Jewish Women - A Feminist Reading of Midrash

Rubrik: Woman as Myth

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

THE HANDMAID, THE TRICKSTER AND THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH

A Feminist Reading of Midrash

Among rabbinic writings, the genre of narrative or aggadic Midrash has been favored by Jewish feminists since the very beginning of second wave Jewish feminism. This popularity which began in liberal Jewish groups has spread even into the more orthodox and traditionalist communities, and currently there is a growing market for women's midrashic writings.

Two aspects of midrash that contribute to this newly found appreciation. Firstly, midrash as a hermeneutic methodology is perceived as the quintessential rabbinic, and therefore, Jewish way of reading the biblical text. Jews do Midrash, whereas others do historical critical exegesis or allegory. By choosing midrash as a methodology, therefore, feminists can locate themselves more easily within the Jewish camp and circumvent the criticism that certain types of feminism are brought into Jewish culture from the "outside." Secondly, aggadic Midrash is considered to have great creative potential. Thus, Judith Plaskow emphasizes the fluidity of midrash in her now classic book on feminist Jewish theology, Standing Again At Sinai:

"The open-ended process of writing midrash - simultaneously serious and playful, imaginative, metaphoric - has easily lent itself to feminist use. ...Listening to the traditional sources, we wait for the words of women `to rise out of the white spaces between the letters in the Torah' as we remember and transmit the past through `the experience of our own lives'" (Standing Again At Sinai, 53-54).

A midrashic approach to the Bible is often understood as a way of rewriting the biblical stories, as filling in the gaps of these often enigmatic narratives. With such a perception, midrash can and has been turned into a useful tool to fill in the missing voices of women in biblical literature. Some commentaries even consider midrashic techniques as a tool to refocus the readers' attention to the female characters in the biblical stories and their relationships with each other, against the overt interest of the biblical narrators themselves.[1] As one prominent Jewish feminist puts it: "I want midrash to give a voice to women in the Bible who have had nearly none. To be an advocate for biblical figures over whom the ages have kicked considerable dust, and to imagine their lives."[2] Midrash then becomes the bridge between an intellectual or religious commitment to the insufficient, androcentric Torah that we have and creates a new, inclusive kind of collective memory.

This general appreciation of midrash as a literary genre and as a hermeneutic tool for Jewish feminists raises some interesting questions. First, Midrash, of course, has its roots in rabbinic culture, the same culture which understood Judaism to be based on halakhah and structured its relationship to biblical Judaism on this basis. Feminists in the past have found it easy to indict the halakhic system for its sexism or androcentrism. However, the same rabbinic culture which created the halakhic system also developed midrashic methodology to its fullest potential. Could it be that the same culture created simultaneously a system which is androcentric and oppressive to women, and also a literature and hermeneutics which has a creative, and thus liberatory function? Are, indeed, these two genres culturally speaking so disparate, even antithetical to each other? Does the genre itself, i.e., narrative versus legal, indicate a certain proclivity towards gender equity, on the one hand, or towards sexism, on the other, as Plaskow would have?[3] Rather, we need to take seriously the conservative function of midrash as a hermeneutic tool, to maintain the basic androcentric structures of the biblical world and to intimately connect rabbinic halakhah with the biblical text.

Feminists in general have favored the creative use of midrashic methodology, but they rarely have focused on rabbinic midrashic texts themselves. The immense popularity of the methodology of midrash has ultimately been made possible only by decontextualizing its methodological approach from the literature that first comprehensively employed it. For one of the most important functions of rabbinic midrashic texts is to enhance the halakhic system. Midrash posits that Abraham was already a rabbinic Jew, who observed the halakhah and kept all the commandments as the Rabbis understood them. Rabbinic midrashic exegesis often shows how the rabbinic halakhic system is lived by biblical characters. Midrashic narratives often enable and enhance rather than undermine the halakhic system, by illustrating how deeply the halakhic system is rooted in the biblical world.[4] The two genres are two intimately related elements in the rabbinic culture, which together reinforce a cultural system that has traditionally marginalized women. The full critical potential of midrash can be enacted only if we reckon with its conservative function. No text and no genre is in and by itself more conducive to feminism. The critical potential of texts depends on how they are read and to what use they are put.

Further, the classical rabbinic midrashic commentaries have entered the collective and often normative Jewish tradition and have defined the way Torah is read and remembered. Perhaps the most important avenue for this is the medium of Biblical commentary, such as Rashi's popular commentary on the Torah. Rashi takes recourse to rabbinic midrashic interpretations throughout his commentary and assumes them to be the framework within which we are to read the Torah. Thus many midrashic interpretations have become part of the Jewish cultural vocabulary. The classical midrashic elaborations on biblical narratives are part of the remembrance of Torah even of those who do not study the rabbinic texts per se. We would not even think long about the fact that we read the Song of Songs as a love poem about the relationship between God and Israel, or in more mystically inclined commentaries as about the relationship between God and the individual. Such midrashic knowledge circumscribes the traditional horizon of Jewish imagination. It is the possibilities and limits of this imagination with respect to gender that we need to read critically. In fact, it is too easy and seductive to operate with simplistic juxtapositions between inclusive Midrash and exclusive Halakhah, between narrative texts which allow women a subject-position, and between legal texts which objectify women. Rather, we have to carefully analyze the agenda of the narrative midrashic commentaries and the cultural values they project.

As we embark on this project we can learn from the more mature literature of feminist criticism of biblical narratives, which in turn employs methodologies developed in literary criticism. Hence, it is not sufficient to differentiate between rabbinic stories and commentaries that are good for women, that in fact praise women, and between those that border on misogyny or are outright sexist.[5] First of all, the narrative horizon of the rabbis is vast. If our question is merely about the rabbinic attitude towards women as it is reflected in the stories, we will find attitudes ranging from putting women on a pedestal to blaming women for the evils of the world. For any particular narrative we have to ask how representative it may be for rabbinic imagination as a whole. Further, we have to move beyond the question of what the texts say, and ask why they say what they say. Why is this story told, and why is it told this way? Asking this question allows us to analyze the struggle inherent in midrashic narratives to make sense of the world and to make sense of gender. It also also allows us to read the narratives as doing constructive work rather than merely reflecting a reality of the past. The midrashic narrators want the reader or listener to think about gender in a certain way. Here, I find Daniel Boyarin's approach useful who describes the task of a critical reading of rabbinic texts as looking "at texts as (necessarily failed) attempts to propose utopian solutions to cultural tensions" which need to be uncovered by the various techniques of hermeneutic suspicion (Carnal Israel, 15). A reading of midrashic narratives that is based on hermeneutic suspicion does not simply recover stories of resistance, and stories that "speak in positive terms of women's experience"[6], but also asks what function such tales have in the larger context of rabbinic culture. Finally, by focusing on the struggle that produces a midrashic narrative, its answer may appear as only one possible answer rather than as the only possible one.

