An-Other Woman: Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. Staging the Body Politic

Abstract

This article is an attempt to use a number of rabbinic texts that portray the sexual encounter between Joseph and Potiphar's wife in order to focus on the transformation of the semiotics of the body in late antiquity. Rabbinic literature, following the lead of Second Temple literature, evinces a sustained interest in the erotic aspects of the seduction scene (Genesis 39). Peter Brown ascribes such a change to a paradigm shift in the very meaning of sexuality itself Following up on this insight, I try to show that when the body's sexuality becomes a dominant vehicle for religious and social discourses, it becomes necessary to read it politically, as an arena for displaying and contesting those plays of power and knowledge that constitute identity and experience. In certain rabbinic texts that represent this encounter (esp. bSot 36b), the biblical moral code is preempted by a gendered cultural code. Thus, the sexual nature of the seduction recedes into the background, and in its place emerges the theme of a cultural seduction. In this new paradigm, Potiphar's wife functions not only as Joseph's sexual other but as his cultural other as well, and the story of the trials and tribulations of a Hebrew slave in a foreign and hostile environment becomes emblematic of rabbinic culture itself The dramatic situation portrayed in this reconstituted Joseph narrative would have been easily recognized as one of the most popular stock plots of Greco-Roman culture-the seduction plot, most notably found in the Greek romances and adultery mime. When the Rabbis re-imagine the biblical text they do so using the theological, theatrical, and literary models provided by the culture of late antiquity. Through a cross-coding of the gender and cultural codes in the Joseph narrative, the hegemonic discourse of the theater is exploited to denigrate the dominant foreign culture as a form of deviant identity. By founding ethnic differences upon a gendered dichotomy the seduction scene is transformed, and erotic attraction becomes a trope for cultural congress, dramatizing the transgression of cultural boundaries as mirrored in the body. The phenomenon I address is this use of gender discourse to establish cultural identity, and how discourses of gender were employed to produce and police discourses of identity in the social formation of rabbinic Judaism.