Papers by Rhiannon Graybill
A Child Is Being Eaten: Maternal Cannibalism and the Hebrew Bible in the Company of Fairy Tales
Journal of Biblical Literature
The Hebrew Bible contains multiple texts in which mothers eat their children. Deuteronomy 28, Lam... more The Hebrew Bible contains multiple texts in which mothers eat their children. Deuteronomy 28, Lam 2 and 4, and 2 Kgs 6 all offer variations on the theme of maternal cannibalism. While these passages are often written off as gruesome, exceptional, or motivated by extreme necessity (such as starvation), such approaches miss the literary and ideological significance of maternal cannibalism. This study, in contrast, approaches the biblical accounts through another body of literature with its own rich assembly of cannibalistic mothers: the classic fairy tales. Reading with fairy tales surfaces four important points: (1) starvation is insufficient to explain cannibalism; (2) cooking children, as much as eating them, is narratively significant and should be analyzed as such; (3) some mothers are indeed Bad Mothers, even as (4) cannibalism does not preclude affection and love—including at least some mothers who cannibalize their children. Taken together, these principles challenge the assum...
Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible
Voluptuous, Tortured, and Unmanned
Conclusion: After Terror
Texts after Terror, 2021
The conclusion synthesizes the account of how to read stories of rape and sexual violence “after ... more The conclusion synthesizes the account of how to read stories of rape and sexual violence “after terror”—that is, with and through the methodological framework offered by this book. Several repeated themes emerge. First, there is no single story or script for “rape stories.” This includes many of the explanatory or affective frames applied to rape stories, including “rape is the worst thing possible,” “rape is exceptional,” and “there is no after to rape.” Second, just as there is no one way to tell a rape story, there is no one way of framing harm, in either type or degree. One alternative model is peremption, the unlimited limiting of possibility. Third, the after of rape stories names both the immediate aftermath—what happens next in the narrative, for example—and the larger space in and around the story, including readers’ responses. Fourth, the work of feminist criticism is about finding ways to read and live with biblical rape stories. To do feminist work is to stay with the f...
Jeremiah, Sade, and Repetition as Counterpleasure in the Oracle Against Edom
Concerning the Nations : Essays on the Oracles against the Nations in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel
The Jeremian Oracles against the Nations
The Oxford Handbook of Jeremiah, 2021
A substantial portion of the book of Jeremiah consists of the Oracles against the Nations (OAN), ... more A substantial portion of the book of Jeremiah consists of the Oracles against the Nations (OAN), a common prophetic genre of threats and predictions of violence directed at foreign nations. In Jeremiah, the OAN are significantly different in the Masoretic (Hebrew) and Septuagint (Greek) texts, including their length, their internal order, and their location in the book. While the function of the OAN is unclear, their literary character is undeniable. Primarily poetry, they present a dense collection of evocative images of violence and destruction. Sound, gender, and the “nation” are all themes of interest in the OAN. The OAN are a crucial part of the book of Jeremiah as a whole.
Introduction: Getting our Hands on It
“Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”, 2020
Where Is Clytemnestra When You Need Her? Gender, Alterity, and the Masculine Economy of Prophecy in Isaiah 56–66
Prophetic Otherness, 2021
The Edges of Consent
Texts after Terror, 2021
The notion of consent plays a key role in many analyses of sexual violence, in both the biblical ... more The notion of consent plays a key role in many analyses of sexual violence, in both the biblical text and the contemporary world. However, consent is both insufficient and insufficiently feminist as a framework for describing and combating rape and sexual violence. After tracing six major difficulties with consent, the chapter turns to a close reading of three biblical rape stories, suggesting that these texts are better approached as fuzzy, messy, and icky. This point is reinforced via close readings of three rape stories: Dinah (Gen 34), Tamar (2 Sam 13), and Lot’s daughters (Gen 19). The interpretation offered here employs four new tactics, set forth in the previous chapter: refusing to claim a position of innocence, resisting paranoid reading positions, tracing sticky affect, and reading through literature. The result is a more flexible, sensitive, and illuminating reading of biblical sexual violence than is possible under a framework of consent.
