Bible Books
006
Facsimile Edition of the Kennicott Bible
(Facsimile Editions: London, 1984) 922 pp., $4,700
In 1476, during the infamous years of the Spanish Inquisition and just 16 years before the Jews of Spain were expelled from their homeland, a Jew of La Coroña undertook an elaborate and expensive effort to perpetuate his heritage. Isaac di Braga of La Coruña commissioned the scribe Moses Ibn Zabara and the artist Joseph Ibn Hayyim to execute a lavishly illuminated copy of the Bible. The result is one of the world’s most sumptuous medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. Kings and prophets, animals and geometric designs, painted in rich colors and often embellished with gold and silver leaf, appear on 238 of the Bible’s 922 vellum pages. The manuscript, in an excellent state of preservation, has now been reproduced in a limited edition of 550 copies by Facsimile Editions of London.
All the brilliant colors of the original are captured in the facsimile. Craftsmen added gold and silver leaf by hand to the photographically reproduced illustrations. The paper on which the facsimile is printed is practically indistinguishable from vellum, both in its appearance and in its feel, and the manuscript is handbound in a replica of the original box binding. Craftsmen handcut brass dies to emboss the intricate geometric designs that appear on six sides of the binding’s Moroccan goat skin.
Called the Kennicott Bible for the English Hebraist Benjamin Kennicott who acquired it in 1771, Ibn Zabara and Ibn Hayyim’s masterpiece is now a treasure of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. Until the facsimile edition was published, the only way to study the Kennicott Bible was to visit the Bodleian Library or to examine the reproductions of a few pages of the manuscript that have appeared in scholarly books.
The text of the Bible and of David Kimchi’s famous grammatical treatise Sefer Mikhlol that accompanies it are written in clear Sephardi script (Sephardi refers to the writing style and other traditions of Jews from Spain and Portugal and is distinguished from Ashkenazi traditions of central and eastern European Jews.)
Those who order the facsimile will also receive a separate leather-bound introduction to the Kennicott Bible written by Bezalel Narkiss, founder and director of the Centre for Jewish Art, and by Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, author of The Making of a Manuscript. The introduction explains how the scribe and the artist produced the manuscript, analyzes the content of each illumination, and discusses Joseph Ibn Hayyim’s place in the history of Spanish art. For more information write to Facsimile Editions, 35 Hamilton Terrace, London NW 89RG, England.
Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives
Phyllis Trible
(Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1984) 128 pp., $7.95 paperback
There are several different ways to study “woman and the Bible” in order to reveal important insights. The first step is to realize that the Bible, which has shaped so much of our thinking, is to some degree culture-bound. It was itself shaped by men who were “patriarchal,” which is to say androcentric (male-oriented) if not misogynous (women-hating). The Bible’s “patriarchy” can easily be demonstrated; studies have shown the legal subordination of women, their greater vulnerability to impurity, restriction of the roles they played in society, and even their inferior valuation monetarily.
It is equally important to realize that not all statements in the Bible are misogynistic, that some portrayals of women are more sympathetic, that women are sometimes depicted as having a more nearly equal role than traditional interpretation has admitted. When Biblical texts are read with a fresh eye, unburdened by traditional interpretations of the text, the portrayal of women does not appear as misogynistic as had been previously thought. “Depatriarchalizing” the Bible consists of finding sympathetic portrayals of women that have been ignored, or reinterpreting 007stories portraying women, or finding the original sense of texts that have been used to justify anti-woman attitudes or actions. The act of “depatriarchalizing” reveals that the “patriarchy” or “misogyny” of the Bible is not as monolithic or as extensive as later generations interpreted it. It was only after the biblical period that biblical tales were reread and reinterpreted to accord with misogyny. Recovering the original sense of the text is crucially important, not only as an intellectual “objective” scholarly endeavor, but also because an original sense of the text can undercut “biblical” support for current misogynistic traditions, and thereby advance the cause of women in religion today. In this way, feminist reading of scripture can approach the stance of a prophetic movement, offering a critique of history in the light of an oppressed group (in this case, women) and, further, calling for a purification of the present in the light of a newly authenticated biblical vision.
Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Fortress, 1978) is a classic work of “depatriarchalizing.” In it Trible studied several “familiar” stories in the Bible, and by paying careful attention to the nuances of the text, presented a picture of God’s original intentions for the relationship between men and women, the changes that occurred because of “the fall” of Adam and Eve, and the restoration of ideal relationships embodied in the Song of Songs. The job of depatriarchalizing is not complete, and production continues of books and articles that show us the biblical image of women in much more favorable light than interpretations proffered in the intervening millennia have led us to believe.
Nevertheless, there remains a corpus of texts in the Bible that are clearly not sympathetic to women. What attitude should religious feminists take toward these texts? One could opt to declare them culture-bound and thereafter to ignore them. But they are part of Scripture; they refuse to go away. People will read them, and people will be influenced by them. The modern feminist biblical scholar wants to find meaning in all of Scripture, and it is for this reason that Phyllis Trible wrote Texts of Terror. Trible retells these stories in order to make them meaningful to us today. We cannot ignore what it is perilous to forget, and therefore Texts of Terror is, metaphorically, a book of holocaust studies, told so that we should remember and in remembering say, “never again.”
