Framing Jezebel and Others¹

In the class the Maori elder was telling the genealogy of the gods, of how Rangi, the sky father, and Papatuanuku, the earth mother, produced many offspring including Rongo the atua of peace, Tangaroa of the sea, Tane of the forest, Tumatauenga of anger. One of the class of intending Presbyterian ministers, most of them ethnically European (Pakeha), objected to a presentation that suggested "other gods" were being honoured, and refused to accept the explanation that these represented elements of life of continuing relevance, with a lasting and valued place in the spirituality of Maori, the people of the land (tangata whenua) in Aotearoa New Zealand. I, as the elder's Pakeha colleague, was embarrassed but not surprised, for the student in this reformed tradition had texts in plenty to draw upon, texts such as Lev 18:25, 28 with its talk of the land vomiting out all those committing abominations, defined as the practices of the inhabitants of the land. The fit felt uncomfortably close.

But the issue is not so easily resolved, either in the Bible or in my own community. Even Jesus is drawn into the matter, for as Mark tells it Jesus goes off to the region of Tyre, wanting peace and quiet, only to be confronted by a Syrophoenician woman, begging healing for her daughter (Mk 7: 24-26), a Syrophoenician being, of course, not only a Gentile but a person of the land. Matthew goes further, describing her as Canaanite (Mt 15: 21-22), a word which, to quote a recent article:

I want to prise open this biblical rent, to pull it apart as a frame through which I can peer and perhaps look more closely at the face of the Canaanite whose features haunt the texts of scripture, and those who read them. I have an interest in texts which would promote such ethnic and religious erasure for I belong to a country and a church which continues to wrestle with difference on various levels. I want to look more carefully at the traces of these Canaanite women.

The writer of Matthew himself sends me back to texts of the Deuteronomistic History for while the word Canaanite may open this memory, in the gospel opening he has already signalled the flow of Canaanite blood that refuses to be stemmed. As Luz and others note, Matthew is a writer of considerable skill, who works as a literary code-setter, embedding clues for the perceptive (Luz 1995: 2; Kingsbury 1986: 32; Wainwright 1991:114). It is the skill of doublespeak, shown in the title (1:1) where genealogy reads both as a flashback to Genesis (2:4 and 5:1) and a clue to what follows, virtually announcing that Matthew is "writing the Bible anew" with "a new ‘book of the origins’" (Luz: 24), and there embedded in this new beginning are four women, probably all non-Israelite.² One is notably a Canaanite, although the C word is not mentioned, the text simply stating Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab. One might ask how Rahab could have mothered a son who lived so many decades later! The text, however, sees no problem.

But if Matthew is providing a new book of origins, he is also urging me to return to the fading but not faded first layer of this palimpsest text, to that first book of landed origins, the Deuteronomistic History, to look more carefully at the face of this Rahab, that catalyst of the conquest in Joshua 2, who happened to be Canaanite, and yet became an ancestor of Jesus and a model of Christian faith. I now have questions to ask of the role of Rahab the spy-keeper, who stands at the entry point of this History.³ And there are those other niggling wonders. Will it be her face that I uncover? Will it be her voice that I hear if I listen to this text? Certainly I hear a Rahab speaking. In the second verse when the king of Jericho hears of spies in Rahab's house and sends his henchmen on a night-time raid, she answers and admits the men came to her, but adds I did not know where they came from, declaring where the men went I do not know. A dishonest model of faith?! For she clearly not only knows, but has hidden the men. It is this Canaanite Rahab, and not the Israelite spies, who is secretly and effectively working for the Israelite agency. I listen to her declaring to the spies hidden under the flax, I know that Yahweh has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us ... For we have heard how Yahweh dried up the water of the Red Sea before you ... and what you did to ... Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed and I am suspicious. Her remarkable affirmation, Yahweh, your God is the God of heaven above and earth below, before extracting their pledge to save her family, convinces me that there is a credibility problem here. Can this possibly be the voice of a Canaanite Rahab, versed in Israelite traditions, in Sihon and Og, Song of the Sea, Holy War language? Or are we hearing another conversation, the words of a long ago Deuteronomistic writing team? One can imagine a Deuteronomist thinking:

