Patriarchal Narratives Research Articles

From Joseph to Moses: The Narratives of Exodus 1-2

Abstract In this paper it is argued that the canonical text of Exodus 1-2 is a compilation of three originally independent narratives belonging to the pentateuchal sources J, E, and P. The text of Exodus 1-2 is divided source-critically, and each individual narrative analyzed on its own terms. Each of these stories contains specific narrative claims that are distinct from that of the canonical text as a whole, and each represents a continuation of the patriarchal narratives into the Exodus account.

Focusing the Gaze: The Role of Music in Film Adaptations of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

This article illustrates how four productions of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice both reinforce and depart from standard film conventions of male and female perspectives, which are coded by both the visual and soundtrack elements. The narrative of Pride and Prejudice, with its dual climaxes illustrated by the two proposals of Fitzwilliam Darcy, helps break some of the filmic conventions for media set in and close to the Regency period. Consequently, the perspective is fourfold, split by gender and circumstance and falling into the categories of male, female, joined (coupled), and society. Although the female perspective grows in importance in the twenty-first century, the music cannot escape the traditional patriarchal narrative. The musical and visual fusing of the couple reinforces the male viewpoint at the end of the film. This study examines the 1940 MGM production, the 1980 BBC miniseries, the 1995 A&E miniseries, and the 2005 Focus/Universal production.

Kate Bush, The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve and the Uses of Symbolic Transformation

In Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, and her film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, she engages with the symbolism of The Red Shoes fairytale as first depicted in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale and later developed by the Powell and Pressburger film (1948) of the same name. In Bush’s versions of the tale she attempts to find a space of agency for the main female protagonist in a plot structure over-determined by patriarchal narrative and symbolic logic. I will argue that it is through her own use of mystical symbolism — the Line, the Cross and the Curve — mediated through the deployment of ritual magick and kabbalistic ritual — that she breaks the ‘spell’ of the red shoes story where the main female character can escape the gender specific ‘curse’ of the red shoes.

A Study of the Patriarchal Narrative through the Biographical Analysis

A Study of the Patriarchal Narrative through the Biographical Analysis

Shylock Is Shakespeare. Kenneth Gross . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xi+202.

<i>Shylock Is Shakespeare</i>. Kenneth Gross . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xi+202.

Abraham, Blessing, and the Nations: A Reexamination of the Niphal and Hitpael of כרך in the Patriarchal Narratives

Abraham, Blessing, and the Nations: A Reexamination of the Niphal and Hitpael of כרך in the Patriarchal Narratives

Short Note

AbstractFamilial succession is a complex issue in the patriarchal narratives. One area of consistency is the designation of the firstborn as bkwr, a title or designation that is never transferred.

Melville's Bibles (review)

