ABSTRACT
The impact of the Hebrew Bible on the present state of sexual politics has been universally recognized by feminist critics. 1 Nevertheless, few of them have gone beyond the “aetiological” myth of Genesis 2–3 to demonstrate the patriarchal conception of the Bible. While the narrative strategies of androcentric “classics” have been challenged (e.g., de Beauvoir; Millet), while feminist philosophers and theologians have worked out critical analyses of biblical patriarchalism (e.g., Daly), and while feminist historians have begun to document the social status of women in ancient Israel (Bird), not a single consistent analysis of the patriarchal (literary) strategies of the biblical narrative has yet been produced. A possible explanation for this remarkable scholarly gap may lie in the traditional appropriation of the Bible by specialists who denned the Bible as anything but literature. A more reasonable explanation would take into consideration the privileged status of the Bible as the alleged locus of divine revelation. This may illuminate the dominant status of what I might call, for lack of a better word, an appropriative tendency among contemporary feminists, who emphasize what they interpret as antipatriarchal or anticultural currents in the biblical text (e.g., Trible:l–30). In what follows, I would like to exemplify how we might approach the literary strategies of biblical patriarchalism. As a part of a more comprehensive study of the patriarchal determinants of the Bible’s presentation of women, the present reading focuses on the mother figure.
