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Rape Culture in the House of David: A Company of Men describes a biblical rape culture sustained and maintained by Yhwh and a host of men—from royal kings and princes to their relatives, counselors, generals, and servants. This volume reveals that sexual violence in the house of David is not simply perpetrated by its most powerful men. Rather, in the pursuit of power, status, authority, and honor, men form alliances and networks that support the use and abuse of women’s bodies and valorize sexualized violence against other men. The man who is most capable of sexual violence is Israel’s ideal king. Barbara Thiede deftly addresses the power and contemporary relevance of these narratives and argues that exposing and naming rape culture in biblical literature is essential—in social, economic, and political realms. This is a meaningful feminist intervention in the field of biblical studies and is of great benefit to graduate students and scholars of religion, gender studies, and masculinity studies.
Male alliances, partnerships, and friendships are fundamental to the Hebrew Bible. This book offers a detailed and explicit exploration of the ways in which shared sexual use of women and women’s bodies engenders, sustains, and nourishes such relationships in the Hebrew Bible. Hebrew Bible narratives demonstrate that women and women’s bodies are not merely used to foster and cultivate male homosociality, male friendship, and toxic hegemonic masculinity, but rather to engender them and make them possible in the first place. Thiede argues that homosocial bonds between divine and mortal males are part of a continual competition for power, rank, and honor, and that this competition depends o...
Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements stages a critical engagement between religious texts and the problem of sexual violence. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are widespread on college and university campuses; they also occur in sacred texts and religious traditions. The volume addresses these difficult intersections as they play out in texts, traditions, and university contexts. The volumegathers contributions from religious studies scholars to engage these questions from a variety of institutional contexts and to offer a constructive assessment of religious texts and traditions.
The essays in this volume explore in detail many of the ways power structures our daily personal, political and intellectual lives, and evaluate the workings of power using a variety of theoretical paradigms, from Hobbesian liberalism to Foucauldian feminist postmodernism. Taken as a whole, the book aims towards an end to unjust and destructive uses of power and the flowering of an encouraging, educated empowerment for all human beings in a pluralistic world. Section I offers a progressive chain of arguments that moves from the acceptance of domination, through the rejection of domination and, finally, to a new vision of power based on equality and mutual respect. Section II explores the questions, how is the philosophical self, that is, our very understanding of who we are, implicated in the web of power and domination? Section III responds to political realism as it explores morally ideal solutions to the global problems of poverty, war and hunger. Section IV discusses ways in which our thought and practice in both public and private life are bound up in hierarchies of domination.
To reference death as sleep is commonplace. Indeed, so usual is the use of the terminology of rest, repose, and slumber to denote the process of dying and, indeed, death itself, that such linguistic turns barely call attention to themselves at all: to wish aloud that a deceased individual rest in peace could hardly be more ordinary a prayer even for moderns little given to lyrical expression or to the use of metaphor in daily speech. But to approach the equation from the other direction—and so to assert that, no less than death is sleep, sleep is death, or at least death dialed down sufficiently to deprive it of its permanence and awful finality—is less common a thing to say...and it is even less common than that actually to believe. Indeed, although the Talmud, speaking with strange precision, asserted long centuries ago that sleep is precisely one-sixtieth of death, it is hard to find moderns who comfortably or naturally think of awakening from a night’s sleep as a kind of daily resurrection.1 Consider, for example, the undeservedly obscure prayer of Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English polymath, who movingly wrote:
In one of his most famous poems, Robert Frost imagines himselfstanding at a crossroads in a “yellow wood” and having to decidewhich path forward to choose. The poem turns on the fact thatneither path clearly recommends itself as the “better” one to choose:both are covered in yellow autumnal leaves, one is “just as fair” as theother, and both lead to destinations that Frost cannot see.1 In justtwenty lines, the poet thus suggests the plight of moderns who mustmake decisions in life that may eventually be perceived as mattersof great importance, but that feel hardly even to matter much whenthey are actually being made. That is surely a challenge we all face,but how exactly to deal ...
Offering a reading of the intermarriage debate and expulsion of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, this book engages with the production and performance of masculinities in this biblical text, shifting the focus away from the 'foreign women' to the men who are the primary actors in this work. This approach addresses the diversity of masculinities and the ways in which they are implicated in the production of power relations in the text. It explores the ‘feminized’ masculinity of the peoples-of-the-lands, the unstable masculinity of the golah, Ezra’s performance of penitential masculinity, and the rehabilitation of divine masculinity. The rejection of the marriages and the call for the exp...
Drawing on both biblical studies scholarship and practitioner experience, this book explores the disjuncture between complementarian accounts of biblical marriage and intersections of marriage and violence in texts from Jewish and Christian Scriptures. This volume challenges authoritative complementarian claims to the Bible’s allegedly clear and unequivocal directions on marriage. It refutes these claims with analysis of the muddled and often violent depictions of marriage in the Bible itself. Regular reminders show why such an exploration matters: that is, because recourse to the authority and ‘plain meaning’ of the Bible has had and continues to have impact on real people’s lives. ...
When Allen Ginsberg famously began his idiosyncratic eulogy of his mother by asking the reader to imagine him “up all night, talking, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles,” he did not pause to explain what exactly this thing called Kaddish was or why he would have been reading it aloud in his mother’s memory. Nor did he need to: there is no Jewish prayer better known to the non-Jewish world than Kaddish, and the concept of saying Kaddish “for” someone has entered the American lexicon of cultural phrases known to all and used freely without the need to translate or explain. Neither Imre Kertesz’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child nor Leon Wieseltier’s 1998 bestseller Kaddish provides a translation or explanation on the dustjacket, for example, the assumption being that anyone cultured enough to want to read either book—and surely not only Jewish readers—would know what the word means and what its use as the title implies about the book’s content. Nor did Leonard Bernstein seem to feel the need for any explanation when he named his third symphony “Kaddish,” and left it at that.