Schwartz (English/Northwestern Univ.; Remembering and Repeating,
not reviewed) has written a strange, discomfiting book on the
Bible's legacy of violence. The author uses the Bible as a lens to
explore Western culture's heritage of violence, but defines
violence in such a broad way - as "acts of identity formation" and
"the very construction of the Other" - that the reader is left
wondering what isn't violent behavior. Indeed, the book is far more
deconstructive than constructive; it is only in the last chapter
that Schwartz rather generically envisions a Bible that embraces
generosity and pluralism, not scarcity and a totalizing monotheism,
as ethics to cultivate. The book also suffers from a certain
eco-preachiness (as in such first-person assertions as "we cannot
really own anything"), which systematically undermines what is
truly prophetic here. Yet there is also a coldly brilliant realism
at work. Schwartz writes with style and verve, gracefully teasing
out new meanings from the Bible's elusive Hebrew text. Her chapters
on land and kinship are as insightful as they are disturbing.
Particularly significant is her connection between monotheism,
land, and female sexuality: Hosea's denunciations of the adulterous
wife, for example, can be understood as more than an embrace of a
strict moral code. The wife (who represents faithless Israel) has
also violated Yahweh's property rights, because unlike a
self-respecting whore, she doesn't even receive money for her
favors, but pays her lovers. The story, Schwartz argues, is a
metaphor for Israel's transgression of the boundaries of
monotheism, which is basically "a doctrine of possession."
Ultimately, both monogamy and monotheism function to set a people
apart in a covenant relationship - but, Schwartz reminds us, this
otherness is always potentially violent. The construction of
boundaries, Schwartz asserts, leads to nations, and then to
bloodshed. Unfortunately, the few alternatives she offers are vague
and touchy-feely. (Kirkus Reviews)
A murderer, an outcast, a man cursed by God and exiled from his
people - Cain, the biblical killer of Abel, is a figure of utter
disdain. But that disdain is curiously in evidence well before his
brother's death, as God inexplicably refuses Cain's sacrifice while
accepting Abel's. Cain kills in a rage of exclusion, yet it is God
himself who has set the brothers apart. For Regina Schwartz, we
ignore the dark side of the Bible to our peril. The perplexing
story of Cain and Abel is emblematic of the tenacious influence of
the Bible on secular notions of identity - notions that are all too
often violently exclusionary, negatively defining "us" against
"them" in ethnic, religious, racial, gender, and nationalistic
terms. In this compelling work of cultural and biblical criticism,
Schwartz contends that it is the very concept of monotheism and its
jealous demand for exclusive allegiance - to one God, one Land, one
Nation or one People - that informs the model of collective
identity forged in violence, against the other. The Hebrew Bible is
filled with narratives of division and exclusion, scarcity and
competition, that erupt in violence. Once these narratives were
appropriated and disseminated by western religious traditions, they
came to pervade deep cultural assumptions about how collectives are
imagined - with collective hatred, with collective degradation, and
with collective abuse. Recovering the Bible's often misguided role
as a handbook for politics and social thought, Schwartz
demonstrates just how dangerous it can be.
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