Sad Stories and Unhappy Reading
Texts after Terror, 2021
Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror continues to dominate feminist approaches to biblical sexual vio... more Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror continues to dominate feminist approaches to biblical sexual violence, especially stories of extreme violence or misogyny. However, Trible’s approach, which she describes as “telling sad stories,” fails to capture what is fuzzy, messy, and icky about sexual violence. In its place, this chapter argues for “unhappy reading” that holds space for complexity and unhappiness. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work on unhappiness in The Promise of Happiness, unhappy reading concentrates on the difficulties in our reading processes, and in the stories themselves. The chapter demonstrates the difference between approaches via a close analysis of Judges 19, the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine. While well intentioned, the “telling sad stories” approach collapses the difference between rape and murder and attempting to speak “on behalf of” the dead woman. An unhappy reading, in contrast, lingers with the unhappiness of the story, transforming the challenge it p...
Rape and Other Ways of Reading
Texts after Terror, 2021
Approaches to biblical rape often assume what Sharon Marcus calls a “gendered grammar” of rape: R... more Approaches to biblical rape often assume what Sharon Marcus calls a “gendered grammar” of rape: Rape is something male subjects do to female objects. Furthermore, this heterosexual relation is treated as the most important dynamic in the text. However, heterosexual rape also occurs as a secondary event in texts that are overwhelmingly about the relationships between women. A feminist theory of biblical sexual violence needs to account for the points of contact between rape stories and stories of female relationships. Hagar and Sarah in Genesis 16 and 21 furnish a key example. Drawing on contemporary literary fiction about relationships between women, this chapter argues that the significance of Hagar and Sarah’s relationship cannot be reduced to the scene of sexual exploitation. Instead, the text presents a complex and entangled account of female relationality and intimacy.
“Even unto this Bitter Loving”: Unhappiness and Backward Feelings in Ruth
Biblical Interpretation, 2020
Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy obj... more Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy object.” At the same time, contextual readings have suggested that Ruth is a narrative of exploitation, including possible sexual exploitation or trafficking. Building on recent scholarship about queer feelings and affect, this article negotiates a reading that takes seriously both the history of lesbian and queer readings of Ruth and Naomi and the critical attention on structures of exploitation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward (2007), I argue for the importance of feeling, especially unhappy or backward feeling, in reading Ruth. My reading also frames the biblical book in conversation with Radclyffe Hall’s classic 1928 lesbian novel (and source for lesbian and queer theory) The Well of Loneliness. By following unhappiness and backwardness in and around Ruth, we are able to snatch a glimpse of queer feeling, and the space of promi...
When Bodies Meet: Fraught Companionship and Entangled Embodiment in Jeremiah 36
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2018
This paper uses Donna Haraway’s theoretical work on “companion species” to offer a new perspectiv... more This paper uses Donna Haraway’s theoretical work on “companion species” to offer a new perspective on the mutually implicated bodies in chapter 36 of the biblical book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 36 narrates the prophet’s dictation of a scroll to his scribe, Baruch; the scroll is subsequently read aloud, destroyed, and recreated. Though the story is filled with prophets, scribes, secretaries, and a furious king, it is fundamentally the story of a scroll, and of a scroll as body. This paper treats the scroll-body as companion species, foregrounding relations of entanglement and significant otherness. Haraway’s theorization of interdependence, conflict, and co-becoming offers a new model for understanding the individual and compounded bodies of prophet, scribe, king, and nation. The paper experiments in (fraught) companionship and mutual embodiment, offering an alternate framework for imagining the body in and of prophecy. This reading opens new ways of thinking across bodies, texts, and tr...
