ofthe

Beth's marriage reflects the competition between patrilocal and virilocal marriage. This competition is more often at stake in the Hebrew Bible than is generally assumed. The wooing of Rebekah has virilocality as its condition, and Jacob had to integrate himselfin a patrilocal environment for a long time, before he managed to emancipate himself from Lahan. Father and hushand, in these cases, compete over the "memory" of the daughter. Within the preoccupation of biblical ideology, that competition concerns the question: Whose memory will she perpetuate, whose will her children be, which name will she serve? Not her own, in any case; of that, the writers who deprived Bath and Beth of a name have taken care. But they overlooked what female subjectivity can accomplish, even within the limits of the struggle between two forms ofpatriarchy.