Or perhaps a team working together, where another Deuteronomist suggests:

It would, of course, have been a different story told in Canaan; different interpretive communities naturally interpret trickster tales differently. If I continue this fictitious scenario, I might imagine a further conversation, where the Deuteronomist suggests:

Could he have added: "she might even be revered for ever as a model of faith in Israel"?

Even if this conversation is wholly imaginary, the Canaanite features of Rahab's face have clearly been erased, and overpainted in Deuteronomistic colours, by being set in a Deuteronomistic frame. I wonder then about the possibility of catching even a glimpse of a Canaanite who, according to tradition, remained resolutely Canaanite. This sends me back to Jezebel, that ambiguous Israelite queen, whose story, coming much later in the History, has already been framed by the Rahab tale placed at its beginning.

If Rahab is portrayed as a Canaanite who qualified for an "in" place in Israel, there seems little doubt that the History wants Jezebel "out". As the texts portray her, Jezebel is not only a powerful queen and queen mother, but a manipulative murderer and killer of Israel's divine prophets. But once again I cannot help wondering whether this was really Jezebel. Did she do this? Could she have done this? Isn't there a tension in the tale of a foreign queen with such power and malignity? And why the excess of violence in the telling of her death? Tina Pippin asks, "What have we done with the story of Jezebel?" (1994: 206). That brings an urgency to my questions, and returns me again to the tensions in my own communities. As one who both belongs to the dominant European culture which still holds most of the places of privilege and power, but who has also, as a woman, experienced gender prejudices and biases, I have a personal interest in figures who stand in places of ambiguity. And Jezebel as both a Canaanite woman and a powerful queen of Israel seems notably ambiguous. But first I want to ask what the Deuteronomists have done with her story. Was she too a literary cog in the powerful Deuteronomistic ideological machinery? I want to ask whether there was a carefully devised framing of Jezebel. The question is: can I find traces of this? If there was a framing, then a case needs to be made, with the defendant's voice heard. But Jezebel's voice has been silenced, just as her face has been all but erased. So all I can do is imagine Jezebel. If this seems a somewhat doubtful scholarly practice, I draw Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's hermeneutics of imagination to my aid (1992: 26-28).

The imaginary Jezebel has a strong point here. If it is difficult telling a Canaanite pot from an Israelite one, or a Canaanite house from an Israelite house (Edelman 1996), it is surely no less difficult to recognize the differences in ancient religious practice. That very difficulty of course, may have made the need to draw boundaries all the sharper. On the surface level of the texts, the case against Jezebel is presented in vivid colours. Under the reign of Jezebel and Ahab, there is a vivid struggle between the gods of death and the Israelite God of life. When Jezebel appears next in 1 Kgs 18, "[d]eath ... seems to be on the brink of seizing all of Yahweh's prophets" (Hauser 1990: 28). Here the framing of the Deuteronomists is clearly visible; Jezebel the death-dealer returns in the immediate wake of Elijah the life-giver, and life-restorer of 1 Kgs 17. In this third year of drought motifs of life and death are foremost. There is a dramatic tension. Who will provide food? Who will be the giver of life? Surely it could not be Jezebel! But although Jezebel has been on a deathly prophet-killing spree, her own four hundred prophets are reported safe and eating well at her table (18:19). Perhaps the death dealer is a life giver after all. The immediate textual move is to the competition between Elijah and the "foreign" prophets at Mt. Carmel, where Elijah and Elijah's God win, kill all the Baal prophets and send the rains. But if Elijah runs in triumph to Jezreel, he is also running in the direction of Jezebel, for in the next verse (19:1) she reappears, and, as Hauser expresses it, "[s]inglehandedly, ... dramatically alters the course of events. Elijah .. is transformed by Jezebel into a whimpering defeatist ... Jezebel serves once again ... as a powerful agent of death" (1990: 60).⁴ The later Masoretes appear to have had some trouble depicting Elijah in this way, and pointed the verb in 19:3 as he saw, against the earlier versions he was afraid. If Jezebel was death personified, then well might Elijah have been afraid. But could Jezebel really have wielded such power? The simple answer, following the line of the narrative, is yes, for Jezebel does not stop there, but strikes again in the matter of Naboth's vineyard. Here again, imagine the defendant given a voice:

