Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Here Keefe is responding to the position of Bal, Lethal Love. Keefe finds Bal’s position to be overly one-sided. In this regard, Keefe agrees with Biale, Eros and the Jews. Keefe is not denying the reality of “patriarchal determinants of biblical texts” (Woman’s Body, 184).

      181. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 184. Admittedly, says Keefe, “The possibility that woman’s body could have a symbolically positive and central location as a sign for the social body in ancient Israel does not easily occur to the modern reader, whose access to the text is filtered through some 2500 years of intensifying misogyny within which woman comes to signify the temptation to sin, the threat of chaos, and all that which is ‘other’ to the realm of the sacred” (Woman’s Body, 184). In my view, the connection of woman’s body (preeminently Mary) with the social body of the Catholic Church fits with Keefe’s analysis of Israel’s scriptural texts, and indicates that the past 2,500 years are more complex—though certainly not lacking in misogyny among some misguided Jews and Catholics. Regarding the ancient Near East, Keefe directs attention to Springborg, Royal Persons.

      182. Keefe, Woman’s Body, 210. In the book of Hosea, as Keefe observes, “the condition and fate of the nation are figured in graphic images of maternal bereavement, the loss of female fertility, and the death of mothers” (Woman’s Body, 210). She adds that these “graphic images are certainly rooted in the realities of war which eagerly claims women and children as victims (see also 2 Kgs 8.12; 15.16; Amos 1.13). But more so, as a metonym for the devastation of war, the slaughter of children and mothers and especially, the slitting open of pregnant women, bespeak the more far-reaching corporate consequences of Assyrian invasion: the end of Israel. Mothers with their children figure the nation as a whole, such that their destruction is the nation’s. . . . Israel is a woman in Hosea’s metaphor not simply because women are wives, whose conjugal obligations to their husbands in patriarchal society are analogous to the demands of a jealous god, but because women are mothers, whose procreativity functions symbolically as a locus of intergenerational continuity, and hence of national identity. . . . The woman of fornications represents at once the wayward people and the land itself, the land then serving as a congruent metaphor of the corporate body. The identity between the woman and the fertile land is suggested again in Hos. 2, when the husband’s threat to strip his wife naked fades into images of drought and desolation upon the land” (Woman’s Body, 211–12, 214; cf. 216–17). Keefe’s conclusion is important: “In Hos. 1–2, the female body, the body politic and the fertile land intertwine in a dense symbolic complex that yields no unambiguous correspondences, but which evokes the reality of the contemporary situation as one of betrayal, bloodshed and ‘adulterous’ political and commercial liaisons. . . . Although the metaphor is predicated upon the legitimacy of patriarchal control of female sexuality, there is a depth dimension in this symbolism of woman that exceeds those determinations” (Woman’s Body, 217).

      183. See Weems, “Gomer,” 100; cited in Baumann, Love and Violence, 99. See also Weems’s Battered Love, a book frequently referenced by Baumann. In addition, see Setel, “Prophets and Pornography”; as well as Thistlethwaite, “Every Two Minutes,”; Shields, “Gender and Violence in Ezekiel 23”; Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 109–10. Exum describes Ezekiel 23 as “the most pornographic example of divine violence,” where “the male author seems to take pleasure in picturing the sexual attentions pressed upon them by ‘desirable young men’ (vv. 12, 23): the handling of their breasts and their defilement by their lovers’ lust. He betrays a fascination with sexual prowess and an envy of other (foreign) men’s endowment, fantasizing his rivals with penises the size of asses’ penises and ejaculations like those of stallions” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 109; cf. 124–25). See also Brenner, “Pornoprophetics Revisited”; Brenner and van Dijk-Hemmes, On Gendering Texts, 167–95; Brenner, “Women’s Traditions Problematized.”

      184. Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 122; cf. 126–27, where she celebrates Jerusalem’s insistence upon autonomy vis-à-vis this abusive god. On the positive side, Exum appreciates that male readers (that is, the majority of the intended hearers and readers) would have recognized themselves as “personified Israel” and therefore would have experienced being “placed in the subject position of women and, worse, of harlotrous, defiled, and sexually humiliated women” (Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 123). However, the effect is somewhat bleaker when viewed as a whole, as seen in Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, 161 (quoted by Exum in Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 123n62).

      185. See also Holt, “‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,” 111. Regarding Jeremiah 2–3, she grants the offensiveness of the abusive imagery, but adds that the offensive passages “might even have been meant to be offensive from the beginning. . . . The implied—male—audience is supposed to be offended, emasculated by an imagery that turns them into wayward, nymphomaniacal, unfaithful women. This is how the metaphor is supposed to work by the implied author in a patriarchal society, based on honor and shame. The implied—male—audience is supposed to understand the message that God is still in control, but also that their God is a jealous and violent God. We might not like this picture—but the picture is there on purpose and we need to be able to understand its message” (“‘The Stain of Your Guilt’,”112).

      186. For the historical development of biblical portraits of God, see Smith, The Early History of God; Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. See also his more theological work, How Human Is God?, in which he argues that issues such as the divine anger (for example) are caught up in a paradox, rooted in the difficulty of speaking adequately about God and about God’s relationship to us in the midst of sin and suffering: “On the one hand, images of the violent and angry God suffer in their limitations as they partake of our human language. On the other hand, these images capture helpful dimensions of what the divine is about” (43). In response to David R. Blumenthal’s Facing the Abusing God, Smith suggests that we proceed by recognizing that what we see in the prophetic texts involves the people’s effort to understand their intense sufferings during the conquest in relation to the covenant to which God remains faithful. He states, “Anger and love are strong, powerful emotions that reflect how deeply one feels about another person. In Jeremiah and Ezekiel, this is God and Israel, husband and wife, now suffering from their terrible breakup. Even anger, terrible anger, is part of this tragic love story. Yet even so, this story is never done, because God is never done; God recovers from the wounds inflicted by Israel, and so Israel does as well” (How Human Is God?, 52). Attending to the creation passages in the Old Testament, Smith notes that God the Creator is depicted in terms of his power, wisdom, and presence—and this context is the context of the covenant.

      187. Augustine, Confessions, III.v.9, p. 40.

      188. Augustine, Confessions, IX.v.13, p. 163.

      189. Augustine, Confessions, V.xiv.24, p. 88.

      190. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §42, p. 66. See Ramage, Dark Passages of the Bible.

      191. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §42, p. 66.

      192. Yvonne Sherwood points out that when Jerome and Augustine turn to the prostitute married by the prophet in the Book of Hosea, СКАЧАТЬ