The Psalms Project, but before turning to the songs proper, the projects themselves need to be introduced. 17.3.1 Sons of Korah

Sons of Korah, named after the Levitical group mentioned in several of the psalms superscriptions, ‘is an Australian based band devoted to giving a fresh voice to

274  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the biblical psalms’.40 Their first Psalms album appeared in 1999, called ‘Light of Life’, and included recordings of Psalms 56, 116, 93, 15, 103, 6, and 59. Since then, another nine albums have been released, setting a large number of Psalms to contemporary music, drawing on folk and world music.41 The band is led by Matthew Jacoby, PhD, Senior Pastor at One Hope Baptist Church in Geelong and lecturer in Christian Thought and Preaching at Melbourne School of Theology.42 Describing their view on the psalms, a stress on the need for what was described above as repetition can be seen: We believe that the psalms contain a particularly pertinent message for today. They are the supreme biblical portrayal of the spiritual life in all its facets and dynamics. They speak powerfully to a postmodern world that is generally more interested in what the biblical faith looks like from the inside than its abstract doctrinal expression. And for the church today the psalms present a deep and rich spiritual well for prayer and worship.43 According to Jacoby, the Psalms are ‘a perfect blend of spiritual realism with aesthetic and artistic integrity’,44 and the project is motivated by an understanding of the psalms as ‘originally written as songs and […] intended to be expressed musically’.45 The best way to repeat the psalms in contemporary contexts is thus to use music. Notably, when asked about how one can remain ‘faithful’ to the Psalms while creating something interesting musically, Jacoby responds that ‘faithfulness to the psalm is, I think, as much as anything, being effective in communicating it’ and that ‘singing was a primary way in which the biblical faith was passed on from one generation to another’.46 Apart from setting psalms to music, Jacoby has also written a book on the spirituality of the Psalms called Deeper Places,47 as well as brief comments on most of the recorded psalms, published on their website. In these written works, some of the emphases of Contemporary Praise & Worship can be found, albeit with a broader understanding of praise. According to Jacoby, praise is: expressed verbally, but it is primarily a state of being […] Praise in this sense permeates the psalms whatever the mood. Even in the darkest laments there is praise, if only in the sense that the psalmist persists in seeking God through his grief. He is declaring much about God simply by this pursuit […] Throughout the psalms in different ways, the disposition of praise is abundantly expressed in an indirect sense even where there is no direct verbal praise […] Some of the most powerful verbal expressions of praise, however, are those made in the context of grief. Here the psalmists commend themselves to God and use praise to urge themselves on in their pursuit of God. And if these verbal acts of praise do indeed prove to be effective, it is only because their lives are already expressing praise by the very pursuit itself.48 As a state of being, praise thus includes lament, and in some contrast to Contemporary Praise & Worship, Jacoby recurrently emphasises the need for the latter.49 Honesty and sacrifices of thanksgiving are, furthermore, seen as instrumental in the (inward)

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  275 journey in pursuit of God, a journey often characterised by waiting rather than immediacy. In line with Contemporary Praise & Worship, focus is thus on human agency, on the act of drawing near to God: The more you praise, the more you’ll see, […] because acts of praise & worship open our awareness to the God who is already there, they are acts of us presenting ourselves—becoming present to God, stopping and being aware of God. The problem […] is not that God is absent; the problem is that we are absent.50 Last, for Jacoby, David is seen as a ‘model man of faith an experience with which [one can] identify’,51 including his ‘spontaneous’ dancing before the ark (2 Sam 6, a passage noted above as significant above), where he put his ‘dignity aside’.52 17.3.2 The Psalms Project

The Psalms Project is led by Shane Heilman, whose aim is to set all 150 psalms to music ‘in their entirety, including the essential meaning of every verse, a marriage of King David’s vision with modern music’.53 Heilman has studied music at Belmont University in Nashville, led worship at the reformed church The Connection in Harrisburg, South Dakota, and founded Way Deeper Ministries.54 Speaking on the Psalms, he recurrently emphasises David as a model of piety: ‘You see how worship really was his lifeblood’,55 and this also means that for Heilman, the Psalms point to Christ: It’s been impossible to miss the degree to which the Psalms speak about Christ and reveal his character. Even besides the Messianic Psalms, which clearly speak of a future reality beyond David’s situation, we see the psalmists taking their grievances to God rather than seeking petty retaliation or vengeance […] the Psalms point powerfully to Christ and the work He will perform to reconcile the world to Him and establish justice. In the project, Heilman works in collaboration with other musicians and has so far produced six albums. The first, ‘Volume 1: Psalms 1–10’, was released in 2012, and all subsequent volumes follow the sequence of psalms in the book of Psalms.56 Describing his approach to the Psalms, he states that he ‘desire[s] to minister only in conformity with exegetically pure Biblical doctrine in the power of the Holy Spirit, allowing for freedom of style and cultural expression of said truths’,57 thus overlapping with emphases of Contemporary Worship as well as with the Retuned Movement. 17.3.3 Shane & Shane

The last project is led by Shane Barnard and Shane Everett (Shane & Shane), who work as worship leaders at the reformed Dallas megachurch Watermark Community Church.58 They have a long experience with congregational music, as well as an extensive musical production. Their first album rewriting Psalms, called

276  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry ‘Psalms’, was released in 2002, featuring psalms 143; 13; 145; and 118.59 Since then, another two Psalms albums have been released, and additional psalms have been recorded on other albums.60 Like Sons of Korah, their project is fuelled by a desire to make ‘God’s Word’ accessible and overlaps with the emphasis on ‘praiseto-presence’, as well as the Retuned Hymn Movement, which emerge as they are interviewed about their work: Now more than ever, with the onslaught of information overloading us, we wanted to create authentic songs and compelling resources families can use to worship and study the Word together […] Our ultimate goal is to see kids and families develop a hunger for God’s Word and a desire to worship Him, growing deeper in love with Jesus.61 To this end, they founded The Worship Initiative, ‘a collective of worship leaders and songwriters based in Dallas, TX’ aiming to be ‘an online equipping resource for worship leaders and churches […] to help the Church worship God with music that is artistically compelling and scripturally sound’.62 When describing their approach to the Psalms, Shane & Shane point to Col 3:16 as their ‘mission’; they ‘want to equip [“some younger folks”] to set the table for the bride of Christ so God’s people can enjoy and savor the great truths of God’.63 In this lies an emphasis on teaching Psalms in community, but also on the importance of experiencing the presence of God: Our music is my way of trying to record that moment with Jesus and put it into the airwaves so that someone else can also have that encounter—a true, real, tangible encounter with the Lord that allows the Word of Christ to dwell richly within them […] It doesn’t matter if it’s at church or in our car—when we praise God with fellow believers, we experience a glory the world can never take away.64 17.4  Rewriting Psalms In what follows, I will discuss the rewriting of each psalm by first providing a general introduction to the psalm, then compiling an overview of the structure of the songs, followed by analyses of the lyrics of each song.65 Although all songs are set to music, the analysis will include lyrics only. 17.4.1 Psalm 1

As the first psalm in the book of Psalms, Psalm 1 has been given prime importance in recent research.66 As a Torah psalm,67 it provides a didactic reflection on the contrasting fate of the righteous and the wicked. At the centre of this comparison is ‫תורת יהוה‬, ‘Yhwh’s instruction’, which in the Second Temple period referred to Mosaic traditions.68 By continuously meditating on this body of divine revelation, the righteous are said to be like a tree transplanted by the temple stream,69 bearing fruit in its time. The wicked, in contrast, are blown away like a chaff in the

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  277 wind, not standing in the judgement—a notion that would eventually be interpreted eschatologically.70 As for the three songs, they are structured as follows: Ps 1 Verse 1

v. 2

Verse Pre-Chorus Chorus Tag

Chorus 1

v. 3

Bridge

Pre-Chorus 2

v. 4

Pre-Chorus 1 Verse 2

v. 1

P  s 1

repeated content

Chorus 2

vv. 5–6

Verse 3

vv. 1a, 2a

v. 1 v. 2 v. 3ab v. 3c vv. 4–5a, 6

Everything He D  oes Shall Prosper (The Psalms Project)

P  s 1 Verse 1 Chorus Verse 2 Verse 3

vv. 2–3ab vv. 2a, 3a vv. 1ab, 4b v. 1a

I Delight in You (Shane & Shane)

Blessed is the Man (Sons of Korah)

17.4.1.1 Sons of Korah

Turning first to Blessed Is the Man, the lyrics are based primarily on the NIV, and a few things are worth noting. First is that phrases are repeated to create smoother transitions. Verse 1 and Pre-Chorus 1 read (italics mark additions to the NIV): [Verse 1] Blessed is the man, | the man who does not walk | in the counsel of the wicked. | Blessed is the man | who doesn’t stand in the sinner’s way, | or sit in the seat of the mocker. | [Pre-Chorus 1] Blessed is the man, oh-oh, | blessed is the man, oh-oh. These repetitions create an emphasis on the blessed, gendered (the NIV has ‘the one’) man throughout the song. The gendering is seen further in Chorus 2, which features ‘godly men’ (the NIV has ‘the righteous’). To be noted is that, according to Greg Scheer, ‘using masculine pronouns for God, gender exclusive terms for humans, and hierarchical language (“Master”)’71 is quite common in Contemporary Praise & Worship, despite its aim to be contemporary. It can thus be seen as a (somewhat surprising) consequence of the conservative theology and stress on theological orthodoxy in this tradition, aspects that were also noted above in the introduction to the three projects. Second, the two bridges strengthen the contrast between the two fates in the psalm, but, unlike the psalm in both the MT and the NIV, the outcomes are pushed into an (eschatological?) future: ‘whatever he does will prosper’ and ‘the wind will blow’. Third, ‫ תורת יהוה‬and ‫( תורתו‬v. 2) are interpreted as ‘the law of the Lord’ and ‘the word’ respectively, thus widening the reference to encompass not only the Pentateuch, but also the entire canonical body, as made explicit in the online commentary: ‘the word “law” is equivalent, by way of applying this today, to the Bible

278  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry as a whole and so in our version we use “the Word” and “Law” interchangeably’.72 Jacoby expands further on this dynamic in Deeper Places: When the psalmists spoke about the law, the statutes, and the decrees of God, they meant the written Word of God […] It is important, when we read references to the Torah in the psalms, that we take into view a deeper referent than simply words on a page. The Word of God is the expression of God himself, and to receive it into the heart is to receive God. In a sense, the written Word is the outward linguistic representation of the personal Word, which we ultimately see incarnate in Jesus Christ.73 The repetition of part of a canonical body by a Christian community of faith has thus destabilised the historical meaning in favour of a reading of individual parts in light of a bigger (theological) whole, thus generating a Christological understanding. Put differently, the ideological lenses of the community to which the composers belong has (re)shaped the way canonical stability is constructed. Such a conclusion is further supported by the fact that the song now ends with an exhorting summary, drawing the community into the rewritten psalm: ‘Blessed is the man | That man for his delight | is in the word of the Lord’. The song thus constitutes a good example of the aim to ‘sing Scripture’ as a way to pass on ‘biblical faith’ from one generation to another. This is also stressed in the comment: ‘It is the principles of the Torah in lyric form to help the people to meditate on it (by singing it) and more importantly to remember it’.74 The tension between stability and adaptability is clearly seen. 17.4.1.2 The Psalms Project

Next, in Everything He Does Shall Prosper, two significant changes can be noted in relation to the psalm. First, the rewriting includes a contrast to ‘this world’: the blessed man is one who ‘does not heed the counsel of this world’, nor ‘conforms to worldly ways’. The dichotomy of the psalm is thus transhistorically contemporised and overlaps with a common Free Church evangelistic emphasis of the importance of being in the world but not of it.75 Similar to Blessed Is the Man, the outcomes of the wicked and the righteous are magnified: the tree does not only yield fruit in ‘its season’, but ‘abundant fruit in every season’; the leaves shall ‘never, never wither’; and the phrase ‘everything he does shall prosper’ is repeated thrice. Furthermore, the passing away, not of the wicked himself, but of the ‘evil ways of man’—perhaps indicating an implicit separation of sin and sinner—is repeated twice at the very end of the song, followed by ‘forever’, possibly indicating an eschatological understanding (v. 5b is not included). Second, ‫ תורה‬is first interpreted as ‘law’ and then ‘word’, possibly pointing to a similar Christological interpretation as in Blessed Is the Man. 17.4.1.3 Shane & Shane

Compared to the two previous songs, I Delight in You features the most comprehensive rewriting of the psalm. Starting with Verse 1, the tree and water imagery found

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  279 in verse 3 is related to Christ in two ways: ‘Lord, you are a stream of purest water, | blessings grow in beauty by Your side’. As above, ‫ תורה‬is taken as ‘Word’ (although with no reference to any ‘law’), shaping verse 2 into ‘From the rising of the sun | until the day is done, | in Your Word, | oh Lord, I will abide’. The basic imagery in the psalm, relating the meditating on Mosaic traditions to the psalmist’s being in Yhwh’s presence, is thus adapted in light of a protestant understanding of Christ as the Word and a Pauline emphasis on being ‘in Christ’. This is, then, further unpacked in the Chorus, where the ‘word’ is transformed from object to subject— the ‘Word’ (Christ)—a reading inspired by Ps 37:4:76 ‘I delight in You [repeated] | […] Like water, You satisfy my soul […] | Oh day and night I delight in You’. Verse 2 then continues with a reference to the wicked but shaped as a petition: ‘Keep me from the counsel of the wicked | Keep your light upon the ancient path’, while the imagery in verse 4 is used without reference to any wicked to create a contrast to the enduring nature of the Word: ‘Chaff will blow away | and all the flowers fade, | but only You and Your Word will last’. Following a repeated chorus, Verse 3 is then loosely based on verse 1, but through a breaking down of the wicked/righteous dichotomy, it casts the singing congregation as sinners in need of salvation (note especially the reference to ‘my flesh’): Lord You know my heart is prone to wander, | Lord You know my feet have gone astray. | Though my flesh may fail, | every sin was nailed to the Cross. | Now I will sing Ultimately, Shane & Shane’s version, which is musically most in line with the pop/ rock-music of Contemporary Praise & Worship—both as to harmonies and form— has created a more complete (and coherent) rewriting in light of the ideology of their reformed community of faith. In fact, the result of the rewriting of Psalm 1 is a song quite in line with their own aim, ‘to see kids and families develop a hunger for God’s Word and a desire to worship Him, growing deeper in love with Jesus’ (see above). The role of the community in defining the meaning of various parts of the canonical body is clearly visible. 17.4.2 Psalm 16

The next psalm, Psalm 16, is a psalm of trust in which the psalmist expresses confidence that Yhwh will keep her in his presence and not let her be moved or shaken.77 Furthermore, this presence is understood as a life-giving space where the psalmist is well protected from the threats of Sheol.78 The imagery is rooted in the notion of Yhwh’s presence in the temple, but applied to the psalmist’s everyday life—he keeps Yhwh before him continuously (v. 8).79 Two aspects of the psalm are to be noted before we turn to the songs. First, there are some textual difficulties in verses 2–4a: (1) in verse 2a, the 2f. sg. suffix is generally emended to 1s., translating ‘I say’, rather than ‘You say’ (although the KJV and the NKJV add ‘O my soul’, having the f.s. referring to ‫נפש‬,

280  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry and Peter C. Craigie keeps it as a quote of a position opposite to the psalmist’s own view);80 (2) in verse 2b, ‫ בל‬in ‫ טובתי בל־עליך‬can be taken as either an affirmative or negative particle (cf. ‘my goodness is nothing apart from you’ with ‘my welfare indeed rests on you’);81 (3) in verse 3, it is not clear who the ‘holy ones that are in the land’ (‫ )לקדושים אשר־בארץ‬and the ‘mighty ones’ (‫)אדירי‬82 refer to—idols / other gods83 or saints (cf. LXX)?—and why the psalmist delights (or used to delight?)84 in them; (4) in verse 4, the meaning of ‫ אחר מהדו‬is uncertain. Options include, for example, ‘they acquired another (god)’85 or ‘they have hurried after another (god)’.86 Taken together, these difficulties have resulted in a wide range of emendations and translations that will inevitably impact the rewritings below, although there exists a general agreement that the main contrast painted in these verses is between the psalmist’s (complete)87 trust in Yhwh and the idolatrous practices of people around him. Second, this psalm is framed with ‫לדוד‬. As I have argued elsewhere, this superscription, best translated ‘Davidic’,88 originally functioned as a demarcation of discourses—not as providing information about the penning of the psalm.89 Moreover, I have shown elsewhere that the primary function of connecting psalms to David was to relate the psalm to the history of the people (which may be implicit in the language used in verse 5, for example, which overlaps with the book of Joshua),90 and, as such, it suggested a collective reading.91 As with James L. Mays, the psalm could thus be read both as a prayer of an individual seeking (poetical) refuge in the sanctuary and of ‘corporate Israel after the exile when they had learned that the Lord would not abandon the people to death (Ezek 37)’ (cf. Lam 3:24).92 Then, in the late Second Temple period, a third reading was introduced. David was increasingly seen as an originator of psalmic discourse, and so the voice of David, the individual, was now heard. As a consequence, Psalm 16, especially verses 9–10—verses repeating common language about Yhwh rescuing the psalmist from Sheol—came to be interpreted in line with an idea that David did in fact not die but ascended to the heavens. This motif forms the backdrop to Peter’s speech in Acts 2:22–36 (cf. Paul’s speech in Acts 13:34–37), where it is reinterpreted as pointing to the resurrection of Jesus (vv. 32–33).93 Turning now to the three songs, they are structured as follows: Ps 16

Ps 16

Ps 16

Verse 1

vv. 1–2a

Verse 1

vv. 1–2

Verse 1

vv. 1–2

Verse 2

vv. 2b–3

Pre-Chorus

vv. 3–4

Verse 2

vv. 3–4

v. 4

Chorus

vv. 5–6

Chorus

vv. 11

Chorus 1

vv. 5–6

Verse 2

vv. 7–8a

Verse 3

vv. 7–8

Verse 3

v. 7

Pre-Chorus 2

vv. 8b–10

Bridge

vv. 9–10

Pre-Chorus 2

v. 8

Bridge

v. 11 + new content

Verse 4

vv. 4–6

Pre-Chorus 1

Chorus 2

vv. 9–10

Verse 4

v. 11

Keep Me Safe (Sons of Korah)

Fullness of Joy (The Psalms Project)

Fullness of Joy (Shane & Shane)

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  281 17.4.2.1 Sons of Korah

In Keep Me Safe, the NIV again provides the base for the lyrics. In contrast to Blessed Is the Man, transitions are not created by means of repetition, but by repeated use of ‘oh’, and, compared to the NIV, some differences can be observed. First, verses 2–3 are taken as referring to ‘saints’ and ‘glorious ones’ (NIV has ‘the holy people who are in the land’ and ‘the noble ones’). A specific historical referent (‘in the land’) has thus been replaced with more well-known language, facilitating transhistorical identification. This is also true in verse 4, where ‘I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods’ (NIV) is replaced with ‘I will never go with them to sacrifice’, thus removing the reference to a somewhat obscure practice. That ‘sacrifice’ is used may be seen as archaic, although not necessarily to be taken literally, but rather seen in light with the emphasis on sacrifice—especially a ‘sacrifice of praise’ (Hebr 13:14) in Contemporary Praise & Worship. Second, ‘not be shaken’ in verse 8 is expanded: ‘Because He’s at my side | I will never be shaken. | I will not be moved | with the Lord at my right hand’, emphasising the suggested main theme for the psalm (Keep Me Safe). Last, verse 10, translated in the NIV as ‘you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead’—indicating that Yhwh will not remove his protection so that the psalmist would die—is taken as a promise of resurrection: ‘For you will lift me from the grave’, possibly with a Christological sense—‘Your holy one (sg.) won’t see decay’ (here preferring an option specified in the NIV footnote).94 17.4.2.2 The Psalms Project

Moving to Fullness of Joy, it does not follow any translation in particular, although the language used tends to overlap with the KJV and the NKJV, creating an archaic linguistic feel. This feel is further emphasised in the sometimes unusual syntax (‘Their sorrows shall increase | who run after other gods’), and the retention of obscure imagery—‘boundary lines’ (‫)חבלים‬, is rewritten as ‘the boundaries of my land are never-ending’, thus making possible both nationalistic and Zionistic interpretations (the blood libation language in v. 4aβ is not included, however). The choice not to make the language more contemporary likely aims to convey a sense of canonical stability and faithfulness (‘conformity with exegetically pure Biblical doctrine’, see above), emphasising the notion of ‘singing Scripture’ while minimising the sense of the song being a creative adaptation—a rewriting of canonical texts. Throughout the song, a theological emphasis is found that was present only implicitly in Keep Me Safe (v. 10), namely an eschatological postponement of trust, casting the spatial understanding of salvation vertically as a heaven/earth dichotomy. ‘The holy ones in the land’ become ‘the saints who are on the earth’ (v. 3 cf. NKJV) and the reference to Sheol becomes a hope of resurrection: ‘And when I die | I will rest in hope, for You | won’t leave my soul in the grave, | nor let me waste away’. In the Bridge, this is repeated and followed by a reference to 1 Thess 4:17: ‘You will raise me up and I’ll fly away | You did not leave Jesus in the grave | You will raise me up and I’ll fly away |’.95 The imagery here is also based

282  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry on the popular Albert E. Brumley song ‘I’ll Fly Away’ that was written in 1929 and includes the lines, ‘Some glad morning when this life is o’er, | I’ll fly away | to a home on God’s celestial shore, | I’ll fly away (I’ll fly away)’. 17.4.2.3 Shane & Shane

Shane & Shane also name their song Fullness of Joy, but divide it into a more common pop/rock structure. The order of the psalm verses is shuffled, and, as with Psalm 1, they provide the most comprehensive reworking. First, the problematic verses 3–4 are rewritten as: ‘All sons and daughters, | brothers, sisters, my delight, | let’s sing together: | ‘No other gods shall satisfy’, | God You satisfy’, thus taking the ‘holy’ and the ‘noble’ in the psalm as transhistorically referring to the church, who are exhorted to join in a confession that no other gods but God can fill their needs. Second, by making verse 11 the Chorus, the emphasis on the presence of God in Contemporary Praise & Worship is seen and related to the title of the song: ‘In Your presence | there is fullness | of joy, joy. | At your right hand | there are pleasures | forevermore, | forevermore’. Third, like in The Psalms Project, verses 9–10 are rewritten Christologically, with their own (reformed) theology providing the framework: ‘Cause You put on flesh | Lived a blameless life | My curse on the cross You bore | Then You ripped the doors off the City of Death | And the chains fell to the floor | Now the serpent’s crushed | It has been finished | And You reign forever more. The notion of trust in the psalm is thus reshaped into belief in the song, as is further explained in the online devotional: Rehearsing who God is for us can transform everything. Far from detached thought experiments and philosophical speculations, what we believe about God can be life and death for us today. It will make all the difference if we, like David, know God to be our reliable Savior, our sovereign Lord, and our greatest Treasure.96 17.4.3 Psalm 42

Two general observations can be made as a way of introducing the last psalm, Psalm 42.97 Firstly, the psalm is a complaint of the individual in which the psalmist protests against a sudden loss of Yhwh’s presence.98 As is common in these psalms, suffering and salvation are interpreted spatially. The psalmist longs for the presence of Yhwh—‘the living God’—in a time where the chaotic forces of Death have taken him captive.99 The experienced threats are thus not primarily to be understood as indications that the psalmist is geographically removed from Zion—the complaint is, indeed, voiced ‘within the walls of the worship service’

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  283 (cf. Ps 63:2–3).100 Instead, the language is aimed at the experienced core: Yhwh has hidden his face, and the result is that psalmist finds himself in the depths of terror (v. 7).101 Since suffering is not understood as caused by any sin, the solution is thus not repentance or redemption, but protective intervention.102 Facing deadly threats, what the psalmist longs for is Yhwh’s (‘my rock’, v. 10) protection—a hope of being restored into his presence so that he can sing songs of rejoicing (‫ )גיל‬and thanksgiving (‫ידה‬, Ps 43:4). As this temple theology was increasingly understood in light of the canonical history of the people, however, the ‘I’ of these psalms (the innocent sufferer) came to be read as the people (see also above), and so the fundamental dynamic changed from complaint to confession—suffering was understood less in spatial terms and increasingly as temporal removal (exile).103 Secondly, there are some textual difficulties, most notably in verse 7. The Hebrew reads ‫)על־כן אזכרך( מארץ ירדן וחרמונים מהר מצער‬. Most commentators take this as references to ‘the land of Jordan’ (‫)מארץ ירדן‬, ‘Hermon’ (‫)וחרמונים‬, and mount Mizar (‫ )מהר מצער‬respectively. The overall effect would thus be an emphasis on geographical distance (to Zion). Such a reading is possible, but the peculiar plural form of Hermon (a hapax), the lack of definite article of Jordan, the puzzling ‘mount Mizar’, the fact that it is unusual to find named geographical places in individual complaints, and the fact that verse 8 follows with two references to the ‘deep’ (‫ )תהום‬causes some problems. As a way of resolving the issues, Fredrik Lindström takes ‫ ארץ‬as a reference to the kingdom of Death and translates ‫ארץ ירדן‬ ‘the land of descent’. Furthermore, he relates ‫ וחרמונים‬to ‫ חרם‬in passages like Ezek 26:5 and Hab 1:15–17, translating ‘of nets’, and emends ‫ מהר מצער‬to ‫המר מערצה‬ (‘the depths of terror’). Although only tentative, the result is a consistent use of imagery throughout the verses.104 Turning now to the three songs, they are structured as follows: Ps 42a Verse 1 vv. 2–3αβ Verse 2 vv. 3b–4 Bridge 1 v. 5a Verse 3 v. 5bα–c Bridge 2 v. 6a Verse 4 v. 6b Streams of Water (Sons of Korah) Ps 42b Verse 1 Chorus 1 Verse 2 Chorus 2

vv. 7–8 v. 9 vv. 10–11 v. 12

Ps 42 Verse 1 Pre-Chorus 1 Chorus Verse 2 Pre-Chorus 2 Chorus Bridge

vv. 1–5a v. 5bc vv. 6/12 vv. 7–8 vv. 9–10a vv. 6/12 vv. 10b–11

Hope in God (The Psalms Project)

Ps 42 Verse 1 Chorus Verse 2 Bridge

vv. 1, 3, 5 new content vv. 7, 8, 11 vv. 5, 7, 11

Loudest Praise (Shane & Shane)

284  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 17.4.3.1 Sons of Korah

Looking first at Streams of Water (Ps 42a), Verses 1 and 2 follow the NIV closely, with one notable omission: the relation between the psalmist and God, so central to the complaint and expressed in the psalm through first person suffixes, is reframed. Instead of thirsting for ‘my God’, the psalmist longs only for ‘the living God’. This is also the case in Verse 4, where the last line is removed (‘my Savior and my God’, NIV). Moving to Hope in God, however, these observations may turn out to be insignificant. Like the first song, some verses are abbreviated, but in contrast to it, the relation between God and psalmist is emphasised by an added ‘to me’ and ‘with me’ in verse 9, so that Chorus 1 reads: ‘By day the Lord directs His love | to me, | and through the night His song is | with me, | with me; | a prayer to the God of my life |’. More significant is the interpretation of verse 7. First, the reference to mount Mizar (NIV) is left out. Second, a geographical movement to Hermon is implied: ‘To the heights of Hermon from | the land of Jordan through |’. In the comment, Jacoby explains that the psalm was ‘probably written by a Levite who had crossed the Jordan with David when he fled from Absalom during the rebellion’.105 Interpreted in such a way, the focus on an individual suffering from the loss of Yhwh’s presence is preserved, albeit with a slightly different emphasis: The problem in these cases is not immediately the physical needs of the person praying but the question of where God is. God is the answer. What is most disturbing to the psalmists in these kinds of instances is not so much their suffering but their sense of abandonment by God.106 The moving away could thus be seen as by the psalmist, not Yhwh, although the latter may also be implied in Jacoby’s comment, where the innocence of the psalmist is retained: what they most need in any situation is God. And here again, as in many of the psalms, it is evident that God is standing back, as it were, to let this realization emerge. For faith emerges in hardship and here faith emerges as a passion to find God.107 17.4.3.2 The Psalms Project

