ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 addresses the mechanisms of violence in Genesis and its construction through the narratives of Isaac and Ishmael, and Hagar and Sarah. I focus on Abraham’s hand and the slaughtering knife, the ma’akhelet, and engage numerous poems that locate the core of the drama in the knife, making it the ultimate site of incisive interrogation of God’s tyrannical love in Israeli culture. The scandalous exchange between Hagar and Sarai in Genesis 16 augments the discussion of torture, Ishmael’s otherness, and the categories of inclusion and exclusion. Following the logic of the male gaze, I theorize the "pregnancy gaze" as the ultimate patriarchal desire for pregnant bodies. Hagar’s gaze and Sarah’s torture unleash a series of ruptures, collapsing self, body, and narrative and discourse. It explains Ishmael’s description as: “His hand is against/inside everyone, and everyone’s hand is against/inside him (kol-bo)” (Gen. 16: 12). I discuss the mechanism of exclusion that making children into others in three Modern Hebrew works by David Shahar, Yehudit Katzir, and Albert Swissa.
