OVERTURES TO BIBLICAL THEOLOGY The Land by Walter Brueggemann God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality by Phyllis Trible Texts of Terror by Phyllis Trible The Suffering of God by Terence E. Fretheim A Theology of the Cross by Charles B. Cousar Prayer in the Hebrew Bible by Samuel E. Balentine The Collapse of History by Leo G. Perdue Canon and Theology by Rolf Rendtorff Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses by Dennis T. Olson Ministry in the New Testament by David L. Bartlett From Creation to New Creation by Bernhard W. Anderson Prayer in the New Testament by Oscar Cullmann The Land Is Mine by Norman C. Habel Battered Love by Renita C. Weems Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities by Phyllis A. Bird Editors WALTER BRUEGGEMANN, McPheeters Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia JOHN R. DONAHUE, S. J., Professor of New Testament, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, California SHARYN DOWD, Professor of New Testament, Lexington Theological Seminary, Lexington, Kentucky CHRISTOPHER R. SEITZ, Associate Professor of Old Testament, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives PHYLLIS TRIBLE in memoriam HELEN PRICE MARY A. TULLY Contents Editor's Foreword ix Abbreviations xi Preface xiii Introduction: On Telling Sad Stories 1 1. Hagar: The Desolation of Rejection 9 2. Tamar: The Royal Rape of Wisdom 37 3. An Unnamed Woman: The Extravagance of Violence 65 4. The Daughter of Jephthah: An Inhuman Sacrifice 93 Indexes 119 Authors and Editors 119 Hebrew Words 121 Scripture 122 Subjects 125 Editor's Foreword In her first book in this series, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978), Phyllis Trible offered a fresh way to listen to the text that permitted the text to have its own say, without excessive interpretive manipulation. By the time of this present book, Professor Trible has become established as one of the most effective practitioners of rhetorical criticism, and as perhaps the decisive voice in feminist exposition of biblical literature. The studies offered in this book are the substance of her Beecher Lectures at Yale. That lecture series is intended to deal with the preaching enterprise in the church. Trible's perspective on exposition and proclamation is implicit and by example, without direct comment. She proposes to get the interpreter/expositor out of the way so that the unhindered text and the listening community can directly face each other. What strikes me most about these expositions is the remarkable congruity between method and substance. That congruity has been a continuing agenda of scholarship, for we have become increasingly aware that conventional methods are essentially alien to the matter of the text and are something of an imposition on the text. The method utilized here makes very little, if any, imposition on the text. Trible presents a "state of the art" treatment of rhetorical criticism, learned from our common teacher James Muilenburg. It is hard to imagine the ground gained in the few years since he called for this methodological accent. Indeed, such a perspective was scarcely in purview in Old Testament studies when this series began. The remarkable fact about Trible's use of the method is that while she is fully conversant with literary theory, her presentation is free of every theoretical encumbrance. But of course this book is not an exercise in method. It is the substance of the argument that makes the difference. The method, when utilized with fresh questions, lets us notice in the text the terror, violence, and pathos that more conventional methods have missed. Indeed this work makes clear how much the regnant methods, for all their claims of "objectivity," have indeed served the ideological ends of "the ruling class." What now surfaces is the history, consciousness, and cry of the victim, who in each case is shown to be a character of worth and dignity in the narrative. Heretofore, each has been regarded as simply an incidental prop for a drama about other matters. So Trible's "close reading" helps us notice. The presumed prop turns out to be a character of genuine interest, warranting our attention. And we are left to ask why our methods have reduced such characters, so that they have been lost to the story. No doubt the feminist project of interpretation is much needed. The merit of Trible's feminist enterprise is that there is no special pleading, no stacking of the cards, no shrillness,