Customer Reviews

Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other

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While I do not share some of Klitsner's presuppositions, her book qualifies immediately in the most important virtue of a book on Biblical interpretation: she helps readers see the text in new ways. Occasionally her exposition is strained but for every non-sequitur there are dozens of insightful connections in inner Biblical interpretation.

The first chapter draws attention to connections between the Jonah story and the earlier Noah story:

(1) Noah sent a dove (Hebrew, yonah) to see if the flood was ended; Jonah is, of course Yonah.

(2) God flooded the world because of hamas (violence, injustice); in Jonah, the Ninevites repented of their hamas and turned away from it.

(3) Noah and Jonah's stories both involve boats, sea journeys, and water-induced catastrophe (even though Nineveh is nowhere near the sea).

(4) The Noah story is about judgment without mercy; the Jonah story is about mercy over judgment.

(5) Noah ends his career in self-induced slumber and drunken self-destruction; Jonah begins his quest sleeping in the hold of the ship, then asking to be drowned in the sea, and at the end praying for God to take his life.

(6) Noah is ambivalent about the destruction of the world while God is unrelenting; in Jonah, God wants to save the wicked, but Jonah is unwilling.

Klitsner is more willing than I to question God's motives in the story, as she apparently views the Biblical narratives as human writings about God. Thus, it is possible, in her view, that the Noah story represents an earlier and inferior view of Divine judgment and mercy. My own theology differs a bit from hers, not being as willing to find fault with God in the Flood account. I would say that context was different between the Flood and Nineveh and that the Judge of all the earth does right. In fact, the repentance of Ninevah, if you believe Jonah is based on real events, was temporary and did not save them. In the end, the Assyrians like the generation of the flood, paid the price for their hamas and went down in history as a defeated empire and a despised people.

Nonetheless, Klitsner's insight into the verbal parallels, puns, and interconnections has forever changed the way I will read both Noah and Jonah. She is an interesting thinker and reader. I recommend this book to those who are not beginners in Bible reading. If you are a beginner, perhaps get it and put it on your list for after you have learned a bit more and you are ready to handle a little controversy. I especially recommend this book to those for whom Bible reading has become stale or whose faith in the God of the Bible is waning.

You can see my review of the first chapter here at [...]

Derek Leman
[...]

Submitted by Prof. Henri Zukier

In Subversive Sequels in the Bible, Judy Klitsner explores the complex relationship between various familiar Biblical tales in a manner that is at once both surprising and convincing. What is convincing is the degree to which these narratives interact with common theme and language. What is surprising is that the results of such an examination yield a subversive yet stubbornly reverent approach to Bible study. Klitsner is a masterful guide on a thrilling voyage of discovery of hidden meanings and dynamics in the classical texts. Klitsner shakes up our old certainties about our most ancient and seemingly familiar biblical narratives, with counterintuitive, but ultimately compelling insights. She casts this familiar universe in a very different, bright light.
Written with a minimum of academic jargon, this work is accessible, enjoyable and valuable to scholar and layperson alike and may be one of a very few examples of literary close readings of Hebrew texts that brings the sophistication of ancient Hebrew literature to the English speaking public.
An easily summarized example is Klitsner's first chapter comparing the narrative of Noah and his ark to that of Jonah (Hebrew for "dove"). Under Klitsner's lens, these two stories are in dialogue about the dynamic nature of both human transcendence and Divine compassion. Whereas Noah is the surviving prophet in a drowning world - Jonah is the drowning prophet in a world redeemed. One story (Noah) ends with the sending of a dove and begins with the saving of many animals. The other begins with the sending of a "dove" (Jonah) and ends with a verse about saving many animals.
I won't spoil the adventure of discovering with Klitsner the intricate inversion of theme and language that creates this theological dialogue between the stories. Yet, the whole treatment is greater than the sum of its parts. The author picks up on the way in which the Jonah story redeems the Noah story and with it the chance for human triumph with its stubborn hopeful "perhaps?" over the gravity and despair of our presumed fate.
What links the various essays in the book is the tight literary analysis and its striking methodology of reading texts as "intertextually" related. Stories are seen as sequels that mine and undermine prior tales. No longer seen as ancient statements of monolithic messages, these stories echo into other stories and eventually resound beyond the pages of the Bible. The result is a highly relevant approach to Bible reading that ultimately invites the reader into an ongoing moral and theological symposium.
Most of the book is dedicated to a rereading of various women's narratives in the Bible -from Eve and Sarah, and Rebecca and Rachel of Genesis to Deborah and Hannah, and Mrs. Manoach. Here too, to the satisfaction of traditionalists and feminists alike, the stories are read with a respect for the original stories together with a mindfulness of the ways in which later stories subvert and elevate the status of Biblical women in an ongoing conversation about biblical woman's relationship to self, to man, and to God. Be prepared for a ride. Very highly recommended.

