“CHERCHEZ LA FEMME,” OR SEX, LIES AND THE BIBLE

Abstract

The article's title both unearths and introduces the article's prevailing proclivities on ideological grounds: unveiling and displaying the way the Biblical text cultivates an unworthy credo that embraces and internalizes indecent norms of abusing women by depriving them of their elementary rights and freedom, by belittling their intellectual faculties, by considering the woman as nothing a passive womb, or a piece of merchandise, devoid of any rights, appreciation, compassion. Indeed, the Bible exhibits some example that may contest the above. Such are the cases of Debora the prophetess; Yael who killed bravely the Israel's foe Sisera; and to a certain extend Miriam. Nevertheless, those examples are very few in comparison with the “myriads” cases in which the Biblical woman is humiliated, exploited, hoaxed, “enslaved”, both helplessly and hopelessly “harnessed” to a male oriented agenda, derogated, animadverted, put to shame, robbed of her most basis needs, wishes and an opportunity to defme and materialize her own role and place in society. The article may be bisected into two parts: the descriptive, panoramic part and the critical, interpretative, analyzed part. The first part reviews both panoramically and comprehensively “hosts” of cases that plausibly attest to the article's leading idea. The second part, however, is the more analytical part of the article since it interprets fastidiously and systematically some Biblical cases. Among them are the following. Eve is degraded, humiliated and wronged in the story of the Garden of Eden since she brilliantly breaches the Bible's agenda, one that promotes the male's verbal and intellectual faculties, by exhibiting an admirable level of cleverness and intellectual capacity that eclipse and cloud Adam's. Sara in the chronicle of Abraham's descent to Egypt where she is practically enslaved and sold like a sexual object to Pharaoh only to enable Abraham's selfish, egoistic, shamefully materialistic desires materialize and being met by disgraceful success. Tamar the wife of sinful Er and daughter in law of Judah who is portrayed as a swindler, a pathetically dishonorable person who is ignominiously stumbled by his sexual lust. Tamar's deprivation and humiliation are underlined by comparing her chronicles with Joseph's in the land of Egypt. In all cases mentioned above, and in others as well, the heartlessly, shamefully cynical fashion in which the woman is put down and deprived to the point that she is incredulously used by the male oriented society as a piece of sellable merchandise, or as nothing but a womb that is expected to serve the male's ambitions and the Bible's agenda, is analyzed insightfully while unveiling in the text in focus aesthetic devices, poetic patterns and literary mechanisms that serve effectively the Biblical text's ideology. The article commences with a comprehensive portrayal of the study of feminism and anti feminism in world's literature, thought and drama.