The Psalms Project’s Hope in God picks up on the repeated verse in Psalms 42(– 43), uses it as a Chorus, and repeats parts of it (the phrase ‘hope in God’) at the end, thus creating an overarching framework for the rewriting: ‘Hope in God, | for I will yet praise Him. | Hope in God, | my salvation | and my God’ (the phrase ‘my salvation’ is also repeated in the final Chorus). In relation to the spatial understanding of suffering presented above, it is explicitly interpreted in terms of temporal removal. The psalmist, who ‘used to lead the way with shouts of joy […] to the house of God’, no longer has access to the sanctuary, but remembers God ‘from this distant lonely land | from these hills of exile’. By this rewriting, the difficult verse 7 has

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  285 been handled, and the reference to ‘leading the way’ likely points to an interpretation of the psalmist as a Levitical singer—a ‘worship leader’. Notable in light of the emphasis on praise in Praise & Worship is also that verse 10b has been changed from ‘Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy’ (NKJV)108 to ‘Why do I mourn the oppression of my enemies’, thus relating the question to the act of mourning itself, creating a dichotomy between this act and ‘For I will yet praise him’ in the Chorus—ultimately between sadness and hope.109 17.4.3.3 Shane & Shane

Turning to Shane & Shane, they again provide a comprehensive rewriting, reshaping the individual complaint into Loudest Praise. A first observation is that, as before, they do not follow the sequence of verses in the psalm but, rather, use the content of the psalm as inspiration to create a new composition, and despite the fact that Psalms 42–43 have repetitions that could serve as a chorus, their Chorus is not explicitly based on any part of the psalm but only loosely reuses its water imagery. Secondly, the taunting voice of the enemies (vv. 3, 7) is removed. As a consequence, the suffering of the psalmist is no longer understood in terms of Yhwh’s absence, but as the psalmist being separated from God: ‘As the deer longs for the water | So my soul longs to be home’ (Verse 1). This separation is further expanded on in the Bridge, where the waves that sweep over the psalmist in verse 7 are not deadly powers of chaos, but ‘waves of unbelief, | breakers crash and bring me | falling to my knees’. Having unbelief as the cause, salvation is not understood spatially. God is not primarily a protective space (the reference to the rock in verse 9 is left out, as is the house of God in v. 4)—emphasis is rather on redemption: ‘Oh, my soul, you feel forgotten. | Put your hope in Christ alone’; ‘Let Your goodness, like a fetter, | bind my broken heart to Thee’. Third, and following from the second, is that the dichotomy between mourning and praise that was implicit in The Psalms Project’s version is made explicit as the proper response to suffering is not said to be complaint but praise: ‘Come thou fount of living water. | Tune my heart to bless Your name. | Streams of trouble never ceasing | call for songs of loudest praise’. For someone experiencing streams of trouble and grief (cf. ‘All my tears have been my fodder’, Verse 1, verse 7 is not featured in the song), the appropriate response is thus loud praise. This also means that instead of including the voice of the enemy of the psalm, the song repeatedly calls to trust in Christ: ‘Oh, my soul hope in Jesus | You shall praise your God at last’, ‘My salvation is in You and You alone’. 17.5 Repetition through Rewriting Throughout this chapter, some fascinating examples have been provided of how attempts to stay true to a canonical text can materialise as acts of liturgical reimagination. More specifically, the tension between stability and adaptability of a canonical body has been negotiated through creative repetition—psalms have been

286  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry rewritten in light of the four major theological emphases found in Contemporary Praise & Worship identified in the Introduction above: 1) The emphasis on praise as a tool to experience God’s presence in worship permeated all three projects but was most explicit in The Psalms Project’s and Shane & Shane’s rewriting of Psalm 42. A dichotomy between sadness and hope was introduced in Hope in God—‘Why do I mourn’ (when I should praise)—and made explicit in Loudest Praise, where absence was rewritten in terms of unbelief and trust transformed into belief, so that trouble now called for ‘loudest praise’. While Psalm 42 emphasised protest as the proper response to suffering, as the basis for hope in Yhwh’s presence, these rewritings highlight the need for praise, regardless of human emotions. A more nuanced approach was found, however, in the rewritings of Sons of Korah, likely a consequence of the wider understanding of praise in Jacoby’s work, seen also in the reflections on the experienced abandonment in Psalm 42. 2) The idea of worship as a corporate musical enterprise with Levites instrumental in ushering in the presence of God was also found in all three projects. It could be seen in their stated aims, as well as in the description of the intended function of the rewritten psalms. It is also indicated by the way Sons of Korah and The Psalms Project identify the psalmist in Psalm 42—a Levite who used to lead the congregation into the presence of God was now geographically removed from the temple. The notion of David as a model could also be seen in the commentaries although not explicitly in the songs. 3) Third, clearest examples of the emphasis on divine activity and human response were found in Shane & Shane’s work, where exhortations and petitions were added in, for example, Fullness of Joy, where ‘all sons and daughters, brothers, sisters my delight’ are exhorted to ‘sing together’, or in I Delight in You, where an emphasis on being ‘in Christ’ led to a petition to be kept away from the wicked. The song also framed the call to sing by means of identifying the singers as sinners in need of salvation. References to various body parts to be activated were sparse, although Loudest Praise included a reference to falling to one’s knees. 4) Fourth, and last, the biblical text was evidently central to these projects, but in line with Contemporary Praise & Worship, the psalms were not read as individual, independent compositions, but as belonging to networks of proof-texts that in turn constituted larger, conservative theological frameworks. Implicit indications of this dynamic were found in the function of texts such as 1 Thess 4:17 in the eschatological rewriting of parts of Psalm 16, as well as in the use of archaic terminology (see Keep Me Safe and The Psalms Project’s Fullness of Joy) and the somewhat surprising use of gendered language (Blessed Is the Man). Explicit signs include how ‫ תורה‬was transformed into the word (the Protestant Bible) and the Word (Christ) in Psalm 1, how the salvation from Sheol pointed to the resurrection of both the Christian and Christ in Psalm 16, and how the call to hope in God in Psalm 42 was transformed into a hope in Christ. Taken together, these observations point to the conclusion that, in

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  287 terms of canon ecology, it is quite clear that what has been observed is a quite specifically Christian ecology. All projects share the idea that the Psalms ultimately point to Christ and that the church (their own communities of faith) is therefore the (only) target audience to be considered. More specifically, it is when related to Christ that the psalms are transhistorically applied to the contemporary worshipping communities. In the end, I hope that this chapter has shown how the study of liturgical rewritings of biblical texts can provide promising windows into the theological emphases of various communities of faith, especially of those aiming to be ‘faithful’ to the ‘original text’. Described as psalms ‘set to music’, the imaginative acts of rewriting studied here are framed as fresh presentations of a stable canon. At the same time, however, these adaptations are nonetheless effectively legitimising the theology of their own tradition. This means that their value for the interpretation of the psalms themselves in fact becomes quite limited. Put differently, little new insight into the meaning of these psalms have been achieved by the rewritings—it is simply not their purpose. Most changes and emphases discussed above—changes based not on exegetical but theological decisions—instead indicate that whether or not a rendering of a psalm can be seen as ‘faithful’ has little to do with any historical meaning derived from scholarly research, nor with any meaning the psalms may have (had) as individual compositions, but with the degree to which the new songs conform to the theological emphases of their communities of faith respectively. Interpreted through what can best be identified as a ‘rule of faith’,110 they thus reveal more about the beliefs of the community rewriting them than about the psalms themselves. Notes 1 See especially Stordalen, ‘Canon’. 2 See further Davage, ‘Canon’. 3 Sanders, Sacred Story, p. 14. 4 Stordalen, ‘Canon’, p. 135. 5 There are, of course, other similar projects, such as Mike Janzen’s ‘The Psalms Project’ in two volumes or Sandra McCracken’s ‘Psalms’. However, they only feature a few psalms each. A project of similar scope, ‘The Corner Room’, has also been excluded since they follow the ESV translation verbatim (no changes or emphases can thus be analysed). As for the selection of psalms, it was made in two steps. First, Psalms 1, 16, 23, 27, 34, 42, and 46 were identified as possible candidates since they had been recorded in all three projects. Second, Psalms 1, 16, and 42 were selected based on the observation that they all relate to the presence of Yhwh in distinct ways, thus enabling an analysis of how the theological emphasis on praise-to-presence in Contemporary Praise & Worship (see more below) has affected the rewritings. They all also contain possible challenges to the emphasis on intelligibility of language important in this contemporary liturgical tradition (more below): Psalm 1 has a positive emphasis on the ‘law’ (‫)תורה‬, which is commonly seen as antithetical to ‘grace’ in protestant theology, Psalm 16 features obscure imagery, and Psalm 42 has notable textual difficulties. 6 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship.

288  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 7 It should be noted that the beginnings of Praise & Worship are often said to be in the 1990s (see, e.g., Lamport, Forrest, and Whaley, Hymns and Hymnody). Such reconstructions are based primarily on form (style of music: ‘rock-band styled musicians featuring guitars, drums, amplification, and physical movement’, p. 331), while Ruth and Lim aim to trace the origins of central theological trajectories, an aim better serving the purpose of this chapter. The former focus also tends to emphasise areas of conflict (see, e.g., Dueck, Congregational Music), a topic that will not be dealt with here. 8 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, 9–10. 9 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, 11. 10 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 21. 11 One of the main theologians introducing Ps 100:4 in this way was Judson Cornwall, see especially Cornwall, Let Us Praise, and idem, Let Us Worship. 12 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 38. 13 Cornwall, Let Us Worship, p. 17 (emphasis mine). On the general tendency to move away from complaint, and its consequences for the (language of the) church, see especially Brueggemann, ‘Costly’, and Strawn, Dying. 14 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 125 (emphasis mine). 15 A widely influential book was Conner, Tabernacle. 16 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 45. 17 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 86. 18 Quote from Barker, Songs, p. 453. 19 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 47. 20 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 127. 21 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 127. 22 The term is from White, Protestant Worship, p. 81. 23 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 91. 24 This observation thus puts into historical perspective the overviews in Siker, Liquid Scripture and Phillips, The Bible. 25 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 173. 26 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 169; cf. Scheer, ‘Contemporary’, p. 294. The language of iconoclasm is to be taken as referring to a ‘suspicion of liturgical inheritance’, often leading to a break with such traditions and causing a lot of conflict (see also Ruth, Eruption). 27 See also Scheer, ‘Contemporary’, p. 297, on music as a tool. 28 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, pp. 178–198. 29 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 191. Cf. the famous quote from Christian rocker Larry Norman: ‘Why should the devil have all the good music?’ (Scheer, ‘Contemporary’, p. 284). 30 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 217. 31 McGavran and Arn, Grow, pp. 107–108. 32 Ruth and Lim, Contemporary Praise & Worship, p. 282. 33 Scheer, ‘Contemporary’, p. 291, summarises the converging traits as follows: ‘Pentecostalism is in its DNA, it speaks with an Evangelical accent, and it is simultaneously conservative theologically and progressive musically’. 34 The overview depends on Benedict and Ruth, ‘Retuned’. 35 Benedict and Ruth, ‘Retuned’, p. 301. 36 Benedict and Ruth, ‘Retuned’, pp. 301–304. 37 Benedict and Ruth, ‘Retuned’, p. 305. 38 Benedict and Ruth, ‘Retuned’, p. 309. 39 Benedict and Ruth, ‘Retuned’, p. 310. 40 For a full introduction of the band, see https://sonsofkorah​.com​/about/. 41 The following psalms (not recorded in this order) feature on the albums: Pss 1; 3; 6; 14 (split into two songs); 15; 16; 17; 19 (split into two songs); 23; 27 (split into four songs); 30; 32; 34; 35; 37; 42 (split into two songs); 46 (split into four songs); 51; 52;

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  289 56; 59; 60; 65; 67; 68 (split into five songs); 69; 73; 77 (split into three songs); 79; 80; 84; 91; 92 (split into two songs); 93; 94; 95; 96; 97 (split into two songs); 99; 100; 103; 103:1–5; 114; 116 (split into two songs); 121; 123; 124; 125; 127; 128; 130; 131; 134; 137; 139; 146; 147 (split into two songs); 148. More have been put to music, but not recorded (so The Blah Blah, ‘Jacoby’). 42 www​.mst​.edu​.au​/faculty​/matthew​-jacoby/; https://philevents​.org​/event​/show​/9576. 43 https://sonsofkorah​.com​/about/. 44 The Blah Blah, ‘Jacoby’. 45 https://sonsofkorah​.com​/about/. 46 The Blah Blah, ‘Jacoby’ (emphasis mine); Jacoby, Deeper Places, Chapter 1. 47 Jacoby, Deeper Places. 48 Jacoby, Deeper Places, Chapter 14 (emphases mine). 49 See, for example, Jacoby, Deeper Places, Chapter 5. 50 Jacoby, ‘Pursue God’. 51 Jacoby, Deeper Places, Chapter 8. 52 Jacoby, Deeper Places, Chapter 15. 53 https://thepsalmsproject​.com​/whoweare. 54 www​.linkedin​.com​/in​/shane​-heilman​-02215258/. 55 Halloran, ‘Soundtrack’. 56 So far, Pss 1–46 have been recorded, with some psalms repeated on a separate volume called ‘Psalms for Sleep’ (2022): Pss 91; 4; 34; 121; 23; 42; 8; 13; 1; 14; and 45. 57 https://thepsalmsproject​.com​/faq; cf. the ‘Retuned Hymn Movement’ above (emphasis mine). 58 www​.watermark​.org​/team. 59 These psalms had also been recorded earlier, in 2001, by Shane Barnard. 60 The following psalms feature on the albums (not in this order): Pss 1; 8; 13; 16; 23; 27; 34; 42; 45, 46; 47; 63; 51; 62; 66; 73; 84; 90; 91; 98; 103; 118; 139; 143; 145; 150. 61 Louder than the Music, ‘Shane & Shane’. 62 https://the​wors​hipi​nitiative​.com​/artists. 63 RAPT Interviews, ‘Shane & Shane’. 64 RAPT Interviews, ‘Shane & Shane’ (emphasis mine). 65 To distinguish between the Hebrew Bible psalm and the contemporary rewriting, I will refer to the latter as ‘song’, and the former as ‘psalm’. I will also use ‘Verse’ with a capital V when talking about parts of the song, while using ‘verse’ with a lowercase v, as well as the abbreviations v./vv. when referring to parts of the Hebrew Bible psalm. 66 The literature on Ps 1 is vast. To be noted is that Jacoby, Deeper Places, pp. 61–62, refers to its possible function in the book of Psalms. For three different perspectives on this issue, presented in critical dialogue with recent research, see Willgren, ‘Preface’ and Weber ‘Tora JHWHs’. 67 Cf. Mays, ‘Place’. 68 See further Willgren, ‘Preface’. 69 See especially Creach, ‘Like a Tree’. 70 See, e.g., the Psalms Targum and the LXX (which introduces a notion of resurrection). 71 Scheer, ‘Contemporary’, p. 294. 72 ‘Ps 1’, https://sonsofkorah​.com​/study/. 73 Jacoby, Deeper Places, p. 81. 74 ‘Ps 1’, https://sonsofkorah​.com​/study/. 75 Cf. Scheer, ‘Contemporary’, p. 295. 76 So https://the​wors​hipi​nitiative​.com​/songs​/i​-delight​-in​-you​-psalm​-1​/instrument​/acoustic​-guitar. 77 Cf. Craigie and Tate, Psalms, p. 155; deClaissé-Walford, Jacobson, and Tanner, Psalms, 176. 78 Cf. Mays, ‘Place’, p. 88: ‘where death is removed as a threat, life is finally free for complete joy in the presence of God, who alone can deliver from Sheol’.

290  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 79 See somewhat similarly deClaissé-Walford, Jacobson, and Tanner, Psalms, p. 178. 80 See Craigie and Tate, Psalms, pp. 154–155. 81 See the more detailed discussion of possible options in Kraus, Psalms, p. 234; cf. Craigie and Tate, Psalms, p. 155. 82 The plural construct of the MT also makes little sense. For a discussion of possibilities, see Craigie and Tate, Psalms, p. 155. 83 Mays, ‘Place’, p. 87. 84 Schaefer, Psalms, p. 38. 85 Craigie and Tate, Psalms, pp. 154–155. 86 deClaissé-Walford, Jacobson, and Tanner, Psalms, p. 177. 87 Cf. Kraus, Psalms, p. 236. 88 Cf. deClaissé-Walford, Jacobson, and Tanner, Psalms, pp. 9–11. 89 See Davage, Isaiah. 90 Cf. most commentators. This reference is also noted in Sons of Korah’s online comments. 91 See most recently Davage, ‘Hearing’. 92 Mays, ‘Place’, p. 88. 93 See Mroczek, ‘David’. 94 Cf. ‘Ps 16’, https://sonsofkorah​.com​/study/. 95 The reference to 1 Thess was confirmed to me by Heilman through personal correspondence. 96 https://the​wors​hipi​nitiative​.com​/songs​/psalm​-16​-fullness​-of​-joy/ (emphasis mine). 97 Since none of the projects make anything of the fact that there are strong ties between Pss 42 and 43, I will not expand on this further here. On the various ways of segmenting psalms in Hebrew medieval manuscripts, see especially Yarchin, ‘Shape’. 98 See Lindström, Suffering, pp. 172–196. Complaint is here understood as distinct in experiential perspective from lament. The former understands the psalm as ‘articulated when the final blow had not yet fallen, when there still was time to argue a case before Yahweh’ (Gerstenberger, Psalms, p. 11), while the latter is rather retrospective (for example, as referring to the act of expressing sorrow or regret). 99 For a summary of this spatial understanding, see Willgren, ‘Canonical Tamings’. 100 Following Lindström, Suffering, p. 177. 101 If following Lindström, Suffering, p. 173, see more below. 102 The possibility that Yhwh’s wrath is implicit in v. 8 (cf. Ps 88:8) does not change this, since in the individual complaint psalms, Yhwh’s wrath ‘is not an affect which activates his (punitive) action, but the experience of his (incomprehensible) action’, that is, ‘the experience of the mysteriousness of the absence of Yhwh’ (Lindström, Suffering, pp. 185–186). 103 I expand further on these developments in Willgren, ‘Canonical Tamings’. 104 See Lindström, Suffering, pp. 183–184. 105 See ‘Ps 42’, https://sonsofkorah​.com​/study/. 106 See ‘Ps 42’, https://sonsofkorah​.com​/study/. 107 See ‘Ps 42’, https://sonsofkorah​.com​/study/. See also Jacoby, Deeper Places, pp. 40, 45, 49–50, 108 The Hebrew is better translated ‘Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’ (NRSV), indicating that the enemies have indeed filled the space left vacant when Yhwh became absent and that the question is not why the psalmist mourns, but why he is in a situation where he needs to. 109 In this context, it may be relevant to note that Shane Heilman has a blog post on the ‘mean’ psalms, arguing for their necessity (https://thepsalmsproject​.com​/blog​/what​ -about​-the​-mean​-psalms). 110 Cf. Greidanus, Preaching Christ, 182: ‘systematic theology functions as the “rule of faith” which sets the boundaries of valid interpretation’.

Psalms in Contemporary Praise & Worship  291 Bibliography Barker, Ken. Songs for Praise & Worship. Waco, TX: Word Music, 1992. Benedict, Bruce H., and Lester Ruth. ‘Retuned Hymn Movement’. In Mark A. Lamport, Benjamin K. Forrest, and Vernon M. Whaley (eds), Hymns and Hymnody. Volume 3. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019, pp. 301–315. Brueggemann, Walter. ‘The Costly Loss of Lament’. JSOT 36 (1986), pp. 57–71. Conner, Kevin J. The Tabernacle of David. Portland, OR: City Bible, 1976. Cornwall, Judson. Let Us Praise. Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1973. Cornwall, Judson. Let Us Worship: The Believer’s Response to God. South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge, 1983. Craigie, Peter C., and Marvin E. Tate. Psalms 1–50. Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2004. Creach, Jerome F. D. ‘Like a Tree Planted by the Temple Stream: The Portrait of the Righteous in Psalm 1:3’. CBQ 61 (1999), pp. 34–46. Davage, David. ‘A Canon of Psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls? Revisiting the Qumran Psalms Hypothesis’. BTB 51.4 (2021), pp. 35–44. Davage, David. How Isaiah Became an Author: Prophecy, Authority, and Attribution. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2022. Davage, David. ‘Hearing the People Through the Voice of David: On the Paratextual Framing of Psalm 30’. In David Davage and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer (eds), Song, Prayer, Scripture: Aspects of the Reception of the Book of Psalms from the Hebrew Bible to the 21st Century. LHBOTS. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, forthcoming 2025. de Claissé-Walford, Nancy L., Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner. The Book of Psalms. NICOT. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. Dueck, Jonathan. Congregational Music, Conflict, and Community. London: Routledge, 2017. Gerstenberger, Erhard S. Psalms: Part I with an Introduction to Cultic Poetry. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988. Greidanus, Sidney. Preaching Christ from the Old Testament: A Contemporary Hermeneutical Method. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Halloran, Kevin. ‘A Soundtrack for the Psalms: Q&A with Shane Heilman, the Creator of The Psalms Project’. https://www​.kevinhalloran​.net​/a​-soundtrack​-for​-the​-psalms​-qa​ -with​-shane​-heilman​-the​-creator​-of​-the​-psalms​-project/ Jacoby, Matthew. Deeper Places: Experiencing God in the Psalms. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2013. Jacoby, Matthew. ‘Pursue God: Knowing the Presence of God’. https://www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=hgI51aOAD2s Kraus, Hans-Joachim. Psalms 1–59. Hilton C. Oswald (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993. Lamport, Mark A., Benjamin K. Forrest, and Vernon M. Whaley (eds). Hymns and Hymnody. Volume 3. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019. Lindström, Fredrik. Suffering and Sin: Interpretations of Illness in the Individual Complaint Psalms. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994. Louder than the Music. ‘Shane & Shane bring “Worship in the Word” to Families’. https:// www​.louderthanthemusic​.com​/document​.php​?id​=11854. Mays, James L. ‘The Place of the Torah-Psalms in the Psalter’. JBL 106.1 (1987), pp. 3–12. Mays, James L. Psalms. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994. McGavran, Donald A., and Win Arn. How to Grow a Church. Ventura, CA: Regal, 1973. Mroczek, Eva. ‘“David Did Not Ascend into the Heavens” (Acts 2:34): Early Jewish Ascent Traditions and the Myth of Exegesis in the New Testament’. Judaïsme Ancien 3 (2015), pp. 219–252. Phillips, Peter M. The Bible, Social Media, and Digital Culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. RAPT Interviews. ‘Shane & Shane’. https://raptinterviews​.com​/features​/shane​-shane

292  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Ruth, Lester. ‘The Eruption of Worship Wars: The Coming of Conflict’. Liturgy 32 (2016), pp. 3–6. Ruth, Lester, and Swee Hong Lim. A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshaped the Protestant Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1987. Schaefer, Konrad. Psalms. Collegeville, PA: Liturgical, 2001. Scheer, Greg. ‘Contemporary Praise and Worship Music’. In Mark A. Lamport, Benjamin K. Forrest, and Vernon M. Whaley (eds), Hymns and Hymnody. Volume 3. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019, pp. 283–300. Siker, Jeffrey S. Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017. Stordalen, Terje. ‘Canon and Canonical Commentary: Comparative Perspectives on Canonical Ecologies’. In idem and Saphinaz-Amal Naguib (eds), The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future. Oslo: Novus, 2015, pp. 133–160. Strawn, Brent A. The Old Testament Is Dying. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017. The Blah Blah. ‘Matt Jacoby Reveals All – An Interview with the Sons of Korah’. https:// theblahblah​.wordpress​.com​/2008​/06​/03​/matt​-jacoby​-reveals​-all​-an​-interview​-with​-the​ -sons​-of​-korah/ Weber, Beat. ‘Meint die Tora Jhwhs in Psalm 1,2 (auch) den Psalter? Erkundungen zur Reichweite des Tora-Begriffs’. BN 178 (2018), pp. 75–102. White, James F. Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1989. Willgren [now Davage], David. ‘Why Psalms 1–2 Are Not to Be Considered a Preface to the ‘Book’ of Psalms’. ZAW 130/3 (2018), pp. 384–397. Willgren [now Davage], David. ‘Canonical Tamings of Suffering: On How Paratextual Activities Reshapes the Relationship between God and Human in Psalm 71’. In idem (ed.), God and Humans in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond: A Festschrift for Lennart Boström on his 67th Birthday. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2019, pp. 176–207. Yarchin, William. ‘Is there an Authoritative Shape for the Hebrew Book of Psalms?’. RevBib 122.3 (2015), pp. 355–370.