As Jezebel rightly points out, the text does not seem able to make up its mind about her part in the Naboth incident. But clearly she has to die, that has also been foretold in this chapter of deathly deed and deathly prediction. The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel (21: 23). Does she have to die because of her supposed role in the Naboth incident or because of her Baal connections and the death of Yahweh's prophets? Four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and four hundred prophets of Asherah - take the Deuteronomists' word, and this is apostasy on the grand scale; she has to be killed off. But the accusations begin to mount. Jehu makes her his excuse for his coup d'état, shouting at Jehoram what peace can there be, so long as the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother Jezebel continue? (2 Kgs 9:22). Whoredoms and spells, the age-old accusation: beware the foreign woman who is either adulterous or harlotrous, for running after other gods has to be the same as running after other men. This is standard stuff but quite ironic for Jezebel, who it has been possible to describe as "a brave, fearless, generous woman, so wholly devoted to her own husband that even wrong seemed justifiable to her, if she could thereby make him happy."⁶ In this telling death has become inevitable. As recorded, she painted her eyes, and adorned her head and looked out of the window (9:30).

As Jezebel the defendant acknowledges, the ending is not nice:

Jezebel with painted eyes and adorned head, framed in her window, to end just five verses later, as only a skull, feet and hands (9:35). There is death and death again in the Hebrew Bible, but a death like this! A death told with "such visceral hostility" to a woman (Fewell and Gunn 1993: 166). I would like to dismiss it as just some ancient stuff, one brief episode among the internecine wars of Zimris, Omris and Jehus, but it is more than that. This is a death told within a Deuteronomistic frame, honed and polished with care, a frame for a last and lasting portrait of Jezebel. As I gaze my suspicion grows; I become aware of shades and shadows hinting of cracks and cover-ups.

The text itself sets us up with certain expectations. For there she is in v.30, Jezebel, queen mother, gebira, of Israel, standing at her window so carefully made up. Could she be waiting for a lover, for the Jehu so freshly arrived in Jezreel? But we, the readers, already know that Jehu is the killer of her son. In any case, the text scarcely leaves space for such a thought, so swiftly overridden by her words: Is it peace, Zimri, murderer of your master? Not words of seduction, but a battle taunt to Jehu as the archetypal usurping murderer. I am immediately uneasy; the scene seems wrongly spliced - two frames that do not fit. The warrior Jehu fresh from the battle a few lines above, having shot not one king, but two, now coming through the gate towards the present holder of the throne, and then the cut to the world of the palace with the queen mother at her window. Why these details of eyes and hair? To paint the loser in this contest, for victims or losers in war have long been feminized (Washington 1997: 331)? Or, perhaps it is an "and", these details have been coded with the message that women who do not behave like women - according to the narrator's gender construction - must fall from their place, that crossing boundaries of authority has dire consequences, that such people must be removed for the health and well-being of the greater good. While I hesitate in my decoding, I recognize very clearly that this textual framing of Jezebel's attracting appearance within the account of Jehu's arrival is creating in me a profound sense of unease.

