Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women's Lives in the Hebrew Bible

Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era: Portraits in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Narratives

This thesis is devoted to a selection of six contemporary novels reconfiguring biblical women perceived to be largely confined to the gaps of the Scriptures: Michele Roberts’s "The Wild Girl" (1984), Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale" (1985), Michele Roberts’s "The Book of Mrs Noah" (1987), Emma Tennant’s "Sisters and Strangers" (1990), Anita Diamant’s "The Red Tent" (1997), and finally Jenny Diski’s "Only Human" (2000). It shows how, in the selected corpus, each female protagonist gives herself a voice through which she can define herself as speaking subject, a voice that not only rests on language, but also, crucially, on silences. After succinct theoretical prolegomena in which the two fundamental concepts of "voice" and "silence" are defined, the first part of this doctoral research, entitled “The Silenced Feminine?,” concentrates on the common starting point of the six novels. It shows that all the selected biblical rewritings are rooted in the same two fundamental forms of silence – the "implicit dimension" and "silencing" – and adopt a complex, ambivalent approach to the Scriptures and the Judeo-Christian tradition, both feeding on them and challenging what is perceived as their almost systematic confinement of women to the silent background. Brief first explorations of the novels foreground the various ways in which the protagonists’ freedom of expression is depicted as drastically threatened or limited. The second, and most substantial part, “Voices Draped in Silences,” describes the way in which each heroine, as an answer to her silencing, strives to define herself by playing on the infinite possibilities offered by language and silence. It is divided into three sections presenting the case studies in pairs to better emphasise how two novels based on the same forms of silence exploit them in unique ways. The first section is devoted to "The Red Tent" and "The Wild Girl," where the protagonists’ struggle against their silencing is tightly interwoven with a celebration of the goddess, whose name is equally in danger of being forgotten, and where silence – in the form of the "ineffable" for "The Wild Girl," and of "eloquent silence" in both "The Wild Girl" and "The Red Tent" – is described as a path to the other and to self-knowledge. The second section concentrates on "The Book of Mrs Noah" and "Only Human," which hinge on "voice blurring" and "spectral silence." The third section focuses on "The Handmaid’s Tale" and "Sisters and Strangers," which are exploited as examples of the silence called "reticence." Finally, the third part, “Closing Silences Voicing Openness,” examines to what extent the biblical women truly make their voices heard or if the silences that they choose, or that are newly imposed on them by the end of their tales, risk silencing them again. It reveals striking similarities in the denouements of the selected works, based on the motif of the granddaughter who hears and transmits her female ancestor’s – partly – lost or buried voice. By revealing the six selected novels’ elevation of silence to a highly effective means of meeting and communicating with the other, and, as importantly, of self-definition, this thesis is meant to contribute to the (re)instatement, as a profoundly meaningful and relational phenomenon, of silence, which is too often overlooked or rejected on account of its conventional status as the opposite of language in the binary oppositions structuring Western thought.

Filling in what was left out : voices and silences in contemporary novelistic reconfigurations of biblical women

The shift in biblical studies since the Age of Enlightenment from the so-called positivist (i.e. modernist) paradigm to the postpositivist (i.e. postmodern) paradigm has become a matter of (de)centralisation of meaning and interpretation. To contribute to the topic, I argue that there is a need for both a composite postpositivist theory of meaning and a model that can explain the phenomenon of the so-called vicious circle in interpretation. I propose a theory of interpretative relativity, and a model based on the telephoto effect of an actual zoom lens. According to this theory and the zoom lens model, the force which compels the interpretation is the reader’s (dis)satisfaction with his/her paradigm. Furthermore, the apparent inconsistencies within the text, as well as between the text and its background, will appear greater as the reader centralises his/her view/focus on the text (i.e. becomes cognitively closer to it). In contrast, during the process of decentralisation, the same discrepancies will appear smaller. The only way out of the vicious circle of reasoning within the reader's subjective view of the compiled text is by following textual clues about relations of dependence between that and other texts. These relations can cause the reader to discover a new paradigm which can challenge his/her current paradigm. This shift of the reader’s paradigm is seen as the only way out from the vicious circle. To develop the composite theory of meaning, I have modified the following postpositivist theories: Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary criticism, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s theory of relevance. This model of interpretation is furthermore applied to reading the ‘Sabbath of the LORD’ motif in the narrative in Exodus 16. It is suggested that the research should be continued by applying this model to reading biblical texts of other genres.

From Irritants to Satisfaction: A Model of a Theory of Meaning Applied to Reading the‘Sabbath of the LORD’ Motif In Exodus 16

The aim of this work is to attempt to read the text of Genesis 18-19 in line with the
canonical approach of Brevard S Childs in order to critique his programme through its
actual praxis. In chapter 1 a historical introduction to the discipline of 'biblical
theology' and its texts provides a background against which to contextualise Childs's
own work and its historical development. A detailed description of the approach in
terms of its historical justification and its actual praxis appears in chapter 2. There
certain common criticisms are encountered and refuted. It is also suggested that
Childs's approach is often the target of unwarranted criticism based upon an assumed
foundationalist view of hermeneutics. In chapter 3, this is developed further and it is
argued that the non-foundationalist hermeneutics of Stanley E. Fish provide a
heuristically powerful way of understanding the canonical approach and its 'community
of faith'. Two aspects of the praxis of the canonical approach form the core of
chapter 4: the necessary role of narrative presuppositions and the potential role of
diachronic studies of biblical texts. A description of presuppositions necessary for
understanding Genesis 18-19 are drawn from Genesis 1-17 and outlined, and the
diachronic studies of H. Gunkel is used as an exemplar to test the illumination which
diachronic studies may provide to readers of the canonical text. In chapters 5 and 6, a
detailed exegesis is provided of the canonical text of Genesis 18 and Genesis 19. A
short section on the effects of this exegesis on subsequent Old Testament texts
completes chapter 6. In conclusion, the experience of reading the texts in this way is
used to point out certain aspects and implications of the canonical approach which are
missed when the approach is considered in purely theoretical terms.

background

What must the 'judge of all the earth' do exactly? : a critique through praxis of the canonical approach of Brevard S. Childs.

1 DECLARATION 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 CONTENTS 4 INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER ONE There is no easy rejection 15 CHAPTER TWO What is really real? The Problem of Meaning 30 CHAPTER THREE Symbols that enslave 38 CHAPTER FOUR Facing the chaos 50 CHAPTER FIVE The moving margins 55 CHAPTER SIX Freeing the process forever 65 CONCLUSION 71 BIBLIOGRAPHY 74

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Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women's Lives in the Hebrew Bible

Citations

Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era: Portraits in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Narratives

Filling in what was left out : voices and silences in contemporary novelistic reconfigurations of biblical women

From Irritants to Satisfaction: A Model of a Theory of Meaning Applied to Reading the‘Sabbath of the LORD’ Motif In Exodus 16

What must the 'judge of all the earth' do exactly? : a critique through praxis of the canonical approach of Brevard S. Childs.

A Feminist Critique of the Christian Symbolic Universe