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Susanna and the Elders, Restored by Artist Kathleen Gilje

by Johanna Stiebert on

Kathleen Gilje  is a US art restorer and artist best known for her technique of appropriating famous paintings in ways that juxtapose historical provenance with contemporary ideas, concepts or perspectives.

In this short clip she discusses a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, called Susanna and the Elders, which is inspired by the story told in the book of Susanna. This book is in the Apocrypha (also called ‘the deuterocanonical books’, because it is part of the book of Daniel and in the canon of both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches). The book of Susanna tells of a virtuous woman who is threatened with sexual assault by two elders. The story proved a popular inspiration for Baroque and Renaissance artists. Accomplished Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1656) was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. Her paintings often depict strong or suffering women, frequently drawing on mythology and the Bible. It is also known that Gentileschi was raped by her art teacher, that she attempted to fight him off with a knife, and that she participated in the prosecution of her rapist.

Gilje places Gentileschi’s painting of 1610 alongside her own painting, which is inspired by an underpainting on the canvas, which has been made visible through X-ray technology. The X-ray, supplemented by Gilje’s lead paint, shows Susanna screaming and wielding a knife. Gilje brings together the painting, the underpainting and Gentileschi’s biography with stunning effect.

 

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The Handmaid’s Tale as a Legitimate Reading of Genesis?

by Alison Joseph on

The new Hulu show “A Handmaid’s Tale,” based on the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel of the same title, depicts a dystopian society in which women are taken from their families and enslaved as handmaids to address an infertility problem in the United States. While some may see the new society as premised on a “deliberate manipulation, not open-minded interpretation” of Genesis, as a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, I consider it a surprisingly accurate interpretation of the patriarchal narratives in the book of Genesis. In these stories, barrenness is a common motif (see, Gen 16-20; 25; 29-30), and handmaids (Hebrew, also translated as “slave-girl”) are used as birth surrogates.

The world depicted in “The Handmaid’s Tale” is, to put it mildly, disturbing. Women are captured, indoctrinated, tortured, and enslaved to perform the job of surrogates. They are chosen as handmaids because they have previously given birth to live children, which has become very rare in the past years. They are also degraded for having participated in what is deemed immoral sexual behavior in their past lives–adultery, having children out of wedlock, lesbianism, and being rape victims.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” focuses primarily on the character of Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss. We are privy to her inner thoughts and attitude towards her new reality. She makes clear that she regards herself as a prisoner and does not perform the role of handmaid voluntarily. She articulates this explicitly to a Mexican delegation of diplomats in episode 6.

The press around this new production of “The Handmaid’s Tale” has focused on the problematic social and sexual values presented in the society of Gilead, especially in Trump’s America. The handmaids have become symbols of the suppression of female reproductive autonomy; recent protests have included women dressed as the handmaids described in the story. Many wonder if our contemporary world is headed in the direction of Atwood’s. Perhaps this, in part, accounts for the popularity of the show.

‘Handmaid’s Tale’, Daniel X. O’Neil

Audiences have been rightly troubled by this, still fictional, dystopian vision. Even the wives of the elite are denied legal rights; all women are forbidden from reading and writing, are forced to take on exclusively domestic roles, and are clearly subordinate. Women are controlled sexually; sex is a means of procreation, not pleasure. Elite wives must accept the handmaids into their households and participate in the monthly insemination ritual (see below). The handmaid is not to have any sexual partners of her own choosing and is even separated from any existing sexual partners. Also, in a particularly gruesome scene, Offred’s friend, Ofglen played by Alexis Bledel, a known lesbian, wakes up in a hospital room, where both she and the audience realize that she has undergone female genital mutilation, in order to remove the possibility of her attaining and seeking out sexual pleasure. Even the handmaids’ names are signs of their subordination. Each woman is renamed Of-the head of the household. Therefore, Offred, is “of Fred Waterford.”

Here’s the thing – this dystopian vision is not that far off from the world of Genesis! In fact, aspects of “The Handmaid’s Tale” are deliberately based on Genesis — Genesis gives legitimacy to the rituals and rule in Gilead. In Genesis, the handmaids are property of the mistress, sometimes given as wedding gifts by their fathers (e.g. Gen 29:24, 29); the mistress has the power to turn them over to her husband as a “cure” for her barrenness. The biblical text establishes a situation in which the sexual exploitation of the handmaids’ fertility is permitted, even encouraged and celebrated, as a strategy for nation building.

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Sex, Rape and Social History – The Case of the Bible

by Johanna Stiebert on

One does not have to look far to find indications of the normalization of sexual violence (a phenomenon known as rape culture) in news articles, pop culture or, indeed, the Bible.