Further, this project is complicated by the question of authorship. Is it indeed mostly the men of rabbinic learning and the collective Beit Midrash of rabbinic tradition who edited the midrashic collections of the classical period[7]and who can or should be considered to be the "authors" of midrashic narratives? Most of the midrashic compilations are edited anonymously. Often even individual aggadic narratives are told anonymously.[8] Jacob Neusner has even been more specific by arguing that, indeed, the editors of the individual midrashic compilations, which he calls "documents," should be considered like "authorships." He insists that "authorships of ... two documents did derive from the same movement, share the same viewpoint, and therefore exhibit sufficient traits in common to justify our comparing the exegetical results of the one with the other. [But] Once we undertake the comparison we find nothing in common" (The Midrash: An Introduction, 27). By engaging in what he calls "comparative midrash"[9], Neusner claims to be able to distinguish such different authorships. However, the narratives discussed in this chapter and ranging from different compilations, will show that they share their motifs and overall gender ideology to such a degree that it will be hard to sustain such distinctions.

A different approach, more useful for analyzing the texts in this chapter, is to think of the genre of aggadic midrash as much more permeable to extra-rabbinic voices than the halakhic discussions of the talmudic literature. Thus, Galit Hasan-Rokem has described rabbinic literature as ethnographic literature with "an almost full repertoire of folk literary genres as we know them from various cultures" ("Narratives in Dialogue," 111). She lists numerous examples of such genres that we find in rabbinic compilations, e.g. proverbs, legends, tales of miracles, magic, spirits, demons and angels. Thus, folk narratives or even narrative motifs and elements whose "authors" are not easily identifiable by gender, may be enshrined in larger textual collections, such as the two Talmuds, that are traditionally studied, interpreted and thus perpetuated by men. As to their authorship it is too simple to read all midrashic narratives automatically as male fantasies. Rather, as a collective literature we need to take account of the sometimes cacophonous tensions and contradictions.

Finally, biblical narrative criticism has taught us about the multi-faceted nature of narrative as narrative. It is in the nature of narrative to allow for any number of possibilities of meaning and interpretation. This is articulated poignantly by Borges:

Even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man (sic) of yesterday is not the man (sic) of today, who will not be the man (sic) of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that reading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.[10]

For feminist purposes, Borges' point that "each rereading, each memory of that reading, reinvents the text" is perhaps the most crucial. It is not necessarily any specific feminist reading of rabbinic Midrash that needs to end up as the ultimate one. Rather, the reinvention of the (rabbinic midrashic) text happens when readers can no longer be blind to questions about gender, when the absence of women becomes visible, when literary or cultural representation is no longer merely a given.

Keeping this in mind, let us turn to a prominent and recurring midrashic motif, the connection of women with redemption, both with redemption in the past, that is, the Exodus, and with redemption in the future, that is, the messianic future. The particular shape that this motif takes and which I want to trace here, is the repeated tale of the trickster woman or women who, due to their cunning, deserve to bring about the fulfillment of redemption and the messianic promise.

The Handmaid's Tale

In the Yalqut (ha-)Makhiri, a medieval anthology of aggadic midrashim,[11] we find the following tale in connection to a famous verse in Psalms:

"The stone which the builders rejected has become the main cornerstone" (Ps 118:22).

Midrash:[12] "Behold, I was shaped in iniquity [be-avvon]" (Ps 51:7) - [in iniquity] is spelled with two vavin. Two Amora'im in Palestine had a disagreement on [how to interpret] the verse. One said David was the son of the beloved wife, the other said David was the son of the hated wife. How so?

Ishai was the head of the Sanhedrin. He went out and returned with an army of 600,000 and he had 60 grown sons. He abstained from sexual relations with his wife for three years and after three years he acquired a beautiful handmaid and lusted for her. He said to her: My daughter, acquire yourself (your freedom) tonight, so that you can come to me with a certificate of emancipation.

The handmaid went and told her mistress [Ishai's wife]: Deliver yourself and my soul, and my master from gehinnom! She said to her: What is the reason? So she told her everything. Said the mistress: My daughter, what can I do, seeing that today it is three years that he has not touched me. Answered the handmaid: I will give you advice. Go and prepare yourself, as will I, and at night when he will say to close the door, you will enter and I will exit. So she did. At night the handmaid got up and blew out the light, she went to close the door and her mistress entered while she left. She made (love) with him all night and got pregnant with David. And because of his [Ishai's] love for the handmaid, David stood out in redness among his brothers. ....

After nine months had passed, her sons wished to kill her and her son David when they saw that he was red. Ishai said to them, "Leave him alone and let him be our slave and tend the flocks." And the matter remained a secret for twenty-eight years.

This story illustrates beautifully how aggadic midrash rabbinizes the biblical world while also weaving a number of biblical plot structures into one coherent narrative. In the set-up of the story Ishai, David's father, is staged as the head of the Sanhedrin, a rabbinic institution introjected into the biblical scenery. The motif of Ishai as heading an army of six hundred thousand soldiers is derived from the Babylonian Talmud (bBer 58a and bYev 76b) which draws a parallelism between the six hundred thousand soldiers and Ishai's six hundred thousand students. In his popular work on The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg reinforces the image of the rabbinized, heroic Ishai who is a worthy progenitor for David: "[David's] father Jesse was one of the greatest scholars of his time, and one of the four who died wholly untainted by sin" (The Legends of the Jews IV, 81).[13] After gushing about Ishai's virtue, Ginzberg then attempts to marginalize the potentially subversive force of our midrashic tale: "In spite of his piety, Jesse was not always proof against temptation" (The Legends of the Jews IV, 81), and proceeds to give us his version of the tale. More will have to be said about Ginzberg's sanitized reading of midrashic texts later on.