18 Of Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters Retellings of Biblical Stories in Children’s and Young Adult Literature Ina Döttinger 18.1 Introduction Why retell a Bible story? And why do so for children and teens? Would it not be enough to let them read the Bible? This chapter looks at the retellings of Bible stories for children six and older and young adults and examines what type of retellings we find, what purpose they might serve, and, ultimately, what role the retelling of Bible stories may play in the greater scheme of religious education as a part of learning about what unites us as humans. We shall first look at the general type of retellings and look briefly at various examples mentioned in the chapter. The examples are then classed into three categories, and the aim and purpose of the retellings discussed, before ending the chapter with further considerations as to the purpose of retellings and further questions. 18.2 The Material Arguably, the best-known ‘retellings’ of biblical stories are children’s Bibles. There is a myriad of them, using very different techniques, with a common goal: to make Bible stories accessible to children. True adaptations of the whole of the Bible for children are comparatively rare (‘Vollschriften’), though there are some around for young adults.1 Instead, children’s Bibles are usually a collection of the most well-known stories, adapted and meant to make children and young adults familiar with biblical characters and concepts. The choice of stories to be included as well as the way the stories are being told and the use of illustrations are an important aspect of the message the respective children’s Bibles want to send.2 Those are not the retellings we are talking about here. The subject of this chapter are retellings of single stories, not the whole Bible, as stand-alone books for older children and young people. While some scholars mentioned the existence of retellings, they are mostly not discussed in any depth, nor are they discussed in Religious Studies.3 In a very partial answer to this gap, this chapter deals with 14 such retellings. They come from four different countries, by 12 different authors (six female, six male), published over period of more than 70 years.4 These are, listed in order of publication date, with country of origin:

DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-19

294  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Lewis, C. S. The Complete Chronicles of Narnia. 1950–1956; UK Bolliger, Max. David. 1965, Germany Bolliger, Max. Josef. 1967, Germany Paterson, Katherine. Jacob Have I Loved. 1980, United States Dickinson, Peter. Eva. 1991, UK L’Engle, Madeleine. Many Waters. 1986, United States Zitelmann, Arnulf. Mose, der Mann aus der Wüste. 1991, Germany Schröder, Rainer M. Der geheime Auftrag des Jona von Judäa. 2005, Germany Grimes, Nikki. Dark Sons. 2005, 2010, United States Silverberg, Selma Kritzer. Naomi’s Song. 2009, United States Grimes, Nikki. A Girl named Mister. 2010, United States Badger, Hilary. The State of Grace. 2014, UK, Australia Berggren, Mats. Rami och Jonatan. 2019, Sweden Pransky, Judith. The Seventh Handmaiden. 2020, UK I have chosen these for a variety of reasons. The first to catch my eye and raise my interest in retellings as such was Jacob Have I Loved, which is particularly interesting as the masculine gender of the protagonists from the original story is switched to female in the retelling. Some of the works I have known since childhood, or I have been familiar with the author for a long time; other works have come to my attention over many years of thinking about the topic or having been brought to my attention by others. Both the Hebrew Bible and, even more so, the Christian Bible, are very patriarchal books, and so there appear to be both more male characters, and more retellings of stories of originally male characters5. This, too, would merit much more discussion; for the scope of this chapter, however, let it suffice that I have attempted to include in the final selection a sizeable amount of retellings about women of the Bible(s). Partly because there are more stories as such in the Hebrew Bible/The Old Testament, they are more numerous amongst retellings than retellings from the New Testament. In this selection, they number 11 to 3, with the Narnia Chronicles doubling for both (Genesis and the New Testament). Also, as Jaime Herndon points out: ‘The field of Bible retellings is also very white, and very Christian’.6 This failure has long been pointed out by scholars: A major problem with children’s bible stories, the contributors agree, is that they erase the Bible’s otherness and the otherness of biblical characters […]. Another is their lack of cultural diversity. They all too often fail to represent difference (gender, race, ethnicity, class, levels of disability), a failure that inevitably has an influence on the child’s perception of self as well as other.7 The inclusion of the works of Grimes as a person of colour and of Silverberg and Pransky as Jewish authors tries to address that, at least to some extent. And while a selection can, by definition, not be wholly representative, I think this current selection presents at least a reasonably good picture of the type of retellings we find in

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  295 biblical retellings. Its failures may, at the same time, point to possible gaps in the canon of retellings. Before diving deeper into the typology of retellings and discussing the aims of the authors and the value of retellings for children and young adults in today’s world (with ‘today’ being very broadly defined as these works being available now, in 2024, and being written in living memory), let me give a very brief summary of each of those retellings. The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis, 1950–1956) consist of seven volumes, mostly telling the stories of the Pevensie siblings in the mythical land of Narnia which they discover by walking through the wardrobe at their great-uncle’s house. Said uncle had, in his childhood, played a crucial role in founding Narnia (told in The Magician’s Nephew). The most important figure in Narnia is Aslan, a majestic lion (‘Aslan’ being the Turkish word for ‘lion’) and lord of all, whose suffering, death, and subsequent resurrection mirror Christ’s passion. David by Max Bolliger is a retelling for younger children. Partly because of the complex character of David, it simplifies and embellishes the story in various ways, in particular with regard to David’s relationship to Jonathan and to David’s marriages. The story relies heavily on the illustrations. Josef by Max Bolliger (1967), like David (and other books by the same author) is a retelling of the story of Joseph, aimed at fairly young children, roughly between six and ten or even younger. In simple words and with compelling black-and-white pictures, it tells the story of Joseph in a very accessible way, keeping interpretations and additions to a minimum. Naomi’s Song (1968/2009) was originally written by Selma Kritzer Silverberg as a present for her daughter’s sixteenth birthday in 1959. However, she didn’t finish it in time and then, in the 1960s, did not find a publisher, so it was privately distributed in the 1980s to her granddaughters, until her daughter finally found a publisher in the 2000s. It tells the Book of Ruth entirely from the viewpoint of Naomi, describing her challenging childhood and subsequent unexpected love story with Elimelech in great detail, before coming to the Book of Ruth as such. It paints a vivid picture of Naomi as the real main character of the Book of Ruth, despite its title. Jacob Have I Loved, first published in 1980 (henceforth Jacob), is a Newbury Medal-winning book by Katherine Paterson. Paterson is known for her poignant YA novels that do not shy away from difficult topics such as war, death, and neglect; usually partnered with a focus on the character’s resilience in the face of various adversaries. Jacob tells the story of Sarah-Louise and Caroline, from Sarah-Louise’s point of view, growing up on a fisherman’s island in the thirties, before and during WWII. Sarah-Louise and Caroline are twins. Sarah-Louise is the elder of the twins and the less favoured one. As the title indicates, it retells, in the broadest sense, the story of Jacob and Esau, from the point of the view of the elder twin, the twin not chosen. ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated’ is the phrase with which teenage Sarah-Louise is confronted by her pious, aggressive, unrelenting grandmother. Close to her father, but, as a girl, not socially accepted as being his successor as a fisherman, she is anchor-less, overshadowed by her

296  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry prettier, more talented sister, who has no qualms taking what does not belong to her if it benefits her. Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle and first published in 1986, is a retelling of the flood—or rather, of the time leading up to the flood. It constitutes volume four of the Wrinkle in Time Series by L’Engle. Its main characters are the twin brothers Dennys and Sandy, brothers to Maggie and Charles Wallace, who feature heavily in the other volumes. By a fluke, while disturbing their mother’s experiment, the brothers land in a kind of fictionalised desert landscape where they eventually meet Noah and his family in the time leading up to the flood, being privy to the fights, evil, and wrongdoings that cause God to send the flood, excepting only Noah and a part of his family. The story is set in a somewhat dreamlike setting, with seraphim and cherubim, unicorns and other mythical creatures playing a large part in the setting. Eva by Peter Dickinson and published in 1991 is a dystopian novel marketed in the UK as young adult fiction; in Germany, however, as a crime novel. Set in an unspecified, dystopian future in which all but human life has been nearly made extinct by humans, it tells the story of Eva, the 13-year-old daughter of a scientist specialising on chimps. Eva has been injured very badly in a car accident— and awakes, not in her own body, but in a chimp’s body, into whom her mind has been transplanted. Told from her own point of view, it details her struggles between her human mind, the chimp’s subconscious mind and ‘her’ chimp body. Throughout the book, it becomes clear that human superiority is not automatic, such transplants would not become the norm, and the future of the planet lies elsewhere—namely in a race making use of certain humanoid aspects while retaining chimp-ness. Rather than leaving paradise, like her biblical namesake, Eva leaves the artificial Eden constructed by humans and goes ‘back’ into the wild, forsaking certain human aspects such as speech in order to be and become part of a (chimp) community. Mose, der Mann aus der Wüste (Moses, Man from the Desert, henceforth Moses), published in 1991 and written by Arnulf Zitelmann, is a fictionalised account of the life of Moses. Much of the book focuses on Moses’ early life, both with his birth family and, intensively, with his Egyptian family—a part of Moses’ life left blank in the Bible stories, which skip from Moses being saved by the pharaoh’s daughter to him killing the Egyptian supervisor (Exod 2:10–11). Zitelmann stresses the humanity of Moses—his temper, his impatience, his uncertainty, and his desires, for himself, for understanding, and for his people. Der geheime Auftrag des Jona von Judäa (The Secret Mission of Jona of Judaea; henceforth Jona), by Rainer M. Schröder, published in 2005, follows the story of Jonas and Timon, two Jewish teenagers who flee from debt slavery and encounter Jesus. Timon becomes an apostle of Jesus, while Jonas is forced to spy on Jesus and his companions. Timon is the literary counterpart of one of Jesus’ disciples. The focus, however, is on Jona, a totally literary character, who observes Jesus’s rise, his travels, and the changes in his teachings not as a disciple, but looking on from a greater distance, with an interested, but at the same time critical, eye and sometimes somewhat scared.

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  297 Dark Sons, published in 2005/2010 and written by Nikki Grimes is a double retelling. It is written entirely in verse. On the one hand, it tells the story of Ishmael, elder son of Abraham, from his own point of view, with a focus on his experience of going from being the only and beloved son, though being torn between loyalty to his mother, whom his father’s wife Sarah despises, and love for his father, to being sent away, cast out in favour of his younger half-brother Izakh (Isaac). On the other hand, it tells of Sam, who lives in New York City and has to deal with his father remarrying and having a much younger brother, David. A girl named Mister (henceforth Mister), also by Nikki Grimes and published in 2010, is, like Dark Sons, a double retelling: ‘Mister’ is a 14-year-old black girl, very active in church and committed to staying a virgin until after marriage—who then falls in love with a slightly older, mischievous boy and has sex with him, once. The relationship ends shortly afterwards—and soon after it ends, she finds that she is pregnant. She keeps her pregnancy hidden from her mother, friends, church, and school, and finds solace in a slim book found amongst her mother’s bookshelves. It tells the story of Mary, pregnant at a young age with a child an angel tells her is God’s son, feeling frightened and isolated and scared of what her righteous Nazarean community will do unto her, until Joseph makes clear his support of her and of her son. Mister does not get support from the father of her child—but when she does open up to her mother, it turns out that her mother herself was 14 when Mister was born. And while she is not happy with her daughter’s pregnancy as such, both she and her church support Mister wholeheartedly. The State of Grace by Hilary Badger, published in 2014, follows Wren, a young girl living in paradise. Everything is wonderful—everything anybody could need, from food and shelter to entertainment and sexual pleasures, is provided by Dot, an unseen, benevolent goddess who has gifted humanity with her ‘books of Dot’. Even the language is light and characterised by positivity; there are not negative words or feelings, but to express negatives or discomforts, the prefix ‘pre’ is used— pre-healthy for ill, etc. Wren starts out happily enough; but slowly, dark appears to creep in; she tries to understand what is happening. The search for knowledge ends in disillusionment: far from being Paradise, Wren discovers herself to be part of a medical experiment where negative experiences are chemically suppressed. Rami och Jonatan, published in 2019 and written by Mats Berggren, tells the story of a young Swedish soccer player, Jonatan, trained by his father. Jonatan encounters a teenage asylum seeker, Rami, who turns out to be an incredible soccer talent. Rami starts training with Jonatan’s team, and the two of them fall in love. Their relationship, cherished by Jonatan, is complicated by Rami being Muslim. He is in a bind: admitting to being gay would greatly enhance his chances of asylum. At the same time, it would mean cutting all ties with the family, since homosexuality is shunned in his culture. Before he can decide, a fire starts in the refugee shelter, and Rami is killed by the fire as much as by his sense of being trapped between two undesirable outcomes which prevent him from running to safety. The Seventh Handmaiden by Judith Pransky, published in 2020, tells the story of Esther through the eyes of Darya, a young slave girl working at the palace. Darya was kidnapped and enslaved as a young child. Not entirely by

298  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry chance, she ends up in the household of a wealthy merchant as playmate for his daughter. Unusually, the merchant wants his daughter to be able to read and write, and, as Darya is quick and smart, she ends up learning more than her playmate. When her master dies abroad, her skills lead her into the palace and eventually in the service of Queen Esther as one of seven handmaidens. Esther’s handmaidens each have different tasks to do and must not talk to one another about these tasks. As it turns out, the seven handmaidens are Esther’s way of keeping track of the days of the week in order to be able to keep Sabbath. Darya contributes to Esther’s successful prevention of the threatened pogrom against the Jews. By chance, she finds out through her former owner’s daughter that she herself is Jewish, and, being able to buy herself free, can marry David, Mordechai’s nephew. As Exum states, there is a common problem with children’s Bible stories: The problem with most children’s Bible stories is what one would expect without even reading them: they are patronizing, overly protective (especially where sex and violence are concerned), moralistic, and vastly oversimplified; their preferred techniques for achieving their goals are omission, glossing over, and adjusting their source text.8 This does not appear to be the case with the retellings chosen here—and that may be a major difference between Bible stories as such and retellings: they are written with a capable reader in mind, taking the child or young adult reading the story seriously. They do so by using three different approaches:

• • •

Reimaginings transport the reader into the time of the original story. Modernised retellings transport the story into a more modern time and place and play with the theme of the story more, sometimes choosing a point of view from a ‘minor’ character or an otherwise unusual perspective. Fantastical retellings keep to the main points of the story, but combine the two categories above by including time travel, fantastical lands or dystopian visions.

In the following section, let us examine each of these three categories and their examples in turn. 18.3 Of Goals and Perspectives: Examining the Three Types of Retellings In this section, we examine more closely the three types of retellings identified above: What do the reellings categorised together have in common and where do they differ? What is the difference between the categories? What may the goals of the retellings be and how do the different perspectives they take pay into those goals?

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  299 18.3.1 Reimaginings

In our chosen examples, eight of the stories fall into the first category: the two books by Max Bolliger, Silverberg’s Naomi’s Song, Zitelmann’s Moses, Schröder’s Jona, the tales of Ishmael and of Mary in Grimes’ Dark Sons and Mister,9 and Pransky’s The Seventh Handmaiden. Of these, three take on the perspective of a well-known major biblical character: the two books by Bolliger (David and Josef), and the work by Zitelmann which centres around Moses. The other five either take the perspective of a lesser-known or usually more minor character (Naomi, Ishmael, and Mary), or invent a character to be placed in the ancient context (Darya as a slave to Esther, Jona as the friend of an apostle of Jesus). In particular, the change of perspective, shifting from the point of view of a major character to a minor, or even to an outsider, allows the reader to experience the ancient world around them, feel emotionally invested—and at the same time enables them to keep a certain distance. 18.3.1.1 Keeping to the Sources—Bolliger’s David and Josef

Max Bolliger is, in a sense, truly retelling. Both books mentioned, as well as his other retellings of Daniel and Moses, keep very close to the original biblical text. They are told as strictly biographical tales.10 There are very few additions to the texts—and they usually serve to make a very particular point. Thus, in the retelling of David, Bolliger picks up that Jonathan gives David his mantle and sword. In Bolliger’s tale, he receives David’s slingshot in return. And what is more, when he dies, he holds David’s slingshot in his one hand, the other clasping his sword. Bolliger does not in any way take up the homoerotic aspects of Jonathan’s and David’s relationship—but this scene shows how important it is for Bolliger to stress the value of this friendship for David. In the tale of Joseph by Bolliger, there is a short scene which depicts vividly how Benjamin and Joseph, eight years apart in age, play happily and undisturbed at home, while their elder brothers are away with the sheep. This is a totally invented scene—yet it serves very well both to capture the carefree times Joseph and his brother share and the bond the two of them have—which of course is important later on in the story when the brothers need to return home to fetch Benjamin on Joseph’s bidding. In particular the early part of the book contains several such scenes, such as Joseph as a child. Both the closeness to the text and the invented scenes serving to stress particular points show that Bolliger is really, in a sense, writing as if he were writing a children’s Bible—just reduced to one particular character of the Bible (in total, four particular characters about whom he has written). And while he does skip over some more contentious points—such as the exact nature of the friendship between Jonathan and David and Saul’s excesses—the texts do nonetheless not feel patronising in the sense other children’s Bibles do. However, while they remain close to the sources, that also prevents, in a way, that children can feel

300  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry truly transported into the ancient surroundings. The texts remain, in that sense, biblical. 18.3.1.2 Changing Perspectives

In contrast to Bolliger, the six other retellings in this section do not so much retell the Bible story, as paint a very vivid, well-researched picture of the figures whose story they tell and the time they lived it. They do so in three different ways:

• • •

Zitelmann focuses on an existing main character, that of Moses. Silverberg, and Grimes (both works), take existing biblical characters— Naomi, Ishmael, and Mary—and tell a familiar story from their, hitherto mostly untold, point of view. Schröder and Pransky invent their main characters and approach the biblical character—Jesus and Esther—through that route. Schröder invents his main character, Jona, and teams him up with one of the lesser-known disciples, Timon, while Pransky invents Darya, the handmaiden to Esther.

18.3.2 Moses

Zitelmann aims at bringing to life Moses, the person, with all his contradictions. In his afterword, he details how he is convinced by the rough edges of the biblical Moses and details such as his second wife as a person of colour that the biblical Moses is also a historical person. And as Tiemeyer puts it: regardless of whether we regard the biblical characters as historical or as literary, they are all people like us, with dreams and hopes and full of conflicting ideas and traits.11 Whereas the Bible story jumps from Moses being found by the pharaoh’s daughter (Exod 2:10) to him being a grown-up (Exod 2:11) with no place whatsoever devoted to the years in between, these years make up more than 100 pages of Zitelmann’s 260-page book. Far from being glossed over or left out, Zitelmann carefully depicts how life as an Egyptian male from the leading classes would have looked like. Both the particulars of this life—learning to read hieroglyphs, being trained with the military, living a life very focused on the afterlife—and first the ignorance of and then the contrast with Moses’ birth family and his original people serve to make Moses the person more accessible to the reader. Only on page 144 is the biblical tale resumed, only to be interrupted quickly again for 20 pages, this time focusing on the inner turmoil of Moses trying to understand his heritage. From page 166, Zitelmann follows the biblical tale more closely, again and again shifting the aspects of the story towards Moses’ subjective experience of the situation. Thus, the plagues barely merit a paragraph, in contrast to the detailed description in the Bible (Exod 7:14–11:10). Readers are left with the compelling picture of a complicated human being— torn between origin and upbringing, between wanting to do good and being overwhelmed both by life and by his God again and again. Readers are also, much

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  301 more than in Bolliger’s tales, immersed in the colours and sounds and experiences of a very different world to ours today—or even, in at least three different worlds, because of course the experience of the Egyptian prince, the shepherd in the desert, and the leader of the Hebrew people is happening in a physically shared world. But Moses is the only one crossing over the boundaries, inner and outer, of these worlds differing sharply in experience and frameworks. In this, he is accompanied at all times by the only mystical feature in Zitelmann’s narrative: the angel. The angel is a constant, invisible companion for Moses, unobserved by him, but seen by the reader, with the angel acting as a go-between—a messenger in the true sense of the word, between Moses, God, and the reader. 18.3.3 Naomi, Ishmael, and Mary

The Book of Ruth is one of just two books in the Bible named after women. However, Silverberg does not focus on the title character of the Book of Ruth, but rather on Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi. Naomi is hugely important in the biblical tale.12 As her daughter states in her foreword, Silverberg’s aim was telling ‘a story of self-discovery and the strength of women’. And for that, Naomi, rather than Ruth, is the main character in Silverberg’s book. However, while the Hebrew Bible tells us nothing about Naomi’s childhood and youth, about her love for and marriage with Elimek (apart from his name and that he came from Bethlehem in Juda), about leaving Israel during a famine in order to go to Moab, bringing up her children or even the death of her husband and sons, this is what Silverberg concentrates on. About 13 of the book’s 18 chapters are concerned with building the character of Naomi and recreating Ancient Israel and Moab for younger readers. Like Zitelmann, Silverberg’s aim is to make a biblical character accessible—something that is even more important in the case of Naomi as there are so few women depicted in the Bible. Thus, Silverberg’s work lets children and young adults experience Ancient Israel and Moab—life in rural societies, with very definite expectations from girls and women, often to their disadvantage—while pairing it at the same time with a love story between Naomi and her husband Elimek, who experience a deep and lasting connection. The story told in the Book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible only makes up about five chapters out of 18 in Naomi’s Song. It focuses on the ways in which Naomi, upon a return to a society not exactly welcoming her with open arms, nonetheless finds her place in that world, and actively contributes to finding a place for her beloved daughter-inlaw Ruth. While Silverberg, like Zitelmann, chose a main character whom she explored beyond what the biblical texts tell us, Grimes used a different approach in both her novels, Dark Sons and Mister, in three ways: First, she tells age-old stories from the point of view of lesser-known or at least less-explored characters, namely Ishmael, Abraham’s firstborn, in Dark Sons, and Mary in Mister. Second, her retellings are in verse rather than in prose, and, third, they are interspersed with a modernday story detailing similar experiences of young people from marginalized backgrounds today.

302  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry The pictures of ancient Israel painted by Silverberg and Grimes have much in common. Both describe vivid daily scenes, such as the baking of bread by throwing the dough against the hot sides of an oven (Silverberg, chapter 1, loc. 89) or tents made from goatskins (e.g. Grimes, Dark Sons, p. 29). Less agreeable, but succeeding fully in transporting the reader into a different time, is the scene in which Mary describes how a girl she grew up with is being stoned to death for having sex outside marriage (Grimes, Mister, p. 111). Grimes uses the scene both to depict Mary’s anguish at her situation, and to make her story relatable to Mister, who is afraid of judgement and exclusion (p.80). 18.3.4 Inventing a Viewpoint

While in the previous sections, we are dealing with the biblical story being told from the point of view of major or minor character found in the Bible, Schröder and Pransky choose to create more relatability by giving themselves greater freedom from the biblical tale—by following the journey of a character of their own invention. 18.3.4.1  Jona

Schröder’s explicit aim, as stated in the afterword, is to make the (Christian) Bible and Jesus accessible to younger people, in a world he regards as devoid of the knowledge and context needed to truly understand the gospels (Jona, p. 443). While Grimes has a similar aim, the two differ with regard to their approach. Rather than following Jesus directly or attempting a biography of the historical Jesus, his aim is to re-create for the reader the universe in which Jesus lived, to make tangible how life looked like, in particular for the people on the fringes of society, or in the lower classes. He wants to lay out how the world Jesus knew will have looked like from the point of view of someone living in it in a non-privileged position. To this end, he invents his main character, Jona, and has him meet Timon/ Thaddäus. One of the Jesus’ disciples is mentioned as ‘Bartholomäus’, that is ‘son of Talmai’; in John, he is referred to as ‘Nathanael’. The fact that not even his name is totally certain made Schröder choose him, as the lack of knowledge gave him complete freedom to make up a biography for him. Interestingly, however, Jona, Schröder’s main character, is removed even further from Jesus. He is not a disciple, but is, ultimately and against his will, sent to spy on him. This is where Schröder then adheres closely to the gospels—virtually everything Schröder’s Jesus says or does can be found in one of the gospels. Occasionally, Jesus’ words are put into more context. Sometimes, footnotes mark particular aspects where Schröder is referring to latest biblical research or discoveries where the text or the historical realities differ from the history of reception of the relevant passages (e.g., denoting that according to the Greek text, Jesus was a builder rather than a carpenter).13 Interestingly, Schröder not only depicts Jesus, but also Barabbas, having Jona being a part of Barabbas’ Zealot band of robbers (p. 166).

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  303 18.3.4.2  The Seventh Handmaiden

Like Schröder’s Jona, Pransky’s main character Darya is an invented person observing the biblical figure only from a certain distance. Here again, the surroundings are described in great details. The decision to have Darya be a slave opens up for the reader a multitude of worlds—that of a lowly (though well-treated) slave, that of a rich merchant (seen through their slave’s eyes), and that of the palace, again mostly seen from the slave’s perspective. Like Ishmael, Mary, and Jona, Darya is a teenager at the time the story takes place, thereby forming an instant bond with readers. Like Silverberg and Schröder, her depiction of Darya’s surroundings is convincing, right down to details such as the bread-baking (p. 22). But where Grimes aims at making readers aware of the parallels of the Biblical teenagers with today’s counterparts (both the fictional ones and her readers), Pransky wants to promote a deeper understanding both of Esther’s role and her firm beliefs and her role in preventing a pogrom. The mere line in Esther 2:20 of Esther not revealing her faith provides the backdrop for the book’s title and the whole storyline of how Esther manages to remember her faith (p. 22)14. 18.3.5 Summary

All eight works succeed in making the Hebrew bible, life in ancient Israel and Persia, the gospels and the biblical characters accessible to young adults today, while keeping to the original time and setting and historical or biblical aspects. There are some qualitative differences in these stories—notably, while Jona and Darya are very three-dimensional and relatable, both Jesus and Esther remain, in my perception, curiously flat. Although there are a couple of occasions where Jesus looks directly at Jona, ‘piercing him with his gaze’, he remains, in my perception, somehow emotionally removed. Similarly, Esther remains out of grasp; more of a shadowy figure. Where Zitelmann, Silverberg and Grimes succeed in letting Moses, Ruth, Ishmael, and Mary come alive for the reader, both Schröder and Pransky succeed in that quest with their own characters and with the times they tell of—but less so with Jesus and Esther. One common denominator seems to be that, where the authors choose teenagers as their main characters (as in the case of Ishmael, Mary, Darya, and Jona), they appear more real and relatable than the biblical characters they are meant to provide access to. This may deserve more research. It is also telling that it appears to be easier for writers to form convincing characters from little or no source material, than to make better known characters truly relatable. Even Zitelmann, who succeeds in depicting Moses, is more convincing during those passages that are skimmed over in the Hebrew Bible. Summing up, the eight works retelling the stories of Joseph, Moses, David, Ishmael, Ruth, Mary, and Jesus all share the aim of making these influential characters, removed from us in time and space and by their customs, relatable. The books by Zitelmann, Schröder, Silverberg, Grimes, and Pransky also succeed in resurrecting the world the stories play in as an everyday-world, full of the challenges and occurrences of daily life, often unassuming and seemingly small. In

304  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry contrast, the literary character of the stories of Joseph and David remains much more at the foreground in Bolliger’s tales. Bolliger’s work therefore make for interesting reading, without being as challenging and thought-provoking as the other works. The reason may well be that they are geared towards younger children—or that Bolliger’s aim is more similar to retellings in the tradition of children’s Bibles; concentrating on the core of the stories rather than adding layers of complexity. They all succeed in their aim, showing that it can be reached using very different styles and approaches. 18.4 Modernised Retellings The four examples of modern retellings in our sample are Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved, Berggren’s Rami och Jonatan (Rami), and the modern parts of Grimes, Dark Sons and Mister. The first is a retelling, in the broadest sense, of the story of Jacob and Esau; the second, that of David and Jonathan. As noted above, Grimes books retell the story of Ishmael and of Mary respectively through the characters of Sam and Mister; the focus here is on the retellings taking place in today’s world, as opposed to the historical retellings that form part of the first category (see above). In all four, rather than retelling the biblical story in its historical context, the bones of the stories are moved to a different time and place. Instead of, or in the case of Grimes, in addition to, using a retelling to draw children and young people into biblical times and working with the historical and biblical contexts, as the examples in our first category do, these modern retellings take particular themes found in the biblical stories and narrate them in a totally different context. Here, the objective seems more to use stories to deal with age-old topics, with the biblical stories providing a starting point rather than the ultimate goal. In Jacob and in Rami, the retellings we are dealing with take a very different point of view from the biblical tales. Grimes, on the other hand, remains very faithful to the original tale, while still transporting it into modern times. Through the interwoven tales of Ishmael and modern-day David, and of Mary and today’s Mister, the parallels are made much more obvious than is the case in the other two retellings. 18.4.1  Jacob Have I Loved

Paterson moves the story to a small and rough fictional fishing island in Chesapeake Bay. It is told from the viewpoint of Sarah-Louise—the elder of twins and the nonbiblical equivalent of Esau. Like Esau, she is the elder twin, and, like Esau, she remains, for the longest time, in the shadow of her well-beloved younger twin, Caroline. Three scenes, to my mind, stand out in Jacob: the first, when SarahLouise asks about their birth and where she was during the crucial moments when it seemed as if Caroline would not survive and what happened to her afterwards. Her mother does not remember and tries to comfort her by saying, ‘You never gave us a moment’s worry’. Sarah-Louise bristles at that, observing acutely, that ‘it was the worry about Caroline’s life that made it so precious’. The second is the scene that lends the book its title: when the grandmother, an old, pernickety, unlovable

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  305 woman, quotes the Bible at Sarah-Louise: ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau I have hated’, indicating Sarah’s role as the second, unloved twin. Sarah-Louise is particularly shaken by the fact that it is God to whom this quote is attributed (Rom 9:13).15 Sarah-Louise tries hard to shut that thought and the feeling of desolation it causes out of her mind, but it lingers like the smell of the crabs she fishes with her father. The third is a brief exchange between Sarah and her mother, talking about Sarah leaving the island, and tentatively asking her mother: ‘Will you miss me as much as you miss Caroline?’—and her mother answers ‘More’ (p. 227). This is where Jacob and the biblical tale differ most: not only does Jacob follow the other, less favoured twin, thereby totally shifting the focus, but in that one word, it redresses the balance between the twins. While Sarah is closer to her father, and remains so until her father’s death, just like Esau remains closer to Isaac, this statement by the twins’ mother revokes the biblical judgement and gives Sarah—and therefore, in a sense, Esau—back the rightful place as a beloved child. 18.4.2  Rami och Jonatan

While, in the Bible, the focus is on David, and first his relationship as a musician to Saul and then as a valued member of the household and friend as well as lover to Jonathan, Saul’s son, Berggren’s ‘Rami och Jonatan’ puts Jonatan more into the focus, despite being told from both Rami’s and Jonatan’s perspective. Jonatan’s father, the counterpart to Saul, is credited with much less of a role than the biblical Saul. The references to the biblical tale are not obvious at first sight, and the story works well without knowing the story, but they are discernible for those familiar with the original.16 The story centres both around the boys’ awakening sexuality, including, at first, both youngsters’ unsuccessful attempts to ignore their feelings. It takes both youngster’s great efforts to admit their feelings—but while, for Jonatan, overcoming his initial embarrassment is personal, for Rami, there is more at stake: his Muslim upbringing means admitting to homosexuality would cast him out of his family and alienate him from his friends. At the same time, admitting to it would grant him asylum, as the murders of his family and the prosecution he has experienced and witnessed were, apparently, not enough for the asylum-granting authorities. In contrast to the biblical tale, in the end, it is not Jonatan and his father who die, but Rami. Where Saul does not succeed in the Bible (1 Sam 31), the societal circumstances in modern Sweden do. Rami is killed, not outright by a spear, and most decidedly not by Jonatan’s father or in a physical battle—but by a combination of his own religious upbringing which does not allow Rami to love the way he was born to—and by the undercurrent of a racist and unfair system with regard to asylum seekers. 18.4.3  Dark Brothers and Mister