I very much enjoyed reading this book and I recommend it enthusiastically. Judy Klitsner combines classical Jewish close readings of biblical narratives with deep modern literary insights. The results are often astonishing. I learned much from this book--both from Klitsner's skill at interweaving seemingly unrelated biblical texts and from the timely lessons she draws from these juxtapositions. She finds surprisingly modern attitudes in the Bible about the relationships between women and men, humans and God.
Readers do not require background in Hebrew or in Biblical Studies to appreciate Klitsner's work. But even experts in the field will find much new and of value in the book.

I have been privileged to study with Judy Klitsner on a number of occasions, including at Pardes, Hadar, JTS and Limmud. Every time I hear her give a lecture, I ask: how could I recreate the magic of that teaching to tell my friends about her main points? Finally, Judy has done that herself in this book. This represents an expansion of the thoughts and ideas she has been teaching for years, and it is a blessing that this exists for anyone who wants to take hold of it, anywhere in the world. You will never read the Bible in the same way once you catch a glimpse of Judy's method. I won't spoil the contents, but the juxtapositions she puts forth between Biblical narratives are simply brilliant. Enjoy this fantastic book.

Judy Klitsner introduces readers to a new, eye-opening, and interesting way of understanding biblical narratives in her book, which won the National Jewish Book Award. She reads the stories as one reads good literature. She shows that different biblical tales frequently and purposely use similar language, often the same word, to draw readers' attention to the connection between the tales. The basic part of this technique is well-known and used by many people to help them understand and appreciate the depths of biblical narratives. However, Klitsner moves a step further and makes a profound contribution to the understanding of the Bible. She proves, with dozens of demonstrations, that the subsequent stories subvert - radically reexamine, develop, and change - the idea or ideas that are in the prior tale.

For example, three of her six chapters examine the changes in the Bible's portrayal of women. The first narrative, in Genesis chapter 1, depicts the first humans as "full and equal partners in their capacity to create and subdue." However, in chapter 2, "the equality between man and woman is lost." The man patronizingly "views her as a unique and irreplaceable gift, and as one who gives him as sense of completion as a human being." Thus, chapter 1's equality of the sexes is lost. The woman becomes subservient to man, a source of pleasure.

The woman is frustrated with this demeaning secondary status. At the end of chapter 2, we discover another subversion. She seeks independence, meaning, and satisfaction. She speaks with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The serpent, says the Talmud, Baba Bathra 16a, is her "evil Inclination," her inner urge. She expresses her feelings by violating the man's command, which he says is from God, by eating the forbidden fruit.

In the next sequel, in chapter 3, her status deteriorates further; the male gives her a name, Havah, Eve in English. The naming expresses his mastery over her, just as when he named the animals he showed mastery over them. God accentuates this when He declares "he will rule over you."