Let us look at the story itself first. At the outset of the story proper, Ishai decides to withdraw sexually from his wife (piresh). The midrash does not provide an explicit reason for his withdrawal. A later commentator, Hayim Joseph David Azulai (1724-1806), points out that Ishai "came to the conclusion that a Moabite is prohibited (from marrying and producing offspring with an Israelite)."[14] That is, now imagined as reasoning along the lines of mishnaic halakhah, Ishai starts to have misgivings about his lineage, realizing that he is a grandson of Ruth, the Moabite, who should not have produced offspring with an Israelite. According to rabbinic halakhah, a Moabite man cannot marry an "Israelite" woman,[15] but he can marry and have children with an emancipated (Israelite) handmaid, since the children would attain the halakhic status of emancipated slaves.[16] Ishai therefore encourages the handmaid, after whom he lusts, to acquire her emancipation, so he can have sex with her.

Thus, the midrashic tale has crafted two women characters, the beloved and hated wife, and echo of Rachel and Leah, the two "vavin" of the verse from Psalms (Ps 51:7) with which the midrash opens. In that Psalm David, whom rabbinic tradition identifies as the "author" of Psalms, pours out his remorse over his transgression with Bat-Sheva. Ps 51:7 extends his sinfulness to his conception. The continuation of this verse is important for our reading of the story: "I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." One of the midrashic functions of the handmaid's tale, therefore, is its exegetical purpose to explain why David would claim that his mother conceived him in sin, here to be understood as deception.

Subsequently, the story foregrounds the action of the two women. The handmaid, instead of quietly submitting to her master's wishes, promptly informs his wife. Both of them together conspire to get the "proper" woman into Ishai's bed, against his wishes or desires, and without his knowledge. The midrash does not identify which one of the two is the beloved and which one the hated woman. It does not resolve the anonymous amoraic disagreement cited in the beginning. In terms of the narrative logic, or at the very least from the perspective of Ishai's character, David is the son of the hated, rather than the beloved wife.

Beyond the exegetical purpose, however, the story has a further midrashic function. It comes to supply biographical information that the biblical narrative has failed to offer. In fact, it answers the questions which the biblical lacunae raise: Why is David, the future king, merely a shepherd in the biblical account and thus segregated from his brothers? Why are we told that he was reddish? The biblical narrative, enigmatic as it is, does seem to suggest that David is not a "regular" brother, that in fact he is hidden away with a menial job away from home. With a plot-structure which echoes the dynamic between Joseph and his brothers, our midrashic tale explains the reason for David's ostracization, his mistaken illegitimacy. At the same time it explains the rare biblical characterization of David as "reddish" (1 Sam 16:12)[17]: In accordance with rabbinic embryology,[18] the child is endowed with the "genetic" imprint of the woman whom the father desires and whom he visualizes while having sex, or vice versa.[19] When Ishai had sex with David's mother in the dark, he thought he was having sex with the handmaid whose "genetic" imprint David receives at conception. The thought or visualization of a sexual partner other than the one in bed is associated with adultery, just as in other rabbinic tales that employ this motif.[20] David turns out to resemble the handmaid, rather than his (biological) mother, one of the factors, which leads the brothers in the second part of the midrashic narrative to suspect the mother of adultery. The additional factor is that they know that his father had withdrawn sexually from his wife.

The narrative, thus, incorporates the tension between two different kinds of embryology. The brothers expect the child to look like the (biological) mother, like any reader who is well-versed in rabbinic literature. When her child turns out to look "reddish," they suspect adultery committed by the mother. This is a classic expression of anxiety over fatherhood and the difficulty of proving fatherhood in a pre-gene-testing era. The narrator, on the other hand, who draws on talmudic embryology, also reverses the much more common representation of women as thinking of other men and thus committing imaginary adultery and producing questionable off-spring.[21] Our narrator suggests that the father has a determinant role in the genetic make-up of his child via his thoughts and imagination. His thoughts (of another woman) overrule the role of the biological mother in the genetic make-up of the child. This utopian notion resembles an attempt to strengthen the role of the father in the process of conception and procreation.

The Subversive Potential of the Handmaid's Tale

The handmaid's tale is an example of how classic midrashic imagination acts to transform the biblical narrative. In particular, it is a powerful example of inventing and adding women characters or mothers where there are none in the biblical account. It is an example of what Norma Rosen wants Midrash to do: "... to give a voice to women in the Bible who have had nearly none. To be an advocate for biblical figures over whom the ages have kicked considerable dust, and to imagine their lives."[22] Even more, this particular midrashic tale represents women as acting, as protecting their interests against male domination. This aspect of the midrashic narrative can not be underestimated, especially because in this case the contrast with the biblical narrative could not be any more pronounced. The biblical story of the geneology and selection of David for king is, after all, an all-male scene.

Samuel the prophet is told by God to visit Ishai and his sons "for I have provided me a king among his sons" (1 Sam 16:1). The prophet has Ishai parade all his sons in front of him but cannot find the right one. David is introduced somewhat enigmatically, since he is not part of the main crop of sons. Samuel therefore has to ask whether the ones he was introduced to were in fact all of Ishai's sons: "And he (Ishai) said: There remains the youngest, and he is tending the sheep. Then Samuel said to Ishai: "Send and fetch him, for we will not sit down till he comes here. Now he (David) was reddish, with fine eyes, and good looking" (1 Sam 16: 11-12). This one turns out to be the right one.

Compared to this biblical stage with its exclusively male characters the midrashic tale is, indeed, a welcome and imaginative introduction of women into one of the central stories of Israel's history.

