Lori Lefkovitz's stimulating book confirms the arrival of feminist biblical studies—with its particular set of questions and concerns—as a given in contemporary scholarship on the Hebrew Bible. Subversive readings such as those offered by In Scripture are no longer hidden or even deemed “counter” to a dominant reading. Engaging and often original, Lefkovitz takes her place in a line of predecessors such as Phyllis Trible, whose magisterial rhetorical readings of biblical narratives “depatriarchalizes” and recovers tales of women (“Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41, no. 1 [March 1973]: 30–48, and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 1978); Mieke Bal, whose Lethal Love (1987) and Death and Dissymmetry (1988) brilliantly trace scripture's influence on culture and gender (the focus of the present work); and Ilana Pardes, who offers finely tuned close readings of biblical women with the aid of Freud and Bakhtin in Countertraditions in the Bible (1992). Others whom Lefkovitz omits somewhat surprisingly from her study, considering their interest in gender theory, include Susan Ackerman, Warrior Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel (1998) and When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David (Gender, Theory, and Religion) (2005) as well as Claudia Camp, Wise Strange and Holy (2000). Thanks to this group and many others, most of us have come to accept and appreciate the incontrovertible contributions of female characters to a fuller comprehension of biblical narratives. Lefkovitz's book makes this fact ever more apparent.
Lefkovitz turns to the first stories of the Hebrew Bible, those that aim to “tell us not only how things came to be as they are, but why they must be as they are; they at once account for and regulate the present” (14). These stories must be scrutinized and challenged for “their power to have set in motion definitions of the body, the sexual body, and the Jewish sexual body that developed over time” (5). She aims to overturn the influence of these stories, with their privileged position in Western cultural history. Applying gender theory to these tales creates “the project of queering or denaturalizing sex in the very place where nature and sex were first and authoritatively invented, represented and inscribed” (5). She also aims to expose the “relationship between biblical foundation texts and the contradictions of Jewish sexualities as we experience them in our culture and in our lives” (5).
To do so, Lefkovitz relies on psychoanalytic theory. Its language—repetition, compulsion, family romance, envy, and displacement—pervades her prose. Fantasies, anxieties, and ambivalences run fast and furious in the unconscious biblical psyche that Lefkovitz exposes and interprets for us. The past is “deep and dark,” but one must grapple with it, in good psychoanalytic fashion, to escape its hold on us. She deftly weaves together later midrashic interpretations, medieval art, and contemporary materials that include biographies of Dickens and Freud; studies of Jewish masculinity, French feminist theorists, and Judith Butler; book and film reviews; and a Woody Allen movie in her search for the traces and afterlife of biblical stories. The fruits of her labor are strong readings, those that account for seemingly bizarre or ignored details and offer a persuasive argument for “internal resistance in the text itself, as each complexity in the story compromises its own conclusions” (13).
In Chapter 1, Lefkovitz argues that Eve, the snake, and Adam illustrate the depth of biblical anxiety and confusion regarding the categories male and female. A male God births a woman out of a man, reversing an established biological experience and revealing that “beneath the story lies a fear or envy of female sexuality … the birth of the first woman from the side of a man, betrays, and attempts to allay that fear” (19). Male sexuality is “uncontrollable because disassociated and disembodied”; that is, displaced onto an erect snake (22). Meanwhile Eve highlights God's lack of control over her actions, a fact that is remarkably well-tolerated biblically but less so in later rabbinic readings. Eve represents a mother and a seducer—two roles of biblical women that Lefkovitz highlights throughout her book.
Sarah's laughter and Hannah's muttering overflow boundaries, symbolizing their resistance to being contained in “the neat categories of familial roles” (46). In fact, the “barren mother” (an oxymoron, as cleverly noted by Lefkovitz) undermines the authority of the father. The matriarch relies on, and forms a deep alliance with, God at the expense of the patriarch, whose own virility and seed is thrown into doubt. Favoring the second-born son, she resorts to any means at her disposal to ensure that he is the next patriarch and, in so doing, weakens his already fragile masculinity. The biblical mother becomes the prototype of the twentieth-century stereotyped Jewish mother.
In her most insightful reading, Lefkovitz identifies Jacob as a character who must masquerade before his father. He is a man “in drag enacting masculinity,” a man who must be “who he is not in order to inherit the patriarchy” (50). She concludes, “the patriarchy itself is thus built on the foundation of radically destabilized identity categories” (50). God creates this instability, the ultimate father who “compromises the sexual potency and domestic authority of human fathers” (50). The legacy of masquerade and drag (continued by Joseph in the Egyptian court) are the life-saving lies and deception found in stories of “sexual and political passing” that run continuously through Jewish mythic history (62).
In the second half of the book, Lefkovitz turns to the biblical seductress and highlights stories “between a man made to want a woman and a woman who pretends to want a man but actually wants access to his power” (112). These stories substitute violence for sex. Masquerade reappears as the female's weapon of choice. Tamar dresses as a harlot. Esther dresses to kill. The identification of male and female uses of masquerade seems particularly convincing and nicely weaves the two parts of the text together. Lefkovitz again has contemporary stereotypes in mind as she links the stories of the femme fatale with the “JAP” (Jewish American Princess) to offer an explanation for the Jewish male's avoidance of Jewish women today.
Lefkovitz concludes that “gender and sexual reversals are so pervasive in biblical narratives as to ultimately confound the stability of the categories themselves” (10). She summarizes her findings in this way: “Each story is fraught with anxiety and insecurity about identity, expressed through contradiction and category confusion: patriarchs masquerade as men; mothers are infertile, fathers lack authority; sexual women lack desire; all power is tenuous; all love is uncertain” (158).
There is much to admire in this work. I appreciate Lefkovitz's application of gender theory in original readings of both female and male. Her language is often poetic, her handling of different texts and genres over time is skillfully done, and her passion to clarify the enduring legacy of sexual limitations and subversions for our time is moving. I would have appreciated a more critical engagement with Freudian theory and the assumptions of psychoanalysis. I am also skeptical of the repeated claims she makes on behalf of the unconscious of a culture. Although it is a given that biblical narratives continue to have a hold over our imagination, Lefkovitz might have taken more care in establishing links between biblical stories and contemporary stereotypes concerning the feminized male Jew, the Jewish mother, and the figure of the JAP.
In Scripture strikes me as very much of our time. We live in a culture in which all bets are off, in a world made strange, and it is in this setting that Lefkovitz's book finds its place, leaving us with a richer and more nuanced appreciation for the shifting and multiple ways in which we take on, and discard, our identities as sexual and gendered readers of biblical texts.