R E V I E W ILANA PARDES Melville’s Bibles Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. viii+ 192 pages. F or astonishing undergraduate students in a Moby-Dick seminar I teach, nothing succeeds quite like reading the Book of Jonah. Though usually at least passingly familiar with the story of a man swallowed by a whale, students revel in unpacking the narrative’s surprising details, its absurdist relation to time and space, the Ninevites’ lavish repentance, Jonah’s miserable pouting. But when God steps forward to end the story espousing universalism and cracking a terrific joke, they nearly rub their eyes in disbelief to find a book of the Hebrew Bible telling what seems to them so frankly unbiblical a story. Despite being as Father Mapple says “one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures,” the Book of Jonah delivers a bracing indication that the biblical canon is not ideologically unified. And since the one thing most of my students know for sure about the Bible is that it is a “canon”—a monolithic set of traditions and teachings devoted to establishing and enshrining its own authority—the evidently contrarian Jonah’s inclusion in the canon forces them to consider what the Bible is after all. Such a reconsideration is precisely what Ilana Pardes identifies in Melville’s Bibles as the larger aim in Moby-Dick, through which, “with unparalleled verve,” Melville “opens up the question of what counts as Bible and what counts as interpretation” (1). A Hebrew and Biblical scholar and comparatist, Pardes has published books on the canonical heteroglossia of female Biblical traditions such as Miriam’s song, Rachel’s dream, and the Song of Songs (Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach [1992]), and on the national imagination within the patriarchal narratives (The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible [2000]). In such work as well as her new book on Melville’s Biblical imagination, Pardes regards the Bible as a “cultural” text, one constituted in a fluid process of on-going textual assertion, interpretation, and reinterpretation that she designates as “exegetical.” Pardes signals with this term the need for critical commentary, the leading out of a text’s obscure or latent meaning, but her Hebraic sense of the critical enterprise of exegesis has less to do with explication (producing definitive answers or interpretations) than C 2009 The Authors Journal compilation C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 88 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W it does with the compounding of story-telling. The “sacred knowledge” of the Hebrew community that produced the Biblical text, “is not the invention of a select circle, but rather the product of extensive negotiations between different socio-ideological groups, different beliefs, and different dreams.” While the Biblical text invariably “bears the stamp of [an] official religion,” it remains “the product of collective imagination and collective work” and thus “gives expression to a whole gamut of perspectives” (Biography of Ancient Israel 90, 92). In persuasively identifying the driving aesthetic force behind the creation of Moby-Dick as Melville’s exegetical impulse—his tendency to receive and think through Scriptural narratives by retelling them—, Pardes follows Robert Alter’s observation that the Hebrew “culture of exegesis” that produced the variety of the Hebrew Bible continued over two millennia later to inspire modern literary artists such as Faulkner, Kafka, and Joyce. Modern novelists work exegetically when they acknowledge Scripture’s authority by responding to its puzzles, rewriting its narratives, and extending the range of its validity within the imagination. In this welcome redefinition of Scriptural authority, a text’s “canonicity” (its mattering, its enduring importance) is determined neither by cult nor by ancient decree but rather by its “intrinsic need to be grasped through exegesis” on the part of later readers (Alter, Canon and Creativity, [2000] 15–6). Pardes constructs Melville against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Biblicism as an exegetical writer whose Moby-Dick records his encounter with Biblical tradition. Buoyed by its own intrinsic “canonicity,” Moby-Dick itself emerges in her final pages as an “ark” both all-inclusive in its aims...

