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On Bad Sex and Bad Seed: Doubting Deuteronomy

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Book cover Marginal(ized) Prospects through Biblical Ritual and Law

Part of the book series: Postcolonialism and Religions ((PCR))

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Abstract

Lee, in this chapter, takes a deconstructive agenda to Deuteronomy 22–24 from a Third World feminist perspective. While the literary topoi remain the same from previous chapters—sexual impropriety, Israel and its ‘others,’ the purity of the camp, and sacred offerings—emancipative interests probe inconsistencies in Israel’s characterization of parties excluded from its assembly on the grounds of moral and genetic defect. The reader’s suspicion, then, carries over into a negative evaluation of Israel’s construct of gender in marriage in adjacent laws. Lee’s reading unravels the variedly (intersectional) discriminatory identity building project of Deuteronomy 22–24 against a backdrop of currents in decolonizing discourse that blend inequities of gender and race. Israel’s views of the ‘other’ and its correlation of valued values come apart.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For similar orientation to subjectivity, see Roland Boer, ‘Thus I cleansed Them from Everything Foreign: The Search for Subjectivity in Ezra-Nehemiah,’ in Postcolonialism and the Hebrew Bible: The Next Step (ed. Roland Boer; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 221–37; Philip Chia, ‘On Naming the Subject,’ in The Postcolonial Biblical Reader (ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah; Oxford and London: Blackwell, 2006), 171–85; Jeffrey Kah-Jin Kuan, ‘Diasporic Reading of a Diasporic Text: Identity Politics and Race Relations and the Book of Esther,’ in The Bible and Postcolonialism, 3 (ed. Fernando F. Segovia; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 161–73.

  2. 2.

    Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’ in Questions of Cultural Identity (ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay; London: Sage Publications, 1996), 3. Hall’s understanding of identity or subject formation as a relative positioning within historically and geographically determined symbolic economies is current in cultural studies (over and against the now near moribund essentialized Cartesian subject). For concise surveys of this intellectual shift(ing), see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Cultural Studies of the Americas 2; Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5–8; Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?’ in Questions of Cultural Identity (ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay; London: Sage Publications, 1996), 89–92.

  3. 3.

    All references to biblical texts follow those of English translations.

  4. 4.

    R.S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28–29. The following paragraphs are but a cursory overview of salient points—ones relevant to our analysis—in discussions at the intersection of postcolonial studies and feminist criticism. For comprehensive overviews of the state of the dialogue, especially pertaining to biblical and theological studies, see Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000); Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005). Concise depictions of the exchange are available in Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 111–29; Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 81–101.

  5. 5.

    Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,’ Boundary 2 (1984): 333–58.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 344.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 334–35.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 335.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 343–44.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 344–45.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 345.

  12. 12.

    Kwok Pui-lan, ‘Unbinding Our Feet: Saving Brown Women and Feminist Religious Discourse,’ in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan; London: Routledge, 2002), 76.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 75.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 71.

  15. 15.

    Meyda Yeğenoğlu, ‘Sartorial Fabric-ations: Enlightenment and Western Feminism,’ in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan; London: Routledge, 2002), 82–99.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 84.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 95–96.

  18. 18.

    Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism,’ Feminist Review 17 (1984): 3–19.

  19. 19.

    Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L’Ecriture Feminine,’ Feminist Studies 7 (1981): 253–54.

  20. 20.

    Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire Building (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 60–62.

  21. 21.

    Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 84. Emphasis in original.

  22. 22.

    Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 162.

  23. 23.

    Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 28–29.

  24. 24.

    Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 44.

  25. 25.

    Valerie C. Cooper, ‘Some Place to Cry: Jephthah’s Daughter and the Double Dilemma of Black Women in America,’ in Pregnant Passion: Gender, Sex, and Violence in the Bible (ed. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 181–91.

  26. 26.

    Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation, 117.

  27. 27.

    Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 98. The emphasis is mine.

  28. 28.

    Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 6.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 13–14; idem., ‘Changing the Paradigms,’ 296.

  30. 30.

    Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 47; ‘Changing the Paradigms,’ 289.

  31. 31.

    Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 120–21.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 14. ‘Wo/man’ and ‘wo/men’ are Schüssler Fiorenza’s lexemes for clarifying and unsettling the occlusive and domineering gestures of ‘man’ and ‘men’ as all-encompassing terms across genders (but not always) by reversing the direction of erasure (see pp. 6–7 n 21). The encounter, by her reckoning, is ‘a good spiritual exercise for men’ by forcing a double-think in ascertaining whether their sex is in reference, an experience familiar for women with respect to the traditional linguistic practice.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 128; ‘Changing the Paradigms,’ 297–98.

  34. 34.

    Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Transforming the Margin—Claiming Common Ground: Charting a Different Paradigm of Biblical Studies,’ in Still at the Margins: Biblical Scholarship Fifteen Years after ‘Voices from the Margin’ (ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah; London and New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 25.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 25.

  36. 36.

    Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 128. Here, Schüssler Fiorenza quotes Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 59. The emphasis is mine.

  37. 37.

    Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 125.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 122; ‘Transforming the Margin,’ 24.

  39. 39.

    Denise Noble, ‘Postcolonial Criticism, Transnational Identifications and the Hegemonies of Dancehall’s Academic and Popular Performativities,’ Feminist Review 90 (2008): 106–27.

  40. 40.

    Lena Sawyer, ‘Engendering “Race” in Calls for Diasporic Community in Sweden,’ Feminist Review 90 (2008): 87–105.

  41. 41.

    Zheng Wang and Ying Zhang, ‘Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese Feminism since the Fourth UN Conference on Women,’ Feminist Studies 36 (2010): 40–70.

  42. 42.

    David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).

  43. 43.

    For concise outlines of the status and duties of Israel’s assembly, see Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 209–10; Jacob Milgrom, Numbers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 335–36; idem., ‘Priestly Terminology and the Political and Social Structure of Pre-Monarchic Israel,’ Jewish Quarterly Review 69 (1978): 65–81. The litany of texts in example cover the initiatives of Israel’s qhl and ‛dh, seemingly interchangeable terms variously rendered ‘assembly’ or ‘congregation.’ By Milgrom’s assessment (Num, 335), qhl becomes the preferred term from the period of Israel’s monarchy.

  44. 44.

    Tigay, Deuteronomy, 210.

  45. 45.

    Jack R. Lundbom, Deuteronomy, A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 651–52, connects this verbal aspect of the legislation to the later sequence on campsite purity (vv. 10–11). The nexus, in keeping with the analogical mind-set of the present project, facilitates the metonymic transfer/slippage between ‘assembly’ and ‘camp.’

  46. 46.

    See, for example, John Van Seters, The Yahwist: A Historian of Israelite Origins (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 112–16; Angela R. Roskop, The Wilderness Itineraries: Genre, Geography, and the Growth of Torah (History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant 3; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 185–232; Tigay, Deuteronomy, 422–29; W.A. Sumner, ‘Israel’s Encounters with Edom, Moab, Ammon, Sihon, and Og According to the Deuteronomist,’ Vetus Testamentum 18 (1968): 216–28.

  47. 47.

    Tigay, Deuteronomy, 425–27.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 427.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 425–26, 27.

  50. 50.

    Van Seters, The Yahwist, 112–14.

  51. 51.

    Roskop, The Wilderness Itineraries, 193–209.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 208. The reference is to Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller; New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

  53. 53.

    Roskop, The Wilderness Itineraries, 191. The emphasis is original.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 185.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 208.

  56. 56.

    M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 280–81.

  57. 57.

    Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 20–21. Emphasis added.

  59. 59.

    Boer, ‘Thus I cleansed Them,’ 234–35. Emphasis added.

  60. 60.

    So Tigay, Deuteronomy, 211–12; Sumner, ‘Israel’s Encounters,’ 216–28; S.R. Driver, Deuteronomy (International Classical Commentary; 3rd edn.; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1859), 261. Calum M. Carmichael’s comment in The Laws of Deuteronomy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 175, is to the point. Following a survey of the uneven exposition on Ammon’s and Moab’s villainy, he surmises that ‘D’s ideological interests create or erase past events and actions’ (my italics). The overriding intent of the legislation by its ambiguous motivation, then, ‘is to prove that their [the Ammonites and the Moabites] generations at the time of the exodus must have manifested the “fault” of their ancestry’ (my emphasis).

