Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

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СКАЧАТЬ Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 123.

      143. The two quotations come from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, cited in Jesus the Bridegroom, 137.

      144. In Sexual and Marital Metaphors, Moughtin-Mumby affirms “the inability of the prophetic texts to reverse their own negative sexual and marital metaphorical language,” despite their clear attempts to do so and, somewhat more hopefully, “their astonishing tendency to undermine themselves, unravelling their own assumptions and rhetoric, leaving themselves all but impotent” (274–75). In her view, positive meaning emerges from these texts only when the women are viewed as (often strong, resistant, ungeneralizable) individuals, as for example when we recognize that the figure of the prostitute takes “on an astonishing range of different guises in the prophetic text, repeatedly liaising with different literary frames to breed a striking variety of associations, including animal instinct, ruthless entrepreneurship, absurdity, nymphomania, cultic defilement, lust, misunderstanding, the desire for control, and uncontrollability, to name just a few” (Sexual and Marital Metaphors, 275–76).

      145. Baumann, Love and Violence, 195. See also Sanderson, “Nahum,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, 217–21, at 221: “To involve God in an image of sexual violence is, in a profound way, somehow to justify it and thereby to sanction it for human males who are for any reason angry with a woman.” For historical background to Nahum’s “presentation of the Judean/Assyrian crisis” and the manner in which Nahum’s feminized Nineveh is the object of Yahweh’s sexual shaming and abuse, see Chapman, The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, 103–10.

      146. Baumann, Love and Violence, 195. Baumann directs attention to Franzmann, “The City as Woman.”

      147. I am employing an unpublished translation by Sr. Albert-Marie Surmanski, of Jerome’s Commentarium in Naum, with thanks to Surmanski for the privilege of using her work.

      148. Jerome, Commentarium in Naum.

      149. Jerome, Commentarium in Naum.

      150. By contrast, see the remarks of J. Cheryl Exum: “In describing God’s treatment of his wayward wife, the prophets rely upon a rhetorical strategy that encourages the audience to identify and sympathize with a male-identified deity. This is the privileged point of view, the ‘I’ that condemns the ‘you,’ the other, whose view is not represented. . . . When readers privilege the deity, which most readers of the Bible still do, they are forced into accepting this position, for to resist would be tantamount to challenging divine authority. This is the position taken almost without exception by biblical commentators, who, until recently, have been almost without exception male. Typically these commentators either ignore the difficulties posed by this divine sexual abuse or reinscribe the gender ideology of the biblical texts; usually they do both in their ceaseless efforts to justify God” (Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 114–15). She cites Wolff, Hosea, 34, 38, 44; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, 248–49. Exum goes on to argue, “The contributors to The Women’s Bible Commentary show the difference reading as a woman makes. The authors of the entries on the prophetic books all wrestle with the implications of biblical violence against women and struggle to find ways of dealing with it. . . . What distinguishes their work from that of their male counterparts is their recognition of divine sexual violence as a problem and their honesty about it. One looks in vain in the standard commentaries for responses like these to the violence against women in the prophetic corpus” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 117–18, referring to The Women’s Bible Commentary).

      151. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 175.

      152. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 177.

      153. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 179.

      154. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, 178. For a contrasting approach, see Dempsey, “The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16.” Dempsey recognizes that “imagery and metaphors relating to women are used to communicate to Ezekiel’s audience and to the text’s (re)readers an ethical message: God will not tolerate injustice” (“The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 72), but she emphasizes that “Yhwh in his anger said and did some despicable things to Jerusalem as her husband. Although Yhwh is willing to forgive and restore the covenant with Jerusalem, despite the fact that there is no mention of remorse on Jerusalem’s part, it seems a bit presumptuous on Yhwh’s part to assume that Jerusalem would take him back. After all, he has been verbally and physically abusive to her” (“The ‘Whore’ of Ezekiel 16,” 76).

      155. See Sheridan, Language for God in Patristic Tradition, 42.

      156. Similarly, Exum states, “The fact that this is metaphorical violence does not make it less criminal. Indeed, it is extremely injurious: because God is the subject, we—that is, female as well as male readers—are expected to sympathize with the divine perspective against the (personified) woman. . . . Sexual violence of which God is the perpetrator and the nation personified as a woman is the object, along with its destructive implications for gender relations, is there. It cannot be dismissed by claiming that it is only ‘metaphorical’, as if metaphor were some kind of container from which meaning can be extracted, or as if gender relations inscribed on a metaphorical level are somehow less problematic than on a literal level” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 101–2; 119). I see her point, though I do think that the fact that it is metaphorical makes it less problematic. She draws attention to such studies as Gordon and Washington, “Rape as a Military Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible”; Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel; and Ellwood, Batter My Heart. For metaphor’s destructive potential, see also Bal, “Metaphors He Lives By.” See also, for Bal’s broader project, her Lethal Love.

      157. Baumann, Love and Violence, 223. Alice A. Keefe surveys a number of feminist readings of Hosea, and she criticizes these readings for assuming the correctness of the standard scholarly view that interprets Hosea as attacking the Canaanite fertility religions. Against the standard feminist scholarship on Hosea, she denies that Hosea “is misogynistic literature which assumes and depends upon a view of female sexuality as something intrinsically negative” (Keefe, Woman’s Body, 154). After all, “the redeemed Israel is still a woman” in Hosea (Woman’s Body, 154). Indeed, she observes that “in a social context [such as ancient Israel] where the individual is not the primary locus of human meaning and value, body, sex and gender will carry meanings which are quite distinct from our own and the equations most central to feminist analysis will not necessarily hold” (Woman’s Body, 158). Furthermore, by contrast to modern understanding of sex and sexuality as a private matter, “In a kinship-based society, sexual reproduction, material production and the maintenance of social power constitute intersecting and coordinate dimensions of a unitary sphere of cultural activity. . . . Rather than sex and the society signifying two separate spheres of human activity, in biblical literature, sexual activity СКАЧАТЬ