“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels”: Musical Salvation in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

The thing that did keep me safe, that gave me a feeling of comfort growing up, was music. Music took me somewhere safe--a place where I was happy and free and comfortable being myself. I knew from a very young age that was something I wanted to be a part of. It was something that made me feel good and helped me escape to a place where life was how I always dreamed it should be. Where life was like the movies. Fairy-tale endings and unconditional love. --Melissa Etheridge I believe in a higher power. I believe we all need to be connected spiritually ... Music is a very supernatural thing. --Mark Collie Melissa Etheridge and country singer Mark Collie endow with an almost mystical power. For Etheridge becomes a place where she finds love and happiness, and for Collie represents a spiritual where human beings come together. For these singers (as for many musicians, scholars, and avid listeners), holds a saving power, even if it is only imaginary, like Etheridge's fairy-tale endings. In her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison interrogates the notion of musical salvation offered to Ruth Anne Boatwright in the gospel and country communities of the American in the 1950s and 1960s. A mature narrator recalling the childhood trauma of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse inflicted by her stepfather Glen, Bone tells a story enveloped in that grants her a safe, spiritual not unlike Etheridge and Collie's descriptions of musical power. Allison's fervent depictions of gospel revival tents and country radio stars invite readers to recover a musical portion of southern history where acts not only as a to reflect on the trauma of childhood abuse but also as a site to criticize and revise the exclusivity of an imagined southern community dependent on the hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Through these musical tropes, Allison unfolds Bone's developing realization that (as Kitty Wells's song suggests) it isn't God who constructs roles for men and women, but instead patriarchal southern social structures. (1) Since the novel's publication in 1992, scholars have effectively discussed Bone's white trash status and its history in the South, the shame it brings to Bone in particular, and the different ways Bone challenges her assigned place in the community through her masturbatory fantasies, story-telling, and visual re-makings. (2) Few of these critics consider the musical elements in the novel, though James R. Giles intimates that these are aspects worthy of exploration in his mention of southern Christian fundamentalism as an inoperative escape from trauma: one of the most fascinating aspects of Bastard Out of Catalina is its exploration of the gospel subculture and especially of the close connections between gospel and 'popular' in the South (91). Giles' quick parenthetical reference to Allison's use of echoes Deborah Horvitz, who recognizes how Bone infuses her passion for with her extreme self-loathing when she awakens to the pleasure of art in the form of live gospel music and how this artistic passion represents transcendence from physical trauma (5). Also incorporating music, Ann Cvetkovich explores the intersections of Bone's sadomasochistic masturbatory fantasies, incest, sexual trauma, and queerness, beginning with an analysis of the lesbian band Tribe 8 and their openness in performing sexually deviant tendencies on stage. While Giles and Horvitz connect story-telling and in the novel, Cvetkovich (on a more general level) recognizes the ways and story-telling create a safe space for queer women to express themselves. While these scholars note such connections in passing, I turn further attention to Allison's use of as more than a site of escape from physical trauma. While Allison employs gospel and country as a safe space for an expression of personal trauma, she also asks readers to recover the history of southern (of which Giles hints in his chapter) to subvert the patriarchal narrative of the South. …

