98 - Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives

Texts of Terror:
Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives
By Phyllis Trible
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1984. 128 pp. $7.95.

Phyllis Trible's earlier book, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, made a significant contribution to the literary study of women in the Hebrew Scriptures. I think particularly of her chapters on Eve and Ruth in that work. Although Texts of Terror is rich in exegetical insights, my expectations based on her earlier volume were not met.

This book brings together studies of four female figures in the Old Testament. It is introduced by a statement "On Telling Sad Stories."

100 - Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives

Trible invites the reader to notice and recognize the sad stories of women that have been ignored or neglected in the male-dominated history of interpretation. She is at her best in the close reading of specific texts. Applying her skills in rhetorical criticism, a branch of literary criticism, she writes essays that are "monuments" to Hagar, Tamar the daughter of David, the Levite's concubine in Judg. 19, and Jephthah's daughter. Each essay is headed by the line-drawing of a gravestone with an epitaph for the protagonist which plays an appropriate variation on lines from the suffering servant poem of Isa. 52:13-53:12 or the gospel passion narratives. In each chapter Trible offers interesting reflections on responses to the female subject made by characters within the stories themselves and those identifiable in biblical traditions. She also represents some responses of contemporary readers.

The book is a success as a series of exegetical essays that elicit sympathy for its female subjects; yet, in my view, it is unsuccessful on the level of biblical hermeneutics. It is too atomistic and narrowly focused, and neglects important interpretive questions.

By "atomistic and narrowly focused" I mean that Trible does not communicate a sense of larger biblical patterns. Apart from a more extended treatment of the motif of the suffering servant, its use as a key symbol reads as an imposition on the texts. She relates her texts to other biblical narratives (for example, Judg. 19 and Gen. 19), but she does not indicate how the stories fit into the greater drama of the Hebrew Scriptures. One exception is the nice juxtaposition of Tamar as the wise sister and Dame Wisdom in Proverbs (pp. 56-57). That juxtaposition touches on a question: Could the women studied be construed as metaphors of Israel? Do their stories have an allegorical dimension? Even if one has made a certain hermeneutical decision about one's focus, it seems strange, for example, that Trible would not at least discuss the position that the dismembered body of the unnamed woman in Judg. 19 is a metaphor of the chaotic condition of Israel as depicted in Judges.

The question of an allegorical dimension in the stories presupposes a basic interpretive issue. In what sense are these tales historical in any usual meaning of the word? Trible reads texts as a literary critic, asserting that "literary judgments supersede historical claims" (p. 4). In spite of this, at times she seems to assume that the texts reflect historical events, persons, and conditions. She speaks of Hagar as a figure "within the historical memories of Israel" (p. 28), and she claims that Gen. 19 and Judg. 19 "show that the rules of hospitality in Israel protect only males" (p. 75). She also refers to the story of the virgin daughter of Jephthah as though it was based on actual happenings in the time of the Judges (p. 93). As for Hagar and Jephthah's daughter, whatever they represent in terms of actual events, "historical" is not the accurate adjective to use of them. Concerning male laws of hospitality that allowed brutal treatment of women, I consider it no more likely that the stories of Lot and his daughters and the Levite and his concubine reflect conditions that actually prevailed than does the story of Ruth and

102 - Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives

Naomi, who travelled alone from Moab to Bethlehem according to the book of Ruth.

What is wanting in Trible's treatment is a concept of "historic" figures and stories, namely narrative interpretations that try to capture the meaning of historical experience without themselves being history. And if very little of biblical prose narrative is history in the modern sense, then a distinction like Robert Alter's between historicized fiction and fictionalized history is useful.

Finally, has knowledge of these female personages survived only from "the oppressor's perspective?" That is Trible's position (see p. 9). But it is peculiar that one can find narratives with sympathy for the woman and scathingly negative depictions of the male (as of Amnon and the Levite). Trible herself takes the struggle of the patriarch Jacob at the Jabbok (Gen. 32:22-32) as the key story for these studies, which involve an interpretive journey that entails "wrestling demons in the night" (p. 4). Is it not peculiar then that this male oppressor, Israel as embodied in Jacob, could come up with so many sympathetic portrayals of women in the stories he composes? Clearly some of these matters will have to be thought through more carefully. There are moments when Trible makes a moving appeal to read and listen from a different standpoint, but she does not accomplish the hermeneutical task.

James G. Williams
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York