Beyond the mere introduction of women into the biblical narrative of David's anointment, however, the story further adds what can be read as a particularly radical moment. The narrator seems to project the following perspective: Two women conspire to fool Ishai, thus enabling the birth of the future historic as well as messianic king of Israel. Because of Ishai's (legitimate?) halakhic scruples - if we follow Azulai's comment as discussed above - and subsequent sexual withdrawal from his wife, he almost prevents the birth of his youngest son David. In addition, Ishai's project of legitimizing his morally questionable desire for the handmaid, for all its halakhic correctness ("get yourself a certificate of emancipation"), does not appear in a positive light in the context of this story. After all, he abandoned his wife. As a consequence, the brothers almost murder the mother with child, mistaking her for an adulteress. According to the logic of the narrative, Ishai's refusal to allow the killing allows for two possible readings of Ishai's character which in my opinion differ only in degree. The question is whether the narrative projects Ishai as recognizing the child as his son or not. Either Ishai did realize that he actually had sex with his wife but will not admit to it publically. Since in this case he knows that David is his son, he protects him from his brothers. Or Ishai never realized that he had sex with his wife, instead of the handmaid, and thus cannot know whether the child is his son. In this case he protects the child merely out of a general moral sensibility against the killing of a child. In either case, Ishai does not allow for the ultimate evil to happen, but he also refuses to clarify David's status publically and take responsibility for the situation. To summarize, then, the women are the righteous ones, the real heroes of the story. Thanks to the women's solidarity the messianic king of Israel is born. The father, on the other hand, is lecherous and a fool, in spite of, or perhaps even because of, his halakhic zealousness. This last point adds one more interesting subversive aspect to our story. It marks (Ishai's) halakhic behavior, the desire to follow and observe halakhic regulations as male. This is juxtaposed with the (women's) subversion of halakhic attachment, marked as female. And it is exactly the subversive, female, moment or the trickster moment of the narrative which produces the messianic king.

About the trickster motif James C. Scott has written that "nothing illustrates the veiled cultural resistance of subordinate groups better than what have been termed trickster tales" (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 162). Discussing a number of examples from various contexts of subordination he points out that typically the trickster makes his [sic!] successful way through a treacherous environment of enemies out to defeat him ... not by his strength but by his wit and cunning. The trickster is unable, in principle, to win any direct confrontation as he is smaller and weaker than his antagonists. Only by knowing the habits of his enemies, by deceiving them, by taking advantage of their greed, size, gullibility or haste does he manage to escape their clutches and win victories. (162).

This description applies in part to our story as well: Ishai's wife sighs that she cannot do anything, since her husband has abandoned her. The two women have to resort to cunning, using Ishai's desire against him.

What does this mean? Do we assume that this story is told by a woman, along the lines of Harold Bloom's argument for the Book of J? Bloom famously claims that the Book of J is written by a woman, more specifically by an aristocratic writer at the Davidic court. His argument focuses on what he reads as an ironic representation of God, but he further points out: "I think it is accurate to observe that J had no heros, only heroines. Sarai and Rachel are wholly admirable, and Tamar, in proportion to the narrative space she occupies, is very much the most vivid portrait in J. But Abram, Jacob, and Moses receive a remarkably mixed treatment from J" (Bloom, The Book of J, 32). Similar criteria could be applied to our midrashic tale. If we recall Galit Hasan Rokem's description of rabbinic literature as ethnographic literature, we can now draw on James C. Scott's analysis of the trickster tale again. Scott argues with respect to certain slave narratives that "the slave child learned ... that safety and success depended on curbing one's anger and channeling it into forms of deception and cunning, where one's chances of success were greater. What they taught, the tales also celebrated as a source of pride and satisfaction" (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 164). This moment in our handmaid's tale needs to be emphasized and is part of its power. The halakhic system which via Ishai silences the women's desire and in fact, puts it at Ishai's mercy, is criticized. In this sense, the narrative does create some "imaginative breathing space in which the normal categories of order and hierarchy are less than completely inevitable" (168) and other possibilities than those officially endorsed become thinkable.

But the reconstruction of an author's gender, particularly with respect to classical, "canonical" Jewish texts, is an insufficient feminist reading strategy. I do not wish to entirely discredit the importance of diversifying the voices that are assembled in the anonymously edited rabbinic texts. However, such a reconstruction ends up being based on problematic assumptions about the difference between women's and men's writing. But further, and more significantly for our reading of the midrashic tale, such a reconstruction has an only limited explanatory or critical value. Even if the story about David's story were told by women first and has [and retains] a subversive aspect, we still must explain how it made it into the midrashic collections of rabbinic literature and how it functions in the larger context of rabbinic imagination.

Hermeneutic Suspicion and Subversive Midrashic Tales

A common sense of hermeneutic suspicion compels me to inquire how this story supports gender roles promoted by traditional rabbinic Judaism. If the subversive moment is allowed to emerge, we must also analyze the conditions under which it is allowed to emerge. This is not to argue that midrashic narratives are all locked into one homogeneous gender ideology to which they must conform. However, methodologically, we have to move beyond the story itself to the larger narrative context in Jewish culture. We will then notice that the male-female plot-structure of the medieval midrashic story of David's birth, in which women are portrayed as the guarantors for bringing the divine plan to fruition and men as its liability at best, is after all not an exception in rabbinic narrative tradition. Rather, it copies and rewrites biblical models that are variously reinforced, restaged and focused in midrashic literature. In each of the following cases of midrashic readings of biblical stories we shall see that over and over again the midrash rewards the women for behavior which in the biblical narratives does not always have an uambiguously positive overtone. Midrashic readings superimpose the plot structure of the women who coax their male counterparts into a sexual encounter particularly on those stories related to the geneology of David. The more wide-spread this plot-structure is in rabbinic literature, the more characteristic it becomes of rabbinic imagination, the more questionable the subversive nature appears to be.

The classic biblical precedent is, of course, the Book of Ruth, with its genealogy of David as the great-grandson of Ruth, in the last four verses of the book. Without going into too much detail, we just need to highlight the female-male plot-structure in Ruth that is echoed in the handmaid's tale. For in the Book of Ruth, too, two women collaborate to seduce a man, Boaz, into sexual relations and ultimately marital commitment (Ruth 3:1-4), thus ultimately paving the way for the birth of David. The biblical story itself makes the geneological connection with David explicit (Ruth 4:18-22) and does not need much emphasis by the midrashic commentaries. The plot is obviously not exactly the same as in the handmaid's tale. Boaz is not lecherous. If anything, he is presented as passive and free of any sexual thoughts or lust. But the pivotal point in both stories is the narrative of two women plotting to trick and seduce a man into the sexual act.

If we trace the Moabite lineage, which through Ruth produces David, back to its beginning we again find the plot of the trickster women. After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, the two daughters of Lot are under the impression that "there is no man [left] on earth to have sex with us [lit., to come upon us], as is the way of all the world" (Gen 19:31). Thus they conspire to get their father drunk, lie with him and to "give life to seed from our father [heb., nechayeh me-avinu zara']" (Gen 19:32). In two consecutive nights both daughters get pregnant from their father, thus turning into the matriarchs of the Moabites and Ammonites respectively: "And the firstborn bore a son and called his name Mo'av. He is the father of Mo'av to this day. And the younger, she also bore a son, and called his name Ben-ammi. He is the father of the children of Ammon to this day" (Gen 19:37-38).