The Bible can be put to many uses, and each faith community—including the feminist faith community—has its own needs and uses for the Bible. There is nevertheless a difference between biblical scholarship and preaching. Preaching may use a text very freely. The primary guide for the preacher is the message that he or she wishes to draw, rather than the plain sense of the text. For the preacher, the text becomes the pretext for the message. Biblical scholarship, on the other hand, must try to reach some understanding of the text in its own terms. This is not always easy, for we cannot easily divorce ourselves from our own quests for truth that we bring to the text. There is no such thing as “total objectivity.” However, in biblical scholarship the focus must always remain on the text rather than on our own needs. It is this attempt at finding an unmotivated or unbiased or objective perspective that makes it possible for biblical scholars of different faith communities to communicate and collaborate with one another. This does not mean that we cannot involve ourselves in the message of the text, and use the textual message as a guide; but it does mean that we must be very strict in our approach to the text, that we must have a disciplined methodology to guide us in our quest for meaning, and that we must make sure that the meaning that we read in the text does not violate the sense of the text itself. On this issue one cannot fault Trible, for she is a serious textual scholar, and it is this that makes her books works of scholarship rather than preaching. Trible’s method is that of a literary critic, which means that she searches within the text for artistic “clues”—repetition of words, sentence and text construction and other nuances that reveal the author’s intention.
In Texts of Terror, Trible has studied four tales: The story of Hagar, Abraham’s concubine who gave birth to Ishmael; the rape of Tamar by Amnon; the concubine in Gibeah; and the daughter of Jephthah.
Hagar’s tale (Genesis 16:1–16; 21:9–21) is embedded in the story of Sarah and her son Isaac. Sarah and Hagar were involved in a power struggle, within the limited confines of women in a society that allowed real power only to men. Sarah guarded her prerogatives and those of her son Isaac. First Hagar was used (to bear Abraham a son in Sarah’s stead); then she was rejected. Trible finds similarities between Hagar’s situation and that of Israel in Egypt. A similar vocabulary is used in each story. Hagar is also the prototype of special mothers in Israel, for she receives a divine annunciation predicting the birth of a child. But Hagar presents a contrast to the later Israel, for she experienced exodus without liberation. In this contrast is the terror of the tale of Hagar. In the passion tale Trible tells, she chooses this line for Hagar: “She was wounded for our transgressions, she was bruised for our iniquities.”
Tamar, the daughter of David, was raped by her half-brother Amnon and then was expelled by him (2 Samuel 13:1–22). The author uses a set of inclusive structures in the text to draw a net around Tamar, trapping her structurally as she was trapped in her family structures and in her brother’s lust. The reason and wisdom with which Tamar spoke were of no avail. The beautiful virgin protectively encircled (13:1–2) became the isolated raped sister. Tamar was “a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
The tale of the concubine in Gibeah is one of rape and murder (Judges 19:1–30). During the pre-monarchical period of the Judges, a man of Ephraim and his unnamed concubine, while traveling, found shelter in the home of a man of Gibeah. The men of the city came to attack the stranger, much as the men of Sodom had done to the angels sojourning with Lot (Genesis 19:4–5). In order to save his male guest, the host (like Lot in the Sodom story) offered his daughter to the attackers. When the attackers declined the offer, the concubine was cast out. She was raped “all night until morning” and finally collapsed (Trible asks, dead, or exhausted?) at the door of the house. Her master-husband took her home, dismembered her body and sent pieces to all the various tribes—a macabre call to war that rallied the Israelites against Benjamin. In this war other women were ultimately captured, raped and abducted as Benjamin was first brought to the brink of destruction and then repopulated. Trible points out that there are many responses to this story of the woman “whose body was broken and given to many.” She calls upon us to redeem the story by retelling it and confessing its present reality, which is that misogyny is still with us, and women are still considered objects, abused and destroyed with little thought of the personhood of each individual.
Condemned to death by the thoughtless vow of her father, Jephthah’s daughter declared her willingness to die in obedience to that vow (Judges 11:29–40). But first she turns to other females for comfort and asks that they join her in lamenting her virgin death. Although God did not act to save her as he had saved Isaac (“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken her?”), this childless woman was not forgotten, for the women of lsrael gathered to mourn and remember her yearly. Trible calls on us too to hallow her memory by perpetuating our lament for her.
Not everyone will want to retell these stories either as passion-tales or as holocaust readings. But for all four, Trible’s solid scholarship offers fresh perspectives on woman and the Bible, presenting a lesson to all of us on what can happen not only to women in a male-dominated society but to those who are oppressed or subordinated in any unequal society.
Facsimile Edition of the Kennicott Bible
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