Legal Frankensteins and Monstrous Women

Abstract Anti-violence activism for women in India has been riddled with a unique advocacy challenge. Women experiencing violence within the home confront a widespread backlash against Penal Code section 498A, the only criminal law in India that specifically encompasses domestic violence. Analysis of this phenomenon reveals that this prohibition against marital cruelty has been drastically undermined by a level of skepticism that not only permeates societal consciousness, but more perilously, has entered judicial decision-making in these cases. In this essay I deconstruct the patriarchal narratives that undergird the judicial backlash against Section 498A, arguing that they reflect a modern incarnation of the “crisis” discourses that have characterized state responses to women's right claims. I contend that Indian patriarchies are being recast in law through the construction of gendered subjects who threaten to destabilize the sanctity of the Indian family, and who are therefore deemed undeserving of the law's protection.

Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing by Ann Heilmann , Mark Llewellyn (review)

206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and content of the volume, is followed by fourteen lively chapters thatdiscuss textsfrom North America, Australia, and the UK. Essays on canon icalwriters (Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt,JeanetteWinterson) are interwovenwith discus sions of established but neglected authors (Stevie Davies, Eva Figes, Rose Tremain, Michele Roberts, Daphne Marlatt), lesser known figures (BetsyTobin, Susan Kenney, Moy McCrory), and thosewhose work has appeared more recendy (AliceThompson, Sena JeterNaslund, Sarah Waters). As this listof names indicates, one of the strengths of thevolume lies in its scope; the essays cover popular and literarytextsand consider the representation of a range of differenthistorical periods, expanding the current critical focus on neo-Victorian literature. This scope is compromised to some degree by the inclusion of two essays on Carter. Moreover, while essays on Canadian and Australian fictionhelp togive thevolume an international dimension, furtherdiscussion of postcolonial writing and an exploration of race and ethnicity would have enabled the collection to reflecta greater plurality of historical voices. Working within the context of postmodern and feminist reconceptions of history,many of the essays employ a similar critical framework, one indebted to Adrienne Rich's notion of revision, Linda Hutcheon's definition of historio graphic metafiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory ofWomen's Time. They also cover established themes: history as a patriarchal narrative that excludes and silences female subjects; the past and literary classics (Melville's Moby Dick, de Sade's Justine, and Yeats's poetry) rewritten from a woman-centred perspective; the challenge posed to the authority and authenticity of official historical records; history as a discursive construct; the relationship between fact and fiction; and the uncertainty of historical truth. The theoretical and thematic links between chapters give the volume coherence without suppressing critical debate, and, despite a conscious effort tomake connections between the essays, some interesting and productive tensions emerge. For example, while Sherry Booth celebrates 'the role of the imagination in the creation of true stories, of YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 207 accurate histories' (p. 45), the historian Katharine Hodgkin expresses concern about the historical accuracy of speculative fiction, highlighting a tendency for anachronism and ahistoricism. Further, while there is an acknowledgement that historical writing bywomen isnot a new genre, there isno consensus about what distinguishes contemporary women writers' engagement with history from that of theirmale peers and female predecessors. Some of the essays stress connec tions between contemporary writers and their historical antecedents (Caryl Churchill and the early nineteenth-century Scottish playwright Joanne Baillie, for example); others identify in contemporary writing a greater focus on gender, an emphasis on the fluidity of gender boundaries, the use of fairy-tale motifs, the recuperation of what has been edited out of dominant versions of the past ? domesticity, the body, desire, particularly same-sex desire (represented in Winterson, Marlatt, Waters) ? and self-reflexive intertextuality. Such points of difference only enrich the volume as a whole. As contemporary women writers' continuing preoccupation with the past demonstrates, history is far from over. By oudining key debates and critical issues, this lucid and illuminating collection of essays considers how and why women reimagine (literary) history, underlining the ways in which gender is significant to an understanding of the present as well as the past. University of Leicester Emma Parker ...

The Blessing of a Wounded Patriarch: Genesis 27.1-40

The interrelation of the characterization of Isaac in Gen. 27.1-40, his blessing in 27.28-29, and the narrative past constructed for him in the non-Priestly material addresses a number of questions that have persisted about the evaluation of this blessing and its relation to the divine blessings promised to the patriarchs. The present study argues that the character of Isaac restricts and deforms the blessings that are the leitmotif of the patriarchal narrative. The thesis is articulated in dialogue with current source-critical scholarship on the Pentateuch and presents a stratum of biblical material whose conception of Isaac and his blessing is at odds with subsequent inner-biblical and post-biblical mainstream interpretations. Perspectives derived from the nexus of character, blessing, and narrative 'history' are germane for understanding the oracle to Rebekah (25.23) and the different uses of niphal and hithpael verbs in discrete passages on the nations' participation in the patriarchal blessings.

Vreugde en verdriet in die huis van Jakob

Happiness and lament in the house of Jacob&#x0D; &#x0D; The birth narrative in Genesis 29:31-30:24 is a coherent mini drama in its own right, although it is embedded in the patriarchal narratives and as such furnishes important background to the unfolding drama in Jacob's house. In this narrative, the reader is invited right into the intricate family relations of a dysfunctional polygamous marriage, where two rivals communicate with each other and their mutual husband by means of the names given at birth to their children and the children of their slave girls. This article focuses on the quest for happiness, which is evident in the births and name-giving in the house of Jacob. Although true happiness remains elusive, at the end both women receive their dues. God keeps a balance between the two contenders, but the birth of Rachel’s son calls for a resolution still to come. The text is thus left open ended.

Divine Messengers and Mysterious Men in the Patriarchal Narratives of the Book of Genesis

Article Divine Messengers and Mysterious Men in the Patriarchal Narratives of the Book of Genesis was published on December 17, 2007 in the journal Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook (volume 2007, issue 2007).

