In Male Friendship, Homosociality, and Women in the Hebrew Bible: Malignant Fraternities, an unflinching examination of the misogyny of Hebrew Bible narratives, Barbara Thiede offers the thesis that male-male friendship is “generated, supported, and sustained through the sexual use of women” (10). This perspective adds significantly to our understanding of male domination in ancient Israelite texts. It also reveals that several “secondary” characters of Hebrew Bible narratives are in fact profoundly integral to the stories’ logic. Thiede’s argument never strays from the hermeneutic of suspicion, and as such her voice is a valuable counterweight to academic discussions of gender that sometimes value “objectivity” or nuance over a clear moral stand. Even after decades of thinking through various feminist critiques of biblical narratives, Thiede’s argument brought me up short and recalled the kind of shocks I had to grapple with on my initial reading of Mary Daly.
The argument moves through analyses of several narratives in the Hebrew Bible. Thiede arranges the chapters discussing various friendships in order of thematic pertinence rather than canonical order. First, Thiede analyses the friendship of Judah and Hirah in Genesis 38. She observes that “Judah and Hirah’s friendship is grounded in sex and developed through sex – but not, seemingly, with each other” (15). Immediately after Judah leaves his brothers and “turns” to Hirah in friendship, Judah sees an unnamed woman, identified simply as the daughter of Shua. The narrative uses common biblical language of “taking and entering” to describe Judah’s sex with this anonymous woman in possessive terms. Here the simple juxtaposition of making friends with a man and having sex with a woman suggests the kind of triangulation the book will develop. It is in Judah and Hirah’s cooperation regarding the payment for Tamar’s sexual services that suggestion moves to an explicit example of how men cement their friendship through the “traffic in women,” a concept proposed by the feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin and which underlies Thiede’s argument.
The chapter on David, Jonathan, and Saul charts a dizzying chain of displacements in the course of David’s use of sexual prowess to gain political power. The narrative presents David as entering Saul’s court with sexually suggestive language. Saul “takes” David, and “taking” can represent sexual activity. However, the focus shifts to David’s relations with Saul’s children, Michal and Jonathan, both of whom love David. While David marries Michal, the very close parallels between Michal and Jonathan shows how both exist narratively in feminine positions that shore up David’s masculinity. The narrative thus highlights the fact that gender and power intersect more in terms of relational dynamics than biological determinants. From the gender imagery in David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan, Thiede draws the conclusion that “women exist in order confirm what makes a man a man” (56-7). Thiede draws connections between Tamar and Bathsheba to assert that the narratives show that “if men rape as an attempt to demonstrate who (really) should be king, then they murder to ensure the outcome” (63). Thiede continues her provocative readings of the “endangered ancestress” narratives in Genesis 12, 20, and 26, and the horrific story of the rape and murder of the Levite’s pilegesh (concubine) in Judges 19.
Finally, she turns to the relationship of Deborah and Jael to show that the biblical canon does not have an interest in exploring female friendship, but that “friendship as the Hebrew Bible authors conceive of it can only be male" (134). In her analyses, she also implicates Yhwh as a party to shoring up masculinity through the shared sexual objectification of women. Thiede’s object is the final form of the text, although she does bring insights from source criticism into play. It would be interesting to see how far one could push the thesis that the “traffic in women’s bodies” serves as a kind of bond between otherwise competing male voices in the Hebrew Bible. Is the common objectification of women what allowed redactors to merge priestly and non-priestly perspectives?
Thiede has argued her way to a position where the Hebrew Bible comes across not merely as “treacherous” (167), but irredeemable. This impasse is seen most clearly in her bald statement that “women of the Hebrew Bible are objects, not agents.” (165) The use of a totalizing “are” here locks her into the canonical framing of the narratives that feminist biblical scholars have been at pains to dislodge for decades. Although she cites many of these voices, Thiede erases key insights from Carol Meyers, Susan Ackerman, Ilana Pardes, Athalaya Brenner, Mieke Bal, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, all of whom acknowledge the androcentric and misogynist framework of the biblical canon. However, these scholars have also introduced a dialectic between androcentric canon and women’s subversion, agency, and resistance that has opened biblical scholarship to various paths beyond “accept the misogyny of the text” or “reject the Bible.”
Thiede furthermore forecloses the agency of ancient women in her binary construal of readers of Judges 19: she posits that “modern” readers will understand that the women of Jabesh-Gilead were victims, whereas “ancient” audiences could only understand them as war-booty (125). But reception history shows that it is not only modern audiences who can protest against misogyny in the Bible—witness, for example, Arcangela Tarabotti, the seventeenth-century critic of forced monachization, who portrayed Jephthah as a model of “paternal tyranny.” Do we in fact know that ancient Israelite women were incapable of a similar solidarity? However, Thiede’s avoidance of these perspectives gives her argument a force and power that is valuable insofar as it asks the reader to stay in the moment of denunciation and process it. The evils, both ancient and modern, Thiede presents are deep and do not admit of easy resolutions.
Dirk von der Horst is instructor of religious studies at Mount St. Mary’s University, Los Angeles.
Dirk von der Horst
Date Of Review:
September 24, 2022