“Little Women: Lesser-Known Characters from the Hebrew Bible”
March 11-13, 2007
An interdisciplinary conference on the Jewish and Christian afterlives of scriptural women like the midwives of Exodus, the daughter of Jephthah, the wise woman of Abel and the wife of Job. Speakers will explore the appearance of these figures in exegesis, midrash, literature, and the visual arts.
All conference events are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Program Coordinator Cristine Hutchison-Jones at 617-358-1754 or crissy@bu.edu.
Sunday, March 11, 2007, 6pm
“The Witch of Endor: Reading the Future”
Gregory Maguire,
author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue, first-floor auditorium
Using the Hebrew Bible reference to the Witch of Endor and her prophecies to King Saul about his imminent death, novelist Gregory Maguire will consider the correlation of prophecy and sympathy in the Book of Samuel story and other sources, including his own work in progress, Deposition of an Oracle.
Maguire’s talk will be followed by performances of the witch of Endor’s arias from Handel’sSaul and Honegger’s King David by mezzo soprano Emily Marvosh, directed and accompanied on piano by Scott Jarrett, Music Director of Marsh Chapel at Boston University.
Monday, March 12, 2007, 9am-12:45pm
Little Women in Torah
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue, rooms 426-428
Speakers listed in the order in which they will present.
“‘The Problem That Has No Name’: Noah’s Wife”
Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion, Boston University
The woman known to us only as Noah’s wife plays a central role in the account of the Flood and God’s new covenant with humanity. She is mentioned five times in the Bible and is also discussed in rabbinic literature. This paper explores her namelessness in light of her relationships with two mysteries: Noah and God. It focuses particularly on the psychological and spiritual challenges of being married to a religious fanatic who turns out to be not only righteous but right. The presentation will examine biblical and rabbinic texts and then turn to depictions of Noah’s wife in contemporary American culture, particularly in children’s literature and outsider art.
“Hagar en procès: The Abject in Search of Subjectivity”
J. Cheryl Exum, Professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Sheffield
Female characters in the Bible are almost always minor characters, not subjects of their own stories. This is true of Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maid who becomes Abraham’s wife and bears him a son, in spite of the fact that, unusually, she is the subject of a theophany, two theophanies in fact. The book of Genesis, in which Hagar’s story such as it is appears, is about Israel’s identity formation. Who constitutes the ‘self’ that calls itself ‘Israel’, the chosen people, and who does not? To draw on the language of Julia Kristeva: the abjection of Hagar and Ishmael is the first and most violent in a series of abjections in Genesis whereby Israel, as a sujet en procès personified in its ancestor Abraham, seeks to define itself over against its neighbors. But what about Hagar, who is given a degree of subjectivity by the biblical narrator? Can she also be viewed as a subject in process? In this paper I propose to read the accounts in Genesis 16 and 21.8-21 not only as Israel’s abjection of Hagar (Egypt) and Ishmael (the Ishmaelites) but also—though it is truncated because this is Israel’s story not Hagar’s—as Hagar’s attempt to establish her subjectivity by abjecting Israel.
“Saviours and Liars: The Midwives of Exodus 1”
Esther Schor, Professor of English, Princeton University
Shifrah and Puah, the midwives who disobey Pharoah’s command to kill baby boys in Exodus 1, have perplexed two millennia of biblical commentators. Even the matter of their ethnic identity—were they Hebrews or Egyptians?—is debated. They are both saviours and liars, God-fearing yet fearless before Pharoah. Drawing on a variety of exegetical traditions—midrashic, talmudic, patristic—this paper explores how several readings of the Exodus story radiate outward from the decisive, defiant act of Shifrah and Puah. There is, finally, an irony to reading the Exodus story as their legacy: While these midwives were blessed with a legacy of their own, they were cognizant, above all, of the fragility of our most basic human legacy – the bestowing of life on a new generation.
“Brides of Blood: Women at the Outset of Exodus”
Jacqueline Osherow, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Utah
This paper will explore the alternative approach to power and national identity exemplified by the cluster of female characters who predominate in the first chapters of Exodus (the midwives’, Moses’ mother and sister, Pharoah’s daughter) and what effect their example has on this Biblical paradigm of nation-building through direct confrontation. It will also trace the symbolic recap of Genesis in those first chapters to demonstrate that Joseph’s – and subsequently the Hebrew slaves’ — relation to Egypt is marked as feminine, Moses’ return to Egypt, as masculine. In this light Professor Osherow will pay particular attention to the mysterious interlude of Zipporah circumcising her (and Moses’) son, and what may be implied when Zipporah refers to Moses as a “bridegroom of blood.”
Monday, March 12, 2007, 2-4pm
Little Women in the Visual Arts
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue, rooms 426-428
Speakers listed in the order in which they will present.
“Bibles, Midrashim, and Medieval Tales: the Artistic Journey of Potiphar’s Wife”
Ena Heller, Executive Director, Museum of Biblical Art, New York City
This paper presents the history of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in art as a test-case for the exploration of sources, constructs, and historical contexts, and the ways in which they have defined, over the centuries, “biblical art.” Both Jewish and Christian art use multiple narrative sources, embellishing or altering the biblical story with details from rabbinic exegesis and medieval lore. The depiction of the seductress – the details of the portrayal as well as the frequency of the scene in certain periods – also sheds light on issues of patronage, message, and the respective society’s view of women, seduction, and rape. The story of Potiphar’s Wife thus becomes, in turn, an illustration of Joseph’s virtue, an allusion to Christ’s Passion, an admonition against infidelity, or a judgment on women and their loose morals. Each period, and each work of art, weaves its own meaning – and pointed message – around this turning point in the biblical story of Joseph.