While, in Jacob and Rami, the biblical tales referred to are somewhat obscured, that is not the case in Grimes’ works. On the contrary, the modern and literal retellings are used in turn to highlight differences and similarities. Their aim is, quite

306  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry clearly, both to show the relevance of the Biblical tales for today’s youths and to highlight the different obstacles and ways to overcome them. Both teenagers in the modern retellings are black, living deeply embedded in congregations. Both pull away from them when first confronted with their respective challenges—being pregnant at a very young age and suddenly finding himself displaced by another child, and this child being born of a white mother, thereby adding racial tensions to the father-son relationship. Both find ways to get back into those communities—and make the experience that the congregations are open to embrace them. In that, they both make different experiences from their biblical counterparts who are or become mostly separated from their own communities. 18.4.4 Summary

Interestingly, all four modern retellings adopt significantly different endings, diametrically opposed to the original Bible stories: Sarah-Louise, ‘Esau’, finds her place in the world, surrounded by love and family (though the biblical reconciliation between Jacob and Esau is, if not missing, very much toned down and unimportant in the context of the story). Rami, ‘David’, far from becoming king, dies. His story ends, and Jonatan’s continues. Rami has changed Jonatan irrevocably, and therefore Rami’s influence continues, but the world that has collapsed for Jonatan with Rami’s death remains otherwise largely and, from the point of the reader at least, unfairly unchanged by this tragedy. Sam, ‘Ishmael’, makes peace with his father and finds a place in his life both for him and for his little brother David. And while he finds solace in the story of Ishmael, the deep love between the brothers Sam and David is, at best, hinted at in Exodus 25,9. Mister is, in contrast to ‘Mary’, left by her partner and father of the child, but finds herself firmly connected both to her own mother, whereas in the Bible, Mary’s mother is not mentioned; in Grimes’ work, she is mentioned in passing, and she is secure within the community. Her outcome is opposed to Mary’s, whose partner Joseph remains at her side, but who has to leave her own community behind. 18.5 Fantastical Retellings The final category is, in a sense, a mixture of the two. The authors here neither take the reader into old Israel, nor do they transport her into realistic settings nearer to our time and experiences—or only very briefly. Rather, using travel through time and space or dystopian settings, they open up fantastical universes, worlds reminiscent of both the biblical world and of ours, and yet unashamedly different. The four retellings are the Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis, specifically The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Many Waters

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  307 by Madeleine L’Engle, Eva by Peter Dickinson, and The State of Grace by Hilary Badger. 18.5.1 The Narnia Chronicles

The Narnia Chronicles consist of seven books. The volumes we are concerned with here are the first ever written, namely The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (henceforth LWW), The Magician’s Nephew, which was written as the penultimate book of the series but constitutes a prequel to LWW, and The Last Battle—the ultimate book of the series. All start out in our world, LWW during the Second World War, when the Pevensie siblings are sent to safety from the London bombings, and The Magician’s Nephew about 50 years earlier, in late Victorian or Edwardian London. The Last Battle plays around 5–10 years after LWW. With regard to retelling, The Magician’s Nephew closely echoes Genesis, while LWW retells the gospels and The Last Battle is a vision of the second coming of Christ. Much has been written on Narnia and its religious over- and undertones, and it has been subject of many theses.17 Narnia is the equivalent of paradise; the lion Aslan is her King. It is a magical land, a refuge, while always in danger, even from the beginning, as The Magician’s Nephew (MN) shows: ‘For though the world is not five hours old an evil has already entered it’ (MN: 113), it is, at the same time, the be-all and end-all. Lucy, in The Last Battle, is somewhat reluctant to believe that eternity in Narnia is truly to come: ‘You have sent us away so often!’ Narnia is the place of longing—and Aslan, of course, is Christ, already a part of the story from the very beginning of the—of that—world, as detailed in The Magician’s Nephew. That is not only very apparent in the story itself, where Aslan gives his life for that of Edmund, the wayward Pevensie sibling colluding with the evil witch, and is resurrected, going on to win the battle against evil, together with the siblings. It is also made very explicit by Lewis in his correspondence with children. As Xu details: Hila, an 11-year-old, wrote to Lewis, asking Aslan’s name in this world. Lewis wrote back: ‘As to Aslan’s other name, well I want you to guess. Has there been anyone in this world who: (1) arrived at the same time as Father Christmas; (2) said he was the son of a great emperor; (3) gave himself up for someone else’s fault to be jeered and killed by wicked people; (4) came to life again; (5) is sometimes spoken of as a Lamb [….] Don’t you really know His name in this world? Think it over and let me know your answer!’ Obviously, Aslan is the embodiment of Christ.18 At the same time, while to someone familiar with the Bible, the religious aspects are clear, Narnia is accessible to all children (with some imagination). There is no need to believe in anything but the ability to make (morally) good choices and want to learn to stand up for one’s beliefs in order to feel at home in Narnia.

308  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 18.5.2  Many Waters

Many Waters is Book 4 in the Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle. It features the twins Dennys and Sandy, who describe themselves as the ‘ordinary, run-ofthe-mill ones in the family’ in a family full of geniuses and time travellers (p. 6). They accept their role good-naturedly—and stumble into the fantasy world full of seraphim, nephilim, unicorns, and mini-mammuts inadvertently, on their search for some hot chocolate in their mother’s lab. As Tiemeyer discusses in depth, much of their time there is spend worrying about Noah’s youngest daughter Yaleth (a non-biblical character)—Dennys and Sandy know about the flood, and they remember that no daughters of Noah are mentioned as surviving.19 The world they land into is and remains dreamlike, very removed from their experiences so far. Not unlike Lucy in LWW, they are sent to the time and place just before the flood to fulfil a role: to save Yaleth and to help the community to understand about the flood. And while they fully accept their role, their whole stay is coloured by the wish for and working towards returning home, to their proper time and place. Given their role as middlemen, Tiemeyer concludes: ‘The overarching message of the novel is God’s love combined with human trust and faith in him’.20 18.5.3 Eva and State of Grace

Both Eva and State of Grace are dystopian novels. Both are very loosely based on Genesis and the creation of the world—and both play with the desire of man to play God and with the dangers that holds. Eva, where a teenage girl wakes up after an accident in the body of chimpanzee, shows what happens when boundaries are consistently violated and, in particular, beings regarded as inferior are manipulated and made use of. First published in 1991, it poses questions that are much nearer the front of science today—how do we cope with cloning? Why do we summon superiority? Can we as societies ever effectively deal with the aftermath of the unthinking use of fossils? Dickinson gives a tentative answer at the end, which lies in a possible combination of human and chimpanzee skills. Unlike the historical retellings from category 1 or the modernised retellings from category 2, Dickinson refers to the Biblical story only as a starting point, venturing far from the established paths and thereby forcing readers to ask new questions. The same is true for Grace, who, as it turns out, is put in a forced state of ‘blissful ignorance’, induced, as the reader finds out, to deal with substantial trauma by constant suppression and providing a totally controlled environment devoid of surprises or even decisions. Like Eva, the paradisiacal state is only used as a vague reference and starting point. An interesting twist is the Goddess Dot, who turns out to be only a construct meant to manipulate the participants of a sinister experiment. Again, the aim is to provoke questions rather than to provide answers. 15.6 Conclusion and Further Questions Taken together, what can we say about the three categories of retellings examined in this chapter? They all have in common that they take the universal themes from

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  309 the stories and make them more accessible for readers today: the search for self, the question of good and evil, of right and wrong, the search for truth and understanding, for finding a greater sense, and for feeling a connection to something bigger than yourself, the many aspects of a divine being. They differ, however, in how they attempt do that: The retellings of the first category aim to enable the reader to better understand the Bible stories as such, by providing context and explanations that the modern reader will often not have from their daily lives, but which would have been common for earlier or contemporary recipients of the biblical stories. The retellings in the second category have a wider aim: they confront the reader with fundamental themes of growing up—of finding yourself, establishing your values, forging lasting relationships, and confronting inner demons. They take up these universal human themes contained in the biblical stories and, using those as a backdrop, open up the whole heartbreaking business of growing up and finding your place in the world. While that is, of course, a theme also in the more literal retellings of the first category—Joseph and David and Moses and Jona are all, after all, ‘finding’ themselves, and the retellings detail that—these retellings of the second category open up radically different perspectives—e.g., that of girls and women in Jacob and that of a (relatively) openly gay couple in Rami, that of a slave in The Seventh Handmaiden and of a stranger in a strange land in Naomi’s Song, that of the unhappy elder son in Dark Brothers. Apart from being very readable and important stories on their own, these angles fill the gap the Bible itself is leaving simply by being formed in very different times and from a perspective otherwise often dominated by male characters, favoured protagonists, or members of a dominant class.21 While the retellings of the first category draw their reader into the biblical stories, the second category draws the stories into our world. And the third draws the reader out of this world into others. In this last category, the modern world serves at best as a starting point. However, the examples differ radically in their relationship of the modern world to the mythical or utopian one. As Kate Kinast puts it: Narnia is ‘an England stripped of modernity, of people, cities, schools, and roads, of all but Good and Evil playing out their battles against the backdrop of an unspoiled landscape’—at the same time leaving room for children’s imagination to incorporate their own landscapes: ‘Narnia was alive to me, and I secretly superimposed it onto my own landscape’.22 Even if the reader had had no interest whatsoever in the religious aspects, Lewis imparts his values. Kinast puts it this way: ‘Indeed, if you weren’t a brave child when you first started reading the Chronicles of Narnia, you were by way of becoming one after you’d imbibed one or two of the books, since their purpose, in part, was to endow you with a backbone—or at least a stiff upper lip’.23 In contrast to Narnia, and even though Dennys and Sandy, too, later experience homesickness for the mythical land they have left (L’Engle, Many Waters, p. 320), that antediluvian desert is very decidedly not a paradise, nor a place of eternal happiness. Of course, this is in no small part because it is about to be submerged as a result of human and other wrongdoing. Therefore, it holds a very different character

310  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry to Narnia, and the homesickness, it is surmised, is for the people and creatures they learned to love, more than for the landscape or the culture and general feeling. Lastly, both Eva and Grace are darker visions, making for thought-provoking discussions and the facing of uncomfortable questions such as ‘Are humans superior to animals?’, ‘Can ignorance really be bliss?’, and ‘Do I prefer ignorance to knowledge and where does that lead me?’ To sum up: in addition to the aim all good literature has, and certainly good children’s and YA literature—that is to widen one’s perspective, to introduce young people to new concepts, to enable them to understand—the three categories of biblical retellings introduced here aim:

• •

•

to acquaint children and teens more intimately with biblical texts; to use the biblical tales as a starting point or base for topics particularly relevant to puberty and finding oneself and to understand the world around one, in ways that fill the gaps often left by the biblical, often patriarchal point of view, and; to promote particular values or understandings of faith(s)—without being overly patronising or moralising in that respect, but rather taking younger readers seriously as people on their journey through life.

Two questions would make interesting follow-ups: First, how well do the categories hold up when applied to other children’s and YA books with biblical topics in the widest sense? The answer to that question would also require a further examination into which books exist with those topics—as Zimmermann points out, there is not as much of this type of literature around as one would hope or think.24 Second, it appears that children’s and YA literature, specifically that of the second category, can fill gaps in particular with regard to groups beyond the patriarchal structures favoured in the Bible. Thus, how can such approaches be encouraged, what can be done to promote the writing of such retellings, and how could such literature becoming more widely spread, keeping in mind Exum’s wish for biblical stories to be told to entertain, rather than to moralise? To that end, it may be worthwhile for future authors to keep an eye on the question how to make particularly prominent Bible characters accessible and multi-dimensional. All in all—reasons enough to examine this topic further than this chapter can. And also, as the examples given here show—the Bible just always makes for cracking good stories! Notes 1 Cf. Boeck, ‘Online-Bibeln’, who discusses both full versions and related apps of the Bible for young people. 2 Much has been written about them—a particularly helpful and relatively recent discussion by Exum, ‘Reflections’, and Fricke, ‘Kinder- und Jugendbibeln’. 3 Zimmermann, ‘Ganzschriften’, p. 6; see also various attempts of categorisations referred to there.

Siblings and Soccer, Lions and Lobsters  311 4 This, of course, poses its own problem, as retellings from more than seventy years ago will have a vastly different lookout from those done today. Indeed, it would be a separate, interesting study to see how retellings of the same story in children’s literature and YA have changed over the years. That is not, however, the subject of this chapter, for the purpose of which all texts are taken as they stand, next to one another. Another fascinating topic would be how the retellings differ with regard to their country of origin and authorship; that, too, we have to leave for another time. 5 For an extensive project on women and the Bible, see the project ‘Women and the Bible—“Frauen, Bibel und Rezeptionsgeschichte”’ detailed in Fischer ‘Frauen, Bibel’. 6 Herndon, ‘Retellings’. 7 Exum, ‘Reflections’, p. 1. 8 Exum, ‘Reflections’, p. 6. 9 Note that Grimes uses categories 1, ‘literal re-tellings’, and 2, ‘modernised re-telling’, side-by-side in both her works. 10 Gärtner, ‘Bolliger’. 11 Tiemeyer, ‘Vänner’, p. 10. 12 Reinhartz ‘Naomi’s Story’. 13 Schröder, p. 235. 14 For a recent discussion about the Persian roots of the Book of Esther (which incidentally makes no mention of that line), see Llewellyn-Jones, Book of Esther. 15 Interestingly, this sentiment is not found in Genesis or Exodus, as one might surmise, but in Mal 1:2, and then quoted in Rom 9:13. It would be worth examining the biblical aspects of Jacob in detail. However, that would go beyond the scope of this chapter. 16 Tiemeyer‚ Vänner, p. 242. 17 A web search ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ yields, at first sight, 32 dissertations and theses on the topic on Grafiati​.co​m, e.g. Patchin, ‘Once a Queen’, on the topic of Susan, and Xu, ‘Christian Elements’. 18 Xu‚ ‘Christian Elements’, p. 171 19 Tiemeyer, ‘Retellings’. 20 Tiemeyer, ‘Retellings’, p. 222. 21 To delve deeper into that subject, Fischer’s ‘Frauen, Bibel’ is a good starting point, as is the project ‘Women and Bible’ as a whole. A thorough examination of some retellings about biblical women in children’s and YA literature can be found in Gillhouse, ‘Framing Eve’. 22 Kinast, ‘Paradise Lost: Revisiting Narnia’, p. 13. 23 Kinast, ‘Paradise Lost: Revisiting Narnia’, p. 13. 24 Zimmermann, ‘Ganzschriften’, p. 2, 6ff.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Badger, Hilary, The State of Grace. London: Hardie Grant Egmont: London UK, Richmond (AU): 2014. Berggren, Mats. Rami och Jonatan. Bromma: Opal: 2019. Bolliger, Max. David. Ravensburg: Otto Meier Verlag: 1965 Bolliger, Max. Josef. Ravensburg: Otto Meier Verlag: 1967. Dickinson, Peter. Eva. London: Gollancz: 1988. Edition used: Opal: 1991. Grimes, Nikki. Dark Sons. Grand Rapids, MI: Blink: 2005, 2010. ePub edition used: July 2010. Grimes, Nikki. A Girl Named Mister. Grand Rapids, MI: Blink: 2010. ePub edition used: January 2017.

312  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry L’Engle, Madeleine. Many Waters. New York, NY: Crosswicks: 1986. Edition used: Square Fish: 2007. Lewis, C.S. The Complete Chronicles of Narnia. 1950–1956. Edition used: Diamond Books: London: 1999. Paterson, Katherine. Jacob have I loved. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1980. Pransky, Judith. The Seventh Handmaiden. London: Green Bean Books, 2020. Schröder, Rainer M. Der geheime Auftrag des Jona von Judäa. München: cbj, 2005. Silverberg, Selma Kritzer. Naomi’s Song. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 2009. Zitelmann, Arnulf. Mose, der Mann aus der Wüste. Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg, 1991. Secondary Sources Boeck, Nadja. ‘Online-Jugendbibeln, bibeldidaktisch’. In Bibelwissenschaft. Online (2022). https://bibelwissenschaft​.de​/stichwort​/201019/ Exum, J. Cheryl. ‘What Does a Child Want? Reflections on Children’s Bible Stories’. Semeia Studies 56. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2012, pp. 333–347. Fischer, Irmgard, Jorunn Økland, Mercedes Navarro Puerto, and Adriana Valerio. ‘Frauen, Bibel und Rezeptionsgeschichte: Ein internationales Projekt der Theologie und Genderforschung’. In Fischer, Navarro Puerto, and Taschl-Erber (eds), Tora, Die Bibel und die Frauen 1.1. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010, pp. 9–35. Fricke, Michael. ‘Kinder- und Jugendbibeln’. In Bibelwissenschaft. Online. 2015. https:// bibelwissenschaft​.de​/stichwort​/100039/ Gärtner, Hans. ‘Max Bolliger’. In Deutsche Akademie für Kinder und Jugendliteratur. Online, 2021. https://www​.akademie​-kjl​.de​/online​-lexikon​/bolliger​-max/ Gillhouse, Elizabeth. ‘Framing Eve: Contemporary Retellings of Biblical Women for Young People’. Unpublished PhD thesis. Illinois State University, 2013. Herndon, Jaime. ‘Unexpected and Compelling Biblical Retellings’. Book Riot (2022). https://bookriot​.com​/biblical​-retellings/ Kinast, Kate. ‘Paradise Lost: Revisiting Narnia’. SiteLINES: A Journal of Place 11.1 (2015), pp. 12–15. Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther: Achaemenid Court Culture in the Hebrew Bible. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Patchin, Amanda Kathleen. ‘Once a Queen in Narnia: Susan and the Divine in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narina’. Unpublished PhD thesis. Boise State University, 2011. Reinhartz, Adele. ‘The Book of Ruth? It’s Naomi’s Story’. TheTorah​.c​om (2023). https:// www​.thetorah​.com​/article​/the​-book​-of​-ruth​-its​-naomis​-story Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia. ‘Retelling Noah and the Flood’. Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 6.2 (2017). https://doi​.org​/10​.11157​/rsrr6​-2​-706 Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia. Mina bibliska vänner och jag. Malmö: Spricka Förlag, 2024. Xu, Yumei. ‘The Christian Elements in The Chronicles of Narina: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research 310 (2019), pp. 170–172. https://doi​.org​/10​.2991​/iccese​-19​.2019​.39 Zimmermann, Mirjam. ‘Ganzschriften, Kinder- und Jugendliteratur’. Bibelwissenschaft. Online (2016). https://bibelwissenschaft​.de​/stichwort​/100132/

19 Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction Marian Kelsey

19.1 Introduction A man and an angel, locked together in the tight embrace of combat. Feet slip and grind in gravelled dust at the edge of a rift in the land. Behind, danger and exile and dull years. Ahead, also danger, but promise too, the unknown. The first moment I spotted for myself a retold biblical narrative in my voracious reading of fantasy and sci-fi was in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Intellectually, I knew that such retellings are commonplace in the genre—I had read the Narnia Chronicles growing up, I had sat through my father’s sermon on the messianic references in the Matrix, and Pullman himself was hardly coy about his engagement with biblical material. But this example was different because it was a true allusion, veiled, not overt, and independently discovered from my own awareness of biblical narrative. It was, appropriately enough, a moment of magic to see the intersection of two narratives enrich the story that I read. Lord Asriel, whose very name is an anagram of Israel, decides to literally wage war on God, just as Jacob of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis got his name from (supposedly) wrestling with God.1 In the biblical texts, Jacob wrestles with an angelic or divine figure as he steps into his role as the father of the nascent nation Israel. He clings onto his opponent until he forces a blessing out of him. In Pullman’s books, the father of the protagonist Lyra wrestles the angel Metatron, leader of God’s forces, into the Abyss to protect his daughter and the choice she must make regarding Dust (The Amber Spyglass [TAS], pp. 427–430). The Hebrew Bible lends itself to retellings because so much of it is narrative. It is largely in story format, rather than largely teachings or sayings, and stories are a form of representation. This is something that we instinctively understand with paintings and visual art—we do not confuse a painting with the real thing. When it comes to literature, and especially biblical literature, it is not so immediately obvious. Much of the Bible presents itself as a record of events; as factual, or historical, or inspired and inerrant. It is common to hear religious people outside the academy talk about the biblical Abraham or Moses as real people, exactly as they are in the biblical texts—rather than talking about the biblical Abraham or Moses as a representation of the real person, if such a real person ever existed. But the characters are representations. If something already is a representation of a supposed original, it not only feels permissible but even very tempting to represent it yet again in our DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-20

314  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry own way. My scholarly home is in the world of inner-biblical allusion, of Bible representing other bits of Bible. Such activity is rife within the Bible itself, so it is hardly surprising to see that it extends beyond the Bible too. The affinity between fantasy/sci-fi and biblical texts is, in my view, attributable to the fact that sci-fi and fantasy are often used to explore the nature and the boundaries of humanity and society. Because of this, they often borrow from the stories that already exist about the nature and boundaries of society—and these are often religious stories. In particular, a popular source of fantasy/sci-fi borrowings are religious narratives about creation and de-creation, the beginning and the end of the world, or what Colin Manlove calls the ‘supernaturally ultimate elements of the biblical story’.2 These religious narratives talk about times when society is being established, destroyed, or remade. Fantasy/sci-fi retellings, in their exploration of the boundaries of society, frequently borrow from and revise aspects of the biblical stories to accomplish their aims. Many fantasy/sci-fi books can be seen to explore three underlying questions. How did the world (or a world, new world, postapocalyptic world…) begin? How will the world end? And how does humanity fit in the middle? 19.2 How Did the World Begin? There are beginnings and beginnings. Many beginnings—rather like in the biblical text itself—are also endings. In the Gen 2–3 narrative, the creation of humanity, and the start of life in the world as we know it, is inseparable from the end of life in Eden, and, indeed, the eventual end of the lives of Adam and Eve. This counterpoint suffuses the multiple reenvisionings of the Eden narrative in fantasy and sci-fi. 19.2.1 The Beginning of Death

Crace’s book Eden is set in the biblical garden long after, but within the shadow of, the departure of Adam and Eve. A small community of gardeners continue in the life that, it is implied, God originally intended his creatures to have. The gardeners live immortal and unageing lives within the confines of Eden but are warned that leaving the garden will mean death. Another version of Eden, or rather several, appear in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. The Eve-like protagonist Lilith awakes in a ship that provides her with everything she needs to live. In addition, Lilith has the promise of life in an Edenic restoration of the devastated earth, if she remains obedient to the aliens who formed it (Dawn, pp. 31–47). There is even an echo of ‘let…’ language when humans settle on new proto-Eden.3 In Crace’s Eden, the book opens when a woman, Tabi, has disappeared from the gardeners’ lives and lodgings. Those who remain believe she has left the garden. As with Adam and Eve, a woman has led the way, and the book tells how her friend Ebon follows in her steps (p. 13).4 Ebon is unsure whether this death would occur in the moment he touched the soil of the outside world, or simply that entering the outside world will mean his eventual decline (pp. 154–155). Crace thus creates an explicit ambiguity out of the difficult contradiction of the biblical text. God says

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  315 that death is the same-day consequence of eating the forbidden fruit, but, in the event, mere mortality is the actual result (Gen 2:17; 3:24). The spectre of death also waits outside the garden walls in Xenogenesis. To be apart from the ship will in time mean death for the aliens (Dawn, p. 37). Likewise, to be apart from the alienmade villages on earth would mean sterility and the death of the human species (Adulthood Rites, pp. 19–27). Philip Pullman has a somewhat different approach to immortality in the trilogy His Dark Materials. The Adam-and-Eve characters of Lyra and Will find that life after earthly death is a grey Hades of ghosts who persist forever without life or light or hope (The Amber Spyglass, pp. 309–320). Lyra and Will eventually overturn this immortality by cutting a window into the living world, through which the ghosts step and disappear, ceasing to exist by dissolving back into the physical world (TAS, p. 382). Crace’s Ebon and Tabi, and Pullman’s Lyra and Will, follow the biblical Adam and Eve by in some manner choosing mortality over immortality. Tabi and Ebon each take the same risk of threatened death in order to access the outside world. An old apple is the catalyst for Ebon’s decision to risk leaving the garden, picking up on the popular Western understanding of the type of forbidden fruit: ‘apples were the smell of man’s first disobedience, as everybody knows’ (p. 31). Though prohibited from eating windfall, Ebon takes a bite from a fallen apple, only to find it tastes of decay (pp. 79–83). The image foreshadows the fact that an individual’s choice of mortality rebounds on more than them alone. As a result of the actions of Ebon and Tabi, their angelic friend Jamin, a literal fallen angel, is killed by an outside hunter (p. 242). Ultimately, the disobedience of Ebon and Tabi brings death into even the sacred confines of Eden, and the end to the gardeners’ lives there, including those who did not choose to leave. In such an aftermath, ‘They were the wise ones, it appears. They reached the world before the world reached them’ (p. 226). By contrast, Lyra and Will, the second Adam and Eve, very consciously reject immortality as hollow and joyless, and instead embrace the mortality that was a punishment for the primordial couple. For Pullman, it is antithetical to all beings, humans but also angels and so-called deities, to be immortal.5 All life is mortal life, a point driven home when Lyra and Will end up killing—or rather releasing—the character who is called God in the book (TAS, pp. 431–432). Mortality is not, however, presented as an uncomplicated good. In the first book of Pullman’s trilogy, Lyra’s best friend Roger follows her in her adventures and is killed as a result. The scene contains a verbal allusion to Genesis 3: when Adam and Eve eat from the tree, ‘the eyes of both were opened’ (Gen 3:7), and when Lyra holds the body of Roger at his death, ‘her eyes were wide’ (Northern Lights [NL], p. 394). Within the book, this is the first of Lyra’s great betrayals and tempers the general endorsement of mortality. The approach of Lilith in Xenogenesis is somewhat different. Lilith repeatedly makes the adjustments required and gives the obedience demanded to continue living—both as an individual, and, more importantly, to create a future for the human race. Without Lilith’s continued obedience to her alien masters, humanity will perish. By the end of the trilogy, however, the descendants who exist because of Lilith’s commitment to survival make their own Eve’s choice. Akin,

316  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry her human-alien hybrid son, leads a community of new humans as they break away from the security of alien patronage to start a precarious, possibly doomed to fail, life on Mars (AR, pp. 300–302). The fantasy/sci-fi books thus all embrace mortality. Given the chance to rewrite an Eden story in which humans never leave the garden, they reject it. Turning to the biblical texts, this suggests an interpretation in which leaving Eden was an inevitability of created life and the narrative that follows. If the story ended with Eden, we would have no Bible. 19.2.2 The Beginning of Knowledge

Church history—and specifically church history, rather than Jewish history—has condemned Eve for her choice to eat of the tree of knowledge. Modern fantasy and sci-fi have often taken a different perspective. The biblical Eve is tempted by the thought of becoming like God, but specifically in the sense of the acquisition of knowledge. At the serpent’s suggestion, she is willing to disbelieve God’s warning of death and disregard his command not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Instead, she judges for herself and sees ‘that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise’ (Gen 3:6), so she takes and eats from its fruit. Some of these biblical details tend to get glossed over by the popular bowdlerisation of the story, in which an evil serpent tempts a naïve Eve into sin. Pullman and Crace are, so to speak, more careful readers of the biblical text in depicting their second Eves, Lyra and Tabi. Both distrust the warnings of authority figures and disobey their strictures. They are independent and insatiably curious, and natural leaders, effortlessly pulling companions along with their explorations, just as Adam followed Eve’s lead in eating from the tree of knowledge. In modern fantasy/sci-fi, the lure of knowledge twins with the lure of unknowability as two sides of the same tempting coin. In the biblical narrative, the fruit is the thing forbidden, and expulsion is the consequence. In Crace’s novel, the thing forbidden is the act of leaving the garden. The biblical fruit appealed to the first woman for the knowledge it could bring. For Tabi, the temptation of the outside world lies precisely in its unknowability. Life in Eden is dull, predictable, and unchanging. Despite the obvious suffering and hardships of life outside the garden, Tabi longs for the ability to be ignorant of what the next day might bring: ‘this is what the world is all about. It’s wondering and stories’ (p. 237). Similarly, Xenogenesis presents chosen ignorance as having its own appeal. Butler’s Lilith always has knowledge in the sense of memories of her former life, but she resists the enhanced memory the aliens wish to grant her (Dawn, pp. 83–84). In yet another example, Tabi’s interest in the outside world matches that of Frodo, who in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy lives in the Edenic surroundings of the Shire. This is inhabited by the peaceable hobbits, largely in ignorance of the outside world, who resemble the primordial and ignorant Adam and Eve. Yet Frodo is fascinated by a far broader sweep of the world than the Shire alone, and his desire is encouraged by the serpent of the piece, the nomadic wizard Gandalf (p. 56).