If this is bedroom warfare, it concludes with deathly result. Again I wonder about the framing of this scene, set in marked contrast to the scene in the Rahab tale, where the window opened out for life; here it opens to death. But again I pause and wonder about the coding, for a woman's body thrown through a window has ominous overtones. A woman whose battle taunt from the confines of her house has been invitation to war, is surely none other than the deadly killer-woman, the one who leads those who enter her house down to the shades (Prov. 9:18). The imagery may be even more chilling, for if the house "is ... a metonymical symbol of woman", as it frequently is in literature, and the window representing the birthing canal (Exum 1993: 47), this is a birth, not into life, but into death.⁹ Psychoanalytical theory has much to say about the subconscious desire to kill the mother figure. Would that have applied in Israel? I am unsure here. But at the very least, if one accepts that a community's identity is intimately tied to those it chooses to kill (Bronfen and Webster Goodwin 1993: 15-16), then what is clear is that Jezebel represents what Israel wants eliminated from its midst.

But then that cut to domesticity; Jehu goes in to dinner. Has this narrator no sense of the proprieties! Mentioning a body to bury in the midst of eating and drinking! Or do I read this as a hint of the victory banquet? If the death of Jezebel has an analogy with the ban, which Susan Niditch (1993: 73) thinks may have been Jehu's motivation, then such a death is "a means of gaining God's favor through expurgation of the abomination ... divine judgment" (Niditch: 57).¹⁰ The word abomination stirs another memory. I go back and look again at the figure at the window, for painted as she is, this is surely the very image of the ‘woman at the window’, that seemingly popular motif in ancient Near Eastern art, which some have thought may be representing "the goddess as sacred prostitute" (Ackroyd 1993: 258).¹¹ Even if this is not so, is it yet possible to follow Susan Ackerman's suggestion (1993: 400) not only that Asherah devotion might have been expected of Israelite and Judean queens and queen mothers, but that the motif of divine sonship in Judean royal ideology may have had a feminine equivalent, so that just as Yahweh was the adopted father of the king, who became his earthly representative, so the queen or queen mother became the earthly counterpart of Asherah?¹² All the more likely for queen mothers if Asherah herself was celebrated as queen mother among the gods in Ugarit (Gordon 1988). If this could possibly be Asherah, in any form at all, then there is only one way to deal with her. Quickly quickly "cut" her down. This is the classic mise-en-abyme, the casting down of Jezebel as the casting out of foreign gods in miniature.

Such cutting down leads to the matter of the death, that trampling of the horses, that spattered blood, that skull, feet and palms of the hands - the all that remains. The detail is chilling, although the plot had already been laid as far back as v.10 where a most youthful of prophets gave his divine prediction, repeating the words of Elijah from 1 Kgs 21:23, that Jezebel would be eaten by the dogs. I shudder and wonder what I am to make of this. Is it, as Alice Bach suggests of another context, to resolve the writers' own deep fears "of being eaten up by fear of the other" (Bach 1997: 188)? Fear of woman, fear of a powerful woman, fear of a powerful Canaanite and therefore "Other" woman. What is clear is that Jezebel has slipped entirely outside the human frame. No-one can say this is Jezebel; this is indeed erasure. But remains that lie like dung upon the ground? The fact that we are told that these are Jezebel's remains implies that "[t]here is still something of the subject bound up with them" and so adds to the feelings of disgust and repulsion that body bits evoke (Grosz 1994: 81). Kristeva's theory of abjection puts this in bold relief; if death as the abject "confronts us ... with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal" then surely Jezebel's deathly remains from an animal's feasting confront us with abjection upon abjection (Kristeva 1982: 12).