  61. 61.

    Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 113.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 113.

  63. 63.

    Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 59.

  65. 65.

    Judith E. McKinlay, Reframing Her: Biblical Women in Postcolonial Focus (The Bible in the Modern World 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004), 20–21.

  66. 66.

    Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), xi, 4–13, 77–83.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 82–83.

  68. 68.

    See, among others, Duane L. Christiansen, Deuteronomy 21:10–34:12 (Word Biblical Commentary 6b; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2002), 534; Carmichael, The Laws, 173. On the element of abundant offspring as a component of divine promise to Israel’s patriarchs, see Gen 12:1–3; 15:4–5; 28:14.

  69. 69.

    Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 297. Helped by the subsequent reference to ‘cultic prostitution’ (vv. 17–18), Craigie surmises that voluntary genital mutilation born of the veneration of a deity is the specific issue in the view of Deuteronomy 23:1.

  70. 70.

    Randall C. Bailey, ‘They’re Nothing but Incestuous Bastards: The Polemical Use of Sex and Sexuality in Hebrew Canon Narratives,’ in Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States (ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 125–26.

  71. 71.

    McKinlay, Reframing Her, 26. McKinlay, on this point, cites Claudia V. Camp, Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible (Journal for the Old Testament Supplement Series 320; Gender, Culture, Theory 9; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 17.

  72. 72.

    So Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 120. The connection to sexual impropriety (incest) is inherent to the sequence, ‘a contextual inference from the general to the particular.’ The movement of mind is not lost in the interpretative gesture of Ezra 9:11–14 (see n 42 on the same page).

  73. 73.

    Such is the conclusion of Carmichael, The Laws, 175. Indeed, the insight from thematic abstraction across the legislation on admission to the assembly shows the reasoning for the exclusion of the Ammonites and the Moabites spurious. Quite conceivably, it is the imputed genetic heritage of the two groups that is the source of the issue.

  74. 74.

    The irony to this view, of course, is that it was the fear of no offspring—the precise concern of Lot’s daughters (Gen 19:32)—that inspired the unconventional initiative.

  75. 75.

    Defecation is deemed ‛rwt dbr, an ‘unseemly thing,’ the very designation that renders the wife abhorrent to her husband in Deuteronomy 24:1. The connection is just one more node in the vast web of correlations that sustains the logic of exclusion across the laws in view.

  76. 76.

    Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 19–22.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 19.

  78. 78.

    Ibid.

  79. 79.

    Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 271–72.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 272.

  81. 81.

    These components have been noted variously by, among others, Christiansen, Deuteronomy 21:10–34:12, 515; Carolyn Pressler, The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Altestamentliche Wissenschaft 216; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 28; Driver, Deuteronomy, 258.

  82. 82.

    Driver, Deuteronomy, 259.

  83. 83.

    Deuteronomy 24:4 adds ‘land’ to the list.

  84. 84.

    Pressler, The View of Women, 21–43; Deborah L. Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts of Leviticus and Numbers: A Comparative Conceptual Analysis (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 458; London: T&T Clark, 2008), 189–234; Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, ‘Precious Memories: Rule of Law in Deuteronomy as Catalyst for Domestic Violence,’ in Exodus and Deuteronomy (ed. Athalya Brenner and Gale A. Yee; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 258–88.

  85. 85.

    Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts, 190–93. See also Pressler, The View of Women, 43.

  86. 86.

    Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts, 193–204. See also Kirk-Duggan, ‘Precious Memories,’ 273–74.

  87. 87.

    Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts, 204–06.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 209–11. See also Pressler, The View of Women, 31–32.

  89. 89.

    Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts, 213–14, 229–33. See also Kirk-Duggan, ‘Precious Memories,’ 277; Pressler, The View of Women, 30–31, 42–43.

  90. 90.

    Pressler, The View of Women, 24. The forcible nature to the sexual intercourse is the sense to the verb tpš: see discussion in Pressler, The View of Women, 37–38; Eve Levavi Feinstein, Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 68–70, 78–81.

  91. 91.

