Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative

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by Alice Bach

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published August 1997, 310 pages, paper

ISBN 0521475600

In the expanding field of feminist literary studies of the Bible, this work represents a shift in the paradigm of biblical study. While scholars have traditionally privileged the Bible and isolated it from ideological scrutiny, this readable study applies cultural perspectives to a group of biblical texts revolving around the "wicked" literary figures in the Bible - the wife of Potiphar, Bathsheba, Delilah, Salome - and suggests what it is that makes them different from biblical heroines who kill - Esther and Judith. Alice Bach has designed an approach to these texts that is kaleidoscopic: its function is to find new arrangements, ones that allow the reader to move outside the self-referential loop of reading the Bible only against itself. Most importantly, Bach argues that biblical characters have a "life" in the mind of the reader independent of the stories in which they were created. Thus, the reader becomes the site at which the texts and the cultures that produced them come together. In her final chapter, Bach follows the cultural history of the biblical figure Salome, using visual representations as well as films, in order to explain the fluctuations of interest in and the varieties of interpretation of this biblical character.