A woman who lingers as excretion. This is certainly a fearful text. But was Jehu responsible or the Deuteronomists? For if Jezebel's death avenged the murder of the prophets and the blood of all the servants of Israel's God, as the divine message to Jehu states (2 Kgs 9:7), she was not the only one who killed. Follow the story line, and the murdering role moves from Israel's god, to Elijah, to the elders who carry out the orders of the letter regarding Naboth, and finally to Jehu. Does it all depend on who one kills? Jezebel killed Israelites and Israel's divine prophets. But did she? The question stays with me. Can a charge be made that Jezebel was framed by the Deuteronomists? They had inherited the stories of Yahweh's prophet, and Jezebel was their ideal foil. Perhaps here too they carefully spliced stories together, inserting another stock tale, this time of "the consuming female ... who entraps and then kills the male," the basic elements of the Naboth plot, into the framework of Jezebel the instigator of Baal/Asherah worship, adding the standard accusation of whoredoms for religious unacceptability. She is to be destroyed, for she, as Canaanite, provides a face from the grimy rubble of history, on which not only the weak deeds of a weak (was he?) monarch, but the sins of all Israel could be written. Perhaps her greatest crime was that she did not follow in the path of Rahab, the Canaanite turned Israelite, and for that Israel destroyed more than her body.

The biblical writers have left us with two lasting pictures of these women, each framed in a window: Rahab, tying the crimson cord so necessary for her own survival, albeit at the cost of her people, and Jezebel, the foreign femme fatale about to be thrown to her death for being resolutely Phoenician, to the cost of Israelites. The good Canaanite and the bad. But these brief scenes are more than episodes in the lives of two individual women, they are significant narrative miniatures that encapsulate Israel's story of beginnings. These women, one in her house opening out the land for Israel, the other virtually vomited out, carry the weight of Israel's mega-narrative. Israel will gain the land and foreignness will be cut down and eradicated, and Rahabs and Jezebels, in many forms, will be multiplied as the story is told and retold.

My concern is that if we accept these narratives as written, their effect continues and spills out into our own lives and the lives of our communities, for, as recent writers have written, "the cultural narratives in which we think about race and ethnicity not only reflect but also shape the material realities of racism" (Friedman 1995: 6); "a cultural text ... should be read not just for the history it reflects, but also for the history it has made" (Guardiola-Sáenz 1997: 71). If the Rahab story is heard persuading the reader that the good Canaanite is not just the Canaanite who delivers enemy spies and works for the destruction of her own people, but the one who leaves behind her Canaanite identity and adopts the belief system of the winning or dominant power, what is the message that has been passed on to generations of readers?¹³ As Tina Pippin asks (1994: 206), "What have we done with the story of Jezebel? Is her story continually recolonized, reopened, the brief scenes of her life re-enacted and reinscribed?" It is now readers' lives which are at stake.

But if the Rahab and Jezebel narratives are framed by Israelite interest, is it possible to see and hear a biblical Canaanite who has eluded such a framing? Jim Perkinson has used the metaphor of the overwritten manuscript to describe the reappearance of the Canaanite in Matthew's gospel. If Rahab and Jezebel were kept within their houses, glimpsed through their windows, then, in one sense, this woman is markedly different; she is meeting Jesus publicly out in the open. My suspicion of the Deuteronomistic writing team makes me want to query Matthew. He introduces this Canaanite woman but I wonder to what end. It is he who, in contrast to Mark, has chosen to call her Canaanite. It is he who has her meet Jesus outside, so that Jesus cannot be seen breaking the barriers between Jew and Gentile by sharing a table (Sim 1996: 192). And again in contrast to Mark has her address Jesus as Lord, Son of David (v.22, 25, 27). Why? If I drop my suspicion, I can hear this as the woman being merely polite, addressing Jesus formally as kyrios, and indeed being doubly polite in adding the full terms of his lineage. But a Canaanite using the address Son of David! Surely this must reinforce the ancient division. I sense another framing, for can I really believe that a writer who has set the encounter within the frame of the conflict traditions of early Israel, Canaanite versus Israelite, and with the gender relations of imploring outsider woman and powerful Jewish healer, has no interest in these differences.¹⁴ It may well be that Matthew, the gospel writer, is using this title to signal to those who have travelled through this gospel and remember the episode of 9:27-31, that there is another healing about to occur through the power of this man Jesus (Duling 1992: 112).¹⁵ Certainly there is a healing for the Canaanite woman, a recognition that she also has shown faith, and therefore may have crumbs, but I want to ask: is the point being made that it is faith in the Jewish Jesus' god that has achieved this? Is this a rediviva Rahab now programmed as a symbol of belief in the Matthean gospel agenda?