Shakespeare and Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Modernism Benjamin Hagen SHAKESPEARE AND MODERNISM, by Carl DiPietro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 242 pp. $85.00. Though three centuries separate modernism, the major aesthetic movement of the twentieth century, from William Shakespeare, the major literary figure of the English canon, readers of Ulysses who encounter the “face of William Shakespeare, beardless” staring back at Stephen and Bloom may get a feel for the interest critics have in correlating these two literary subjects (U 15.3821–22). From Ruby Cohn’s Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, a survey of how modernist writers re-wrote Shakespeare’s work in their novels and drama, to Alexander Welsh’s Hamlet in His Modern Guises, a study of narrower focus investigating the modern novel’s engagement with Hamlet’s youth and mourning, specialists have built up a hefty body of research examining the connections between the modernists and the Renaissance playwright.1 Carl DiPietro adds to this work with Shakespeare and Modernism. Though the book’s title does little to indicate what DiPietro means to offer, he deviates from Cohn’s and Welsh’s approaches. He does not exhaustively explore offshoots or trace a single Shakespearean theme through a domino of modernist texts. Rather, DiPietro draws on several critical frameworks—aesthetic Marxist ideologies of the modernist period and Nietzschean and Freudian currents in the air, as well as “the patriarchal narrative” coupled with the early feminist reaction to it (13)—to explore the modernists’ engagement with Shakespeare in their literature, literary criticism, and theatrical and book production. DiPietro begins Shakespeare and Modernism by discussing George [End Page 848] Bernard Shaw and T. S. Eliot’s shared effort “to disconnect modern literature and theatrical practice from . . . the idealizing and romanticizing tendencies” of the nineteenth-century Victorians (42). This study of Shaw transitions nicely into an investigation of early biographical criticism (specifically Frank Harris’s The Man Shakespeare2) followed by a discussion of Stephen Dedalus’s theory of Hamlet in the ninth episode of Ulysses. From here, DiPietro detours into a history of various revolutionary theatrical practices and theories from around the turn of the century. He begins in 1911 with William Barker publicly burning film reels of his scenes from Henry VIII and moves through “the campaigns for national and repertory theatres” (11), Edward Gordon Craig’s desire to replace all actors with his “Über-marionette” (20), and the aesthetically progressive and politically disturbing art and criticism of Theodore Komisarjevsky (118–36). Then DiPietro focuses on 1923 (the tercentennial of the Folio) and highlights the various editions of Shakespeare’s plays published during that time. This specific year, according to DiPietro, was “a meeting-ground for text and performance,” where ideas of performance as a textual practice became complicated with ideas that performance actually “conflicts and divides the text between various idealizations of author and representation” (166, 166–67). He ends his book with an interesting chapter on Virginia Woolf that explores A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, and her only extant play Freshwater (which she first drafted in 1923 and later revised up through 1935). DiPietro reintroduces Ellen Terry (the actress to whom Bernard Shaw writes the letter that opens Shakespeare and Modernism) and analyzes the way Woolf, in her fictive portraiture of Terry in Freshwater (akin to the portraitures of Shakespeare in Harris, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Joyce’s texts),3 replaces Shakespeare as a “haunting image of . . . anxiety-inducing aesthetic patriarch[y]” with the “actively re-imagined” actress “in order to thematize the idea of female subjectivity in art” (183, 171). This impressive range of topics, however, neglects Shakespeare at times, leaving him in the background while DiPietro foregrounds subjects that appear indirectly related. For instance, he ends his third chapter discussing at length the “fairly obvious correspondence between [Komisarjevsky’s] own aesthetic doctrine and the political doctrines of totalitarian dictators” such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini (136). While the disturbing implications of such a comparison are certainly interesting (and relevant to a discussion of modernism’s legacy, given the political affiliations of other artists such as Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner), the last several pages of the chapter contain no specific mention of...