The biblical story by itself does not shed any positive light on the manipulative behavior of Lot's daughters. It could, in fact, be read as an etiological tale demeaning the enemies of Israel by attributing their origins to incest. The midrashic commentary in Bereshit Rabbah, however, justifies, if it does not actually valorize the behavior of the daughters:

[On Gen 19:31:] "And the firstborn said unto the younger: our father is old, and there is no man [left] on earth, etc."

They [the daughters of Lot] thought that the whole world was destroyed, as in the generation of the Flood.

[On Gen 19:32] "Come, let us make our father drink wine... that we may give life to seed from our father." R. Tanhuma said in the name of Shmu'el: It is not written "that we may give life to a son from our father," but "that we may give life to a seed from our father." That is, that seed which comes from a different place. Which one is this [seed]? This is the King Messiah. (GenR 51:8)

On the one hand, this last part of this midrashic commentary tries to separate and differentiate the seed that will eventually produce the proto-typical, messianic king David from Lot, the more-than-questionable father of the Moabite people. To that aim, it uses the linguistic irregularity of the biblical text which uses "seed" instead of "son." To the midrashic sensibility, once the focus is the future birth of the messianic king, the biblical text with this formulation suggests that Lot's seed is not really his. Fatherhood can be contested when need be. On the other hand, however, by identifying the seed that Lot's daughters speak of as the messianic king, the midrashic commentary also "rewards" their behavior. By itself, the biblical text at most implies that the daughters actually had good intentions, since they thought that "there is no man [left] on earth to have sex with us [lit., to come upon us], as is the way of all the world" (Gen 19:31). Based on this implication, the midrashic commentary again represents the daughters' behavior as enabling the messianic future. In fact, the midrashic tradition remains unambiguous as to the moral integrity of Lot's daughters and their intention:

R. Eleazar said: Usually a woman does not become pregnant in her first coition. Nevertheless, the two daughters of Lot, mastering the pain that attends the first coition, became pregnant. For their purpose was other than lewdness with their father. They said: God assigned to humans no task other than that of increasing and multiplying. But behold, the world is now being destroyed as in the generation of the flood. How is it to be kept going? The answer must be that the Holy One, blessed be He, saved us only in order to keep it going through us. They did not know that only Sodom was to be destroyed. All they knew was that the angels had declared, `We will destroy this place' (Gen 19:13). The Holy One, blessed be He, said: I do not withhold the reward of any creature. Even though Lot's daughters did not think the matter through properly, nevertheless, I know what is in men's hearts: `I, the Lord, search the heart, I try the reins' (Jer 17:10)." (Pesiqta Rabbit 42)[23]

These two tales of trickster women provide the background for the maternal Moabite line of Ishai. They are connected with the handmaid's tale through the recurrent motif of the women fooling or intoxicating and seducing their husbands, or in this case, their father. The women's behavior enables the production and perpetuation of the messianic king. By logical extension, the implication of this narrative line is that if the men were left to their own design, redemption could not happen. This is latent in the biblical narratives, but amplified in the midrash.

We can connect one more biblical tale with its midrashic amplification to our trail of trickster women that produces David: the story of Tamar and Judah. Tamar is an ancestress of David, as the Book of Ruth lists the ten generations of filiation that lead from Tamar's son Perez to David. Ruth explicitly mentions the story of Tamar as an intertext. The elders give Boaz their blessing:

May God make the woman who has come into your house like Rachel and like Leah, both of whom built the house of Israel; and become prosperous in Ephrath, and famous in Bethlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore for Judah, from the seed which God will give you from this young woman. (Ruth 4:11-12)

Commentators of all kinds of religious and ideological perspectives, as well as the rabbinic midrash point out that the allusion in the blessing here is not just a genealogical allusion, but an allusion to the entire story and relationship that transpires between Judah and Tamar.

After his first two sons died in marriage to Tamar, Judah refuses to give up his youngest son to her. Tamar resorts to trickery. She dresses up as a prostitute and, in what reads like a carefully designed plan, seduces Judah: "And the following was told to Tamar: Look, your father-in-law goes up to Timna to shear his sheep. And she took off her widow's garments, and covered herself,and sat by the entrance to Enayim, which is by the way to Timna..." (Gen 38:13-14). The midrashic commentary amplifies Judah's blindness and near failure to carry out the divine plan:

"And Judah saw her..." (Gen 38:15). He did not pay attention when he saw that she covered her face. He said: If she were a prostitute she would cover her face. That sounds strange! Said Rabbi Yohanan: He [Judah] wanted to pass by, but the Holy One Blessed be He made the angel who is in charge of desire appear before him. He said: Where are you going, Judah? From where will kings arise, and from where will redeemers arise? [Thus] "he turned to her," against himself and against his wish. (BerR 85:18)

As opposed to Ishai, Judah is here represented as walking by Tamar and avoiding the snare of sexual desire initially. The overt intent of the midrash is to keep Judah's moral character intact.[25] Even if the angel is primarily a personification of Judah's aroused sexual desire, the angel reminds him of the responsibility for the procreation of the messianic promise. Tamar herself is disregarded and her plotting is only indirectly validated, but it is validated and again rewarded with the procreation of the messianic promise. The midrash emphasizes Judah's initial blindness. It seems to pick up on a aspect of the biblical story which Mieke Bal has observed: "What exactly is Tamar's role? She is a focalizer in the first place. She sees what Judah does not see" (Lethal Love, 102).[26] She sees the injustice done to her, when Judah refuses his third son to her. She sees that Judah cannot be trusted when he asks for a pledge. Judah, in his turn, sees a whore instead of a relative. In the end, she forces him to see the truth. As Bal puts it: "In fact, her wit, used to restore what was wrong, serves to make Judah see his own (neurotic) errors" (Lethal Love, 102).

This then is the trail of trickster women who each in her particular way contributes to securing the possibility of a messianic future, through channeling the messianic seed. It takes its beginning with Lot's daughters, continues with Ruth and Naomi and culminates with Ishai's wife and handmaid on David's maternal side. It is echoed by the story of Yehudah and Tamar on David's paternal side. The biblical narratives themselves are only indirectly and retrospectively connected with each other, by genealogical lists such as the one that concludes the Book of Ruth. The midrashic commentaries weave them together more tightly with the thread of the messianic line. Our handmaid's tale then appears as the culmination of the narrative fabric of biblical and midrashic texts. It highlights the trickster motif, the cunning labor that women have to invest in order to enable the future of the messianic seed.