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  317 The ability to not know—and thereby the ability to find out—is viewed by many characters as a gift for which there is no compromise. It is an inseparable aspect of humanity and maturity: ‘perhaps not knowing what you cannot know is a fate worse than death; perhaps this was why it was so easy to eat the fruit’.6 Frodo achieves his desire for greater knowledge in his adventures through the Lord of the Rings. Yet as with Eve, and with Tabi, to some extent this knowledge backfires. By the end of the story, Frodo must live in exile from the Eden of the Shire, not because another party expels him, but because he has been burned by the selfknowledge he achieves in his adventuring (pp. 1346–1347). Nevertheless, Frodo’s actions resulted in ultimate good through the saving of the world from Sauron. Similarly, the tone of Crace’s book is far from condemnatory of transgression’s consequences. The ingress of the outside world into Eden and the death that results is met by resignation from God. Instead, Eden implies that self-justification and the blame of others is the primordial sin, shared by angels as well as people (pp. 180–187). Shame and guilt, ‘heavy trophies from unholy lands’, rather than death, are the real consequences of transgression (pp. 244, 255). Such retellings place emphasis on the fact that in the biblical story, while God condemns the disobedience of Adam, he does not condemn the desire to know. The text has no explicit explanation of why God does not want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge. Instead, the structure of God’s speech after the event mirrors the order of blame each creature lays on the other: the responsibility was passed from man to woman to serpent, and God enumerates the consequences from serpent to woman to man. Each creature’s guilt and attempt at self-justification has greater prominence than whatever their knowledge has brought them. 19.2.3 The Beginning of Sexual Desire

In the biblical Eden, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. The man Adam ‘knew’ the woman Eve only after their expulsion from the garden (Gen 4:1). While it is likely these were entirely separate aspects of the story in the biblical texts,7 the tangled relationships of shame, nakedness, and sex have proved fertile ground for biblical retellings. Sexual desire, albeit unacknowledged as such, threads through Crace’s narrative and is especially bound up with disobedience. The book implies a kind of contagious nature to transgression. The angels in charge of the gardeners fear—correctly—that Tabi’s example will infect the desires of those close to her. Ebon, it appears, would never have contemplated leaving Eden if not to find Tabi. Readers receive a similar impression of spreading human transgression through Gen 1–11: humans are tempted into sin, then it stalks them, then they are evil all the time, then their arrogance knows no bounds (Gen 3:4–5; Gen 4:7; Gen 6:5; Gen 11:4). Both Ebon and the angel Jamin are implied to be in love with Tabi, and this love compels them to follow her, with all the consequences that it brings (cf. the sons of God and daughters of humanity in Gen 6:2 and their possible connection to the flood). Life in Crace’s Eden appears to readers to be unnatural, with no coupling or children or the passage of generations, contrasted with life outside the garden that is a closer reflection of the world as readers know it (p. 9). The reader

318  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry is left to wonder if the unrequited nature of Ebon’s and Jamin’s love is in part responsible for the sequence of events. When the outside life breaches Eden’s walls and comes inside the garden at the end of the book, it feels like the beginning of familiar human history. Pullman’s work dives even more deeply into those Christian readings of Genesis that see a close connection between the knowledge of the forbidden tree and sexual maturity. In Pullman’s retelling of the biblical story, when the first Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, they explicitly reach puberty and sexual maturity, as is only implied in the actual biblical text (NL, pp. 371–372). But more than that, they begin to attract Dust. Dust, in Pullman’s world, is the manifestation of consciousness: ‘a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself’ (TAS, p. 33). The term comes from the dust of the earth from which Adam is formed, and to which all humanity will return. In Pullman’s world, the church views Dust as evidence of original sin, irresistibly attracted to people once they reach sexual maturity. Pullman’s church therefore wants to eradicate Dust, or at least its attraction to people, through increasingly brutal means. The heroes of the trilogy come to see Dust as the manifestation of sentience and free will.8 When they save the world’s access to Dust, the ‘fall’ of Christian readings of the Bible is repainted as the elevation of humanity to a state of self-knowledge and self-direction. Butler’s trilogy tackles the nexus of shame and life and sex more explicitly, and with a less optimistic view of sexual behaviour than that presented in His Dark Materials. Still a prisoner in the ship, Lilith is offered fruit that is pleasing to the eyes and good to eat (Dawn, pp. 28–30). The aliens offering the fruit are depicted as serpent-like in aspects of their appearance (Dawn, pp. 12–13).9 Having prevented the fertility of humans amongst themselves, the aliens wish to interbreed with them. The breeding allows for the restarting of the human race which would otherwise quickly become extinct. Nonetheless, Butler’s trilogy presents deep reservations about the process, most clearly through the feelings of Lilith. With her choice reduced to intercourse or the end of her species, it is hardly a choice at all. Lilith resents it accordingly, even though she complies. Such procreation does not come across as ‘natural’ in the same manner as the ending of Crace’s book. After alien sex, human participants cannot touch each other, in a reversal of the biblical Eden.10 Butler’s exploration of the topic may well reflect gendered experiences of sexual encounters, in which Eves of the world are often more attuned to the potential perils of intercourse and childbirth rather than merely celebratory of them. One wonders whether the biblical Eve would have felt equally as trapped into sexual and reproductive roles as Butler’s Lilith, had we heard her thoughts on the matter. The intertwining of sexual identity and power imbalance enunciated for Eve in Gen 3:16 certainly continues to shape the lives of most female readers of the Bible. 19.3 How Will the World End? In biblical texts, an end is rarely simply an end. It is often also a renewal, or at the least, a re-start. The canonically ordered Hebrew Bible is open-ended in a manner that precludes any easy reaching for the absolute severing of apocalypse. Instead,

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  319 endings are often the beginning of a new, different, as yet undetermined continuance of life. Many fantasy and sci-fi books echo such an approach. 19.3.1 Expulsion

One kind of ending in the biblical texts is the end of humanity’s easy life in Eden and their exile to the mortal world. The last act of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy takes place in a fertile and peaceful (almost Edenic) land when Lyra and Will share a picnic. The serpent of Pullman’s story—the tempter—tells a story that makes Lyra realise she is in love with Will. She puts a piece of fruit in his mouth, and having shared this fruit of knowledge with him, the two of them reach sexual maturity and become enveloped in Dust (TAS, pp. 480–497). But the final temptation, and final betrayal, comes when Lyra realises that, being from separate worlds, she and Will must each return to their own worlds. Their new-found relationship must end in almost the moment it has begun, as only by remaining apart can the two of them prevent Dust from pouring through the gaps between worlds and being lost to the universe. The only window between worlds that may remain open is that through which the ghosts of the dead dissolve into the world of the living (TAS, pp. 509–528). The biblical Adam and Eve seem to unwittingly choose knowledge over immortality when they eat from the tree of knowledge and as a result are prevented from accessing the tree of life. Lyra and Will must make a conscious choice between knowledge and immortality and decide to protect self-knowledge and sentience. In the biblical text, if knowledge is the prize, mortality is the cost, a cost which is necessary and even laudable for humanity to bear in their new-found place in the world. By contrast, in His Dark Materials, the cost of saving Dust is bound up with the prize of mortality, the gift of ultimately dissolving back into the living world at the end of a sentient and freely lived life. In a similar manner, Frodo’s adventures in Lord of the Rings mean an end to his life in the Shire. Frodo chooses a life of exile, scarred both literally and figuratively by his new-found knowledge of evil and the self-knowledge that, when faced with the choice, he tried to hold on to ultimate power (p. 945). Throughout the primeval narratives of Genesis 1–11, humanity constantly strives to reach beyond its own limits and grasp that which is God’s alone. Similarly, in the Lord of the Rings, the crucial struggle is that of individuals’ desire for power, seen through their desire for the ring, which itself brings unnatural immortality. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the evil characters in the book who bring terror and violence to the world are those who succumb to the ring’s siren call, like Sauron or the Ring Wraiths or Gollum. The most celebrated trait in the books is the ability to renounce or reject such power, a trait seen in Samwise Gamgee, Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn and others. Caught between these two groups, Frodo seems to realise his own vulnerability too late. Though he is eventually rid of the ring, it was not by his own actions, and the awareness breaks him. Frodo sails off to the undying lands where he is completely cut off from the world about which he was once so curious (pp. 1346–1347). It is as if, faced with the chance to choose again between knowledge and immortality, he favours immortality and the peaceful isolation of Eden.

320  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Despite the prices paid by Lyra and Frodo, neither narrative implies that their choices were in error. Each saved the world, albeit at the cost of their own happiness. Returning to the biblical narrative, it is notable—especially in light of much later interpretations—that the text itself rarely expresses a wish to reverse Eve’s choice. One might desire a return to paradise, certainly, but it is a return by passing through the torment of the world, not through having never experienced it in the first place. Whatever the cost, humanity had to leave Eden. 19.3.2 Flood

The beginning/end ambivalence of the biblical Eden narrative reoccurs with other biblical destructions that are also re-creations, such as the story of the flood, where almost the whole world is destroyed to make space for a re-start. Biblical stories of floods hark back to the ancient Near Eastern concept of a sea god locked with a storm god in primordial battle. Several fantasy/sci-fi books draw on the idea of an independent and potentially threatening power besides God, with the potential to destroy and remake worlds in their own image. In Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series, the Godlike figure is the Architect, who made the House—a sort of heavenly realm—and the material world. Yet outside the House is the ocean, a region not under the Architect’s control and ruled over by the Mariner. The Mariner is neither on the side of the ‘good’ or the ‘evil’ powers of the book, but stands apart. While his ocean does not threaten the world, the world is at dire risk from the rising flood of Nothing, a substance or force of disorder and non-creation which is slowly swallowing up both House and world. Indeed, throughout the seven books, Nothing does destroy the whole world and almost all the House. Both must be re-created by the protagonist Arthur, the new Architect. Even Crace’s Eden gestures towards the notion of sea-monsters. The angel who helps Ebon to leave the garden, resulting in the garden’s dissolution, oversees the fish pools. Ebon tends the apple trees. Alum, the Cain figure, ‘has always known that the apple and the fish would conspire’ in the actions that bring about the end of paradise and the start of recognisable human history (pp. 165–166). Margaret Atwood adapts the flood myth in the MaddAddam trilogy.11 Arguably Atwood’s work intertwines the garden and flood myths even more thoroughly than the biblical text. The ‘Waterless Flood’ is a flood-level extinction event predicted by a group calling themselves the Gardeners, which only they, as the righteous ‘plural Noah’, will survive (The Year of the Flood, p. 110). The flood is sent, according to the Gardeners, because of the wickedness of the world and likened also to the destruction of Sodom.12 In the event, the ending comes through the BlyssPluss pill, a supposed sexual enjoyment enhancer which in fact infects and kills those who take it (Oryx and Crake [OC], pp. 342–349). The pill is presented as a ‘seed’ which, like the fruit of the tree of knowledge, is bound up with the complications of sex.13 The correspondences between the biblical antediluvian world, and Atwood’s antediluvian world, are evident to the readers. In the time prior to the Waterless Flood, violence is rife and there are simply too many people for the world to sustain (OC, pp. 118, 345). Humanity arrogates the position of God, creating hybridised plants

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  321 and creatures (OC, p. 57). The worst example of the latter is the man Crake who in his arrogance takes it upon himself to destroy and remake the world. However, in a twist of irony, he becomes deified by the very people from whom he tried to remove all religious instinct.14 The Waterless Flood marks the end of humanity. The only people intended to survive are the genetically engineered, human-animal hybrid Crakers, a species seemingly designed to re-create life in Eden or at least, given their vegetarian habits, pre-Noachic life (OC, pp. 354–360). Pullman too has his own flood narrative in the prequel to His Dark Materials, the novel La Belle Sauvage. In an echo of Noah bringing two of every creature into safety on the ark, the boat-builder Malcolm rescues Lyra from a devastating flood; Lyra who, as the Eve of Pullman’s world, is the mother of all living (La Belle Sauvage, pp. 314–570). Thus, the world-saving events of His Dark Materials can happen. Atwood’s series in particular, and to some extent that of Nix, stress the wreckage and grief of their respective flood events. The characters confront a new world, but not a renewed world. The struggles faced by the characters in the aftermath ‘suggest the limitations of restoration as an ideal’.15 Such retellings highlight not the rainbow of the biblical flood story, but the devastated earth below it. God himself grieves his act of creation (Gen 6:6). His commitment not to destroy it again stems not from the discovery of some redeeming feature of the world, but rather God’s resignation to the fact that the ‘the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth’ (Gen 8:21). There are no easy fixes throughout the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, no perfect renewals, only the steady grinding work of striving to live a better life. 19.3.3 Fire

While the preceding discussion might give the impression that no author of fantasy/sci-fi reads beyond the first few chapters of Genesis, there are some retellings of other biblical texts. The fall of cities resonates through several fantastic worlds. Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy has the mythical Babylon running like a thread through the books, refashioned as the Sithi city Asu’a that fell to human forces and was burned to the ground millennia ago. However, just like the biblical Babylon, its material end is not the end of its power.16 Only when the protagonists of the story come to terms with it can they find peace. Another Babylon occurs in William Nicholson’s Wind on Fire trilogy. The beautiful, wealthy, ordered, yet evil city of the Mastery must be destroyed to free the Manth people and save the world (Slaves of the Mastery [SM], p. 198). The city is the paradigm of corruption and therefore ends in flames (SM, pp. 288–319).17 Both Asu’a and the Mastery were dominated by rulers who grasped for power beyond their proper reach, and in so doing doomed both themselves and their cities, in an illustration of the peril and futility of overweening human (or Sithi) ambition (cf. the king of Babylon in Isa 13–14). The Wind on Fire trilogy in particular provides further evidence for the interweaving of creation and destruction. The narrative retells in detail Israel’s

322  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry foundational experiences of exile and exodus, while also utilising the day-of-theLord trope and various apocalyptic themes (Isa 13; Jer 46; Ezek 30; Joel 2; Amos 5; Zeph 1; etc.). The Manth people are ancestral nomads, who live in slavery through much of the second book (SM, pp. 4–12). Their Moses-like prophet, Ira Hath, dreams of a foretold homeland of freedom and comfort (SM, p. 147). After defeating the godlike ruler of the enslaving city of the Mastery, a remnant of the people follows Ira on a long and difficult journey through barren wilderness to reach their promised land (Firesong, p. 13).18 In true biblical style, Ira Hath regards her prophetic role as largely hopeless, yet nonetheless an unavoidable duty, even in the face of those laughing at the prophet of doom (SM, pp. 241–242; cf. 2 Chr 36:16). Ira herself reaches the very threshold of the territory and looks down on the landscape from a high hill, but dies before she can enter (Firesong, pp. 308–316). Her Joshua-successor Bowman must instead lead the people in their last, miraculous, wind-enabled steps into the land (Firesong, pp. 322–324). Safely arrived, they agree to tell their children and their children’s children the history of their escape from slavery and their perilous journey (SM, pp. 185–186; cf. Deut 4:9 etc.). Yet the establishment of the Manth homeland takes place—and can only take place—in the context of the imminent end of the world (SM, p. 191). Through the second and third books, we see the repeated refrain that the wind is rising (SM, pp. 28–41; c.f. the destructive east wind of the biblical texts, e.g. Ezek 19:12; Hos 13:15; Ps 48:7; Job 27:21). In an echo of the later biblical apocalypses, written prophecies describe the periodisation of history, which is now reaching its climax (SM, p. 199). By the middle of the third book, doomsayers have become commonplace, and pronounce the end of the world in day-of-the-Lord language: ‘Fire in the sky!’ they say, ‘Signs and wonders! The end days are coming! […] Wonders! Terrors! […] Last days! Lists of the cities that will perish! The last days explained!’ (Firesong, pp. 195–196) In the final chapters, the Singers—figures of both angelic and messianic nature—fly over and observe the burning land in a manner reminiscent of apocalyptic vision tours (Firesong, pp. 306–308). At the end of the book, the purifying fire is followed by ‘cool, sweet stillness across a silent land’ (Firesong, p. 323). The exile-exodus mashup of Nicholson’s trilogy resembles Atwood’s ‘palimpsest’ of biblical narratives.19 Both draw out the circularity of the biblical narrative: while theoretically tracing a linear history from the creation of the world to the end of Israel’s independent statehood, in fact the texts follow a devolving cycle of exile-punishment and restoration-return. The resolution of the cycle, should it ever appear, is still to come. Human life must be lived in the middle. 19.4 How Does Humanity Fit in the Middle? The beginning and the end of society, in both biblical and fiction texts, are explored not from mere arcane curiosity, but because of what they might tell us about ourselves. Where do we come from? Why do we exist? How are we supposed to relate to what is around us? What, exactly, is humanity?

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  323 19.4.1 An Imperfect Eden

Dissatisfaction with the supposed paradise of Eden is a common theme in fantasy/ sci-fi revisits to the landscape. In Crace’s Eden, the garden is a place of abundance and health, but also of labour and hard work (pp. 6, 47). There is even the implication that rest is to some degree sinful, in contrast to the biblical accounts (p. 41, cf. Gen 2:3). For Tabi, the unvaried eternity of time within the garden contrasts unfavourably with the seemingly limitless space and possibility of the outside world (p. 71). The narrator also notes that the existence of the sacred Eden makes no difference to the lives of anyone outside its walls, casting a kind of futility over its endurance. Tabi’s instinct is that seeming perfection must in fact fall short of itself. As Stein writes (referring to Atwood’s Oryx and Crake), ‘if perfection had already been achieved, any change would introduce imperfection; therefore, utopia is also a “u-chronia,” a no time […] a place of stagnation’.20 The final breaking-in of the world presents hope for a future—‘everlasting change, without eternity’—as a goal or prize to be welcomed: ‘Her head is heavy with experience […] in the time she has left […] she will discover how to live and die in hope’ (pp. 257, 259). After all, ‘being free to die is also surely being free to live as well’ (p. 15). Butler’s Edens contain the same threat of boredom, first for Lilith in the cell that provides for all her needs and later in the human-alien communities.21 As with Crace’s garden, life in these communities is long and healthy, but with even greater emphasis on the negatives. Whereas most of Crace’s gardeners seem to have little awareness of or desire for sexual relations, for Butler’s humans, the possibility is taken from them as a result of their mating with the aliens. Crace’s gardeners are never hungry, but they work hard for their food. By contrast, even food is easily accessible for Lilith and her companions. The result is loneliness and boredom. The dull quality of Edenic life is not simply an absence of the emotional heights. Instead, it encapsulates an actual threat entangled in the garden from its inception. Various scholars highlight the precarity to life brought by such ‘dangerous boredom’.22 Wilson-McFarland explores this feature in the novel The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, where an Eden-like environment is ‘somehow seeded with an already present unhappiness’.23 The Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy articulates a similar idea. The elf-like Sithi flee to the human world from the Edenic ‘Garden’, Venyha Do’sae, when it is threatened and swallowed up by Unbeing, an unravelling from time and reality that is very similar to the Nothing of the Keys to the Kingdom. However, they only find that they ‘had not truly escaped shadow at all, but only replaced one sort with another’, one which they brought with them from the Garden into the rest of the world (Stone of Farewell, pp. 524–545). For Wilson-McFarland, such stories reflect the biblical narrative. The garden of Eden is ‘planted with difficult emotions and potential misunderstandings’ for both Adam and Eve from the beginning.24 The result of their transgression, in the opening of their eyes to the knowledge of good and evil, is as much the realisation of the imperfections of Eden as their expulsion from it.25 It is this, perhaps, which explains the inseparability of creation and destruction in the Eden narrative and its

324  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry successors. The end of all things is not so much brought upon the world as already begun alongside it. 19.4.2 A Little Lower than God

Humanity’s discontent with Eden is often interpreted in the narrative’s retellings as an aspect, sometimes an imperfection, of human nature. Envy is a major theme of Crace’s book. The antagonist of the book, Alum, is a Cain figure, full of envy, marked on his forehead, and, in the end, exiled from the community (p. 253; cf. Gen 4:1–16). Both angels and humans want what they do not have, be it arms or wings (p. 127). Even the characters who do not seek to leave the garden sometimes show a kind of horrified fascination with the world outside (p. 96). Much is made of the high walls and forbidden, thorny no-man’s-land around the garden, as if many obstacles must be placed in the way lest the inhabitants escape. At one stage Alum finds a tree the branches of which lean over the wall, providing a precarious but possible route out of the garden, recalling the biblical text (p. 115). However, the reader later learns that Tabi had simply to walk out of Eden’s gate. It encapsulates the sense throughout the book that it is creaturely nature to see the grass as always greener on the other side of the wall, regardless of current conditions. The promise of what one does not have will never be matched by the reality, just as Tabi’s longing for change and excitement in fact brought her mostly guilt and shame and left her ‘burdened by her longed-for loss of innocence’ (p. 249). Butler explores similar themes in the so-called lethal contradiction in human DNA. The aliens identify this as the combination of intelligence/knowledge with hierarchy and all the dissatisfaction and envy such power imbalances create (Dawn, pp. 40–42). The two characteristics reflect the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit: knowledge of good and evil, certainly, but with the penalty that hierarchy emerges within humanity, most particularly between men and women.26 By contrast, in the MaddAddam trilogy, Crake specifically engineers his Crakers to lack any ability for hierarchy in his attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, to re-create a paradise-dwelling human species.27 Crace, Butler, and Atwood each have an account of human nature that suggests a kind of desire for other or more as a distinguishing aspect of human nature. Crace’s Eden has an additional account of what distinguishes human life in the garden: its longevity. This sets them apart from the animals, which even in the garden breed and die like any others. The spill of their blood is shocking, transgressive to the gardeners (p. 140). The humans outside Eden’s walls, who likewise breed and die, are viewed by the gardeners as animalistic (pp. 72, 104). Yet, as discussed, it is when the garden walls are breached and death enters Eden that the readers see human life as they would recognise it. A similar division exists in Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series. Nothing in the material world is immortal, but the denizens of the House seemingly live forever. The main character, however, strongly resists his increasing likeness to the House denizens, determined to remain human and mortal (not unlike Pullman’s Will and Lyra). In this he will eventually fail.

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  325 In Atwood’s books, the human-like Crakers bear some resemblance to these interpretations of Eden-dwellers. While not immortal, they have no knowledge of death. Crake’s belief is that, ‘[i]f you take “mortality” as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then “immortality” is the absence of such fear’.28 As Trauvitch puts it, ‘Not for naught is the Crakers’ environment called Paradice: the Crakers are similar to man before his fall from Paradise. Both are naked and unashamed, both are pain-free and content, both need not labor so as to survive’.29 Yet despite this ‘immortality’, in fact the Crakers do not seem so very different from the animals with which their genes are spliced. They are placid, incurious, and entirely lacking in the yearning for knowledge of the other that characterises human nature in Crace’s Eden. They neither name nor tend their surroundings, so in some ways seem little distinguishable from the animals around them, especially when those animals have themselves been genetically modified into high intelligence.30 Multiple modern authors thereby trouble the easy distinction that the biblical narrative seems to make of what marks out humans as human. The Star Trek episode ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ justifies a detour beyond the literary world for its exploration of precisely this tension. In the franchise’s own retelling of the Eden narrative, the crew seek to explore beyond an energy barrier that has previously destroyed any ship that tried to pass it—forbidden knowledge, with death the penalty for attempting to attain it. As a result of exposure to the mysterious energy, a crew member, Mitchell, develops supernatural abilities to absorb vast bodies of knowledge and control his body to the point of allowing himself to die then bringing himself back to life. He has in a sense become exactly like a god, and the development is met with horror by his shipmates. Mitchell soon escapes to create a beautiful and fruit-filled garden in a barren landscape with another evolved shipmate as Eve to his Adam. The crew regard his extraordinary powers as somehow inappropriate and definitely dangerous for a human being to possess, not least because his new-found abilities make him arrogant and violent.31 The episode was one of the pilots produced to pitch Star Trek to the TV networks. It is, I think, no coincidence that even within a franchise that imagines humanity with godlike powers of technology, the writers still consider it necessary to predicate the imagined future on the assumption that there is an essential and proper distance between humanity and divinity, or at least between humanity and ultimate power. As with the biblical authors, the creators of Star Trek emphasise that there are necessary boundaries to human advancement, and that acceptance of those boundaries is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. We see the theme reiterated at many points across the Star Trek franchise, for example in The Next Generation series and Jean Luc Picard’s encounters with the godlike being Q. In the biblical narrative, Adam and Eve are not forbidden access to the tree of life while they live within the garden. Yet the very tension in the biblical narrative results from the prohibition, on pain of death, against eating of the tree of knowledge. When Eve is persuaded to eat its fruit, her decision was in part based on the belief that it would make her like God—a belief which, it emerges, was justified (Gen 3:22). At this point, she and Adam must be expelled from Eden and barred

326  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry from the tree of life, because they must not become too like God. Within the confines of the garden, the longevity and/or immortality of humanity marks them apart from animals, while limits to their knowledge appear to be necessary to mark them apart from God. If humanity reaches instead for a greater degree of knowledge, its unnatural lifespan must be forfeit to maintain their place in the world as being more than animals, but less than gods. 19.4.3 A Wandering Aramean

Many fantasy/sci-fi novels speculate deeply on the nature of humanity in distinction from God. Very few speculate on the nature of God itself. Few, indeed, have a deity at all, though those that do sometimes show an interest in exploring the relationship between God and humanity—especially through the seeming absence of God from their characters’ immediate lives. No deity features in the Wind on Fire trilogy, but Bowman, one of the protagonists, at one stage prays ‘you who have watched over me before, whoever you are, help me now’ (SM, p. 41). His prayer recalls the word of Jacob describing the ‘angel’ who protects him during his exile from the promised land (Gen 48:15–16). Crace similarly has a virtually absent God who, while responsible for the Gardeners, is never seen or heard by them. However, the absent deity is not, it seems, entirely disinterested in them. He likes to hear from the angels that they are doing well, and at the final ingress of the world to Eden, he resigns himself to the new order rather than rain down punishment for breaching the old one (pp. 181, 257). A similar dynamic exists between God and humanity in Terry Pratchett’s and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. Angels and demons take care of the practical running of the world, and they and humanity are only able to speculate on the direction of God’s Ineffable Plan (p. 352). Good Omens can be understood as a manifesto for the fundamental goodness of humanity, without the need for supernatural intervention.32 Many fantasy/sci-fi novels seem to support the general principle that humanity does not—or perhaps should not—need divine assistance. Nevertheless, as suggested, this often sits alongside a kind of yearning for something other or more than the life the characters lead. Butler’s protagonists across her three novels each live in a kind of eviction, longing for a life that has been made inaccessible to them.33 Echoing the Hebrew Bible, there is a frequent sense that humanity, or specific humans, live their lives in exile, dislocated from where or when they ought, should, or would like to dwell. Atwood’s depiction of the Crakers implies that such dislocation and looking beyond are a fundamental aspect of human nature. The Crakers are an attempt by their maker to return humanity to Eden-like status, but it is unsuccessful. Their carefully managed environment of the Paradice Dome becomes a place they must flee for a better life in the wilderness.34 Once taken outside, the Crakers continually ask about their origins and purpose, and Jimmy provides them with answers through his stories.35 Jimmy becomes the Moses of the new Israel, leading them to their new home and laying down the guidelines for their future life (OC, p. 407). In fact, the Crakers even have a golden calf moment when, during Jimmy’s long

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  327 absence to talk to their deified creator, the Crakers create a ‘graven image’ to aid their nascent cult (OC, pp. 418–419). Thus, all Crake’s hopes of creating a human race that did not conceptualise of such lofty matters fail. By contrast, the gardener’s leader, Adam One, sought to reintroduce myth into the scientific materialism of the world in the hope that by recreating a sense of the numinous a better life can be forged.36 Even in his presentation, there remains an unbreachable distance between the profane and divine worlds, with the Bible referred to as the ‘Human Words of God’.37 Del Villano argues that Adam One’s strategy is an attempt to design a transcendence that does not transfer the unacceptable or inexplicable to some elsewhere, but rather encourages action in the current life.38 If so, his attempt meets with no more success than that of Crake. In some ways, Jimmy’s stories are necessary for the Crakers’ physical survival outside the managed safety of the Dome: their very innocence and naivety can only be cured ‘by acquiring a mythology and a religion […] by acquiring the beginnings of writing and history; by fostering the ability to think ahead and to plan’.39 Contact with the old world ‘infects’ the Crakers with precisely those aspects of which Crake thought they needed to be free to prevent the cycle of human destruction of the world.40 Ironically, it is during the very progress of this infection that the Crakers become more and more human-like from the perspective of the readers: ‘it is their imbalance and imperfection that makes the characters human [… i]f they did maintain a perfect balance there would be no stories’.41 But more than the necessity of stories as a survival advantage, Jimmy sees what Crake did not. Crake attempted to engineer out of the Crakers those very aspects which arguably make us human in differentiation from other animals—culture, meaningful stories of origin and purpose, a sense of history.42 Perhaps most of all, the ability to choose the tree of knowledge rather than the tree of life. Crake’s tinkering with the Crakers’ biology does not so much remove from them the ability to make free choices, but rather the very idea that a choice is possible.43 19.5 Conclusions The biblical accounts of creations and destructions are fundamentally concerned with the relationship between humanity and God. Human nature is repeatedly characterised as more than human and less than God. For the Eden narrative in particular, human nature is characterised by the possession of knowledge but the unattainability of immortality—a specific arrangement that came about through a single, irreversible, choice. Many works of speculative fiction re-explore this choice, often asking if it could have been otherwise: if human nature could have been otherwise, given a different beginning, or after a future end. Curiously, the answer provided often seems to be no. Such an answer forces us back to the biblical text and throws into relief that the Bible is not primarily a chronicle of events. It is, itself, a speculative exploration of how the human world is as it is, and why it could not be otherwise. Immortality is boredom. Ignorance is bliss. Only through the known unknown of some aspect of our lives, the divine, or our true home, and the consequent possibility of its discovery, is life worth the struggle of living.

