Combining literary criticism and feminist analysis, Death and
Dissymmetry radically reinterprets not only the Book of Judges but
also the tradition of its reception and understanding in the West.
In Mieke Bal's account, Judges documents the Israelite culture
learning to articulate itself in a decisive period of transition.
Counter to standard readings of Judges, Bal's interpretation
demonstrates that the book has a political and ideological
coherence in which the treatment of women plays a pivotal role. Bal
concentrates here not on the assassinations and battles that rage
through Judges but on the violence in the domestic lives of
individual characters, particularly sexual violence directed at
women. Her skillful reading reveals that murder, in this text,
relates to gender and reflects a social structure that is
inherently contradictory. By foregrounding the stories of women and
subjecting them to subtle narrative analysis, she is able to expose
a set of preoccupations that are essential to the sense of these
stories but are not articulated in them. Bal thereby develops a
"countercoherence" in conflict with the apparent emphases of
Judges-the politics, wars, and historiography that have been the
constant focus of commentators on the book. Death and Dissymmetry
makes an important contribution to the development of a feminist
method of interpreting ancient texts, with consequences for
religious studies, ancient history, literary theory, and gender
studies.
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