Women rather than men, it appears, are the ones who have the ability to see the big picture. Lot's daughters worry about the perpetuation of humanity in the world. Tamar has the insight into God's plans and acts accordingly. Naomi and Ruth collaborate to secure the future geneology of David. And finally, Ishai's wife and handmaid collaborate to preserve the integrity of wife and husband and thus to enable the birth of David himself. The motif of the trickster women is thus one that is prepared by the biblical narrative, and amplified and organized in the midrashic commentaries. It is a plot-structure that rabbinic literature employs repeatedly, thus rendering its subversive force suspicious. The repetitiveness of the motif renders the focus on the authorship of the handmaid's as misplaced. Rather, we have to analyze this plot-structure as one that is characteristic of rabbinic midrashic imagination. The following intertexts will underline even more how endemic this plot-structure to rabbinic narrative traditions.

Women and the Exodus

The motif of the trickster women dominates the stories woven together to provide the geneology of David, the proto-typical messianic king in rabbinic imagination. The other major biblical stage for the proto-messianic days or redemption, this time in collective form, is the Exodus.

Already in the biblical scene women are quite prominent. When we switch from the Book of Genesis to the beginning of the Book of Exodus we note a brief radical shift. The former is dominated by stories of male conflict: conflict between father and son and rivalry between brothers. Women play mostly a subsidiary role, if any. All of a sudden at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, the scene is dominated by female characters: the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah (Ex 1:15), Moses' mother (Ex 2:1), Pharaoh's daughter, Moses' yet unnamed sister. The conversations revolving around female issues are unusually detailed, particularly about birthing. Pharaoh instructs the midwives: "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool..." (Ex 1:16). The midwives reply to Pharaoh's rebuke after their failure to follow the order to kill the male children that they cannot follow his orders: "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and deliver before the midwife comes to them" (Ex 1:19). Here we also find one of those rare biblical conversations between women, between Pharaoh's daughter and Moses' sister (Ex 2:7-9).

Again, the midrashic commentaries amplify this narrative landscape populated by women. The midrashim, once again, attribute redemption, this time concrete and "historical" redemption and not the messianic future, to the collective action of women, contrasted by men's collective passive acceptance of fate. More particularly, the midrashic Miriam's resilience enables the birth of Moses. This is carried out in a narrative about the people as a whole, as well as in a midrashic story about Miriam:

When the Israelites were in hard labor in Egypt, Pharaoh decreed that they should not sleep at home, so that they would not have intimate relations with their wives. What did the daughters of Israel do? They would go down to draw water from the river, and God would bring up little fishes for them in their buckets. They would cook some, sell the rest, and buy wine. They would go to the field and feed their husbands there, as it is said, "In all their work in the field..." (Ex 1:14). When they had given them food and drink, they would take their mirrors and look into them together with their husbands. She would say, "I am finer than you," and he would say, "No, I am finer than you." And so, they would accustom themselves to desire and grow fruitful and multiply, and God would immediately give them children.... It is written, "The land was filled with them, and as the Egyptians afflicted them, so they would multiply and burst into life" (Ex 1:12). In the merit of these mirrors, which they showed their husbands, accustoming them to desire in the midst of hard labor, they raised up all the hosts of whom it is written:"All the hosts of God left the land of Egypt" (Ex 12:41). [Midrash Tanhuma, Pequdei 9; cp. also bSot 11b][27]

The plot-structure of this midrash is now familiar to us. It is the women who take action, who convince and seduce their husbands to have sex, in spite of their hard labor. Also familiar now is the motif of (food and) alcohol as a means of their seduction. The husbands, on the other hand, are represented as accepting and giving into the fate of slavery, just as Lot seems to accept consequences of the destruction of Sodom, and just as Ishai seems to draw the consequences from his halakhically questionable ethnic status as a Moabite. In this aggadic tale the men are then more carefully coached by their wives into sexual desire. The women carefully educate their husbands to rexperience themselves as desirable, thus simultaneously arousing desire in them and transcending the oppressive present in which their imagination has atrophied.

The theme of male despair or passivity and acceptance of subservience as the end of the future undergoes yet another variation in the narrative about Miriam's intervention in the end of Israelite history:

"And a man went from the house of Levi" (Ex 2:1). Where did he go? Rabbi Yehudah son of Zevinah said: He followed the advice of his daughter. A tannaitic source states: Amram (Moses' father and that man from the house of Levi) was the greatest man of his generation. When evil Pharaoh decreed: "Every son that is born shall be thrown into the river" (Ex 1:22), he said: We are toiling in vain. He got up and divorced his wife. They all got up and divorced their wives. His daughter said to him: Father, your decree is harsher than Pharaoh's, for Pharaoh decreed only concerning the males, and you have decreed concering the males and females; Pharaoh decreed only in this world, and you, in this world and for the world to come; [since] Pharaoh [is] evil- perhaps his decree shall be fulfilled, perhaps it shall not be fulfilled, but you are righteous - certainly your decree shall be fulfilled ... He got up and brought back is wife. They all got up and brought back their wives... (bSot 12a)[28]

This midrashic tale seems to be a mirror of the collective version about the "daughters of Israel" above. Now we concentrate on the individual figure of Miriam. In the context of Miriam's exchange with her father the Talmud provides a running midrashic commentary on the opening chapters of Exodus. In a powerful demonstration of male passivity in the plot-structure that we have followed all along, Amram throws his hands up into the air: "We are toiling in vain."[29] In a move that is parallel to Ishai's sexual withdrawal from his wife, Amram divorces his wife. He gives up since, in his view, the story of redemption, the divine promise, has come to its final demise. The midrash, with detectable irony, makes Amram into "the greatest man of his generation," presumably because he is, after all, Moses' father. But his "greatness" leads to disaster, since all Israelites follow him and through their action actually do bring redemption to a standstill. However, this narrative twist to the tale only emphasizes the contrast between Amram, "the greatest man of his generation," and between Miriam, a woman. She is the one who retains a view of the continuity of Israelite history. She maintains hope and and insists that "fate" is never sealed. Once again it is the woman's view which is in tune with the divine perspective, against male resignation, thus enabling the birth of Moses and the Exodus.