But, Klitsner stresses, this is not a biblical pronouncement that women must be unequal. It is "a description of sociological realities that play out through much of human history." This becomes clear when we read in the subsequent sequel, when the pair are driven from the garden, that its entrance is guarded by "cherubim," two angelic figures, which a Talmudic tradition, in Yoma 54a, understands as "symbols of male-female equality." "Seen in this way, the Cherubim symbolize male-female equality as a prerequisite to entering...God's holy places."

This Klitsner emphasis helps readers understand why the Torah composes its tales in this extraordinary way. Each narrative is an event or parable written to express a particular message and is not intended to reveal the entire truth. The truth can only be grasped by reading the entire Torah, all of the narratives, not by reading one in isolation.

Klitsner builds upon these subversive sequels to analyze the relationship between the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah, with the result that we see Abraham in an unfavorable light. We note that God too speaks to the male, but not to the female, just as in the Adam and Eve narratives, except once, when God criticizes Sarah for laughing at the divine prediction that she would have a son. Klitsner also examines the stories of Sarah's daughter-in-law Rebecca, Isaac's wife. She highlights that all of the biblical women, beginning with Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel, express frustration over their subsidiary role. Yet, she also reveals that in the subversive sequels about Deborah, Jael, Manoah's wife, and Hannah, the Bible considers their frustration justified and their mistreatment by society and their spouses terribly wrong.

This is what Klitsner discusses in half of her book. She focuses on three other issues in the other half. All are interesting, thought-provoking, and worth reading.

The book's introduction gives a good sense of the author's approach: "As if aware of its own problematics, the Bible contains a liverly interaction between its passages that allows for a widening of perspective and a sense of dynamic development throughout the canon. As we will see in the six chapters of this book, if certain gnawing theological or philosophical questions remain after studing one narrative, a later passage may revisit those questions, subjecting them to a complex process of inquiry, revision, and examination of alternative possibilities. I call these reworkings 'subversive sequels.' Like all sequels, they continue and complete earlier stories. But they do so in ways that often undermine the very assumptions upon which the earlier stories were built as well as the conclusions these stories have reached" (p.xvi). Klitsner's approach is a literary one and may seem very much in keeping with the postmodern outlook often associated with that perspective. Yet it is also firmly rooted in the historic Jewish rabbinic tradition of interpretation. Moreover, the recognition of sequels and intertextual interconnectedness in the Biblical corpus leads not only to interesting interpretations of texts, but also an interesting perspective on the place of the interpreter in relation to those texts. "As careful readers of the text, we add our own interpretative voices to this multi-tonal concert that began in the pages of the Bible itself" (p.xvii). After looking at some brief examples of "subversive sequels," Klitsner argues that this approach "adds a dimension of exegesis that is inaccessible through close readings and ordinary intertextual comparisons alone," since it seeks to measure the creative revision process that takes place between stories (p.xxiii). This leads not only to a hermeneutical embracing of change and revision, but also a view of God as "evolving" (at least on a literary level). Klitsner suggests that this stance may be treated not only as descriptive but as prescriptive, and she paraphrases a famous dictum to make the point: "Just as He is dynamic so should you be dynamic" (p.xxv). Flexibility and adaptability are not problematic aspects of the text crying out for harmonization or some other resolution. They are a model for readers to follow.

Before moving on, Klitsner notes the danger of parallelomania, and asks how a sequel is to be identified (p.xxxi). In each case throughout the remainder of the book, the author draws attention to Hebrew word plays, phrases unique in the Bible to the narratives in question, and other features that provide a genuine justification for comparing and contrasting them. Already in this introductory chapter, important terminology and concepts from the rabbinic interpretative tradition are explained.

The first chapter compares the stories of Noah and Jonah. Plays on words that are important to each story, or to the connection between them, are presented. For instance, we are confronted with the irony that Noah is so named because of a desire for comfort (n-h-m), and yet we soon encounter the same root used in its other sense, when we are told that God regretted (n-h-m) having made humanity (p.4; Genesis 5:29; 6:6-7).