But, like Rahab and Jezebel, she is not only seen but heard, and heard as a voice in active confrontation with Jesus. There is another interesting, and perhaps highly significant feature, for we, as readers, have already been told that Rahab is Jesus' ancestor. If Canaanites are strictly Other to Israel, the intriguing question arises as to whether there is a trace of Otherness, of Canaanite-ness, in the face of Jesus the Jew.¹⁶ I want to keep this in mind as I watch his interaction with the woman from Sidon, but the retort about it not being fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs brings an uneasy memory of Jezebel. The woman replies, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table. And Jesus accepts her faith. I watch the interchange eagerly detecting in this meeting of Canaanite woman and Jewish man a recognition that is double facing; the Canaanite recognizes the healing power of this Davidic Jesus, and the Davidic Jesus allows the faithful Canaanite, as "woman", not dog, a place at the table, which now expands to accept the ethnically different.¹⁷ I begin to sigh with relief. At last, this time, Canaanites get to eat the meal. At last, Israelite dogs eating Jezebel's remains are consigned to a past and fading memory. The Canaanite has spoken; to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's much quoted term, we are now hearing the voice of the subaltern (Perkinson 1996: 64). Sharon Ringe some years ago characterized Matthew's Canaanite as "an uppity woman" (Ringe 1985: 65), but this woman in her stand for Canaanite identity, is showing more than "uppityness".¹⁸ Leticia Guardiola-Sáenz (1997: 76) suggests that it may even be possible to hear her challenge as not so much a request of a favour as a demand for restitution, which sounds immediately familiar to me reading from my own context where Pakeha settlement and land deals have bequeathed a legacy of treaty claims for restitution.

If I view the scene through the lens of postcolonialism, which Sugirtharajah (1998: 93) describes as "a reading posture" rather than a method, providing "an active confrontation with the dominant system of thought, its lopsidedness and inadequacies," my suspicions find fresh explanations. While I note all the more clearly how Jesus "places the obstacle of ethnicity across the path of a plea for help" (Wainwright 1998: 92), I can read his equally remarkable turn-around as an example of what Spivak calls "unlearning one's privilege." Yet Landry and MacLean's definition of this as "doing one's homework in the interests of unlearning one's privilege marks the beginning of an ethical relation to the Other" (1996: 5), returns the focus to Jesus, and prepares the way for the woman to slip out of sight. The Canaanite woman has done her conscientizing work, perhaps most significantly in allowing Jesus to recognize that Canaanite trace in his own face.

So I have a few lingering doubts. I would like to agree with those who hear a Canaanite voice speaking "for a brief moment ... in [Jesus'] place" (Perkinson 1996: 80), speaking as "the christic one" (Wainwright 1998: 88). But that retort of the woman leaves me wondering. It may be that there is an irony in her response, that her re-use of the term "dogs" is a ploy which postcolonial theory describes as "a way of resisting and yet acknowledging the power of the dominant ... allow[ing] a text to work within the constraints of the dominant while placing those constraints as constraints in the foreground and thus undermining their power" (Hutcheon 1990: 177), and thus allowing the gospel message entry. I am not sure. Take away the suggestion of irony, and I hear her accepting her place among the dogs, a woman colonized in the mind. Expanding Jesus' words so both she and the "children" receive the bread, does not necessarily bring her out from underneath the table. And is it only crumbs and not a full meal?

