The Expository Times | 2019
Book Review: Women, Identity, and Method on the Move
Abstract
This collection of eight essays aims to centralise the role of gender in the experience of migration. It is intentionally interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse, invoking e.g. sociological theory, migration studies, and modern feminist criticism. It is by no means comprehensive, but surveys a range of Hebrew Bible narrative and prophetic texts. Four narratives are considered: Susanna, Ruth, Abraham and Sarah, and Esther. Jennie Grillo begins the collection by arguing that Susanna reworks the familiar prophetic ‘marriage metaphor’, which figures the nation as a woman, and turns it from an image of shame to one of vindication. In the prophets, the nation was guilty of adultery, suffered rape, and was shamed through onlookers’ unwanted gaze. Susanna transforms these tropes. Concerning Ruth, Danna Nolan Fewell is cautious of its common characterisation as inclusive of foreigners; as countering exclusivist post-exilic ideologies. Fewell shows that Ruth is more complex, not offering straightforward answers, but providing a narrative space in which communal boundaries and identity markers are challenged, negotiated, and transgressed. Modern sociological criticism is invoked by C. A. Strine and Daniel L. Smith-Christopher in their studies of Abraham and Sarah, and Esther respectively. Strine examines the three wife-sister narratives of Gen 12, 20 and 26 in light of involuntary migration studies and feminist criticism. He shows how each story reflects lived experiences of involuntary migration, particularly concerning the challenges of the foreign host’s trustworthiness and of sex work for economic survival. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher invokes modern case studies of ‘comfort women’—women brought into the sexual service of WW II soldiers. This reframes how we read Esther, particularly highlighting the difficult issues of Esther’s ‘agency’, and her ‘collaboration’ with the Persians. Three essays consider prophetic texts. After presenting important methodological challenges to studying gender in biblical texts, Carolyn J. Sharp argues that gender has been under-analysed in Jeremiah 44. The prophet faces contestation from the women in this chapter, first from the epistemology they embody, and second from their memories, which ‘dissent’ from Jeremiah’s own. Mark J. Boda charts the family imagery in Isaiah 49:14–66:24, drawing out relational tensions, and diverse relational and gender roles. Some of this imagery is quite shocking, which Boda explains with reference to modern migration studies: in migration, roles and relationships are often tense and in flux. Holly Morse argues that anxieties over ethnicity are much more prevalent in Ezekiel 16 and 23 than is often recognised. Furthermore, the metaphor slips from fantasy to reality, and reveals real concerns about female sexual behaviour. Morse invokes modern categories of ‘revenge porn’ and ‘slut shaming’ to cast new light on the prophet’s rhetoric. Lawrence M. Wills’ essay views women and exile within larger social and historical frameworks. He presents 11 general theorems on group identity formation and the construction of the Other (including the gendered Other), and then briefly comments on the manifestations of this in different historical periods. Overall, this is a thought-provoking collection of essays, and a timely contribution, given the importance of both gender and migration in the contemporary world.