7. Fisher, 230.
8. Gruber, 134.
9. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 9. See also Nachman Avigad, “Seal, Seals,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 17 vols (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House), vol. 14, 1072-73; and Bonnie S. Magness-Gardiner, “Seals, Mesopotamian,” in ABD, vol. 5, 1062-63.
10. J. A. Emerton, “Judah and Tamar,” Vetus Testamentum 29, no. 4 (October 1979): 412.
11. Francis I. Anderson and David Noel Freedman, tr., notes, and comm. Hosea, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), 225.
12. Anderson and Freedman, 224.
13. “Cosmetics,” in EJ, vol. 5, 980.
14. Niditch, 145.
15. Niditch, 144.
16. Niditch, 144-46, fn. 8.
17. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 222. See also George W. Coats, “Widow’s Rights,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 1972): 463.
18. Deut. 25:5–10. See also Coats, 463.
19. Anderson, 36.
20. Deut. 25:5–10. See also Coats, 463.
21. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, rev. ed., (London: S.C.M. Press Ltd., 1972), 356.
22. Coats, 464.
23. Calum M. Carmichael, “A Ceremonial Crux,” Journal of Biblical Literature 96, no. 3 (September 1977): 321-36.
24. Coats, 462.
25. Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem, or The Politics of Sex (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 169.
26. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909-1938), vol. 2, 35-36, and “Tamar,” in EJ, vol. 15, 783.
27. Thomas Mann, Joseph the Provider (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), 214.
28. Mann, 200.
CHAPTER NINE
1. B. P. Robinson, “Zipporah to the Rescue,” Vetus Testamentum 36, no. 4 (October 1986): 450, fn. 9.
2. Robinson, 449.
3. Julian Morgenstern, “The ‘Bloody Husband’ (?) (Exod. 4:24–26) Once Again,” Hebrew Union College Annual 34 (Union of Hebrew Congregations, 1963): 38, 43. Morgenstern suggests that Exodus 4:24–26 reflects a primitive form of marriage in the ancient Middle East in which the husband’s task is simply to impregnate his wife, who remains in the household of her own family. By taking it upon herself to circumcise her son, Morgenstern argues, Zipporah is performing a task traditionally assigned to a woman’s eldest brother in such marriages.
4. Trent C. Butler, “An Anti-Moses Tradition,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 12 (May 1979): 9, 11.
5. Morgenstern, 52.
6. G. Vermes, “Baptism and Jewish Exegesis: New Light from Ancient Sources,” New Testament Studies 4 (1957-1958) (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 310, 312-13.
7. Robinson, 457.
8. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909-1938), vol. 2, 295. Satan also appears in place of Yahweh as the attacker in the Book of Jubilees, a biblical-era work that was excluded from the Hebrew Bible but appears in the Apocrypha. Vermes, 314-15.
9. Moshe Greenberg, Understanding Exodus (New York: Burman House for the Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1969), 110.
10. Greenberg, 113.
11. New JPS, 90.
12. Marvin H. Pope, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols., ed. David Noel Freedman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 1, 721.
13. Morgenstern, 45-46.
14. G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren, ed. The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eeirdmans Publishing Company, 1978), 270 et. seq.
15. Greenberg, 114, fn. 1.
16. Ginzberg, vol. 2, 329.
17. Lawrence Kaplan, “‘And the Lord Sought to Kill Him’ (Exod. 4:24): Yet Once Again,” Hebrew Annual Reviews (Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University), (1981): 66. See also Robinson, 456, fn. 17.
18. Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 131.
19. Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 46-47.
20. Morgenstern, 41.
21. Vermes, 309.
22. Robinson, 448.
23. Vermes, 314-315, fn. 1.
24. J. H. Hertz., The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 2d ed. (London: Soncino Press, 1981), 219, fn. 10.
25. R. E. Clements, “The Relation of Children to the People of God in the Old Testament,” Baptist Quarterly 11, no. 5 (January 1996): 198.
26. Robinson, 459.
27. Edmund Leach, “Why Did Moses Have a Sister?” in Edmund Leach and D. Allan Aycock, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myths (Cambridge [England] and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 34-35, 47.
28. Leach, 35.
29. Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 89-92.
30. Cheryl Anne Brown, No Longer Be Silent (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1992), 26, 27.
31. Leach, 39. See also Pardes, 89.
32. Pardes, 90.
33. Pardes, 91-92.
34. Pardes, 87, citing Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 98.
35. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 273.