A recent writer, Pokorny (1995: 337) sums up the encounter: "[t]his is the good news of this story: the puppy became a child." But I want to double check; I am wondering whether this is still a Canaanite child and whether she is out from under the table. I want to look again at whether recognition on both sides has allowed respect for both Israelite and Canaanite identity. My suspicion of Matthew remains as I note his framing of this episode within the disciples' lack of understanding (15:10-20; 15:32-16:12). Coming to this text by way of Rahab and Jezebel makes me suspect that once again the Canaanite woman has been used as a foil (Wainwright 1991: 116), a cog in the ideological agenda.

And I stumble at that undisputed term "dogs". Jesus may have addressed the Canaanite as "woman" but the word "dog" remains unerased. I cannot help wondering whether Matthew has kept the word in the gospel, and indeed built the gist of the dialogue upon it, not only to emphasize the change in Jesus' attitude, but because this was the way in which he too regarded the Canaanite. If the mouths of Israelite dogs are under control, Matthew has clearly not reined in the mouth of Jesus; the violence has not passed, but has moved from physical to verbal. So I am not entirely sure that this is the saving end to "primally unfinished business". But what is clear is that the matter is under negotiation again, there is no closure here.¹⁹

My initial wonderment was how the bible regarded "Other" women, and whether certain texts stand as frames for others. I have watched three women making their way through an ancient "othering" world, with compliance and survival, integrity and death, challenge and grudging reward. Jezebel read between the narratives of Rahab and Matthew's Canaanite woman, is the sobering tale of the cost of remaining resolutely "Other"; it is a quite literal story of the attempted death and burial of a culture. My suspicious reading, informed by a feminist, ideological and postcolonial awareness, has revealed a Rahab speaking in the colonizers' language, an excreted Jezebel and a later Canaanite whose ambiguous stance was written in and then swiftly written over, leaving Jesus to be hailed in the name of the God of Israel (v.31). The term "framed" has been all too apt, for not only Jezebel seen standing in the window from which she would be cast out to her death, but all three, in differing ways, are all too easily read as framed by their writers, in the common legal sense.

I introduced this discussion with an incident I had experienced a few years ago. I did so because finally this discussion is set within the frame of my own concerns, my own reactions, my own responses. I chose to focus on these three texts, and I have chosen how to write about them. But that choice has, in turn, been governed by my experiences of the subtleties of power in my own life. As I wrote this, another incident came to mind. Some years ago I was part of a women's refuge collective that was challenged to divide its underfunded resources so that there could be two women's refuges in the city, one for Maori women and one for non-Maori. Feelings were strongly divided on the matter and there were many meetings with heated debate. On one occasion a small group of us from the existing collective met with some of the Maori women who had issued the challenge, and as we sat facing each other those of us who were non-Maori were asked one by one to state our understanding of the Maori term, that was the key to the treaty relationship between Maori and Pakeha in our land. It was a tense moment for each of us. Did I really understand it? Could I put it into words? We knew the gender tensions in our society from the underside, but how acute was our understanding of the ethnic underside when we were all from the more privileged dominant culture?

So it is I, the person who I am, the person who lives in the tensions of a gendered and postcolonial world, who has read and written about these three women. In doing so, I have, of course, turned their faces to my own world, with the inevitable danger that the faces I turn will be freshly painted to fit my frame more easily, that the differences of time and culture will quickly be faded out. The greater danger is that no questions will be asked about their place within the power dynamics of these texts, which will then spill out into the lives of those who read them. For the questions that finally frame this meeting place of text and reader, are those shared by all women who write about texts:

Laurel Richardson's questions are directed at sociologists, but the issues are shared. Her comment that "[p]eople live by stories ... if the available narrative is limiting, people's lives are limited, textually disenfranchised" (1997: 58), hits the issue. For whom am I writing? And to what end? My fear is that the faces of Rahab and Jezebel are still appearing under the surface of many texts, still framed by their places in the ideologies of their authors, still refusing final erasure. My fear is that they add their warrant to the frames constructed by ethnic assumptions and prejudice, and sometimes from the gender expectations of the professionally and institutionally successful that are still being built around women, sometimes openly, sometimes unseen. As I read these ancient texts and gaze at these ancient faces, I see faces that I know peering through these three, and the shapes and contours of faces that I do not know personally but whose contexts I recognize. It is for them that I pick up my pen, or more accurately pull out the keyboard of the computer, take out these ancient texts from their biblical frame, and set them up as conversation partners, knowing that the conversations will veer from one side to the other, as voice overspeaks voice. What matters is that these writings, with the faces of the framed which refuse erasure, remain to remind us that "identity" and "difference" are always under negotiation.

