Poor banished children of Eve: woman as evil in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible, by Gale A. Yee. Minneapolis; Fortress, 2003. Pp. xii + 298. $24,00 (paper). ISBN 0800634578. Gale Yee has written a ground-breaking book. She relocates feminist criticism of the Bible within general ideological criticism, in which analysis of gender must be forged into a single method with analysis of class, race, and colonialism. She draws impressively on the social sciences to understand roles, particularly their social in societies resembling ancient Israel. She demonstrates her proposed method by readings of four sections of the Hebrew Bible. Yee deals with advanced work in both ideological criticism and the social sciences, and her book will probably have its initial impact mostly with colleagues and with graduate students. But she opens it to a wider readership by clear writing and excellent use of summaries. Notes and bibliography are full and helpful. After a programmatic introduction comes a chapter (2) on ideological criticism, based heavily on Terry Eagleton's Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), with use also of Michele Barrett and Fredric Jameson. The treatment here, of the dialectical relation between structures of governing ideas, their material grounds, and their cultural products (such as texts), is generally excellent. Yee offers a particularly detailed materialist theory of literary (pp. 20-23). There follows an even better chapter on the social sciences. Its first section, on historical modes of in Israel, lays out a scheme that has become widely accepted: a mode before the monarchy, native-tributary during times of independence under monarchy, under the great empires, and slave-based (late and of marginal importance). The remaining sections of ch. 3, on Israelite kinship systems, honor and shame, women's informal power, and women's separate world, I found the most enlightening part of the book. Yee draws heavily here on field studies, especially from the Arab world. Each of the remaining four chapters (4-7) submits a biblical text first to an analysis-including analysis of mode of production and of society and family-followed by an analysis of specific textual issues. Yee chooses texts from widely different periods. She relates Genesis 2-3 to the transition from a familial to a monarchic (native-tributary) mode of production. She sees Hosea 1-2 as coming substantially from Hosea's own time during the independent monarchies. Her other two texts belong to the foreign-tributary mode: Ezekiel 23 comes from Babylon at the time of the exile, Proverbs 1-9 from postexilic Yehud under Persian colonial domination. The extrinsic analyses in these chapters offer a wealth of excellent insights, such as: the regulation of sexuality and privileging of nuclear family over larger kin-group in emerging states (pp. 64-67); the relation between agribusiness in Hosea's time and the Yahweh-alone movement that he spearheaded (pp. 84-85, 92-95); the application of recent trauma studies to Ezekiel and his exiled community (pp. 112-17; this I particularly recommend); and the complexity of the definition of foreign by the returned exiles (the golâ community) and the economic implications of foreign marriages (pp. 140-46). Yee uses current research to identify the specific impact on women of each of these social processes. The intrinsic analyses seem to me to constitute the only weakness in a strong book. This is due to Yee's reading method, a method based on a true and vital insight but employed here one-sidedly. She believes that the gender dynamics in each of her texts function as a symbolic alibi for quite different dynamics, mostly political and economic but also psychological, in the male creators of the texts. In Genesis 2-3, for example, gender struggle symbolizes and displaces the class struggle behind the establishment of monarchy, while the women in Ezekiel 23 function to ease the experience of emasculation in defeated and deported leaders. …