36. Julian Morgenstern, “The ‘Bloody Husband’ (?) (Exod. 4:24–26) Once Again,” Hebrew Union College Annual 34 (Union of Hebrew Congregations, 1963): 43-44, fn. 27, citing the work of A. J. Reinach and Hugo Gressmann.
37. The notion that Exodus 4:24–26 depicts the symbolic deflowering of Zipporah by a lusty god or demon has also been embraced by other Bible scholars, including Eduard Meyer, Georg Beer, and Elias Auerbach. See Hans Kosmala, “The Bloody Husband,” Vetus Testamentum 12 (January 1962): 16.
38. Morgenstern, 1963, 43, fn. 27.
39. Hans Kosmala, 16-17. See also Morgenstern, 44, fn. 27 (“[S]o far-fetched and groundless …, so arbitrary and utterly without proof, that it would hardly merit presentation … were it not put forth by a scholar of high repute”) and Martin Buber, Moses (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 57, where Buber cites these readings of Exodus 4:24–26 as evidence of “the devastation which the excessive enticement and allure of ethnology has effected in the history of religion.”
40. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 39, citing Eduard Meyer.
41. Sarna, 29.
42. Sarna, 158.
43. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 184.
44. Morgenstern, 1963, 36.
45. Sarna, 158.
46. Morgenstern, 1963, 36.
47. Hertz, 201.
48. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 4.
49. Sarna, 157, 159.
50. Kaplan, 67, citing J. Blau, “Hatan Damim,” Tarbiz 26 (1956): 1-3.
51. Kaplan, 68.
52. Greenberg, 117, n. 1.
53. Kosmala, 21.
54. Buber, 58.
55. Buber, 58. (Emphasis added.)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. Leila Leah Bronner, “Valorized or Vilified? The Women of Judges in Midrashic Sources,” in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 73
2. J. Cheryl Exum, “The Tragic Vision and Biblical Narrative,” in Signs and Wonders, ed. J. Cheryl Exum (Society of Biblical Literature, 1989), 64, citing Y. Zakovitch.
3. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909-1938), vol. 4, 43.
4. Gila Ramras-Rauch, in “Fathers and Daughters,” in “Mappings of the Biblical Terrain,” ed. Vincent L. Tollers and John Maier, Bucknell Review 33, no. 2 (1990): 165.
5. I. Mendelsohn. “The Disinheritance of Jephthah in the Light
of Paragraph 27 of the Lit-Ishtar Code,” in Israel Exploration Journal 4, (1954): 116.
6. Mendelsohn, 116, 118-19.
7. Exum, 1989, 73.
8. Robert G. Boling, tr. and intro., Judges, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), 208.
9. Exum, 1989, 67, fn. 4.
10. Barry G. Webb, “The Theme of the Jephthah Story,” The Reformed Theological Review 45, no. 2 (May-August 1986): 40.
11. Daniel Landes, “A Vow of Death,” in Confronting Omnicide, ed. Daniel Landes (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1991), 11.
12. Exum, 1989, 66, citing the work of Phyllis Trible.
13. Exum, 1989, 66.
14. Exum, 1989, 79.
15. Amos Oz, “Upon This Evil Earth,” in Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 217.
16. Cynthia Baker, “Pseudo-Philo and the Transformation of Jephthah’s Daughter,” in Anti-Covenant, ed. Mieke Bal (Sheffield, England: Almond Press, 1989), 197.
17. Ben Zion Bokser, The Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981), 9-10.
18. Bokser, 50, 107.
19. Landes, 7.
20. Boling, 211.
21. Ginzberg, vol. 4, 44.
22. Anne Michele Tapp, “An Ideology of Expendability,” in Anti-Covenant, ed. Mieke Bal, 174, fn. 10.
23. Exum, 1989, 71, fn. 6.
24. Webb, 40.
25. Joseph M. Davis, “On the Idea of Covenant,” Conservative Judaism 41, no. 4 (summer 1989): 26-27.
26. Landes, 8.
27. Landes, 8-9.
28. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 185.
29. Biblical Antiquities 39.11, cited in Cheryl Anne Brown, No Longer Be Silent (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1992), 97.
30. Ginzberg, vol. 4, 43-44.
31. Ginzberg, vol. 4, 44.
32. Ginzberg, vol. 4, 44.
33. Boling, 197.
34. J. Cheryl Exum, “On Judges II,” in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Brenner, 140.
35. Peggy L. Day, “From the Child Is Born the Woman,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1989), 69, fn. 14, citing the work of Gustav Bostrom.