328  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Notes 1 More likely an angel, just as Lord Asriel wrestles Metatron. See Kelsey, ‘Jacob Wrestling’. 2 Manlove, ‘The Bible in Fantasy’, p. 95. 3 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 153. 4 Note the colour pun in Ebon’s name just as there is in Adam’s. 5 Oram, ‘Pullman’s Matter’, p. 426. 6 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 133; see also Dodds, ‘Death and the “Paradice Within’. 7 Holt, ‘Uncovering the Naked’. 8 Feldt, ‘Contemporary Fantasy Fiction’, p. 560. 9 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 136. 10 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 152. 11 Atwood prefers the term ‘speculative fiction’ for her work rather than sci-fi. I do not intend to imply a genre judgement, except to the extent that it feels appropriate to include MaddAddam alongside the other books discussed in this chapter. 12 Strømmen, ‘Always a Potent Object?’ p. 38. 13 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 270. 14 Strømmen, ‘Always a Potent Object?’ p. 40. 15 Minister, ‘Climate Dystopias’, p. 303. 16 Sals, ‘Babylon Forever’. 17 Compare especially the chapter ‘The Anger of Slaves’, when the outsiders to the city overrun it, with the overrunning of Crace’s Eden by those who lived outside. 18 Jimmy too holds this Moses-like role in the MaddAddam trilogy: Strømmen, ‘A Potent Object?’, p. 40; Walsh, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles’, p. 124. 19 Walsh, ‘Atwood’s Speculative Bibles’, p. 129. 20 Stein, ‘Problematic Paradice’, p. 152. 21 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 131. 22 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 39; Morse, Eve’s Afterlives, p. 66; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, p. 81. 23 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 95. 24 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 40. 25 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 41. 26 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 142. 27 Trauvitch, ‘Paradise and Paradice’, p. 174. 28 Dodds, ‘Death and the “Paradice Within”’. 29 Trauvitch, ‘Paradise and Paradice’, p. 176. 30 Trauvitch, ‘Paradise and Paradice’, p. 177. 31 Compare to Ezekiel’s condemnation of the Edenic figure of the king of Tyre in Ezek 28. 32 Clemons, ‘Adapting Revelation’. 33 Wilson-McFarland, ‘Sticky Stories’, p. 129. 34 Walsh, ‘Atwood’s Speculative Bibles’, p. 124, fn. 4. 35 Bosco, ‘Apocalyptic Imagination’, p. 163; Stein, ‘Problematic Paradice’, p. 151. Like the aliens in Xenogenesis, Jimmy even uses the language of ‘let…’ in constructing his origin story, another echo of Gen 1: Bosco, ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination’, p. 163. 36 Del Villano, ‘Ecocritical Retelling’, pp. 160–162. 37 Walsh, ‘Atwood’s Speculative Bibles’, pp. 120–121. 38 Del Villano, ‘Ecocritical Retelling’, p. 166. 39 Bowen, ‘Ecological Endings’, p. 697. 40 Trauvitch, ‘Bible’s Paradise’, p. 176. 41 Stein, ‘Problematic Paradice’, p. 153. 42 Trauvitch, ‘The Bible’s Paradise’, p. 179; Bosco, ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination’, p. 165. 43 Trauvitch, ‘The Bible’s Paradise’, p. 178.

Biblical Retellings in Modern Fantasy & SF  329 Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. London: Virago: 2020. Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. London: Virago: 2020. Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam. London: Virago: 2020. Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. London: Headline Publishing Group, 2022. Butler, Octavia E. Adulthood Rites. London: Headline Publishing Group, 2022. Crace, Jim. Eden. London: Picador, 2023. Nicholson, William. Slaves of the Mastery. London: Egmont, 2001. Nicholson, William. Firesong. London: Egmont, 2002. Nix, Garth. The Keys to the Kingdom, 7 vols. London: HarperCollins, 2003–2010. Pratchett, Terry, and Neil Gaiman. Good Omens. London: Random House, 1991. Pullman, Philip. Northern Lights. London: Scholastic, 1998. Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass. London: Point, 2001. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins, 2010. Williams, Tad. Stone of Farewell. London: Orbit, 2003. Secondary Sources Bosco, Mark. ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake’. In J. Brooks Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, the Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2011, pp. 156–171. Bowen, Deborah C. ‘Ecological Endings and Eschatology: Margaret Atwood’s PostApocalyptic Fiction’. Christianity and Literature 66 (2017), pp. 691–705. Clemons, Amy Lea. ‘Adapting Revelation’. JFA 28 (2017), pp. 86–101. Del Villano, Bianca. ‘An Ecocritical Retelling of the Bible: Genesis and Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood’. Textus 27 (2014), pp. 151–169. Dodds, Lara. ‘Death and the “Paradice within” in Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’. Milton Studies 56 (2015), pp. 115–150. Feldt, Laura. ‘Contemporary Fantasy Fiction and Representations of Religion: Playing with Reality, Myth and Magic in His Dark Materials and Harry Potter’. Religion 46 (2016), pp. 550–574. Holt, Sarah. ‘Uncovering the Naked: The Economic Dimension of Nakedness in the Hebrew Bible and the Innovations of Isaiah 58’. Unpublished Ph.D. Diss. Nottingham, England: University of Nottingham, 2023. Kelsey, Marian. ‘Jacob Wresting (Genesis 32:22–32)’. In George Corbett (ed.), Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century. London: Open Book Publishers, 2019, pp. 127–140. Manlove, Colin. ‘The Bible in Fantasy’. Semeia 60 (1992), pp. 91–110. Minister, Meredith. ‘How to Live at the End of the World: The Bible and Theology in the Climate Dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler’. In Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo (eds), "Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?" The Bible and Margaret Atwood. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020, pp. 285–306. Morse, Holly. Encountering Eve’s Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2–4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Oram, William A. ‘Pullman’s Matter: Lucretius and Milton in His Dark Materials’. JFA 23 (2012), pp. 418–436. Sals, Ulrike. ‘“Babylon” Forever, or How to Divinize What You Want to Damn’. In Diana Vikander Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi (eds), Memory and the City in Ancient Israel. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014, pp. 293–308.

330  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Stein, Karen F. ‘Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake’. In J. Brooks Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, the Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2011, pp. 141–155. Strømmen, Hannah M. ‘“Always a Potent Object”? The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels’. In Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo (eds), “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020, pp. 27–54. Trauvitch, Rhona. ‘The Bible’s Paradise and Oryx and Crake’s Paradice: A Comparison of the Relationships between Humans and Nature.’ In Randy Laist (ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. Critical Plant Studies 1. London: Brill, 2013, pp. 165–180. Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. OBT. London: Fortress, 1978. Walsh, Richard. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: “First the Bad Things, Then the Story”’. In Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo (eds), “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020, pp. 111–134. Wilson-McFarland, Lois. ‘Sticky Stories: Affect and Biblical Myth in Women’s Speculative Fiction, 1970–2020’. Unpublished Ph.D. Diss. Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh, 2022.

20 Retellings and Political Discourse Kyu Seop Kim

20.1 Introduction In this chapter, we aim to explore the various retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Korean contemporary literature, specifically in terms of political discourses. Korean modern literature writers were influenced by various religions, including Buddhism (e.g., Han Yong-un [1879–1944], Ko Un [1933–], Kim Seong-dong [1947–2022], Hwang Ji-u [1952–]) and shamanism (e.g., Kim Dong-ri [1913– 1995]), but Korean authors have also been affected by Christian motifs in various ways since the beginning of modern Korean literature. For instance, Christian images are meaningfully employed in works such as Kim Dong-in’s short story ‘Take This Cup from Me’ (1923), Sim Hun’s novel Evergreen Tree (1935) and Yun Dong-ju’s poems ‘The Cross’ (1941) and ‘The Beatitudes’ (1940). Although biblical motifs have been utilised in various ways, before the Korean War (1950–1953) those images were usually limited to those originating from the New Testament. In Korean literature during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), the images from the Hebrew Bible were used only sporadically since the motifs from the Hebrew Bible were not widely familiar to Korean literary writers prior to 1945. So the full-fledged utilisation of images from the Hebrew Bible in Korean literature is found mainly after Korea’s independence in 1945, particularly after the 1960s.1 While in Korean contemporary literature, personal stories are retold according to the narrative of the Hebrew Bible from a microhistorical perspective, there are also cases in which the Hebrew Bible is renarrated as a political discourse in the context of historical events in Korean modern history. After examining the events in Korean modern macrohistory that influenced these political retellings, we will consider how, through the method and strategy of retelling, Korean contemporary literature composed in the 1945–1990 period interacts with Korean politics. 20.2 Political Discourse and Retellings in Korean Literature In modern Korean history, significant events that have influenced Koreans can be evaluated in various ways. Yet, we have to consider the following events to hold considerable importance in modern Korean history. The first event is the period of Japanese occupation from August 1910 to August 1945, followed by DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-21

332  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry the subsequent dictatorship from August 1948 to June 1987, which is seen as a continuation of the exile experienced during the occupation.2 The second event is the Korean War, which took place from June 1950 to July 1953.3 Finally, we will consider the Gwangju Uprising that occurred in May 1980 and the subsequent democratisation movements in the 1980s.4 Korean society has overcome military dictatorship since the 1990s, and it can now be considered a post-democratisation society as of the twenty-first century. During and after the Korean War and the subsequent period of developmental dictatorship, Korean literature underwent the ‘Realism and pure literature’ debate.5 From the 1970s to the 1990s, Korean literature actively developed a form of literature called ‘engagement literature’ or ‘realism literature’ to address the issues of division between North and South Korea, military dictatorship, political freedom, and economic inequality, etc. Moreover, this engagement literature developed a unique form of literature called minjok-moonhak (national literature) that is interested in the formation of Korean ethnic identity. In this context, we will briefly explore instances of retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Korean contemporary literature in terms of political history. Firstly, we will consider the stages and the developments of the political and economic narrative in Korean literature, as concisely discussed earlier, particularly before and after democratisation (the period of the Korean War and its aftermath, the era of developmental dictatorship, and the post-democratisation era). We will then investigate instances where the imagery and motifs of the Hebrew Bible have been transformed in the different stages and developments of Korean literature, and where the stories of the Hebrew Bible have been retold. In particular, we will examine whether the experiences of three major events in modern Korean history are reinterpreted through the stories of the Hebrew Bible: (1) sibling conflict as represented by the story of Cain and Abel, in relation to the confrontation between North and South Korea; (2) the experience of exile, as represented by the stories of Jacob and Moses, in relation to the Japanese occupation and military dictatorship (such as in Moon Ik-hwan’s poems ‘Death of Moses’ and ‘The Ten Commandments’); and (3) the stories of Noah and David in the capitalist order after democratisation (such as in Kim Ae-ran’s story ‘Goliath in the Water’). We will observe how the motifs of the Hebrew Bible have been retold in the era of developmental dictatorship, and contrast that with the more depoliticised manner in which they have been used in the post-democratisation era. 20.2.1 Hwang Soon-Won’s The Descendants of Cain

Born in Daedong-gun, Pyeongan-namdo, which is presently located in North Korea, Hwang Sun-won (1915–2000) pursued a degree in English literature at Waseda University in Japan before commencing his career as a novelist in 1940. In 1946, as persecution against Christians and the landowners escalated in North Korea, Hwang defected to South Korea. His novel, The Descendants of Cain, reflects his experiences in North Korea from 1945 to 1946. The novel’s plot can be outlined as follows.

Retellings and Political Discourse  333 This novel depicts the period of 1945–1946 in North Korea, during which the land of landlords was seized under the pretext of ‘land reform’, and they were persecuted by the communist government. The protagonist of the novel, Park Hun, a member of the aristocracy in the north-western region, is teaching at a night school when it is seized by individuals sent by the Communist Party. Park’s antagonist, Do-seop, is a former caretaker who has been managing Park’s land for the last 20 years. Do-seop’s daughter, Oh Jak-nyeo, is living with Park during her separation from her husband. Do-seop has served Park loyally and grieves more than anyone else when Park’s father passes away. Park believes that Do-seop is not inherently evil and pledges to entrust all matters to him. However, after Korea’s independence from Japan in 1945 and the communist takeover of North Korea, Do-seop is appointed as a peasant representative and works as a forerunner of the communist government’s land reform, killing or torturing landowners. Do-seop attempts to kill Park through a people’s court, but Oh Jak-nyeo claims to be married to Park and protects him, allowing him to survive. Park’s uncle, Park Yong-je, commits suicide after protesting the confiscation of his estates and being taken to a mine. In retaliation, Park attempts to take Do-seop’s life, only to find himself at death’s door instead. It is at this critical juncture that Do-seop’s son, Sam-deuk, intervenes just in time to spare Park’s life. Sam-deuk threw his body in front of his father and seized the arm wielding the sickle. At that moment, the tip of the sickle was already lodged about an inch into Sam-deuk’s left shoulder. ‘Here comes the little bastard! You’re the first one to die!’ Do-seop Yeong-gam exerted force on his arm holding the soft handle of the sickle. Sam-deuk twisted his father’s arm, holding onto it with both hands. Do-seop Yeong-gam’s arm holding the sickle began to sway, and his body twisted along with it before falling backwards. Sam-deuk also fell down. Father and son tumbled together for a while, freezing in the same position. The blood flowing from their bodies spread onto each other. Sam-deuk managed to snatch the sickle from his father’s hand with difficulty and hurled it away with all his might. With a determined expression on his face, Sam-deuk said, ‘Leave this place now. Don’t let any more blood be spilled here.’ He continued, ‘And please take my poor sister with you’. (pp. 352–353) Park Hun is rescued by Sam-deuk and flees to South Korea with Oh Jak-nyeo, the daughter of Do-seob. The conflicts between the characters in this literary work extend beyond the dichotomy of communism and anti-communism. Despite his active involvement in the villagers’ committee, which persecutes Park Hun and the landlords, Do-seob is not a staunch communist and lacks a full understanding of the ideology. As a result, Do-seob is eventually purged by the communist movement. The villagers’ committee was not convened for any other reason but to purge Dong-seob from his position as the chairman of the peasant committee. The

334  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry party deemed that Dong-seob’s usefulness had expired. The goal was to exploit this person, who had been the closest landlord to the village before the land reform, to drive a wedge between the landlords and the peasants. However, his usefulness had now expired. (p. 349) The depiction of communists in Hwang Sun-won’s The Descendants of Cain is highly negative, but the portrayal of Do-seob is ambivalent. In other words, Do-seob is also a victim, having been taken advantage of by the communists. When Park Hun also decides to avenge himself and attempts to kill Do-seob, he becomes a murderer without remorse. In this novel, who represents Cain and Abel? Both Do-seob and Park Hun can be viewed as both Abel and Cain, as they are both victims of their times and also murderers who try to kill their compatriots. In this novel, special attention should be given to Sam-deuk and Oh Jak-nyeo, Do-seob’s children. These two are the most positively depicted characters in the novel. They devote themselves to assisting the protagonist, Park Hun. In particular, Park Hun’s relationship with Oh Jak-nyeo cannot be interpreted solely from a romantic perspective. Although they live together under one roof, they do not form a romantic relationship. The novel emphasises Oh Jak-nyeo’s chastity. In fact, Oh Jak-nyeo’s attitude towards Park Hun is akin to maternal love. Oh Jak-nyeo began to lick Hoon’s scratched face. She licked the scratches on his neck as well. She even licked the scratches on his hands and wrists. Eventually, she began to lick with her tongue. She licked all over his forehead, chest, and turned around to lick all over him. It was embarrassing. Nonetheless, he left it to Oh Jak-nyeo to do as she pleased. It was somehow comforting. (p. 332) Park’s wounds are being treated by Oh Jak-nyeo as she sucks on them with her own mouth. The scene of Oh Jak-nyeo licking Park’s wounds does not appear erotic but instead provides an image of a mother caring for her child. Park’s first interest in Oh Jak-nyeo was sparked when he saw her eyes lit up by the fire while she was rolling around trying to put out the flames. Oh Jak-nyeo and Sam-deuk attempt to mediate the conflict between Park Hun and Do-seob and are also portrayed as the victims of the era. So they are close to Abel as innocent victims. In this way, Hwang Soon-Won’s novel The Descendants of Cain retells the murder of Abel by Cain in Genesis 4 while portraying the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as those who are used and victimised in between. 20.2.2 Moon Ik-Hwan’s Poems

Moon Ik-hwan was born in 1918 in Yong-jeong, Manchuria. He completed his degrees at Hanshin University in 1947 and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1949, subsequently serving as a lecturer in the Hebrew Bible at Hanshin and Yonsei Universities. In 1968, he embarked on a project to translate the Hebrew

Retellings and Political Discourse  335 Bible into Korean and developed his interest in poetry, culminating in the publication of his inaugural collection of poems in 1973. Following the suspicious death of his friend Jang Joon-ha in 1975, Moon became an active participant in the pro-democracy movement opposing the authoritarian regime. He played a pivotal role in the ‘March 1st Declaration of Democracy statement’ (i.e., a joint collaboration of the Protestant and Catholic church) in 1976 and was apprehended the following day by the Park Chung-hee government. Moon emerged as a prominent leader of the pro-democracy and South-North Korean reunification movements and was incarcerated multiple times under various military regimes. In March 1989, after North Korean leader Kim Il-sung proposed a political conference between North and South Korea, Moon visited Pyongyang for a meeting with Kim Il-sung. However, upon returning to South Korea in April 1989, he was arrested and subsequently imprisoned. Moon passed away in January 1994 due to heart failure. As previously mentioned, Moon Ik-hwan made a significant impact on contemporary Korean history in the pro-democracy movement from the 1970s to the 1990s. As a poet, he provided insights into the political and social realities of Korea through his poetry. As noted earlier, retellings of the Bible in Korean literature have predominantly focused on the New Testament. In this context, Moon’s extensive incorporation of the images of the Hebrew Bible into his poetry, as one of the first poets to do so, is significant. An expert in the Hebrew Bible, Moon draws upon its narratives and vivid imagery to create a realistic portrayal of Korean society. He uses retelling of the stories in the Hebrew Bible as a metaphorical representation of his own destiny and the struggles faced by the Korean people. In particular, he frequently depicts Korean society as being in an exilic state, or not yet having reached the promised land, and often equates the Korean people with the Hebrews who lived in hardship and oppression. We will translate into English two poems by Moon Ik-hwan that retell the life of Moses from the Pentateuch, as presented in the following passages.6 Moses’ Death Night after night, He climbs the mountain of the Lord, Beating the rock with his fists, Until they’re bloody and sore. Moses has faith, That the rock will split, And fire will blaze forth from within. Finally, the rock weeps, Dripping with sweat and tears, A heart heavier than Moses’, Blood-thick sweat pours down, murmuring with sobs.

336  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry —This heart, this heart, take it in your head— Finally, morning arrives, The sun, rise high! Above the writhing desert sands, Over Moses’ broken head, bleeding. The poem under consideration retells the events of the Meribah incident in Num 20:1–10 and the death of Moses as recounted in Deut 34:5–7. Moon depicts Moses’ death by overlapping two images. The first is the account of Moses striking a rock twice with his staff to produce water, as described in Num 20:1–10. The second image depicts Moses hitting a rock with his fist instead of his staff while on a mountain. This event is reinterpreted in terms of the Korean religious practice of ‘mountain prayer’, which is a Korean tradition that individuals climb mountains and pray to God loudly, occasionally striking a tree or rock with their fist or head. For this reason, Moses striking the rock with his fist and head (not with a staff) appears to resemble ‘mountain prayer’ which is practiced by Korean Christians. Moses struck the rock to provide water for the people, whereas in Moon’s poem, water is replaced with fire (second stanza). In this story, Moses’ disobedience is replaced by the poet’s dedication to the Korean people. This image of Moses is merged with that of a poet praying on a mountain, reflecting the Korean custom of ‘mountain prayer’. Although Moses struck the rock, one strike was not enough to spread the ‘fire’ among the people. The poet feels frustrated because the ‘fire’ is not spreading among the people while he is praying on the mountain (third stanza). In the final stanza, Moses’ attempt to strike the rock with his fists and head turns out to fail, and he is ultimately portrayed as dying. This image of Moses’ death overlaps with that of a person hitting their head against a rock while performing ‘mountain prayer’. Ultimately, this image of Moses’ death can be interpreted as a ‘prophetic pessimism’ that is related to the destiny of the prophets who are not, despite failure, afraid of the tragic consequences. It implies that the poet shares in Moses’ fate through the act of hitting the rock and praying. In the following poem, the poet’s calling and Moses’ fate also intersect.7 The Ten Commandments Sweat, mingled with blood, Screaming out in agony, As the scorching waves of anger, Send the sand flying. The mountain, alive with fury. Gasping for breath, His chest about to burst, He unleashes a torrent of flame.

Retellings and Political Discourse  337 A spark, falling onto the fiery sand, Writhes and twists like a flame. Forty years of biting the sand, And the flesh that grinds it, Now ignite in flames. The sound of the whip, Cutting through the fire, Leaves ten bloody stripes, On the back of Moses. This poem reimagines the events of Exod 19:17–25, in which Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the covenant. The central image of fire in the poem alludes to Exod 19:18, wherein the Lord descends in fire. The perspiration and laboured breathing in the first and fourth stanzas respectively are linked to the idea of climbing the mountain. Moon Ik-hwan transforms the image of the Lord’s fire into one of fire pouring out as the poet climbs the mountain, his breath exploding. Like ‘Moses’ Death’, this poem also reflects the poet’s understanding of his own calling to convey fire to the people. Moreover, while the Ten Commandments are etched onto stone in Exod 31:18, the poet’s own Ten Commandments are engraved upon his body by whipping. This suggests that the political suffering endured by the poet represents a commandment that all should abide by. Through ‘Moses’ Death’ and ‘The Ten Commandments’, we can observe the metaphorical connection between the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and the Korean people, with Moses being reinterpreted as the poet himself. In this way, Moon Ik-hwan endeavours to express his own self-consciousness, comparable to that of Moses or a prophet, by retelling the Hebrew Bible as poetry. 20.2.3 Koh Jung-Hee’s Poems

After earning her bachelor’s degree from Hanshin University, Koh Jung-hee (1948–1991) worked as a journalist for Jeonnam Ilbo and served as a coordinator for the Christian Academy Publishers. She later worked as the inaugural editor-inchief for Yeosung Shinmun (women’s newspaper). In contrast to Moon Ik-hwan, Koh’s focus lies not on the self-awareness of the poet, such as Moses or prophets, but instead on the hardships endured by the people themselves. Similar to Moon Ik-hwan, Koh actively incorporates imagery from the Hebrew Bible into her poetry. By retelling the stories of Abel and the Shunammite Woman, we can observe the depiction of the Korean people as a suffering community.8 Abel in This Era […] Typhoon 10W OGDEN, it cried, Plunging many sailors into the depths,

338  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Striking lightning down upon them. Oh, where has Abel gone? Under your cozy eaves, Where we longed to dwell together, our Abel, Where has he vanished to, Rubbing shoulders by your warm hearth? From your bountiful feast of land and sea, Our famished Abel clutching their bellies, Where has he gone, At the well or beyond the East Gate of the era of peace? Our Abel, weary, straightening his back, Heaving a sigh, Where has he gone? […] Abel, bearing your pain, Abel, shouldering your lineage, Abel, laden with your greed and dark past, Abel, weighed down by the yoke of your freedom, Abel, bridled by your songs of love. Have you seen Abel, wandering for seventy-seven days? Have you seen Abel, seeking a moment’s rest on the ninety-ninth day? Now, silence can no longer be forgiven. The stones shall rise, scattering seeds of flowers, Winds will rush in, tearing down the walls, Earthquakes will surge, breaking the bars asunder. From every corner of this wind-blown world, Abel’s cries shall never fall asleep. […] Abel, whom you have chased away, Abel, whom you have pursued and buried, Abel, whom you have chased, buried, and denied, You, who feign ignorance and claim not to know, Have you heard the cries of Abel? […] In that moment, a man, Tearing at his burning beard, Fell to his knees upon the earth. And so, he cried out: Even if only while we shed our tears, Forgive us, O Lord. […] In the above poem, Typhoon 10W OGDEN refers to a typhoon which caused significant loss of life and property damage in Korea between July 31 and August 1 1981. The typhoon embodies both a force of nature and a concrete cause of

Retellings and Political Discourse  339 suffering for the lower class. The poem is a retelling of the story of Abel’s death in Genesis 4. The opening stanza depicts a world simmering with ‘spiritless desires’ before the arrival of Typhoon 10W OGDEN, which subsequently uncovers what was previously concealed. Abel is a victim obscured by ‘spiritless desires’. While the conflict between Cain and Abel in Hwang Soon-won’s novel relates to the division of Korea, Abel in ‘Abel in This Era’ is more of an innocent victim. The query, ‘Where has he gone?’ posed in the poem, echoes the question posed by the Lord to Cain in Gen 4:9 regarding Abel’s whereabouts. Who is Cain in this poem? Although Cain’s identity is not explicitly stated, it can be interpreted as follows: Cain can be a natural disaster such as a typhoon, a proletariat living amidst ‘spiritless desires’, a hypocrite who remains silent about what is concealed, or a capitalist who oppresses the lower classes. What is essential in this poem is that Cain’s identity is mutable, and anyone can become Cain if they remain silent about Abel’s suffering (‘Now, silence can no longer be forgiven’). Koh’s ‘Abel in This Era’ illustrates how the Cain and Abel conflict story can be used as an example in the context of economic inequality issues beyond North and South Korea’s problems.9 The Song of Abishag, the Shunammite Woman —Psalms of Am ha’aretz 15— Where have they gone? The priests of agony who anointed their lips with the juice of unripe mugwort, and shared a kiss with the sorrows of their neighbours, Where have they gone? The prophets and poets, where have they gone? Life feels like a barren hill, Here lies the abandoned body you left behind, For the women to blend their flesh with, For the sick and aged body of freedom, For the women to blend their blood with. The democracy’s body, frigid and desolate, Does not warm under the blanket nor Revive no matter how tightly embraced, The ailing body of division, with slowing pulse and rigid flesh. Strip away the women’s fragility, Caress their tenderness with your breath, Infuse warmth into the cold limbs, Summon life into the fading vessels. Oh, how burdensome is the mystery of life, That dances not to the sound of the flute, And answers not to the call of the voice,