After contrasting Noah's acceptance of the predicted doom for his contemporaries with Abraham's pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, Klitsner turns to exploring the contrasts between the stories of Noah and Jonah. In the latter God also regrets (n-h-m), but this time it is regret concerning a planned judgment (p.11; Jonah 3:10). And while in both stories God sends messengers, in Jonah it is for the most part the prophet who is the recipient of messages from God via emissaries such as the wind and the worm, as well as the ship's captain, who echoes God's call to Jonah to "get up an call" (Jonah 1:2,6). Discussion is offered of contrasting characters in these and other stories, some of whom are able to envisage the possibility that God may relent from bringing destruction, others of whom are not.

Chapter 2 looks at the story of the midwives of Israel as a sequel to the story of the tower of Babel. Klitsner turns to earlier Jewish interpreters such as Rashi (Rabbi Shelomo Yitzhaki, the famous medieval commentator from France) and Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (a 19th century Lithuanian exegete) in an attempt to discern precisely what it was about the action of humanity at Babel that incurred the punishment of diversification of languages. Consulting also the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, Klitsner suggests that the loss of individuality is a key element. "An individual, even a rebellious one, is more godly than a mindless member of a human herd" (p.45). The fact that the Babel story occurs admist lists of names, and yet itself is a story of unnamed builders, helps make this point, and highlights the contrast with the story of the midwives in Egypt.

The two stories are connected by, among other things, the focus on building of cities and the references (found only here in the Bible) to bricks and mortar. Details which are often overlooked by readers are highlighted - for instance, the implausibility of a Pharaoh not being aware of the story of how Egypt was saved from disaster a generation earlier. As a result, it is best to view the "forgetting" of Joseph as an attempt to rewrite history, as totalitarian states so often do (p.52). Likewise Pharaoh's illogical and self-contradictory statements about the Israelites are discussed, with the insightful observation that "often the first casualty of rabble-rousing is consistency" (p.54).

In contrast to the nameless Pharaoh provoking Egyptians en masse to view the Israelites as a group xenophobically, and in contrast to the Babel story with its lack of named characters, two named individuals strikingly take center stage at this crucial moment: Shifra and Puah, the midwives. "At every stage, the midwives' innate morality, their fear of God, bests Pharaoh" (p.60). In a powerful irony, as Pharaoh's command presumes that only male sons among the Israelites pose a threat to him, these two daughters subvert his plan.

Chapter 3 looks at the foreign priests Melchizedek and Jethro and the patriarchs whom they influence. Here it is suggested that the subversive sequel model needs to be qualified, since both Abraham and Moses as leaders are at times in need of a challenge to cast off external influences, while at other times their need is to eschew a solitary existence and accept the advice and assistance of others. The relationship between the stories is dialectical, rather than one undermining the other.

Chapter 4 turns attention to Eve, and while this chapter focuses on subversive elements within the Genesis story itself, chapter 5 turns attention to the story of Sarah as a sequel. In startling echoes of the account in Genesis 3, Sarah becomes the forbidden fruit, while Pharaoh is ironically made to echo the language God uses in that story, with Abraham's failings highlighted as a result. Abraham's character is further problematized in the story involving Abimelech, in which Abraham can apparently intercede for the fertility of others, and yet we are never told that he did so in the case of his wife Sarah (p.130).And while Adam was punished for heeding his wife, Abraham is explicitly commanded to do so. The chapter concludes by noting the subversive recasting of language from the Eden narrative: there an ever-turning sword guards the path to the tree of life, while in Genesis 18:17-19, Abraham will instruct his offspring to "guard the path" of the LORD, perhaps suggesting that this represents the way back to Eden, as it were (p.133).