Not only that, but in an earlier complicated midrashic argument in the same talmudic passage, Miriam is also identified as one of the midwives, and as an ancestress of David:[30]

"And it came to pass, since the midwives feared God, He made houses for them" (Ex. 1:21). [What does houses mean?] Rav and Shmu'el disagree: One said: Priestly houses, and one said: Royal houses. According to him who said priestly houses, this refers to Aaron and Moses, and according to him who said royal houses, David also came from Miriam..." (bSot 11b)

Why is David brought into the picture at this point? Asking this same question, Devora Steinmetz focuses on David's royalty as that which is awarded to Miriam, obviously based on this midrash. Understanding kingship a standing for stability,[31] Steinmetz suggests that "the establishment of kingship, then, seems a fitting reward for Miriam, the midwife, according to this midrash, who guarantees a next generation and the figure who saves the infant Moses" ("A Portrait," 43). However, we can go further: in the framework of the recurrent midrashic plot-structure which I have tried to portray so far, David is also the proto-typical messianic king, the promise of the messianic future. David is the personification of the future redemption, the one that has not yet occurred. Miriam's successful argument with her father enabled the birth of Moses and the Exodus as the "historical" redemption, as did the midwives' and Israelite women's behavior. The midrash extrapolates from this to the future redemption. Rewarding Miriam with David as her progeny, it ties the historical redemption of Exodus to the messianic redemption to come through the agency and person of a woman.

Conclusion: Midrashic Women and Redemption

The two narrative lines in the midrashic texts that I have constructed illuminate each other. On the one hand, we have the motif of the trickster women who interfere with reluctant, short-sighted and overly scrupulous husbands or partners, and thus are turned into ancestresses of David and the messianic king. On the other hand, the entire people of Israel have, midrashically, the women to thank for the redemption from Egypt. Second, in the handmaid's tale the midrash plants trickster women where there is none in the biblical story. In the stories of women's involvement with the Exodus from Egypt, the midrash amplifies and transforms the biblical concentrated presence of women in the transition from the book of Genesis to tbe Book of Exodus. Here, the predominant motif is not the women-as-trickster, but women as agents, in juxtaposition to despairing men. The parallel between the two narratives lies in the fact that in both men need to be persuaded by whatever means available to the women to have sex and to produce off-spring. In both, this persuasion or seduction brings about redemption or the birth of the messianic figure, either Moses or David.

As feminists, how are we to read this midrashic "emplotment," particularly in the handmaid's tale? For most of this essay I have followed a reading which foregrounds the subversive aspect of these narratives. This subversive aspect, i.e., the narrative focus on women's agency, on women's solidarity and women's cunning contrasted with male passivity and short-sightedness, creates a significant imaginative breathing-space within the dominant androcentrism of rabbinic culture and literature.

However, in the larger context of midrashic representation of trickster women, the subversive moment of the handmaid's tale loses force and, in fact, should arouse our suspicion as to why midrashic literature uses this plot time and again in different narrative settings. The consistent reward of a certain type of women's behavior calls for a hermeneutics of suspicion vis a vis the "hidden agenda" of the texts, especially when this type of behavior is repeated over and over again in different narrative settings. The repetitiveness of the plot structure, then, reads less as a rebellion against the strong or a "revenge of the weak"[32] represented in the trickster figure, than as a cultural main script that promotes women's commitment to birth.

Based on such suspicion different aspects of the midrashic plot come to the foreground. All the tales and midrashic commentaries [33] revolve around sexual seduction not for the sake of sexual pleasure, but for the sake of producing progeny. Here biblical narrative and midrashic commentary appear to be on one continuum. The righteousness for which women are rewarded with the messianic seed is that in each case they focus on the production of an heir, or at least of the next generation, from Lot's daughters to Ruth and Naomi, the women of the Exodus generation, the midwives, and Miriam. The handmaid's tale at first blush appears to have a slightly different female motivation, namely to get Ishai to have sexual relations with the appropriate woman, his wife rather than the handmaid. But the larger frame and the intent of the story is to produce David.

Finally, all the tales and midrashic commentaries revolve around the production of the male leader, be it David or Moses. The women are ultimately primarily channels for patriarchal geneology. This is underlined by the fact that in the handmaid's tale the women do not even have names, neither Ishai's wife, nor the handmaid.[34] The omission signals the focus of the narrative on the function of the women in producing the next generation, rather than on the women as characters. The very precondition for any kind of messianic future in rabbinic eyes is the commitment to giving birth, projected onto the women. They are confined and reduced to birthing roles, to the role as mother of the messianic leader or king. Oriented to the future, our midrashic women might be more in tune with God's plans with Israel from the narrators' perspective, than their sexual partners who remain stuck in the present. But before we read this unambiguously as a positive representation of women in the narrative, we have to recall that at the same time God is never represented as communicating with women directly. Midrashic women do not act because they received a divine revelation or because God communicated with them. They are not represented as having their own independent relationship with the divine. The promise is given to Abraham and not to Sarah, and the covenant is made with Abraham and not with Sarah.

The focus on women's commitment to birthing echoes the perhaps most powerful script of Western culture, as Simone de Beauvoir has famously described it: "First we must ask: what is woman? `Tota mulier in utero,' says one, `woman is a womb.'"[35] In short, woman = mother = womb. This then is the "conservative" force of the narratives. In these stories women act and trick only to preserve and enforce their function as mothers, and more than that, as mothers of sons.

This basic notion still does not explain the male reluctance or at the very least passivity to produce (messianic) offspring that is featured in our stories. In her psychoanalytic reading of this motif in the biblical Judah and Tamar story, Mieke Bal has suggested fear of women and female sexuality as Judah's (and the narrators') motivating factor for his reluctance: "the man is so scared that the woman has to cover herself in order to trick him into having sex" (Lethal Love, 102). Bal's suggestion certainly helps to explain at least some aspect of our midrashic narratives. However, the interest of midrashic narratives discussed here reaches beyond the immediate relationship between husband and wife to the production of the son or the next generation. The husbands are not merely reluctant to have sex at all: Ishai withdraws after having produced sixty sons, Lot already had his daughters, and Amram and his wife had already given birth to Miriam. Rather, the husbands are reluctant to produce the son (or the next generation) who will replace them and in most cases, as with Ishai and David and Amram and Moses, will end up to be greater than they. The narrative focus of these midrashim really lies on the men's commitment or enslavement to the status quo of the present, versus the women's commitment to the promise of the future and the change or redemption it may bring.

