Biblical Interpretation 14, 456-485, 2006. Surprising the reader is a common narrative technique. So common, that it has been called ‘one of the universals of narrative’, along with suspense and curiosity. 'Narrative surprise’, also has its drawbacks. As it is based on ‘false impressions’, it may undermine the reliability of the narrator, as readers wonder whether there have...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 336-362. This essay examines Gal. 6.17 in hopes of recovering an interpretation of Paul that demonstrates Paul’s self-identity as a slave. To be more specific, the article investigates Gal. 6.11-17 in light of current studies in postcolonialism, in order to see the influences that the Roman Empire had upon Paul in regard to Paul’s understanding...
Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 483-506. This article explores the theme of Dinah’s narrative silence in the text and interpretive traditions of Genesis 34. Although Dinah’s rape is of central importance to the narrative development of this text, she remains throughout the story a marginal character. The author explores the ethical implications of Dinah’s suppression within...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 309-331, 2006. In beginning the search for an adequate theory of literary production in biblical studies, this article seeks to bring together the theoretical sophistication of psychoanalytic studies of Genesis 1-3 and the historical concerns of other studies. The argument is that Genesis 1-3 may be understood in terms of fantasy, particularly in its...
In Donn F. Morgan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible, Oxford Handbooks (2018). This chapter explores the prose traditions in the Writings under the broad division between historiography and storytelling. While 1–2 Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah make use of archival sources and possibly genuine first-person accounts, these materials are arranged and...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 486-507, 2006. The intricate connection between inscription, place, and economics in the ancient world is carefully carved in the debate over the payment of taxes to Caesar. The application of a Marxist reading strategy that draws on historical and spatial materialism not only opens up the complex interplay of location, denarius, and monetary legend...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 425-443, 2006. Ch. 12 of Ecclesiastes depicts a scene that combines elements of the death of a person with others that describe the death of an entire world. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading ends with a similar scene. Both Nabokov’s writings and his biography suggest that he shared Qohelet’s view of life “under the sun”, but his own...
Ch. 6, pp. 93-110 from Couey, J., & James, E. (Eds.). (2018). Biblical Poetry and the Art of Close Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This essay argues that Qohelet's famous bit of speech on the seasons at 3:1-8 mimics and mocks proverbial poetry, as part of his larger, prosaic denial that life has discernible and usable rhythms and rhymes.
Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007) 519-548. Ambiguity is a driving force of the narrative world of film noir. It is expressed through unconventional characterization as well as innovative and excessive visual and narrative techniques. Just as viewers are engaged in an intellectually demanding process, the book of Judges makes similar demands of its readers and shares a number of...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 205-226. There has been a diversity of viewpoints claiming to approach scripture from a feminist perspective. This essay calls for a rigorous and critical biblical feminist epistemology that seeks to address at every turn the question of knowledge production as power; on the other hand it calls for a radical democratization of the field and the...
Biblical Interpretation 13, 107-136, 2005. n the Roman world, torture, conceived as a mechanism to extract the truth from the flesh, was used in judicial interrogation, most commonly in the interrogation of slaves and other low-status persons. The flogging of Jesus in John 19:1-3, a flogging that occurs in the midst of the trial before Pilate, is best read as an instance of...
Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 100-117. The Gospel of John twins the history of Jesus’ body with the history of the temple. In John’s telling, the intersections of those two violent histories are multiple. In the fourth Gospel, the violence directed against Jesus’ body that unfolds in the passion narrative is catalyzed (on a narrative level) by Jesus’ own physically enacted...
Biblical Interpretation 13, 137-166, 2005. The text of Eliphaz’s vision in Job 4:12-21 is written in highly ambiguous Hebrew whose meaning(s) must be constructed by the reading subject, in conversation with intertexts whose relevance to Job 4:12-21 is determined by the reading subject. This suggests that a single meaning for Job 4:12-21 is impossible, and the search for such a...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 43-59. The Song of Songs is known for a harmonious and unproblematic relationship between the male and female speakers; however, the woman often describes the absence of her lover. This article foregrounds the theme of absence in the woman’s speeches in the Song of Songs, exploring the implications of this theme for the characterization of the...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 154-178. Motherhood in the Hebrew Bible has been celebrated as indicative of female strength as well as derided as patriarchy’s primary entrapment. Somewhere between the two, birth figures as a moment of narrative focus on female characters during which they reformulate their status. Employing theories of the hero pattern, this essay argues...
