ABSTRACT
What happens when a reader resists interpretations hallowed by the doctrinal weight of long use and certainty of worshipping communities? For the feminist literary scholar, such resistance is often the premier hallmark of integrity, be it ever so uncomfortable personally or dangerous professionally. The question raised in the preceding essay was: 'What happens if we take seriously the image of the dismissed and punished mother-slave (Hagar?) found at the beginning of a well-known passage and use it for the interpretation of the even more well-known, second half of the text, where the speaker must obviously be male, since we have always assumed "him" to be so?' The gender of the embedded speaker in Isa. 50. 4-9 (or 4-11) is the question raised by Brenner, and with good reason. Like the origin of prophetic speech as divinely given and recorded without bias by the male prophet, the sex of the so-called 'Suffering Servant' of Second Isaiah has seldom been questioned, although the identity of this despised, broken, yet strangely exultant figure has occasioned much discussion in synagogue, church and scholarly circles. Do we have a male 'Israel' speaking here as a collective entity, or a particular individual whose 'call' sends him to the despairing exiles hoping to hear a word of restoration? Feminist criticism turns these questions on their heads when it starts not with the assumption of a voice of normative maleness, but rather with the echo of the repressed and degraded mother-wife-slave, whose imagery gives the introduction to the whole poem (vv. 1-3) such power and pathos. Why should a male voice suddenly, in v. 4, displace the female whose situation so poignantly sets up the scenario for the entire passage? It does so because we have been taught to imagine such a voice as the only possibility. Brenner's resisting reading of Isaiah 50 offers us an opportunity to imagine differently-but to what end?