Recent press coverage of Adam Johnson, the ‘Rape Clause’, and responses to rape storylines in Broadchurch and Emmerdale are but a handful of instances demonstrating the complex attitudes bound up in public understandings of rape. Can the Bible – given its considerable influence on Western culture – contribute to the discussion? And if so, how? The new Shiloh Project, which I co-direct with Katie Edwards and Caroline Blyth, seeks to answer that very question.

The Bible is of limited value for reconstructing specific events of the past. For the social historian, however, the Bible holds more promise. When it comes to social values, attitudes and laws concerning sex, the Bible has undeniably had tremendous influence.

For example, one biblical commentator claims that the biblical incest laws ‘have had greater effect on Western law than any comparable body of biblical laws’. 1 The kinship and marriage laws (known as consanguinity and affinity laws), which were used in Christian Europe over centuries, were directly derived from biblical incest laws. 2 They were also used rather fluidly. In the twelfth century, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage to Louis VII of France was annulled (following the birth of two daughters and no sons) on the grounds of a blood relationship in the fourth degree. Next, however, Eleanor married Henry (who would become Henry II of England): her cousin in the third degree!

The rape laws and narratives of the Bible also hold out promise for explorations of attitudes to rape throughout history. Male-male rape is threatened twice (Genesis 19 and Judges 19) and in both cases the rapists are invited to violate women instead – with the implication that rape of a woman is less abhorrent and less ‘wrong’ than the rape of a man.

In Judges 19, one of the most horrendous narratives of the entire Bible, a nameless woman, the wife of a Levite, is cast out to a group of thugs and gang-raped all night. Her body is dismembered and its parts sent to the tribes of Israel. This leads to a war, which leads to the exclusion of a tribe, which leads to more rape: because seizing a group of women for wives is deemed preferable to the extinction of a tribe.

The Bible is not for the squeamish. There are many more examples of biblical rape texts. King David ‘takes’ Bathsheba, the woman he sees bathing – and (in spite of the romanticised retellings in film versions) the likeliest scenario is that she was not asked for her consent and raped. 3 King David’s son Amnon rapes Tamar, who is his half-sister. Jacob’s daughter Dinah (whose tale is another often portrayed in pop culture as one of romance) is raped by a local prince.

Often the rape of women in the Bible is depicted in cavalier ways. Abraham offers his wife Sarah to the king of Egypt and to Abimelech of Gerar . Sarah hands Hagar to Abraham as a surrogate child-bearer and Jacob’s wives Leah and Rachel do the same with their maidservants, Bilhah and Zilpah. No words identify such actions as trafficking or rape.

The Biblical legal texts prescribe that if an engaged woman is raped in an urban area, she and the rapist shall both be killed – because she should have screamed for help and (tellingly) because the rights of another man (i.e. the man to whom she was engaged) have been violated.

If the rape occurred in the countryside, however, only the man is executed – because the woman may have screamed and not been heard. By implication raped women are ‘damaged goods’ and potentially co-responsible for their violation. A phenomenon known as ‘victim-blaming’ is something we regularly see played out in contemporary media accounts of rape.

In cases where a raped woman was not engaged, a fine must be paid to her father and the rapist must marry the raped woman, with no possibility of divorce. It is clear that notions of female autonomy and consent are barely present in the Bible and that rape is often a matter of male ownership and competition. This is something we have recently seen in news coverage regarding Article 308 in Jordan which would have allowed rapists to avoid jail by marrying their victims.

Religions play a significant part in both confronting and perpetuating the myths and misperceptions that lie at the heart of rape cultures. As such, it is essential that we begin to consider how religion can both participate in and contest rape culture discourses and practices.

The Shiloh Project, a joint initiative between the universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Auckland, is a new research centre which seeks to explore rape in the Bible and also its reception, resonance and afterlives in contemporary settings. The Shiloh Project is named after the women of Shiloh who are seized for rape marriage as a ‘solution’ to prevent the extermination of the tribe of Benjamin. This is a particularly poignant story in the light of the abduction of the girls of Chibok by Boko Haram.

This article was originally published on History Matters. Read the original article.

Johanna Stiebert is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Leeds. Her main research interests in the Hebrew Bible focus on self-conscious emotion terminology, ideological-critical readings of prophetic literature, African-centred interpretation, sexuality, and family dynamics. Johanna is co-director of The Shiloh Project. Her latest book is First-Degree Incest and the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the Family (Bloomsbury T&T Clark: London, 2016).

Header image: The Levite of Ephraim and His Dead Wife. Jean-Jacques Henner circa 1898 [via Wikicommons].