    Ellens follows Raymond Westbrook’s conclusion that the law curbs economic exploitation by stemming the financial gain for a first husband collecting on subsequent bridewealth payments: Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts, 235–48; Raymond Westbrook, ‘The Prohibition on Restoration of Marriage in Deuteronomy 24:1–4,’ in Studies in Bible 1986 (ed. Sara Japhet; Scripta Hierosolymitana 31; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986), 387–405. More common in the understanding of the law is a sense of sexual impropriety to the resumption of coital relations following a woman’s sexual intercourse with another partner and/or a desire for a measure of decorum to matrimony: Feinstein, Sexual Pollution, 63–64; Lundbom, Deuteronomy, 675; Pressler, The View of Women, 46–51, 60–62; Patrick D. Miller, Deuteronomy (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching; Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1990), 164; Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, 305–06; Carmichael, The Laws, 206.

  92. 92.

    Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 14.

  93. 93.

    Laura E. Donaldson, ‘The Breasts of Columbus: A Political Anatomy of Postcolonialism and Feminist Religious Discourse,’ in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan; London: Routledge, 2002), 45. Europe’s disparaging figurations of the colonized and the colonizable, of course, are part of the landscape of postcolonial studies. For comprehensive surveys, beyond those of interest here, see Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 104–83; Ella Shohat and Robert Stamm, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 137–77.

  94. 94.

    Laura E. Donaldson, ‘The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth through Native Eyes,’ in The Postcolonial Biblical Reader (ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah; Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 165–66.

  95. 95.

    The example of Anglo-colonial penmanship is given in Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 114.

  96. 96.

    McKinlay, Reframing Her, 38.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., 38. ‘Slept,’ as McKinlay notes, is delectably ambiguous. The woman’s name, Rahab (‘broad’ or ‘bountiful’ in the Hebrew), has the same sexual overtones, a nuance fortified in the naming of her profession (zwnh, perhaps a ‘prostitute’). Further to her point, McKinlay recalls H. M. Barstad’s unpublished paper (p. 38 n 5) that takes the name as an allusion to the generous dimensions of the woman’s pudenda.

  98. 98.

    Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation, 77.

  99. 99.

    Ibid., 94–95.

  100. 100.

    Ibid., 95. See also McKinlay, Reframing Her, 40–41.

  101. 101.

    Steed Vernyl Davidson, ‘Gazing (at) Native Women: Rahab and Jael in Imperializing and Postcolonial Discourses,’ in Postcolonialism and the Hebrew Bible: The Next Step (ed. Roland Boer; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 72.

  102. 102.

    Ibid., 78.

  103. 103.

    Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination, 107. See also Judith E. McKinlay, ‘A Son is Born to Naomi: A Harvest for Israel,’ in Ruth and Esther: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2nd Series; ed. Athalya Brenner; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), 151–57. For a Marxist angle on Ruth’s assimilation, see Athalya Brenner, ‘Ruth as Foreign Worker and the Politics of Exogamy,’ in Ruth and Esther: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2nd Series; ed. Athalya Brenner; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), 161–62.

  104. 104.

    Davidson, ‘Gazing (at) Native Women,’ 75–80.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., 78–79.

  106. 106.

    Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 155–56.

  107. 107.

    Jenny Sharpe, ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency,’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 221–43.

  108. 108.

    Ibid., 228–29.

  109. 109.

    Ibid., 231.

  110. 110.

    Ibid., 225.

  111. 111.

    Ibid., 230.

  112. 112.

    Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race and Nationalism,’ in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat; Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 89–112.

  113. 113.

    Ibid., 92. My emphasis.

  114. 114.

    Ibid., 100–01.

  115. 115.

    Ibid., 101.

  116. 116.

    Ibid., 89.

  117. 117.

    Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 42–43.

  118. 118.

    Ibid., 55.

  119. 119.

    Ibid., 70–72.

  120. 120.

    Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms, 98.

  121. 121.

    Sharpe, ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape,’ 22.

  122. 122.

    Ibid., 226. Emphasis is mine.

  123. 123.

    Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 60–61.

  124. 124.

    Sharpe, ‘The Unspeakable Limits of Rape,’ 225.

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    Bernon Lee

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Lee, B. (2017). On Bad Sex and Bad Seed: Doubting Deuteronomy. In: Marginal(ized) Prospects through Biblical Ritual and Law. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55095-4_4

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