Introduction

The Hebrew Bible contains many accounts of rape and sexual violence. Feminist approaches to these stories remain dominated by Phyllis Trible’s 1984 book Texts of Terror. This chapter and book offer a new approach, drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory and offering new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen 34), Tamar (2 Sam 13), Lot’s daughters (Gen 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam 11), Hagar (Gen 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam 1 and 2), and the Levite’s concubine (Judg 19). In place of “texts of terror,” this chapter opens the possibility of reading after terror. The approach offered here also engages contemporary activism against sexual violence and rape culture, bringing them to bear on biblical studies.

The Edges of Consent

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.

A Grittier Daughter Zion

Daughter Zion (Lam 1–2) is often read as a rape victim. Furthermore, and unlike most biblical victims of sexual violence, she has a voice in the text. As a result, there is a pronounced tendency in the scholarship to treat Daughter Zion as an ideal and praiseworthy victim/survivor. However, this representation is both problematic and contradicted by Daughter Zion’s own speech in Lamentations 1–2. In response, this chapter argues for Daughter Zion as a “gritty” survivor with a fuzzy, messy, and icky survival story. Her story is further illuminated when read together with other survivor texts, including Queering Sexual Violence (edited by Jennifer Patterson), Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. Together, these stories form a “survivor archive,” building on Ann Cvetkovich’s description of queer and affective archives.

Fuzzy, Messy, Icky

This chapter introduces a new approach to rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, asserting that sexual violence and rape are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky. Fuzzy identifies the ambiguity and confusion that often surround experiences of sexual violence. Messy describes the consequences of rape, while also describing messy sex and bodies. Icky points out the ways that sexual violence fails to fit into neat patterns of evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Taking seriously these features of sexual violence, the chapter also proposes four new interpretive tactics: refusing to claim a position of innocence (drawing on Donna Haraway’s work), resisting paranoid reading positions (borrowing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), tracing sticky affect (adapted from Sara Ahmed), and reading through literature. The chapter then applies these tactics to a rape text in Nahum 3.

Narrating Harm in the Bathsheba Story

The story of Bathsheba and David (2 Sam 11) is increasingly recognized as a story of coercion and rape. However, this judgment often relies on either a notion of consent (critiqued in the previous chapter) or a model of harm organized around the sexual predator (that is, David preys on Bathsheba). This chapter proposes a new model of harm: peremption. Adopted from Joseph J. Fischel’s work on sexual harm, peremption describes an unlimited limiting of future possibility. It also avoids forcing sexual violence into a predator/prey model. In 2 Samuel 11, Bathsheba is both perempted by narrative (in her silencing and erasure) and perempted by masculinity (David’s flourishing comes at the expense of women). She also perempts others, chiefly Abishag. Approaching Bathsheba’s story through peremption reveals a rich portrait of harm without limiting analysis to the question of “was it or wasn’t it rape?” in 2 Samuel 11:2–5.

Sad Stories and Unhappy Reading

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 poses to feminist reading into a space of possibility.

Conclusion

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 fuzzy, the messy, and the icky, even or especially when such reading seem difficult.

Rape and Other Ways of Reading

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.