1 This paper was first presented at the SBL meeting in Boston, Nov.1999. Back to text

2 Tamar in later tradition considered an Aramean (Jubilees 41:1), Ruth clearly a Moabite, Rahab a Canaanite and Bathsheba introduced as the wife of the Hittite Uriah. See Wilson (1992: 931) re linear male genealogies traditionally used "to ground a claim to power, status, rank, office, or inheritance in an earlier ancestor." Back to text

3 I have a fuller discussion of this in McKinlay (1999). Back to text

4 Hauser reads the text with Ugaritic motifs in the foreground. See Moore (1990: 117-121) for a strong rebuttal of such a reading, although directed at the work of Leah Bronner. Back to text

5 See both Rofé (1988: 95-96) and McKenzie (1991: 67) and those cited by both, for the view that the Naboth narrative is a distinct and later composition. Back to text

6 E. B. Dietrick in The Women's Bible (New York: European Publishing Co. 1895), p.75, quoted by Pippin (1994: 198). Back to text

7 As Cogan and Tadmor (1988: 112) comment the "MT singular with Jehu as subject is the more striking reading and adds to the characterization of the protagonist." Back to text

8 The MT has the word domen but it seems likely that those familiar with Aramaic would pick up the hidden pun. So Cogan and Tadmor (1988:113) Jones (1984: 463) refers to the Arabic and Akkadian zibl meaning ‘dung’. Back to text

9 And not only in ancient literature. In Maori tradition the tribal meeting house is understood to represent a body, with the door as the vagina, so that the dead are carried in through the window, as a person cannot reenter a mother's womb. Back to text

10 Niditch (1993: 40) suggests that "deep in the mythological framework of Israelite thought, war, death, sacrifice, the ban, and divine satisfaction are integrally associated." Back to text

11 As Exum (1996: 73) notes, this earlier suggestion has now been challenged. Back to text

12 As Polzin (1993: 24) notes, the narrator makes the point in 1 Sam 8: 8 that "Israel's political adulation of kings is comparable to its cultic adoration of gods." Back to text

13 Warrior (1989: 261-265) has reminded us that Exodus reads very differently if one is Canaanite. I ask these questions of the Rahab tale more fully in McKinlay (1999). Back to text

14 Kwok Pui-lan (1995: 74, 82) notes the "dense web of significations" in this narrative, i.e. "Jewish homeland/foreign lands, inside/outside the house, Jews/Gentiles, cleanliness/uncleanliness, children/dogs, woman/ disciples, and faithful/unfaithful." Following Theissen, she also notes the woman's knowledge of Greek, "suggesting that she is educated and from the upper class." Back to text

15 Wainwright (1998: 90) follows Duling in seeing this title as multivalent, thus allowing varying possibilities among its cluster of meaning. Back to text

16 See Fewell (1997: 132-152) for a discussion of the traces of Canaanites appearing in the faces of Israel. Back to text

17 Wainwright (1998: 91) reads this pericope as a "threshold dialogue" with both characters "crossing over" into new space and understanding. Back to text

18 Sharon Ringe does not, however, leave the matter as one of "uppity"ness, but talks of the woman's gifts of sharp insight and courage (1985: 72). Back to text

19 As Regina Schwartz (1998: 197) reminds us, in the Bible "[o]n the question of the Other, the foreigner, the narratives are decidedly inconsistent ... Who is an insider and who is an outsider is perpetually negotiated..." Back to text