36. Boling, 209. Boling finds the suggestion “doubtful.”
37. Frye, 185.
38. Ramras-Rauch, 167.
39. David Penchansky, “Staying the Night,” in Reading between Texts, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1992), 84. But Penchansky goes on to disassociate himself from his own speculations: “They all have serious flaws and lack any strong textual or artifactual support” (85).
40. Adrien Jams Bledstein, “Is Judges a Woman’s Satire of Men Who Play God?” in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Brenner, 46.
41. Exum, 1989, 70.
42. Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 34-35.
43. Stephen L. Harris, Understanding the Bible, 2nd ed. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1985), 83.
44. Martin Noth, The Old Testament World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 177-78.
45. Speiser, 7, n. 26.
46. Harris, 3-4.
47. Gerald Cooke, “The Sons of (the) God(s),” Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentische Wissenschaft, band 76 (1964): 24.
48. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Avon Books, 1978), 9.
49. Patai, 9.
50. Patai, 13.
51. Patai, 113-14.
52. Patai, 12.
53. Carole Fontaine, “The Deceptive Goddess in Ancient Near Eastern Myth,” Semeia 42 (1988):86.
54. Patai, 13.
55. Ben Zion Bokser, The Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981), 21.
56. Bib Ant. 40.5-6, in Brown, 110.
57. Bib. Ant. 40.4, in Brown, 106.
58. Baker, 202.
59. Murphy, Pseudo-Philo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 267.
60. Bib. Ant 40.4-7, in Baker, 206-7 (Translation by D. J. Harrington).
61. Bib. Ant. 40.6, in Brown, 110.
62. Bib. Ant. 40.4, 40.6, in Brown, 106, 110.
63. Bib Ant. 40.5-6, in Brown, 110.
64. Bib Ant 40.6, in Brown, 110 (Format has been slightly adapted).
65. Brown, 94.
66. Tapp, 172.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnelin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), vol. 2, 1214-15. Original translation by Adam Kirsch.
2. David M. Gunn, “Joshua and Judges,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 119.
3. Stuart Lasine, “Guest and Host in Judges 19,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29 (June 1984): 40.
4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (New York: European Publishing Company, 1898; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972), 12, 36.
5. Stanton, 7.
6. Carole Fontaine, “The Deceptive Goddess in Ancient Near Eastern Myth,” Semeia 42 (1988): 84-85.
7. Johanna W. H. Bos, “Out of the Shadows,” Semeia 42 (1988): 38, fn, 1, citing the work of Naomi Steinberg.
8. Esther Fuchs, “The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible,” Semeia 46 (1989): 154.
9. Joseph Heller, God Knows (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 5.
10. Gila Ramras-Rauch, “Fathers and Daughters,” in “Mappings of the Biblical Terrain,” ed. Vincent L. Tollers and John Maier, Bucknell Review 33, no. 2 (1990): 168.
11. Ramras-Rauch, 160.
12. Robert G. Boling, tr. and intro. Judges, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), 273-74.
13. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 66-67.
14. J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented Women (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1993), 177.
15. Anson Rainey and Ben-Zion (Benno) Schereschewsky, “Concubine,” in Encyclopoedia Judaica, 17 vols. (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House), vol. 5, 862-65.
16. Trible, 66.
17. Trible, 79-80.
18. Anne Michele Tapp, “An Ideology of Expendability,” in Anti-Covenant, ed. Mieke Bal (Sheffield, England: Almond Press, 1989), 173.
19. Tapp, 171. (I have used the word “stories” in place of the technical term “fabulae” that appears in the original passage. “Fabulae” is defined by Tapp as “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors,” a definition that she credits to leading feminist Bible scholar Mieke Bal.)
20. Adrien Janis Bledstein, “Is Judges a Woman’s Satire of Men Who Play God?” in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 34.
21. David Penchansky, “Staying the Night,” in Reading between Texts (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1992), 84-85. (As previously noted, Penchansky raises but disassociates himself from these intriguing scenarios.)
22. Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 103.
23. Friedman, 117.
24. Bledstein, 53.
25. Boling, 1109.
26. Leila Leah Bronner, “Valorized or Vilified?”, in Brenner, 78.
27. Barnabus Lindars, “Deborah’s Song,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 65, no. 2 (spring 1983): 173.
28. Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, 1990, 394.
29. Bledstein, 52.
30. Susan Niditch, “Eroticism and Death in the Tale of Jael,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1989), 46, citing Robert Alter, “From Line to Story in Biblical Verse,” Poetics Today 4 (1983): 633.
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 40