Chapter 6 continues the focus on female characters. In discussing Rebekah it is drawn to the reader's attention that we here witness the first explicit statement that a woman is the object of a man's affection, being explicitly told that Isaac loves Rebekah (Genesis 24:67; p.143). Also highlighted in this chapter are subversive equels to the stories of submissive, passive women, Deborah somewhat obviously (although with many details and word-plays that are easily missed), and also the wife of Manoah, who in contrast with earlier precedent is herself the recipient of a revelation through an angelic messenger, and Hannah, who is the first to address God directly herself with a request to conceive (p.166).

The book's afterword ties together key threads and emphases, presenting the Bible as a book full of conversations rather than declarations, being "oriented much more toward process than toward conclusions" (p.171). And in contrast to the school of thought that focuses exclusively on "faithful recovery of the elusive original intent" of the texts or their authors, "the vibrant discourse begun by the text suggests that the conversation is meant to continue" (p.172). The book thus offers not only a wonderful model of exegesis, but also a hermeneutic for application and appropriation of the Bible's narratives in our time through a dynamic process that recognizes the conversations taking place within Scripture, and joins in the conversation.

A section with information about classical Jewish sources is included in between the bibliography and the index, and only those with a high degree of familiarity with historic Jewish interpreters and the texts that preserve their insights can perhaps afford to miss this part of the book (pp.179-182).

I recommend Judy Klitsner's book with unqualified enthusiasm. Even those with some proficiency in Hebrew are liable to miss many of the word-plays in the Hebrew text, some of which involve inversion of letters and other forms of what are perhaps best described as "puns." Such details connect stories and represent an often-overlooked form of intertextual echo. Anyone who reads this book will find their appreciation of the beautiful tapestry of Biblical narrative enriched and their understanding enhanced. And those interested in briding the gulf between these texts and contemporary readers will find Klitsner's approach not merely helpful or illuminating but exciting, as her combination of classic and fresh perspectives allows the Bible's diverse voices to be encountered not merely as something to be analysed or dissected, but as full of life, vigor and possibility.

This book originally appeared on the blog Exploring Our Matrix ([...]). James F. McGrath is the author of The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context and John's Apologetic Christology: Legitimation and Development in Johannine Christology (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series).

Subversive Sequels in the Bible by Judy Klitsner has many great insights, particularly in pairing stories based on themes and the repetition of unusual Hebrew words or phrases. For example, she shows that the famous stories of Noah and Jonah are linked in interesting ways - both feature boats at sea, doves (yonah), and other key words.

Her analyses relt on close readings of the Hebrew text. This approach produces many delightful connections that are not obvious and make the book interesting and fun to read.

Unfortunately, her larger thesis - that the bible has a series of interconnected stories where the conclusions of one are challenged are reversed by a second - is not well supported by the examples she gives. Frequently the conclusions of both stories are ambiguous and tentative and do not seem to be in conflict. In particular, Klitsner seems to have a definite agenda to show that the status of women in the Bible and their relationship with God changes from a patriarchal model to a much more inclusive model. While I am sympathetic to her agenda, the examples she gives in her book do not support such a conclusion.

Judy Klitsner applies literary criticism to pairs of Bible stories that reveals themes and connections that enhances our appreciation of the Torah as a whole and the individual stories themselves. The mysterious, profound and often confusing nature of well known Torah narratives is examined in a way that allows them to live with fresh meaning and power. Equally valuable to both religious practitioners and secular scholars. Kol haKavod!

One might think that there is little new to understand of the stories from the Bible (Old Testament only). What could be more familiar than the story of Noah and the flood, or the Tower of Babel?

But, of course, the Bible is so nuanced, subtle and deep that there is much to be rediscovered.

The six chapters offer new lessons and understandings that, after reading them, the connections seem obvious, but I have never appreciated them before.

Recommended for anyone who appreciates the insights offered by careful textual analysis of the Bible.

Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other is recommended not only for Jewish collections, but for any library strong in Bible studies. It comes from a Bible teacher who pairs biblical stories to show how a later text will often comment on or even subvert an earlier one, and provides strong parallels between biblical passages and original readings of familiar narratives.