Biblical Interpretation 18 (2010) 226-250. This article looks at the narrator's weak explanation for Samson to tell Delilah the source of his strength. Then comparisons are made with two retellings of the Samson tale, Milton’s Samson Agonistes and DeMille’s film Samson and Delilah, which diminish or eliminate the “nagging” explanation and find far more satisfying alternative...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 60-82. Using verbal threats and graphic images of destruction, the biblical prophets employed the rhetoric of horror to terrify their audience. Modern theories about the genre of horrors provide insight into the prophets’ rhetoric. This paper examines the image of the laboring woman within the context of the prophets’ horror rhetoric. This...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 332-363, 2006. The article is a close reading of Isa. 40:1-11, which focuses on its function as a prologue to Deutero-Isaiah, and hence distinguished by its promise of a new beginning, and on its dependence on, and reversal of, the past, the spectral voices it seeks to repatriate. The complexities of the passage, and hence of the book as a whole,...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 179-204. An analysis of Jesus' sayings to reflect on how humor is part of the remembered message and personality of Jesus. The article then reflects on four recent Jesus novels' portrayal of him.
Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 265-287. It might be expected that expressions of male beauty in the Hebrew Bible symbolize power, prestige, and divine favor, in contrast to those of female beauty, which operates as the object of male desire and often expresses vulnerability. However, of the three main examples of יפה applied to named men in the Hebrew Bible, Joseph’s beauty...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 209-258, 2006. This article offers a new reading of the role of Job’s wife in the trial of Job, based on feminist hermeneutics, legal hermeneutics, and comparative legal historical analysis. The article proposes that the book of Job explores the problem of the violence and oppression of God’s law as manifested through human suffering. Mrs. Job offers...
Conference paper presented at the SBL Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 2012. It is well-recognized that Chronicles and Ezekiel have opposing views on the suitability of Levites for service in the Jerusalem temple cult. Ezek 44 contains a diatribe against the Levites, while the entire book of Chronicles is an encomium to them. This paper focuses specifically on 2 Chr 29:34,...
Conference paper, SBL Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 2016. The motif of the endangered infant is found across a wide variety of eastern Mediterranean cultures (e.g., Sargon of Agade, Cyrus, Moses, Jesus). The story of Joash’s rescue by Jehoshabeath in 2 Chr 22:10-12 (= 2 Kgs 11:1-3) is an abbreviated version of the motif. This paper explores the gendered dynamics of...
Biblical Interpretation 13, 337-373 p., 2005. Western art history is closely attached to western religious expression. Western artists have correspondingly been made to function as exegetes, preachers, and theologians in communicating messages through biblical stories and ideas. This article uses The Adoration of the Magi as a commentary on the story in Matthew 2.
Oxford University Press (2018), 295 p. This book investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? The author attempts to answer this question by studying the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 158-174. 2006. The roles of women in the Apocalypse of John have been much debated in recent years. Even the “good” women do not triumph. Contemporary apocalyptic films vary in their presentation and involvement in warding off the End. In most of these films women have secondary roles as love interests, even if they are able to participate in...
Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009) 77-99. This article examines two passages about religious violence as it reflects on the presentation of a religious message by Paul and by others. While Paul's appearance is mocked and repudiated, he re-casts manhood and suffering to express the authenticity of his witness.
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 315-335. The story of Balaam is concerned with relationships with foreigners. Evidence from the story shows a later composition and suggests making a position for faithful people to hold onto when they have been scattered into other places.
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 105-153. The binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 has been re-used to describe the actions of governments upon citizens. In these three very different cases the biblical narrative undergoes a theological-political translation and calls forth critical responses in which the core question becomes the relationship of divine monarchy/state authority to...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 259-293, 2006. This article situates Mark's characterization of Herod Antipas within tyrant typology. The implication of lordship would extend and reflect on those in Mark's contemporaneous Christian fellowship.
Biblical Interpretation 13, 41-55 p., 2005. This essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism to help explore a neighboring genre, the biblical Psalms of lament. These psalms display moods and movements analogous to those of confessional self-accounting — isolation, inner chaos, and the turn toward God as loving other for reconstructing a beloved self. The psalms have...
Biblical Interpretation 13, 374-403 p. 2005. Derrida is a source of profound inspiration for many scholars in New Testament studies. Given his importance to the field, however, it is surprising to note that Derrida’s readings of the New Testament often fail to exemplify even the most basic possibilities that deconstruction has to offer. In his hands, the New Testament can take...
Biblical Interpretation 14, 37-53, 2006. This article explains the tension between the ideas of myth and parable to reflect on the gospel depictions of Judas. Judas carries the burden of evil, as he is the 'villain' who betrays Jesus. Looking at a wide range of film versions of Jesus, a four-fold typology is developed. One of the types, the parabolic, allows the audience to...
Biblical Interpretation Volume: 3 Issue: 2 p. 1-69 (2018). This essay focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fields of study. The first part of the essay comments on developments since the so-called “linguistic turn,”...
Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 1-24. This article explores the language of the sentiments of anger and love in biblical Hebrew, English, and Japanese, where sentiments are defined as emotions that are culturally defined and organized. Its leading questions are: To what extent do people in different societies experience the same and different emotions because of their...
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