Notes:

  1. Calum M. Carmichael, Law, Legend and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18–20 (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p.1. ↩
  2. For a full treatment of incest in the Bible, see Johanna Stiebert, First-Degree Incest and the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the Family, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 596 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2016). ↩
  3. Biblical scholar David J. A. Clines puts it well when he states, ‘the sex is essentially an expression of royal power, and it is much more like rape than love’ (in his Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSup 205; Gender, Culture, Theory 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), p.226.
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The Greatest Taboo? The Surprising Truth of What the Bible Says About Incest

by Johanna Stiebert on

Incest sparks strong emotions – and today, in many cultures at least, they are largely negative. But has it always been thus? Or is the taboo peculiar to certain times and places?

Incest taboos are often said to be universal – and sex with a close relative (one’s parent, child, or sibling) is widely considered particularly depraved, as well as detrimental and stigmatising for any offspring who might result from such a union.

Such figures as Josef Fritzl and Frederick West have scaled the heights of notoriety in part because of violent, exploitative incest committed against their own children.

And yet incest also seems to be everywhere: in high and low-brow literature – from Virginia Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things – as well as in film and especially popular television – think Game of Thrones, Brookside, Hollyoaks and Emmerdale. It is also a trope in gothic horror.

Curiously, too, in popular culture, incest is not infrequently depicted as consensual and – especially when it is between a good-looking brother and sister – even as romantic.

Nevertheless, judging from the press over the last few weeks, anyone would think that familial sexual relationships were a completely new phenomenon and that until recently, incest was kept at bay by strong social taboos. However, whether familial sexual relationships are indeed considered to be incestuous (that is, illegal, even criminal) or not depends on the social and cultural context. Moreover, attitudes to incest tend to be gendered and heteronormative.

With relatives who were once separated increasingly able to trace each other (through DNA testing, social media, and reunion services), stories of siblings, or of a parent and childreunited are more common. And not infrequently, such reunions transpire in mutual attraction and love – which has been hitting the headlines recently.

A taboo too far?

This phenomenon is known as GSA – Genetic Sexual Attraction Syndrome – and not infrequently affects relatives who did not spend the formative years together and who meet as adults. When people do spend early life together, a different psycho-social mechanism, called the Westermarck effect, functions to suppress erotic bonding. It is almost never the case that romantic, consensual erotic bonding happens between family members who do spend early life together.

Some of the public conversations now turn to whether incestuous unions – where they are consensual and between adults – should be tolerated and decriminalised. Indeed, in Sweden half-sibling marriage is already legal and the jurisdictions of some other countries, too, do not penalise such acts.

Love: but is it legal?

Media stories only portray heterosexual familial partnerships, however, so there’s precious little coverage on brothers or male close family relations who’ve experienced GSA after a period of separation. That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, of course, but the coverage says a great deal about such being a cultural “taboo too far” for us. By contrast, popular cultural representations of heterosexual sibling incest is often eroticised, with the woman frequently portrayed as a feminine ideal: beautiful and sexy. In such story lines, incestuous relationships function to add an extra thrill of the illicit. The most recent public examples of GSA, however, reveal the mundanity of many of the cases, despite the scandalous tenor of the journalists.

The media coverage provoked by biological mother and son Kim West and Ben Ford, the latest couple to go public with their experience of GSA, has been queasy, voyeuristic and sensationalist, with assertions that familial sexual relationships “are on the rise”. Suggestions that familial sexual relationships are increasingly common suggests that they’ve been very rare in the past; however, even a text as ancient as the Bible outlines prohibitions for incest, suggesting that familial sexual relationships occurred frequently enough to warrant the introduction of behavioural guidelines.

The Bible’s verdict

Despite the seemingly clear rules around incestuous relationships – just as popular culture toys with the titillation and taboo of the topic – biblical depiction is ambiguous. Yes, there are the Levitical laws that prohibit sex with a string of family members (one’s sibling, parent, certain in-laws … but not one’s son or daughter!), but then there is also the story of Lot’s daughters in Genesis 19, seducing their father and bearing sons, which offers no (certainly no explicit) reproof. The daughters even draw attention to incest by calling their sons “Moab” (Hebrew for “from the father”) and “Ben-Ammi” (“son of my people”)!

The revered patriarch Abraham mentions rather casually that his wife, Sarah, is also his half-sister. David’s son Amnon becomes obsessed with and rapes his sister Tamar. This event is certainly depicted as villainous and cruel on Amnon’s part but Tamar’s words, as she tries to prevent the rape, suggest sibling marriage is an option.

Close-kin marriages – between fathers and daughters and between siblings – were certainly known in Egypt, right up to and including Cleopatra, who married two of her brothers consecutively.

The Bible, as usual, however, offers no clear advice going forward.

Katie Edwards, Director SIIBS , University of Sheffield and Johanna Stiebert, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Leeds

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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