The Yahwist: The Earliest Editor in the Pentateuch

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes Hebrew characters omitted) (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.)) I Recent Pentateuch research has again come to center on the long-familiar fact that the Pentateuch narrative rests on a sequence of individual narrative compositions. In the non-Priestly text, six separate narrative groups can be distinguished: (1) the primeval history (Genesis 2-11), which has to do with the origin of the world and humankind; (2) the history of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Genesis 12-36); (3) the story of Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37-50); (4) the narrative about Moses (Exodus 2-4); (5) the history of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their wanderings through the desert (Exodus 12 through Numbers 20), to which the death of Moses may also have belonged (Deuteronomy 34*); and (6) the story about the seer Balaam (Numbers 22-24). The diversity of the material indicates that it was only at a later stage that these groups were linked to form the continuous narrative we have today. At present the view is gaining ground that the compositions were joined together not in a single literary step but in several stages, and that this fusion took place at a late period. One reason is that, according to ancient Israelite tradition, the history of God's people began with the exodus from Egypt. Consequently it is assumed that the great OT history also originally began with the book of Exodus. According to this view, the stories of the patriarchs and the primeval history were put in front of the account of the exodus only later.1 The Documentary Hypothesis, which assumes that there are sources that run right through the Pentateuch, is incompatible with a solution of this kind. Not a few of today's scholars consider that this hypothesis is now superseded.2 Instead, Deuteronomistic3 or late wisdom writers4 are made responsible for fusing the different blocks of tradition. This view can claim support inasmuch as explicit cross-references in the Pentateuch have clearly been introduced subsequently, and at a late date;5 one example is the explicit references to the tradition of the patriarchs in the books of Exodus to Deuteronomy.6 Another solution sees the Priestly source as providing the historiographical scaffolding into which the non-Priestly narratives have been inserted at a later point, not having formed a separate source of its own before that.7 This revival of the supplementary hypothesis once more attributes to the source P the position of the basic document that nineteenth-century research rightly denied to it. Until a short time ago, however, the Documentary Hypothesis was also called into question because of the Priestly source, since the literary coherence in the patriarchal narratives is so weak as to suggest that there was no independent written source here, but that the P material represents a reworking of the older text.8 The Priestly source alone is not suited to serve as the basis for the narrative of the whole Pentateuch, even if there are still good reasons for the assumption of an originally independent literary thread. The composition of the Pentateuch hangs not on a single thread but on a cord plaited together from two strands, the Priestly source and the Yahwists history. This cord makes it possible for the work as a whole to avoid falling apart when one of the two threads is torn or missing, which is the case several times. It is certainly true that the material in the books of Genesis to Numbers that does not derive from the Priestly source provides us with a more or less coherent narrative. Even if this coherence cannot have existed when the transmission began because of the disparity of the material, it will not have been produced merely through the late cross-references. There are good reasons why earlier scholars read the non-Priestly Pentateuch as a literary unity. …

Bluebell, short film and feminist film practice as research: Strategies for dissemination and peer review

This article seeks to reflect on my filmmaking practice through a discussion of my short film Bluebell (2003), situating the film within a theoretical context and providing a ‘route map’ of the practice research process. The film uses the cliché of ‘stranger rape’ to set up and upset audience expectations of rape narrative, challenging the construction of women as the victims rather than survivors of rape. Drawing on previous research on Angela Carter's reworking of Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood, and its reception by the feminist sisterhood, the article explores the opportunities and the dangers of feminist reappropriation of patriarchal narratives. The formal properties of the short film are examined as a potentially radical space for the emergent feminist filmmaker and strategies of dissemination and peer review are put forward.

The Lifespans of the Patriarchs: Schematic Orderings in the Chrono-genealogy

AbstractA remarkable numerical schema is revealed when the lifespan notices for the generations from Adam to Moses in the Masoretic version of the Pentateuch are added together—12,600 years. It is suggested that this schema has eschatological connotations that relates to the 1,260 days mentioned in Daniel and Revelation. The possibility that the lifespan notices developed from an earlier, progenitor chronology that originally tallied 12,000 years is also discussed, and the relationship between this schema, the surrounding patriarchal narratives and other Near East chronological traditions is examined in terms of the textual development of the Old Testament lifespan tradition.

Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible Ziony Zevit Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible, by Ronald Hendel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 200 pp. $35.00. There are true memories and there are false memories, as in the case of false memory syndrome. True memories are constructed, a mélange of facts and [End Page 186] partial recollections, of reexperiences (since they are recalled) filtered through perceptions of the past. False memories are a mélange of fictions, construed the same way. Think "The Manchurian Candidate." To talk of memory is to evoke the presence of Freud and Nietzsche and to raise the possibility of the unreal as real. To talk of true memories is to talk of the past but to address it through ethereal, gossamer filaments of fact, interwoven with shafts of maybes, wafting in breezes of time. And that is what Ron Hendel undertakes in this interesting book. In this collection of six short studies, four of which were previously published, Hendel inquires whether or not historical-like narratives in the Bible, dependent largely on Israel's national and/or cultural memories, were true or false memories of real persons and events. And if true, in what way or with regard to what may they be considered historical. Chapter 1 situates ancient Israel in the cultural context of the Ancient Near East and illustrates well how the Bible's presentation of Israel as a people set aside, somewhat different from its neighbors, despite objective indicators that this was not necessarily the case, created a narrative framework through which Israel perceived the world and comprehended its evolving present and its evolving past. Chapter 2, "Remembering Abraham," written for this book, leads directly into chapter 3, "Historical Memories in the Patriarchal Narratives." The first of this pair explores how Israel's memories of Abraham function in the literature and how the earlier compositions in Genesis attracted later comments and reactions in texts that were composed later. The second focuses on the question of how much of what is predicated about Abraham may be considered factual. Hendel concludes that patriarchal names can be considered historical, that the "El" religion that they practice can be considered historical, and that an Egyptian "Fort Abram" mentioned by Pharaoh Sheshonk, the biblical Shishaq of 1 Kings 14:25–26, as being somewhere in the Negev ca. 925 BCE, imports a vague historicity to an actual heroic Abram, the self-same Abram/Abraham portrayed in Genesis. But when it comes time to parse the literary and archaeological data in order to discern when this character actually lived in the past, Hendel dates the patriarchal era to "the time forever recreated in the biblical narratives of Genesis 12–50. This era consists of myth and memory, mingled in a way far more compelling than ordinary history. It is an era in sacred time" (p. 55). Chapter 4 explores "The Exodus in Biblical Memory," and concludes on the basis of both biblical and extra-biblical data that some veracity may be assigned to the memories linking bondage and Egypt, even though there is no necessary truth to the Bible's claim that all of Israel was in Egypt and that all Israelites in the Central Highlands of Eretz Israel during the divided [End Page 187] monarchy were descendents of former Egyptian slaves. Some of them, however, may very well have been individuals with direct or indirect memories of Egyptian slavery (p. 62). Nevertheless, when the plague narratives and the signs and wonders are factored into the equation and the extant Exodus narrative is comprehended as a memory, Hendel concludes that "the memory of the Exodus is not just a memory of historical events, but a conflation of history and memory that suits the conditions of different qualities of time" (p. 73). In chapter 5, Hendel searches for Solomon in history and memory. Using literary hints and archaeological clues, he disentangles the shadowy historical figure barely discernible behind the elaborate Biblical narrative text from the fictional one. In chapter 6, a well-composed encapsulation of "The Biblical Sense of the Past," Hendel ties together the threads from...

Male trouble: independent women and male dependency in a white working-class suburb of Pretoria

abstract The suburbs on the western side of Pretoria were a seat of the white, Afrikaans-speaking working-class for decades before they were irrevocably transformed by changes in national politics and the nature of heavy industry in the region. This focus reports on part of a larger study investigating social change in response to political and economic transformation. Considering the so-called ‘feminisation’ of the labour market, it examines how a single mother household, run by an independent woman, negotiates challenges posed by an increase in unemployed men's dependency on the economic access held by women. Six months of intensive participant observation reveals the way younger, unemployed men in Pretoria's west apply their masculine identities to negotiate domestic security, even if conventional traits of masculinity, like employment, elude them. The focus also looks at the strategies women adopt to cope with these challenges, even if they subscribe to the expectations created by a lingering patriarchal narrative.