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2019
This suggests the possibility that FR's emphasis on causality, on who creates and predates who, m... more This suggests the possibility that FR's emphasis on causality, on who creates and predates who, might be misplaced. Goldman suggests that Candomblé constantly destabilizes the distinction between the "made" and the "given," not by limiting human agency but by diffusing it in an ongoing dialectic with the agency of spirits, gods and fetishes. He concludes that, in a similar way, the theorist-avoiding presuppositions that predate the encounter at hand-extends and alters their own agency by recognizing the agency of that which they study. FR goes a long and productive way down this path, but the path leads on.
Caves of the Hebrew Bible: A Speleology
Biblical Interpretation, 2018
This paper engages the five cave narratives of the Hebrew Bible: Lot and his daughters (Genesis 1... more This paper engages the five cave narratives of the Hebrew Bible: Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19), the cave of Machpelah (Genesis 23), Joshua and the five Amorite Kings (Joshua 10), Saul and David’s cave encounter (1 Samuel 24), and Elijah’s theophany at Horeb (1 Kings 19). Biblical caves are significant and symbolic places. Frequently, the cave is associated with concealment, providing a hiding place for people and taboo practices and things. The cave is also a space of resistance, both within the text and as part of a larger critique of futurity. Biblical caves are likewise significant to the analysis of gender. While the caves of Genesis simultaneously imitate and displace the female body, other biblical caves are wholly masculine spaces, acting as both shelters and prisons for men. Attending to the caves thus yields insight to questions of gender, futurity, and the function of space in literary reading.
Day of the Woman: Judges 4–5 as Slasher and Rape Revenge Narrative
The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 2018
In Judges 4 and 5, Jael viciously murders the Canaanite general Sisera with a tent peg to the hea... more In Judges 4 and 5, Jael viciously murders the Canaanite general Sisera with a tent peg to the head. This article approaches the text through horror, with particular reference to the slasher film and the rape-revenge film. Drawing on Carol Clover’s landmark Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Horror Film, I argue that Jael should be read as a “Final Girl” who triumphs over the villainous Sisera. The article further suggests that because of the strong suggestion of sexual violence and Sisera as rapist, Judges 4 and 5 also invokes the genre of the rape-revenge film. Jael thus becomes the avenging female survivor. These parallels to horror illuminate the complex intersections of gender, ethnicity, and audience identification.
‘Hear and Give Ear!’: The Soundscape of Jeremiah
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2016
Sound offers a significant but underappreciated point of entry into the book of Jeremiah. Drawing... more Sound offers a significant but underappreciated point of entry into the book of Jeremiah. Drawing on R. Murray Schafer's concept of the ‘soundscape’ and other work on sound and sensory criticism, this article explores the significance of sound in constructing meaning in Jeremiah. The sounds of human voices mingle with the clamor of warfare, the vocalizations of animals, and cries of pain and suffering in a way that adds complexity to an already complex and layered text. Attending to sound also clarifies structure, as the text contains multiple nested soundscapes. Sound is likewise linked to gender, as in the use of marked feminine sounds such as lament. Reading Jeremiah with an ear to its sounds reveals previously unheard subtleties, while also offering a new way to perceive what is already familiar. It also demonstrates the usefulness of sound studies for reading the prophetic books.
Final Reflections
Are We Not Men?, 2017
Teaching Theology & Religion, 2017
Sexual violence on campus is a major issue facing students, faculty, and administrators, and inst... more Sexual violence on campus is a major issue facing students, faculty, and administrators, and institutions of higher education are struggling to respond. This forum brings together three responses to the problem, with a focus on the religious studies classroom. The responses move from the institution to the faculty to the classroom, exploring three separate but linked spaces for responding to sexual violence. The first contribution (Graybill) critiques common institutional responses to sexual violence. The second contribution (Minister) advocates for long-term, classroom-based responses to sexual violence and describes a faculty/staff workshop response. The third contribution (Lawrence) emphasizes the classroom, examining the issues that arise when perpetrators of sexual assault are part of the student body. Read together, the pieces offer a comprehensive view of the complicated intersections of sexual violence, the university, and pedagogical issues in religious studies.
Feminist Media Studies, 2002
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Papers by Rhiannon Graybill