“The Dissemination of Jephthah’s Daughter”
Susanna Bede Caroselli, Professor of Art History, Messiah College
An examination of the medieval visual imagery of the sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter as it is presented outside biblical narrative, including appearances in the Mirror of Man’s Salvation, Moralized Bibles, and John Gower’s Confessio amantis, which reveals both discomfort and fascination with images of violence done to the innocent. This paper addresses why this image was appropriated and what it might convey, then and now.
“Femme Fatale: Judith in Christian Art from the Carolingians to Caravaggio”
Gauvin Bailey, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Religion, Boston College
From Early Christian times to the Baroque and beyond, Judith has punctuated Christian art as a symbol of two seemingly disparate qualities: feminine fortitude and loyalty on one hand, and beauty and sensuality on the other. Although Judith is a minor figure in Scripture (she does not appear in the canonical scriptures at all, only the Apocrypha), her role as a hero to the Israelites and as a biblical-era sex symbol has guaranteed her wider exposure in Western Christian art.
Monday, March 12, 2007, 7pm
“The Wives of King David ”: A reading and discussion from The Life of David
Robert Pinsky, Professor of English, Boston University
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue, rooms 426-428
The reading will be followed by a reception.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007, 9am-12:45pm
Little Women in the Prophets and the Writings
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue, rooms 426-428
Speakers listed in the order in which they will present.
“How A Woman Unmans A King: Gender Reversal and the Woman of Thebez in
Judges 9”
Ken Stone, Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible, Chicago Theological Seminary
This paper focuses on the unnamed “certain woman” in the tower of Thebez who, in Judges 9, drops a millstone onto the head of Abimelech, the man who would be king, during a battle. Drawing upon ancient Near Eastern and biblical associations between gender and warfare, the anthropology of gender, and queer theory, the paper reflects on the ways in which the Woman of Thebez assumes a phallic position and “unmans” Abimelech, thereby placing herself alongside better-known women from Judges such as Jael and Delilah.
“Is Naomi a Liberal Secularist?: The Politics of Loss and Redemption in Jonathan Edwards’ Sermon, ‘Ruth’s Resolution’”
Jay Twomey, Assistant Professor of English, University of Cincinnati
In looking at treatments of Ruth in 17th-19th century commentaries, sermons and popular culture, one is struck by the paradoxical sense that the stability of Ruth and Orpah, the Moabite sisters-in-law whose cultural significance hinges upon their choice vis-à-vis Naomi – to return with her to Israel, or to remain with their families – is purchased only by the instability of Naomi. That is, the rhetorical function played by the younger women, in any number of commentarial contexts, somehow depends upon a profound complexity, and even a fundamental vagueness, in the character of their mother-in-law. This paper will explore this dynamic by focusing principally on Jonathan Edwards’ early sermon “Ruth’s Resolution,” and by thinking about Naomi in that sermon in terms of: (a) traditional and contemporary interpretations of Ruth 1:1-18; (b) recent critical work on the Book of Ruth; and (c) theoretical insights from new work in political theology.
“Men May War from Son to Son, but Wise Women’s Work is Never Done: 2 Samuel 20”
Katheryn P. Darr, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Boston University School of Theology
Amidst familial treachery and inter-tribal conflict, the unnamed “wise woman of Abel” delivers her city, Abel of Beth-maacah, from destruction by means of a strategic proverb performance, a deft use of female imagery, and a precise plan to “overthrow” Sheba, son of Bichri.
“Ms. Job and the Problem of God”
Erin Runions, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Pomona College
Scholars have noticed the ambiguity of Job’s wife’s mininimalist speech: does she tell Job to curse or bless God and die? As Tod Linafelt has suggested, her words set up the ambiguity of the text’s argument with God. Job responds to his wife, by telling her she speaks like “one of the foolish ones.” Perhaps convinced by the many diatribes provoked by this passage about the dangers of women, few scholars have made much of the connection between Job’s response and his description of the “foolish ones” in Job 30:8ff. There foolish ones are described as those who have to scrounge for food, who are haggard from want or hunger. In this paper, I will explore the ramifications of this particular interaction in the larger context of the portrayal of women in wisdom literature. My question is whether and how the interaction between Job and his wife sets up not only the argument with and about God, but also suggests the way in which socio-economic interests—so much at stake in the portrayal of women in book of Proverbs—are also ambiguously encoded in this argument.
“Job’s Wife: The Strange Case of the Disappearing Woman”
Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Virginia
This paper examines the brief and enigmatic appearance of Job’s wife in the biblical Book of Job and her legacy in later interpretations, both ancient and modern, which attempt to make sense of her motives and meanings. In the Septuagint, the Testament of Job, and The Trial, Frank Kafka’s “midrash” on the Book of Job, her character is, on the one hand, necessarily elaborated upon – often through an allusion to or as an inversion of other biblical women, like Dinah of Genesis, the strange woman of Proverbs, and Potiphar’s wife. On the other hand, despite these elaborations, Job’s wife, like her biblical progenitor, continues to function as the woman who mysteriously disappears, thus casting a long shadow on Job’s putative restoration.