340  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Should it blend with the aged and ailing flesh? Should it blend with the frigid, lifeless body? Should it blend with the abandoned flesh? Or should it cover the women’s warm breath? This poem retells the story of Abishag, the Shunammite Woman, in 1 Kgs 1:1–4. In the poem, the old David is personified as ‘the abandoned body you left behind’, an image that is embodied in ‘the sick and aged body of freedom’, ‘The democracy’s body’, and ‘The ailing body of division’. Therefore, we can understand the old David as a symbol of ‘divided Korea’. Then, who is Abishag, who is forced to lay with the old David? According to Jeong Gwari, Abishag symbolises a woman who ‘constantly sheds her old skin and is reborn’.10 This poem clearly expresses Koh’s feminist perspective and her concern for women’s liberation. Thus, Abishag can be viewed as the poet herself, who realises her own reality and struggles with her mission in the divided situation of North and South Korea, or all Korean women (female minjung).11 Koh employs the story of Abishag as a metaphor for the social reality of women under the division between South and North Korea. She does not embrace the situations where women are sacrificed in the reality of the division (‘Oh, how burdensome is the mystery of life’). The poem does not argue that women should reject the legitimacy of being forced into sacrifice. Rather, Koh simply portrays the reality of women being coerced into sacrifice. At the same time, what is also depicted in this poem is the self-awareness of a woman as minjung as the subject of history. The meaning of this poem must therefore be ambivalent. 20.2.4 Kim Ae-Ran’s ‘Goliath in the Water’

Kim Ae-ran was born in Incheon in 1980 and graduated from the Korean National University of Arts. She made her debut by publishing her short story ‘The House That Does Not Knock’ in the literary magazine The Quarterly Changbi in 2003. She has won some of Korea’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Dong-in Literary Award. Kim deals with a wide range of topics, from enlightenment through everyday life to class issues. In particular, the theme of ‘father’s absence’ is significant in some of Kim’s works, including her short story ‘Goliath in the Water’ (2012), which we consider below. A boy lives with his diabetic mother in an apartment scheduled for demolition before redevelopment. His father is an operator of a tower crane (which is called a ‘Goliath crane’) but dies in a fall from the crane. After his father’s death, the monsoon season begins. The boy’s home is isolated in a deserted area. The surroundings were chillingly silent. Occasionally, a dog would bark, but the echo of its growls only amplified the desolate stillness of the empty fields. No one seemed to be around, and it was impossible to know what they were thinking. Perhaps they had evacuated on their own, or maybe they were like us, frozen in place inside their homes. It was also possible that they had all perished […] The village was completely deserted. As the entire

Retellings and Political Discourse  341 neighbourhood had been designated for redevelopment, people had gradually left one by one. (p. 83) Described as a flood that occurs only once every fifty years, the rain eventually escalates into a catastrophic deluge. However, never before had it rained like this for such a long time. Even my mother said that she had never experienced such rain before in her life. She wondered if the world had gone insane. The rain poured down for over two weeks. Before we knew it, the water had already flooded the first floor of our apartment. It would not be long before the second and third floors were submerged as well. (p. 84) On a night when the monsoon rain is at its peak, the boy’s mother passes away. He tears off the door and makes a raft to escape his home. He hopes to be rescued by encountering people while sailing on the raft. He decided that they should leave the village as soon as possible. He hoped that by following the current, they could reach a safe place within half a day or at most a day or two. However, no matter how much they paddled the raft, made of a badminton racket, signs of the city were nowhere to be seen. The whole world was submerged in water, as if the polar ice caps had suddenly melted away. The raft seemed to be heading towards where the water was gradually rising. Although they occasionally caught glimpses of skyscrapers and church spires in the distance, they soon disappeared from view. It was an endless expanse of water, no matter how far they went. (p. 101) However, contrary to the boy’s expectations, he is unable to come across any people. His raft drifts aimlessly like Noah’s ark, without direction. “Why did you leave me behind? Why was I the only one saved? This is not an ark, it is a coffin. Please stop…” […] Instead, what frequently emerged from the water were large cranes. It was difficult to gauge their size as they were submerged, but judging by the length of their elongated steel beams, they were most likely Goliath cranes. The boy sees the apparition of his father on the Goliath crane and climbs up from the raft to the crane. I sank down onto the ground and sobbed uncontrollably once more. The realisation that he was gone was less frightening and heart-breaking than being left alone again. The surroundings had become dark by now. I had no idea

342  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry what to do next, where to go, or what to expect. Maybe this was the end of the world as I knew it, and I had nowhere else to go. (p. 103) On top of the tower crane, the boy recalls memories with his father, who had taught him how to swim by the riverbank. First and foremost, he said that the most important thing to do was not to fear the water. His father had advised him to feel the flow of the water naturally. I wasn’t afraid of the water, but I couldn’t stand the sensation of water entering my nose. Moreover, I didn’t want to show my father that I was failing. My father adjusted my posture and gradually led me to deeper waters. And so, as I chatted and played with my father, I suddenly found myself swimming. (p. 123) When he swims up to the surface of the water, the boy sees a spectacle of thousands of shooting stars falling. And then, suddenly, as I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and rose up above the surface―thousands of shooting stars were raining down on me like a downpour. I was even more breathless than when I was underwater. It was truly the most exquisite gift I had ever received. (p. 124) Through such recollections, the boy gains courage, but still, no one comes to rescue him. With rain-soaked and damp eyelashes, I blinked while gazing at the dark sky filled with stars for a long time. Then, my lips turned blue and I shivered slightly as I murmured softly, ‘Someone will come’. As the gusty wind blew, the Goliath crane shook unsteadily. (p. 125) In Kim Ae-ran’s ‘Goliath in the Water’, the story ends with an open conclusion, depicting a boy who awaits someone to come and rescue him. Two leitmotifs from the Hebrew Bible are significant in this short story: the story of David and Goliath and the story of Noah’s ark. The depiction of the X-marked houses that are designated for demolition and marked as David’s stars in the short story highlights the author’s interest in portraying not only the great size of the Goliath crane but also the people standing before it as small beings, analogous to small David in front of giant Goliath. To understand the description of the Goliath crane in this novel, one must consider that in Korean society, the Goliath crane was often used as a location for protests during labourers’ strikes. In this short story, the boy’s father dies after falling from the Goliath crane during a strike against unpaid wages.​ In this context, Kim Ae-ran may utilise the image of the tower crane, known as the Goliath crane, as a symbol of the giant industry and capital. Through this, she

Retellings and Political Discourse  343

Figure 20.1  Goliath Crane (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

portrays the small and insignificant worker and their families as the David image in conflict with the power of capital. Secondly, this novel retells the Genesis flood narrative. The boy drifts on the water without anyone’s help, similar to how Noah drifted aimlessly during the flood. The absence of the boy’s father in the novel may carry a similar meaning to the absence of God. I cried out “Save me!” several times, but my plea fell on deaf ears and dissipated emptily into the void. I was left alone in the darkness like an orphan of the universe. […] I did not know what color it was, but the phrase ‘Book of Prayer’ appealed to me. However, I soon became uncomfortable and complained that prayer was not that blue, and that the color of prayer I knew was a lowly, faded, and filthy color. I woke up in anger and looked around to see a gloomy gray sky looming over me. (p. 117) The boy experiences the absence of God, similar to the absence of his father who could not currently help him. While Noah’s story emphasises the importance of God’s existence, in this novel, the boy realises the reality of the flood season where God is absent and nobody can help him, and he must rescue himself. However, the father is not portrayed merely negatively. He taught the boy how to swim, which is a positive memory for the boy, along with the memory of seeing shooting stars

344  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry while swimming. In this novel, the father is the one who passes on the knowledge for the boy to survive, and the boy’s ascent to the Goliath crane may symbolise him taking over his father’s place. While on the cold and windy crane, the boy goes through a similar experience as his father did and comes to understand his father. The use of water imagery in Kim Ae-ran’s short story, ‘Goliath in the Water’, is employed in a negative manner, reminiscent of the portrayal of a typhoon in Koh Jung-hee’s ‘Abel in This Era’. This representation of a flood is probably indicative of the experiences of individuals belonging to the lower strata of Korean society who inhabited areas situated at lower altitudes.12 Accordingly, Kim creatively combines the stories of David and Goliath and the Genesis flood narrative, reimagining them as tales of impoverished individuals existing within the system of capital. However, the narrative is not simply a tragic story of the protagonist waiting for rescue. The climax of the novel occurs when the boy climbs onto the Goliath crane, where his father used to work. The act of climbing from the raft to the crane may symbolise that the boy has grown internally, becoming a grownup like his father. The fact that the boy takes his father’s place is not only an indication that he recognises himself as a labourer, but also signifies his existential awareness as an ‘individual’ like his father. The experience depicted in the novel could be interpreted as an existential one, where the protagonist’s journey towards individuality echoes that of young David, who similarly confronts a society that oppresses individuals, as represented by the ‘Goliath’ crane. In contrast to labour literature from the 1980s and 1990s in Korea, this novel does not emphasise the necessity for labourers to unite. Instead, it focuses on the phenomena of workers already being individualised and alienated. Similar to how the boy learns to swim and survive from his father, he should learn to survive as an individual in a dismantled and individualised society. The endless stream of shooting stars may imply to the boy that there is still hope. 20.3 Conclusion In this chapter, we have observed that in modern Korean literature, some writers fill the narrative gaps in the Hebrew Bible while retelling its stories, motivated by political discourses. We have also examined how the use and the retelling of the Hebrew Bible in Korean literature has transformed over time, from the perspectives of (1) the division of Korea, (2) military dictatorship and democratisation movements, and (3) class issues after democratisation. Hwang Soon-Won uses the story of Cain and Abel in his novel The Descendants of Cain as a motif for retelling related to the situation of division in Korea. The key elements of conflict and sacrifice are important in his retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. Just as Cain and Abel fight, Hwang depicts the fight between North Korean landlords and communists in 1945–1946 and the people who were sacrificed in this conflict. Moon Ik-hwan uses the stories of the Hebrew Bible as a means to express his desire for democratisation as a leader of the democratisation movement in Korea from the 1970s to the 1990s. In particular, we have observed how he identifies himself as Moses and identifies the Korean people as the Israelites wandering in

Retellings and Political Discourse  345 the wilderness in his retelling of the story of Moses in his poetry. Ko Jeong-hee also uses the motif of ‘sacrifice’ in her retelling of the story of Abel and retells the story of Abishag as a story of oppressed people and women in a divided reality. Kim Ae-ran combines the stories of David and Goliath and the Genesis flood narrative in her story ‘Goliath in the Water’ to reflect on the economic and class issues in the post-democratisation era, rather than political freedom or the division of Korea. In this way, she retells the stories of David and Goliath and Noah’s deluge to express the story of an impoverished individual who becomes aware of himself as a labourer and an individual. As we have described, we discover similarities between the political experiences of Koreans and these retellings in Korean literature. Thus, the Hebrew Bible have been reflected in Korean literature as a tool for political discourse. Finally, we should examine the ways in which these retellings have altered, enhanced, or subverted the biblical text. In Hwang Sun-won’s The Descendants of Cain emphasises Abel’s victimhood. Yet, individuals who, like Cain, intend to attack and kill someone are also portrayed as victims of their time, thereby positioning the characters simultaneously in the roles of both Cain and Abel. The novel implies that the characters can embody attributes of both Cain and Abel, without definitively categorising them as either. Furthermore, Hwang Sun-won’s novel subverts the original biblical text by suggesting a reconciliation between Cain and Abel, which is not highlighted in Genesis 4. In Moon Ik-hwan’s ‘Moses’ Death’, a retelling of the Meribah incident (Numbers 20:1–10) and Moses’ death (Deuteronomy 34:5–7) takes place. In the original biblical account of the Meribah incident, Moses’ disobedience is emphasised, whereas Moon Ik-hwan transforms the action of striking the rock in his poem into a persistent act of prayer by the poet himself. Thus, the key element of this retelling of Moses’ final moments in the poem lies in the ‘prophetic pessimism’, where the poetic self acts as a prophet despite knowing that his trial will fail. On the other hand, in Moon Ik-hwan’s ‘The Ten Commandments’, the inscription on the tablets of the Ten Commandments is altered to become the marks of wounds on the poet’s body. In Koh Jung-hee’s ‘Abel in This Era’, the image of Abel is imposed to innocent victims sacrificed by a typhoon. The focus of the poem shifts to criticism of those who refuse to listen and remain silent in the face of Abel’s outcry. The theme of silence in response to Abel’s cry, which is not found in Genesis 4:10, is highlighted in the context of the story of Abel’s murder. In Koh Jung-hee’s ‘The Song of Abishag, the Shunammite Woman’, the motif of Abishag is transformed into an image of women sacrificed in situations of the dictatorship and the division between North and South Korea. Although the theme of Abishag’s sacrifice in 1 Kings 1:1–4 did not receive much attention, Koh Jung-hee emphasises this theme, thus subverting the original biblical image. On the other hand, in Kim Ae-ran’s ‘Goliath in the Water’, the motif of Genesis flood narrative is reinterpreted in terms of wandering and personal growth. While the original biblical account in Genesis 7–8 emphasises God’s protection and guidance, Kim Ae-ran’s novel shifts the theme to God’s absence and silence.

346  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Notes 1 A Korean-American novelist, Min Jin Lee, has recently incorporated a motif from the Hebrew Bible into her novel, Pachinko (2017). For example, there may be a relationship between the story of Sunja’s pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage, and the story of Hosea and Gomer in the Hebrew Bible. Both stories involve a woman who becomes pregnant outside of wedlock and is ultimately redeemed through marriage. Seung Woo Lee retells the narratives of Genesis in his five short stories in the collection, ‘What Love Did’ (2020). 2 Cf. Brazinsky, ‘Democratization’, pp. 314–325. 3 Cf. Cumings, The Korean War. 4 Doucette, ‘The Post-Developmental State’, pp. 343–356; cf. Ji-Eun Lee, ‘(Dis)embodiment of Memory’, pp. 367–369. 5 Lee, ‘Late Twentieth Century Poetry’, pp. 445–447. The debate over realism and pure literature in Korean literature intensified with the 1968 discussion between Kim Su-Young and Lee O. Young; two important literary quarterlies were founded in the aftermath of the debate: Munhakgwa jisŏng (Literature and Intelligence; pure literature) and Changjakgwa bip’yŏng (The Quarterly Changbi; engagement literature). 6 Moon, Complete Works, pp. 134–135. 7 Moon, Complete Works, pp. 175–176. 8 Koh, Abel in This Era, pp. 47–53. 9 Koh, Tears of Gwangju, pp. 126–127. 10 Jeong, Poets, 251. 11 For the concept of minjung, see Lee, Religion and Social Formation in Korea, pp. 35–39. Minjung refers to the mass of people oppressed politically and economically in South Korean society. 12 Compare the experiences of the protagonist’s family who reside in a low-lying area and suffer from a flood in Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite to those in the novel.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Hwang, Soon-won. Live Like Stars/The Descendants of Cain. Seoul: Moonji Publishing Company, 1981. Kim, Ae-ran. Contrail. Seoul: Moonji Publishing Company, 2012. Kim, Dong-in. The Complete Works of Kim Dong-in. Seoul: Chosun Ilbo, 1988. Koh, Jung-hee. Abel in This Era. Seoul: Moonji Publishing Company, 1983. Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko. New York, NY: Grand Central, 2017. Lee, Seung Woo. What Love Did. Seoul: Moonhak-Dongnae, 2020. Sim, Hun. Evergreen Tree. Seoul: Munhakgwa Jiseongsa, 2005. Yun, Dong-ju. ‘The Cross’. In Sky, Wind, Star, and Poem. Seoul: Jeongeumsa, 1955, pp. 28-29. Yun, Dong-ju. ‘The Beatitudes.’ In Sky, Wind, Star, and Poem. Seoul: Jeongeumsa, 1955, pp. 62-63. Secondary Sources Cho, Heekyoung (ed.). Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. London: Routledge, 2022. Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010. Jeong, Gwari. The Poets I Have Loved, 2nd edition. Seoul: Moonji Publishing Company, 2014.

Retellings and Political Discourse  347 Kim, Hyeong-su. A Critical Biography of Moon Ik-hwan. Seoul: Shilcheon-munhaksa, 2004. Koh, Jung-hee. Tears of Gwangju. Seoul: Dong-a Publishing, 1990. Lee, Ji-Eun. ‘(Dis)embodiment of Memory: Gender, Memory, and Ethics in Human Acts by Han Kang’. In HeeKyoung Cho (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature London: Routledge, 2022, pp. 357–370. Lee, Peter H (ed.). History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Lee, Peter H. ‘Late Twentieth Century Poetry by Men’. In Peter H. Lee (ed.), History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 420–456. Lee, Sang Taek. Religion and Social Formation in Korea: Minjung and Millenarianism. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996. Moon, Ik-hwan. Complete Works of Moon Ik-hwan. 12 vols. Seoul: Sagyejeol, 1999. Seth, Michael. Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History. London: Routledge, 2010.

21 The Bible in Inspirational Fiction The Case of Bathsheba Ceri Deosun

21.1 Introduction1 Inspirational romance retellings of biblical narratives have emerged from the American Evangelical subculture since the end of the twentieth century. So far, this subgenre has received little scholarly attention. Inspirational romance, itself also a subgenre, also remains relatively unexplored. Romance publishing is worth over a billion dollars each year, and inspirational romances account for a growing share of the market.2 Despite regularly outselling other genre fiction, romance novels are often treated with derision by those that do not read them, and, outside of its legions of loyal fans, the evangelical romance subgenre seems to fly under the radar of popular consciousness.3 Its influence should not be underestimated, however. Books are shaped by the culture that produces them, and reading shapes the reader. Evangelical concepts of gender roles, femininity, and purity are embedded in these novels and absorbed in reading them. In this chapter, I shall explore how the genre conventions of romance novels and the values of the Evangelical subculture shape the way biblical narratives are retold, using the story of Bathsheba as a case study. First, I will give a brief history of the inspirational romance subgenre and the emergence of romance retellings of biblical narratives. Next, I will look at the representation of the character of Bathsheba in a number of inspirational romance retellings, focusing on how romance tropes are used to shape the narrative and present evangelical ideas about womanhood. Finally, I will contrast these portrayals with a retelling from outside of the inspirational romance genre to see how Bathsheba’s story is told differently when evangelical cultural values are absent and romance is not the focus of the plot. 21.2 Background Two terms are often used interchangeably to describe this subgenre of romance fiction, ‘inspirational’ and ‘evangelical’, indicating romances marketed specifically to ‘conservative, evangelical, Protestants’.4 Representation is central to the popularity of inspirational romance: evangelical readers want to read books that reinforce their beliefs and values. Neal explains that reading evangelical romances

DOI:  10.4324/9781003280347-22

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  349 offers [readers] fictional counterparts who face understandable problems and who model situations. Through this relationship configured by identification and inspiration, readers move from a fictional story to their real lives with renewed faith. Their escapist desires and happy endings lead them back to their own struggles equipped with renewed evangelical energy.5 There are several elements required for a novel to be classed as a romance in general and an inspirational romance specifically. Regis identifies eight essential plot points in romance novels: ‘the flawed society that the successful courtship will renovate, the meeting between or among the parties to the courtship, their attraction to each other, the barrier to betrothal, the courting characters’ declaration of love, the point of ritual death, the recognition of new information that will overcome the barrier, and the betrothal’. She also specifies that the majority of the plot should centre on the romance, but the elements can occur in any order or even multiple times.6 To this, Barrett-Fox and Donnelly add six defining characteristics of evangelical romances: 1) Romance through each partner’s relationship with God, so that God is the center of their relationship [meaning that each partner having a close relationship with God is as important to the novel as the partners’ relationship to each other], 2) a lack of detail about theology or religious ritual, 3) no sexual contact or, if the couple is married, only monogamous sex that is not described, 4) a focus on faith to restore brokenness of some kind, 5) a happily-ever-after ending that includes marriage or the promise of marriage between heterosexual partners who have not been divorced from other partners, and 6) traditional gender roles but heroes who may be less traditionally masculine than men in secular romances.7 Interestingly, within biblical retellings there is scope for authors to subvert some of these rules, so long as it is in line with the biblical narrative, as will be explored further in this study. The author most associated with the birth of evangelical romances is Janette Oke, whose novel Love Comes Softly was first published in 1979. There were some precedents, with authors in the nineteenth and twentieth century including religious themes in novels centred on romantic love, such as Charlotte Mary Yonge and Mary Corelli in the United Kingdom and Grace Livingston Hill in the United States.8 While these authors were popular in their time, with changing attitudes in the twentieth century following the World Wars, their sentimentality and morality meant they fell out of favour. Then, the sexual revolution of the 1960s brought more sexually explicit content into popular romances, which was off-putting to evangelical readers.9 Oke began writing because of the lack of things she wanted to read in the secular market.10 At this time, evangelical Christians in America had begun to develop their own sources of media in response to the perceived increase in secularism in the wider culture.11 This meant there was an audience ready for Oke’s novels, and their success encouraged other authors and publishers to begin producing evangelical romances.12

350  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry While there have been some studies of inspirational romances, most notably Neal’s Romancing God and Gandolfo’s Faith and Fiction, romance retellings of biblical narratives have received little attention academically—as these studies were published in the early 2000s the growth in the retellings subgenre had not happened yet. While one of the authors considered here, Roberta Kells Dorr, was writing in the 1980s, she is not as well-known as more recent authors. Although Francine Rivers mainly writes contemporary evangelical romances, Redeeming Love, rewritten as a Christian romance following her conversion in 1997,13 is a retelling of the story of the prophet Hosea, set in nineteenth-century America. Following this, she wrote The Mark of the Lion series, which is set in the first century CE with characters learning to live out the new beliefs of Christianity. A few years later, she released a series of novellas retelling the stories of the women mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy, called Lineage of Grace. Originally released as individual volumes between 2000 and 2002, the books created fictionalised accounts of five biblical women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary— with discussion questions contributed by Peggy Lynch, to encourage the reader to look deeper into the biblical story. They were published in a single volume in 2002. Rivers then created a similar series following male characters from the Bible—Aaron, Caleb, Jonathan, Amos, and Silas—called Sons of Encouragement, again released individually initially from 2004 to 2007, and as a bind-up in 2008, with discussion questions from Peggy Lynch. As Rivers was already an established author of inspirational fiction, these books met with more success than previous inspirational romance retellings of biblical stories. The popularity of these books showed that there was a market for this kind of retelling among evangelical readers and created opportunities in this subgenre for new writers and for reprints of older works. 21.3 Bathsheba I will now use the story of Bathsheba as a case study to explore how evangelical romance authors retell biblical narratives as romance stories. First, I will consider how the novelists establish Bathsheba’s relationship with David, and then I will investigate how her character is shaped by the tropes of romance novels and the cultural values of evangelicalism. There are three interlinked tropes that I will be exploring: ‘not like other girls’; the ‘ideal woman/wife’; and ‘fairytale romance’. These tropes present the character of Bathsheba in a specific way that perpetuates evangelical doctrines and values, especially gender roles. Finally I will compare these retellings to a non-romance retelling of the story. The novels I will focus on are: David and Bathsheba by Roberta Kells Dorr; Unspoken by Francine Rivers; Bathsheba by Jill Eileen Smith; Bathsheba: Reluctant Beauty by Angela Elwell Hunt, and Bathsheba by Torgny Lindgren. The first four are written by some of the more prolific writers of romance retellings of biblical stories, while Lindgren’s work provides the contrast of a literary retelling. The biblical source material covered is taken primarily from 1 and 2 Samuel, with most authors including the ascension of Solomon from the beginning of 1 Kings.

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  351 21.3.1 The Evangelical Backstory

Koenig gives this description of Bathsheba: ‘She has not only been characterized on the spectrum from helpless victim to unscrupulous seductress; but also, she has filled that spectrum’.14 The details of the biblical account are sparse, leaving scholars and novelists to fill in the gaps, particularly regarding her motivation, opinion, and agency.15 In different scholarly accounts, Bathsheba either becomes a seductive instigator, a willing participant, or an unwilling victim. While the former arguments give Bathsheba a certain amount of agency, they fail to account for the power dynamics of the situation, which have implications regarding Bathsheba’s ability to give meaningful consent in the situation in which she finds herself. These issues of agency and consent also occur in the different interpretations in these novels. The novelists each create a backstory for Bathsheba, leading to the pivotal scene of her bath. In these accounts, Bathsheba fits into the ‘’good girl’ paradigm common to evangelical romances. She comes across as a rounded character, facing issues in her life and marriage to which evangelical women can mostly relate. Most of the authors have Bathsheba bathing in the private courtyard of Uriah’s house—Dorr has the bath placed on the roof of the house. All of the authors assume Bathsheba’s bath is to cleanse her from ritual impurity following her monthly period. This is a neat way of establishing that Bathsheba is not pregnant by Uriah at the time of her encounter with David. For Dorr, Smith, and Rivers, this is important as Uriah has only recently returned to the war, leaving Bathsheba lonely, isolated and childless.16 These three authors establish a backstory as to why Bathsheba may be receptive to an affair with David. Dorr places Bathsheba in an abusive marriage—she is treated harshly by her mother-in-law, ImAshtah, and neglected by her husband. Uriah is presented as not caring about her or her feelings from the start, forcing sex with her on their wedding night (p. 106). ImAshtah and Uriah want Bathsheba to take part in Hittite fertility rituals as she fails to become pregnant. Bathsheba refuses to give in, stating her identity as an Israelite (p. 164). The implication is that Uriah has only nominally converted to the Israelite religion for the prestige. During the four years of their marriage, Bathsheba has had a few encounters with David and has watched him from her window (pp. 124, 153). Smith takes a different approach, in that Uriah has made a full conversion to the Israelite religion and is determined to follow the Law (p. 10). His honourable nature and sense of duty are emphasised, as is his loyalty to the king. This leaves Bathsheba questioning his love, as he is away at war more than he is with her (pp. 16, 123). Smith emphasises Bathsheba’s loneliness and her longing for love—whether that is from her husband or having a child to care for. She, too, has had some interaction with David and is attracted to him. It is implied she would have married him if he had not promised Abigail he would not marry again (pp. 54–57).17 Rivers places Bathsheba’s family in David’s camp when he is on the run from Saul, therefore Bathsheba has known him from a young age. In fact, according to Rivers, Bathsheba has been infatuated with David from the age of eight,

352  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry fantasising about marrying him when she is older (p. 1). She constantly compares Uriah to David, and Uriah cannot measure up. She later settles into marriage with Uriah and grows to respect and like him, but cannot get over her feelings for David (p. 40). The authors establish their characterisations of Bathsheba and Uriah from the few details in the biblical account, filling in the gaps in their story in imaginative, and sometimes problematic ways. Uriah is made out to be a bad husband, either complicit in abuse at worst, neglectful, or simply not as good as David at best. This negative portrayal is not in line with what we are told regarding Uriah in the Bible, in my view: he is one of David’s mighty men, he shows respect for the Ark of the Covenant and his fellow soldiers, and if we read Nathan’s prophetic challenge as a metaphor, as Hunt does, he is the poor man who dearly loved his lamb/wife, Bathsheba.18 The setup of Uriah as a bad or indifferent husband, and Bathsheba as abused, lonely, or infatuated serves to make Uriah look worse in contrast to David, the hero. It is significant that these authors all choose to lay the groundwork for a consensual relationship and so explore different reasons why a woman may choose to enter an affair. Due to the strict guidelines set by publishing houses for inspirational romance novels, certain topics or plot points are considered taboo—including adultery, homosexuality, promiscuity, and descriptions of sexual activity.19 One reason why these authors have more leeway to address taboo topics is because they are recounting a story from the Bible. Basing novels on a biblical narrative which is popularly considered to include adultery allows these authors— and the women reading their books—to explore what reasons a woman may have for wanting to have an affair. Through the continuation of the story past the act of infidelity, the authors can also show the consequences of adultery for the woman and those around her. Hunt’s backstory is remarkably different. Her version begins shortly before Bathsheba and Uriah marry, and she makes their relationship passionate and loving. They have been happily married for a year when Uriah returns to the war. The bath scene takes places five months later, with Bathsheba missing her husband and longing for his return (pp. 66–69). Hunt does not present Bathsheba’s encounter with David as consensual. This is significant as it changes the nature of David’s sin from adultery in which Bathsheba is complicit, to rape of which she is victim. It is then David who experiences a redemption arc, while Bathsheba learns to find comfort from God in her suffering. None of the authors have Bathsheba aware of David’s presence on the roof initially. Dorr has Bathsheba hear a noise from the palace, but cannot see anything amiss (p. 166). The only retelling that has Bathsheba become aware of David’s presence is that of Rivers. She notices someone watching her from the palace roof and covers herself, thinking it is a palace guard. After a moment she recognises David (p. 43). Having pined after him her whole life and aware that he was attracted to her on her wedding day, she decides to remain in the courtyard where he can see her: ‘let him see what he had let slip through his fingers’ (p. 44). This is the closest any of the novelists comes to Bathsheba seducing David.

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  353 Each of the novelists presents Bathsheba’s encounter with David in a different way when she arrives at the palace. Rivers’ Bathsheba presents the least resistance to David’s advances. After an initial request to be sent home, based more on a sense of shame that she ‘let’ him watch her than reluctance to be with him, she is quickly overcome by long-held feelings when she recognises he desires her (pp. 52–53). Smith’s Bathsheba wants to leave immediately when she realises his intentions, but worries what the consequences will be if she does not obey the king (pp. 137– 138). They bond over a shared love of music and their feelings of loneliness—his following Abigail’s death and hers as her husband is away—so she agrees to stay when he asks. While there is a level of consent in this version, it is not complete, as Bathsheba is aware of the power imbalance until she is seduced by David’s attraction to her (p. 141). Dorr’s account has a more conflicted Bathsheba and a more seductive David. He initially invites her to listen to a psalm he has written, and then they discuss their feelings of being trapped and not loved or understood within their households. There is the implication that no one has understood David before Bathsheba, and no one has understood Bathsheba before David (pp. 174–175). Bathsheba initially resists David’s advances but is slowly convinced, or coerced, into consenting: ‘Slowly she turned and looked at him with all the pent-up longing of her loveless existence. Then calmly she held out her hand and without further hesitation walked the few steps to where David stood. “I seem to have forgotten all my fine resolve,” she said’ (p. 176). Hunt presents the interaction as entirely non-consensual. Bathsheba repeatedly tries to resist David, despite knowing that no one will help her if she calls out. She stops struggling when David promises not to hurt her if she stops resisting, and afterwards exhibits characteristic trauma responses (pp. 80–81). Hunt defends her choice in an author’s note at the end of the book: ‘the king held the power of life and death over his subjects, so I do not think any woman assaulted by the king would endanger her life by screaming. His power and authority were a metaphorical gun at her head’ (p. 370). While the other authors explore the taboo theme of adultery, Hunt provides an opportunity to consider another taboo topic, that of rape and its consequences. While Hunt is traditionally published within the evangelical subculture, she pushes the boundaries more in terms of challenging readers’ expectations. How the authors understand the start of David and Bathsheba’s relationship is central to how they represent her character and the tropes they each use to develop the romance between them as their book progresses. That three of the authors frame the relationship as consensual allows them to maintain David as a heroic figure, worthy of Bathsheba’s love, and Bathsheba as the damsel he is rescuing from an unhappy life. It also gives Bathsheba agency, the opportunity to act rather than just be acted upon, and become the centre of her own story. Hunt achieves this in a different way by having Bathsheba as the victim of rape who overcomes the trauma she has faced. By giving Bathsheba a voice and perspective, these authors fill out her story in a way that is quite feminist. In many evangelical churches women are not permitted teaching roles, meaning the sermon will nearly always be from the

354  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry male perspective—focused on male experiences and issues. Inspirational romances allow women to minister to other women in ways they may not experience on a Sunday morning.20 Biblical retellings allow the readers to enter imaginatively into the story and explore it from women’s perspectives, centring the female experience in a way that they are unlikely to find in churches with predominately male leadership. While the books may be quite feminist in this way, in others they are clearly shaped by the patriarchal evangelical culture which produced them. This can be seen in the tropes that they employ. 21.3.2 Not Like Other Girls

The first trope I will be discussing is common to all of the novels. This is ‘not like other girls’, in which the female protagonist is defined by her differences to other women in the story. Her attractiveness is shown by her lack of interest in the things regular girls like, such as make-up and fashion. The protagonist therefore can be beautiful without being vain. This trope is problematic, however, as it dismisses feminist interests as superficial, while often praising the protagonist for representing idealised femininity without trying.21 Bathsheba is contrasted most strongly to David’s other wives. The trope is sharpest in Dorr’s version of the story. Bathsheba is presented as lively but mostly obedient and very caring. All of David’s other wives are portrayed negatively— Michal is bitter and demanding; Ahinoam weak-willed and anxious; Maacah vain; Abigail sarcastic, malicious, and controlling; and the others are barely worth mentioning (pp. 45–47, 50, 197, 205, 211). Bathsheba is shown to be more considerate than the other wives, but is treated with resentment by the others throughout the book. Bathsheba is therefore presented as kind and sensitive, while the others are mean and jealous (p. 205). Rivers also uses the ‘not like other girls’ trope to contrast Bathsheba with David’s other wives. When Bathsheba enters David’s harem, she is treated with contempt by the other women (p. 91). While the other wives go to great lengths to try to attract David, Bathsheba does not: Each tried to outdo the others in beauty preparation […] Ahinoam put on Egyptian kohl and Persian mascara. Maacah painted her toenails with henna and wore anklets. They all braided their hair and anointed themselves with perfume. Bathsheba bathed, brushed her hair until it shone and rippled over her shoulders and down her back, and wore the simple dress of a commoner. (p. 92) Bathsheba is therefore shown to be naturally beautiful, while the other wives are vain and obsessed with accentuating their appearance. This is a really common outworking of the ‘not like other girls’ trope—the female protagonist is effortlessly beautiful, inside and out, while the other women are only superficially pretty after a great deal of effort. Only Abigail, who is held up as a wise and righteous woman, becomes friendly towards Bathsheba (pp. 53, 82). Abigail therefore slightly subverts the trope, as she is also not like the other wives, but instead provides a role

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  355 model for Bathsheba. Bathsheba wants to become more like her in order to be more worthy of David’s love (p. 98). In Hunt’s version of the story, the ‘not like other girls’ trope centres around Bathsheba’s incomparable beauty. Hunt frames Bathsheba’s story with an imagined prophecy from Samuel, that she would be a ‘tob woman’ (of exceptional beauty), ‘mother of a great man’ and ‘affect the future of Isra’el’ (p. 9). Every man desires her, even Nathan the prophet (p. 110). When David sends for her, he says: ‘“By all that is holy, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen”’ (p. 80; emphasis mine). Bathsheba is objectified by David and treated as less than a person because of her looks. Later, when she comes into his harem, she is treated coldly by his other wives as they have heard of the prophecy (p. 139). Even though the contrast is not marked as sharply in this book, the other wives are presented as jealous and conniving. Smith also does not play as strongly into the ‘not like other girls’ trope, partly because she has previously established Michal and Abigail as worthy of David’s love in the earlier books of the series. As she has Abigail die towards the start of the book, she instead frames the trope in a different way: David is grief-stricken, and his other wives cannot fill the void left by Abigail’s death (pp. 62–64). When David is walking his rooftop, he is drawn to the sound of her playing the lyre: ‘Who was this woman who could strum the strings with such passion, such feeling? The tune’s melancholy flair matched the exact cadence of his heart’ (p. 128). When she then takes her ritual bath, he is struck by her adherence to the law: ‘A devout woman and a musician. Did she share his lonely heart? The possibility cheered him, Would she understand his need, his own empty longings, that no women seemed able to fulfill?’ (pp. 128–129). This trope is a reflection of the evangelical subculture in several ways. One is in the way evangelicalism emphasises being ‘in the world but not of it’, following Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John 17:14–16. The evangelical subculture emerged in response to the increasing secularisation of society, which caused evangelical Christians to feel marginalised.22 By setting up Bathsheba as a protagonist who is ‘not like other girls’—not obsessed with her looks, conniving, malicious, or ambitious—she becomes a role model for evangelical women to set themselves apart from the women outside of evangelical culture. This works a little differently to the ‘not like other girls’ trope in secular fiction that despises traditional femininity, as evangelical women are encouraged into traditional gender roles of housewife and mother. The second evangelical outworking of the trope is how modesty is emphasised over vanity. Evangelical women, like Bathsheba, are expected to be effortlessly feminine and beautiful, without spending hours on their appearance like David’s other wives do. Bathsheba’s choice to dress simply, without resorting to make-up or jewellery, sets her apart from the other wives and gives evangelical women an example to follow of how to be attractive to their husbands without being vain or immodest, or being concerned about worldly things. In some ways, this is not a bad message, as it subverts the cultural sexualisation and objectification of women by emphasising natural beauty and resisting provocative clothing. In other ways, it puts pressure on women to be

356  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry seemingly effortlessly beautiful by setting an unattainable goal, as in the ‘ideal woman’ trope. 21.3.3 Ideal Woman

One aspect of the biblical womanhood understanding of gender roles is the ‘cult of domesticity’.23 In this culture, women are encouraged to be homemakers, emphasising domestic duties such as cooking, cleaning, and bringing up children well. In her research with evangelical women, Gaddini found one way through which this is being perpetuated: female evangelical social-media influencers who are the wives of mega-church pastors. Through carefully curated Instagram feeds, these women present an ideal of womanhood that evangelical women want to both reject and aspire to.24 Inspirational romances also promote this ideal. Neal explains that one reason evangelical women read the novels, and share them with female relatives, is because ‘they hope that evangelical romances, with their combination of faith and fun, will teach their daughters evangelical lessons in sexuality and marriage’.25 While evangelical women perhaps would not encourage their daughters to find a husband the way she does, Bathsheba still represents an idealised version of womanhood in these novels: beautiful, devout, and a good wife and mother. In all of the novels, one of the primary ways in which Bathsheba is contrasted to the other wives is in how she brings up her sons to follow the Law, encouraging them to study with the tabernacle scribes or the prophet Nathan and correcting them when they do wrong. This becomes one of the reasons David prefers her sons over his other children, who are spoiled and not disciplined by their mothers. Each of the novels includes scenes of Bathsheba fulfilling this ideal wife trope. The clearest example is in Dorr’s narrative: David often came to visit her in the evening […] when he arrived she always sent Sara and the other servants away, removed his sandals and bathed his feet herself, anointing them with warm, fragrant oil. She served him tea and small cakes made by her own hands as he watched, piled the pillows for his comfort and sang for him the village harvest songs he loved. (p. 227) A similar scene occurs in Unspoken: [S]he prayed constantly that God would protect David and give him wisdom. And whenever she was in David’s company, she did all she could to give him comfort, pleasure, and joy. She knew a contentious wife was worse than a constant dripping and submitted herself to his needs, even those he didn’t realise he had—especially for someone to listen to him. (p. 120; the ‘constant dripping’ is a reference to Prov 19:13) Smith’s scene of domestic bliss focuses on Bathsheba as devoted mother more than devoted wife:

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  357 She kissed the baby’s [Shammua] dimpled cheek and carried him into the sitting room where David stood at a table spread with parchments, the ten-yearold Solomon studying them at his side. It was a scene she’d come upon often of late. She settled herself among the cushions of a nearby couch and positioned Shammua to nurse at her breast, draping a soft blanket over them as a covering. She met David’s gaze across the room, reading the pleasure in his eyes. (pp. 268–269) Even Hunt’s Bathsheba, who came so reluctantly into David’s house, does her best to act in the way she believes a wife should: ‘when summoned to the king’s chamber, I did everything within my power to cheer him […] I attempted to distract David with music and dancing’ (p. 233). The emphasis of each of these scenes is Bathsheba’s attention to David’s and her children’s needs. Like the female Christian influencers whose social media bios describe them as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’, Bathsheba comes to exist only in relation to her husband and children, her wants and needs now focused on achieving theirs, as an integral part of her relationship with God. This image of the submissive wife and doting mother is central to the evangelical concept of womanhood. 21.3.4 Fairytale Romance

For many women, fairytales are their first experience of a romance story—a handsome prince rescues a beautiful woman, they triumph over evil and live happily ever after.26 The Cinderella plot line has commonly appeared in romance novels since the early part of the twentieth century, in which a humble woman is elevated to a higher position in society by marrying someone of a better status.27 Aspects of the Cinderella story appear in Dorr’s retelling. As already stated, the story is set up so that the virtuous Bathsheba is trapped in a loveless marriage where she is verbally abused. Although she is not treated as a servant, she has no freedom, describing herself as ‘a sparrow caught in a cage’ (p. 173). David rescues her from her isolation and unhappiness, first by showing her the love she desires, and then by removing the obstacles keeping her trapped by orchestrating Uriah’s death. Shortly after, Uriah’s mother, ImAshtah, poisons herself (pp. 194–195). Bathsheba is shocked by their deaths, but does not grieve. Instead, she feels relief that she is free from their oppression: [S]he turned from the scene [of ImAshtah’s death], holding her mantle over her nose and mouth to keep from breathing the fetid air. She closed the door behind her, reminding herself that never again would she have to enter that room where she had suffered so much anguish. (p. 195) Bathsheba’s abusive home enables David to be the handsome and righteous prince, rescuing the damsel in distress. Bathsheba is set up as the favoured wife in David’s court and is elevated from her humble status of the lowly, unloved wife of a foreign soldier to David’s chosen queen and mother to the future king.

358  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry Rivers and Smith use elements of the Cinderella story as well, but to a lesser extent than Dorr. They both include elements of Bathsheba feeling trapped and isolated by her marriage to Uriah, but do not make her a victim of her situation in quite the same way. Instead, I would argue that the fairytale trope they come closer to is that of ‘forbidden love’ which occurs in stories such as the ‘Little Mermaid’. In these stories the greatest obstacles to the Happy Ever After are the biases or expectations of those surrounding the couple, such as the Sea King who hates humans and does not understand his daughter’s love for them.28 In the case of the Bathsheba novels, the love between David and Bathsheba is primarily prevented by her marriage to Uriah, but the seeds of the forbidden nature of the romance are laid earlier. In the case of Rivers’ version, it is Bathsheba’s unrequited love for David from childhood, which her family repeatedly try to talk her out of, eventually by ordering her to marry Uriah: ‘Bathsheba sat heavily, covered her face and wept in defeat. She was a woman—albeit a young one—and had no say in the matter. The decision regarding whom she would marry had never been hers, and she’d always known in her heart that David was as far beyond her reach as a star in the heavens’ (p. 23). In Smith’s retelling, it is David’s promise to Abigail not to marry again which prevented Bathsheba from becoming one of his wives (pp. 54–55). In both these stories, the obstacles have to be removed before the couple can be together. Smith has both the inconvenient spouses killed off: Abigail dies in childbirth and David orchestrates Uriah’s death. Bathsheba is then able to take her place as favoured wife (pp. 32–35); in Rivers’ version, Bathsheba discovers David desires her as much as she desires him and chooses to be with him, despite the rejection of her family (p. 81). Both these fairytale tropes shape the reader’s understanding of the story in a way that idealises Bathsheba and David’s relationship. They have found their ‘one true love’, and this minimises the negative consequences of their initial encounter. Although the couple face difficulties as a result of their affair, their love for each other, and repentance and restoration in their relationship with God, allows them to overcome any problems together. The redemptive arc in inspirational romances is the most significant way these books differ from their secular counterparts. Equally important to the relationship between the two protagonists is their relationship with God. Each protagonist must come or return to true faith in God and repent of any wrongdoing before they can achieve their Happy Ever After. This is a powerful message of the books, and in the case of the David and Bathsheba story as it is set up by these authors, it shows that God’s forgiveness can overcome even the most terrible of sins. Because adultery and murder are not common topics in contemporary inspirational romances, the use of the biblical text allows these authors to give this positive message of redemption to their readers. The setup of the relationship, however, as an irresistible romance that is ‘meant to be’, like in a fairytale, idealises the protagonists to the detriment of the other characters, and explains away the sin to an extent. An unintended consequence of this may be that it is being read as permission to do what you want because God will forgive you. Hunt does not use the Cinderella or forbidden love tropes. Instead, her retelling of Bathsheba’s story could be said to follow a different fairytale: ‘Beauty and the

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  359 Beast’. Bathsheba is content as Uriah’s wife, surrounded by her family. David’s assault of her destroys her happiness, and leaves her traumatised. Following Uriah’s murder, she reluctantly accepts David’s offer to become his wife for the sake of her unborn child. Afterwards, Bathsheba recounts: overcome by the swift efficiency of the royal household, I sank onto the bed and stared at the stone floor as my escorts closed the door and departed. In the space of an hour, the king had made me his wife, removed me from my family, and stolen my personal freedom. The procedure was altogether clean, quick, and loveless. (p. 133) David then has to win her over, first by acknowledging he has wronged her, then, following Nathan’s confrontation, through his repentance and his prayers for her son (pp. 135, 166–167). Later, he favours her over his other wives, and promises her that Solomon will inherit his throne (p. 244). Gradually, as he shows his love to her, she comes to love him too. Towards the end of his life, he tells her: ‘“I have opened my heart to you, Bathsheba, and loved you more than the others […] I loved you most” he continued, his voice trembling, “because your forgave the most”’ (p. 350). Following this, Bathsheba acknowledges her true feelings for the first time: ‘beneath the surface of my composure, I could feel a hidden spring trying to break through. I loved this man. The feeling was not like what I felt for Uriah; it was deeper and more powerful. I had simply never recognized it for what it was’ (p. 351, emphasis in original). This ‘Stockholm syndrome’ love-​growi​ng-fr​om-pr​oximi​ty-de​spite​-trau​ma plot is not uncommon in romance novels, particularly from earlier times, when it was somehow considered romantic for the man to dominate the woman. One example is The Sheik by E. M. Hull, first published in 1919, summarised by Dixon as: ‘an upper-class Englishwoman, while travelling in the Sahara Desert, is abducted by a handsome Bedouin sheik with whom she falls in love, despite being repeatedly raped by him’.29 Although I find Hunt’s portrayal of David and Bathsheba’s initial sexual encounter as non-consensual convincing, in many ways I find her novel more troubling than the others from a trauma perspective, as it is still presented as a love story. In Hunt’s account, David proves himself worthy of Bathsheba’s love, but within an evangelical subculture that has often encouraged women to stay with and repeatedly forgive abusive husbands it becomes more problematic.30 Each of the novels contain aspects of domestic abuse, such as marital rape, and the messages for women experiencing this themselves are not positive. Women are encouraged to stay with their abusive partners as God will deal with them, as happens to Uriah in Dorr’s retelling. Alternatively, in the case of Hunt’s Bathsheba, the abusive partner, David, will repent of his actions and the relationship will be restored. This message is dangerous as it perpetuates violence against women.

360  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 21.3.5 An Alternate Take

Swedish author Torgny Lindgren’s version of Bathsheba’s story is strikingly different from that of the authors discussed so far. In the book’s dedication, Lindgren claims: ‘this story was the first I heard in my life’ (p. v), suggesting a familiarity with the Bible story from childhood. Lindgren does not share the need of the evangelical writers to present the protagonists in a positive light. He is also not concerned with turning David and Bathsheba’s relationship into a great romance; instead his story is of violence, intrigue, and political machinations. David is presented as an unstable warlord, prone to mood swings and ordering violence when someone displeases him (p. 8). His ‘love’ for Bathsheba is possessive and jealous, and he describes God as being like him, a God of violence (pp. 6, 41). Instead of David choosing to arrange Uriah’s death during battle, in Lindgren’s version David believes God is commanding him to sacrifice Uriah in order to end the siege at Rabbah (pp. 15, 39). David has Uriah castrated and anointed, then sent back to the front line in a state of frenzied bloodlust (pp. 41–42). Bathsheba originally appears as an impressionable teenager controlled by the men who lust after her. It is unclear in Lindgren’s narrative whether she consents to David’s sexual advances (pp. 3–6). After she is sent back home, she compares herself to prisoners of war, and determines not to remain a victim: Captured, conquered: that was how she felt. The vanquished have no further desires, she thought, no aspirations and no purpose; the vanquished are free of hopes and dreams, forsaken and free. Free to be prisoners. If she herself did not want to remain in this situation for ever, then she would have to conquer King David. (p. 10) Bathsheba develops through the novel into a manipulative schemer and is portrayed by the end of the book as the real power behind the throne—both as influencer over David during his final years and as regent in the early part of Solomon’s reign. She is threatened by Tamar’s beauty as she sees David lusting after his daughter but knowing he cannot act on it. Bathsheba schemes to have Tamar removed by suggesting through her servant what Amnon should do (pp. 139–140). She later plots Absalom’s return and sows the seeds for his rebellion (pp. 181, 202). She arranges for her grandfather, Ahitophel, and Hushai to give conflicting counsel to Absalom: ‘“If the King had a thousand counsellors, he would send them all to Absalom. Then his fall would be inevitable”’ (pp. 205, 215–217). Finally, Bathsheba orchestrates Solomon’s rise to power and the death of Adonijah, but reigns herself until Solomon reaches maturity (pp. 241, 249). Lindgren’s retelling is far from the fairytale romances of the evangelical subculture. His versions of the characters are perverse and unlikeable. Bathsheba is not the good girl who messes up and is redeemed; instead she is a victim who becomes a victimiser. David is not the sensitive hero who rescues her and earns her love, but an unhinged despot with a god-complex. Without the compulsion to create romantic role models, the story becomes dark and unsettling. Reading all of these

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  361 novels made me uncomfortable for different reasons, but this one was closest to the discomfort I experience when reading the biblical text. 21.4 Conclusion In this chapter I have presented a brief history of evangelical romance retellings of biblical narratives and outlined some of the conventions of romance fiction in general and evangelical romances in particular. I have used the character of Bathsheba as a case study to show how genre tropes and cultural values are used to shape the retelling of her story and some of the implications this has for how we understand her character. Finally, I have contrasted this with a version of her story that does not have a vested interest in presenting her or David in a good light. My research into this type of novel is ongoing, and there are wider implications to be considered still. On the one hand, the novels can be problematic in their narrow definitions of gender roles and the way they characterise an ancient tale of lust and murder as a model for romantic love. On the other hand, there are also positive elements to the novels as they centre the female characters who are often silenced in the biblical narrative and allow the reader to enter imaginatively into the story. These books are not terrible, but they are flawed, and they should be read with caution—with a soft heart and an engaged mind. Notes 1 This chapter represents part of my ongoing PhD research into romance retellings of the King David narrative. 2 Neal, God, p. 6; Boyd, ‘Romance’. 3 Herold, ‘Book’; Kamble, Selinger, Teo, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 4 Barrett-Fox and Donnelly, ‘Romance’, p. 2. 5 Neal, God, p. 132. 6 Regis, ‘Evolution’, pp. 2–3. 7 Barrett-Fox and Donnelly, ‘Romance’, p. 2. 8 Dixon, ‘History’, p. 8; Neal, God, p. 16. 9 Gandolfo, Faith, pp. 65–66. 10 Neal, God, p. 27. 11 Neal, God, pp. 23–25; Gandolfo, Faith, p. 65. 12 Blodgett, Culture, pp. 46–47. 13 Neal, God, pp. 159–160. 14 Koenig, Bathsheba, pp. 1–2. 15 Sternberg, Poetics, pp. 188–189. 16 Dorr, David, pp. 164–165; Smith, Bathsheba, pp. 123–124; Rivers, Unspoken, p. 42. 17 As Abigail has died by this point in Smith’s retelling, David no longer feels that he has to keep his promise. 18 2 Sam 23:39; 2 Sam 11:11; 2 Sam 12:3; Hunt, Bathsheba, p. 371. 19 Neal, God, pp. 76–77, 86; Gandolfo, Faith, p. 65. 20 Neal, God, p. 113. 21 Bristow, ‘Girl’. 22 Gandolfo, Faith, p. 64. 23 Barr, Making, p. 159. 24 Gaddini, Struggle, pp. 128–135.

362  Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction/Poetry 25 Neal, God, p. 52. 26 Weber, ‘Reasons’. 27 Dixon, ‘History’, p. 9. 28 ReedsyBlog, ‘Trope’; HJP, ‘Romeo’. 29 Dixon, ‘History’, p. 9. 30 Ettinger, ‘Marriage’.

Bibliography Fiction/Primary Sources Dorr, Roberta Kells. David and Bathsheba. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2013. Hunt, Angela Elwell. Bathsheba: Reluctant Beauty. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2015. Lindgren, Torgny. Bathsheba. Translated by Tom Geddes. London: Collins, 1988. Rivers, Francine. Unspoken. Lineage of Grace. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001. Smith, Jill Eileen. Bathsheba. Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2011. Secondary Sources Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021. Barrett-Fox, Rebecca, and Kristen Donnelly. ‘Inspirational Romance’. In Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Abingdon, England/New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 191–211. Blodgett, Jan. Protestant Evangelical Literary Culture and Contemporary Society. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Boyd, Maggie. ‘Inspirational Romance, A Roundtable Discussion’. All About Romance 29 October 2016. https://allaboutromance​.com​/inspirational​-romance​-a​-roundtable​ -discussion/# (accessed 16 January 2023) Bristow, Ailsa. ‘Not Like Other Girls: How to Avoid This Toxic Trope in Your Writing’. The Writing Cooperative, 10 April 2021. https://writingcooperative​.com​/not​-like​-other​ -girls​-how​-to​-avoid​-this​-toxic​-trope​-in​-your​-writing​-29025a3d3b06 (accessed 21 January 2023) Dixon, Jay. ‘History of English Romance Novels, 1621–1975’. In Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Abingdon, England / New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 27–50. Ettinger, Hannah. ‘Ending an Abusive Marriage Is Hard: Ending One in the Evangelical Church Is Harder’. Chicago Tribune, 12 May 2018. https://www​.chicagotribune​.com​ /opinion​/commentary​/ct​-perspec​-divorce​-evangelical​-women​-paige​-patterson​-0513​ -story​.html (accessed 21 January 2023) Gaddini, Katie. The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2022. Gandolfo, Anita. Faith and Fiction: Christian Literature in America Today. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Herold, Thomas. ‘Book Publishing Market Overview for Authors: Statistics and Facts’. Book Ad Report, 2019. https://bookadreport​.com​/book​-market​-overview​-authors​ -statistics​-facts/ (accessed 16 January 2023)

The Bible in Inspirational Fiction  363 HJP. ‘Romeo and Juliet Under the Sea’. Thus With A Kiss I Die, 4 November 2017. https:// medium​.com​/thus​-with​-a​-kiss​-i​-die​/romeo​-and​-juliet​-under​-the​-sea​-558260dfa08a (accessed 21 January 2023) Kamble, Jayashree, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo. ‘Introduction’. In Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Abingdon, England/New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–24. Koenig, Sara. Bathsheba Survives. London: SCM, 2019. Neal, Lynn S. Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. ReedsyBlog. ‘13  Beloved Romance Tropes Every Reader Will Recognise’. 7 February 2019. https://blog​.reedsy​.com​/guide​/romance​/romance​-tropes/​#10_​_forbidden​_love (accessed 21 January 2023) Regis, Pamela. ‘The Evolution of the American Romance Novel’. In Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Abingdon, England/New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 51–71. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Weber, Jill P. ‘5  Reasons Why Fairy-Tale Romances Almost Always Go Wrong’. Psychology Today, 5 May 2015. https://www​.psychologytoday​.com​/us​/blog​/having​ -sex​-wanting​-intimacy​/201505​/5​-reasons​-fairy​-tale​-romances​-almost​-always​-go​-wrong (accessed 21 January 2023)