In the end, I suggest that the cultural tension that rabbinic culture struggles with and which gives birth to the line of midrashic narratives drawn in this essay is two-fold. First, the rabbinic movement produced a culture of learning from which it strove to almost completely exclude women. At the same time, in contrast to early Christianity, for example, it also insists on collective physical reproduction as a primary imperative.[36] The tension that lies in this juxtaposition is that the ideal world of the rabbis - the world of the Beit Midrash - is one without women, while the "real" world of the household, which perpetuates the Beit Midrash via physical reproduction, is one in which women play a vital role as mothers. The reproductive powers of women in this sphere ultimately interfere with the fantasy of the ideal world without women. This tension gives birth to the narrative motif of the women who can lay claim to their reproductive power only through tricksterism, camouflage and seduction.

The other tension, however, might well be generational anxiety, in particular about the son who will replace the father, or will in fact surpass the him.[37] The narratives display a pre-natal oedipal structure. Read from such an angle, the reluctance of the men to invest in the future becomes understandable. Since the women in this constellation have a function only as conduit of the geneology the midrashic narrators have no need to subject them to similar reluctance.

In the end, a feminist reading of midrashic narratives should engage in the two approaches entertained in this essay, simultaneoulsy. A reading which focuses only on retrieving the voices of difference or even resistance, does not take account of the androcentric context which allows for such voices to be heard. On the other hand, a critical reading which focuses only on the androcentric character of the narratives ignores their subversive aspect and does not allow for some breathing space for women within that culture. Both readings are necessary in order to arrive at the most nuanced reading possible. Only in such a case can the midrashic narratives, together with our reading of them, serve a transformative function within the contemporary Jewish community.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, born in Düsseldorf, received her Ph.D. in Talmud and Rabbinic Literature on the Nidda laws in 1995. She taught at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2000, where she trained rabbis for the Conservative movement. Since the fall of 2000 she teaches at the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University in California. Her book "Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender" (Stanford University Press, 2000) received the Salo Wittmayer Baron Price for a best first book in Jewish Studies in 2000.

[1]Witness for example Anita Diamant's the recent novel The Red Tent about the story of Dinah's rape. In the biblical text itself the character of Dinah is of little interest and we learn little about her after the rape. Diamant's novel has been quite a commercial success.
[2]Norma Rosen, "Midrash, Bible and Women's Voices," Judaism 45:4 (Fall 1996), 423.
[3]Based on Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), Plaskow asks in fact: "Is there a feminist critique of the law as law? Or to phrase the issue as baldly and badly as possible: Is law a female form?" (Standing Again At Sinai, 65).
[4]At the same time narratives are often not containable by the authorial intent and may therefore work against it. On the multi-faceted meaning of narratives and on the question of authorship, see further below.
[5]In her brief essay on the role of women in redemption, Ruth Fagen suggests that one endeavor for women who wish to be included in rabbinic sources is "to seek those traditional texts, sometimes well known, more often hidden and esoteric, which speak to us in positive terms of women and women's experiences" ("Talmud Torah" in Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in Contemporary Life, ed. by Debra Orenstein and Jane R. Litman, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Pbl., 1997, 115.
[6]Ruth Fagen, see above, fn. OOO.
[7]With the term "classical period" I refer to the midrashic anthologies of the talmudic and early post-talmudic period (third century C.E. to tenth century C.E.). Obviously, midrashic sections are also found within the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmud themselves. However, even medieval collections contain earlier traditions or traditions that represent the culmination of previous midrashic commentaries. The example of the handmaid's tale discussed in this chapter, is such a case.
[8]For a good introduction to midrashic literature see G. Stemberger, Introduction to Talmud and Midrash, 1992.
[9]See also his book by that name: Comparative Midrash: The Plan and Program of Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah (Atlanta: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies, 1986).
[10]Quoted by Edward L. Greenstein (Reading Strategies, 1999), who presents an illustration of Borges' point by analyzing the variety of readings of the Book of Ruth.
[11]The date as well as the geopgraphical origin of the compilation and its editor Makhir ben Abba Mari are in dispute. Chronological attribution range from the 12th to the 14th century. The location is identified as either Southern France or Spain. As is true for most anthologies of aggadic midrashim, material within this collection may be much older. In some cases, this Yalqut cites texts known to us from tannaitic literature.
[12]Usually the Makhiri provides his sources, but in this case, as in some other cases, he introduces the story by stating "midrash." Buber in his critical edition of the Yalqut points out that there is no exact parallel to this story in any other rabbinic text (Yalqut ha-Makhiri, 107b, n.42). Individual motifs, however, are recognizable, as will be discussed further down.
[13]The latter remark is also based on the Babylonian Talmud bB.B. 17a and bShab 55b. The Talmud cites a tannaitic tradition according to which "four died at the instigation of the snake and these are they: Benjamin the son of Jacob, Amram the father of Moses, Ishai' the father of David and Kalev the son of David." According to Rashi, "at the instigation of the snake" has to be understood: "they would not have been meant to die, were it not for the decree of death made upon all offspring of the first human" (bB.B. 17a).
[14]Midbar Kedemot, s.v. "Ishai", No.20.
[15]See mYev 8:3.
[16]See mKid 3:12-13 and 4:1.
[17]The Hebrew term for "reddish" appears otherwise only as a description of Esau when he is born (Gen 25:25). But the midrash does not seem to play with this connection.
[18]There are two classic talmudic tales. First, Rabbi Yohanan, a Palestinian Amora from the mid-third century C.E., known for his beauty, "used to go and sit at the gates of the bath(houses). He said: `When the daughters of Israel come up from their ritual immersion (at the end of their menstrual periods), they will meet me, so that they will have children as beautiful as I am and as learned as I am..." (bB.M. 84a; par. bBer 20a)). Second, Ima Shalom answers an anonymously asked question why her children are so beautiful: "She replied: [Because] he [her husband Rabbi Eliezer] `converses' with me neither at the beginning nor at the end of the night, but [only] at midnight; and when he `converses,' he uncovers a handbreadth and covers a handbreadth, and is as though he were compelled by a demon. And when I asked him, What is the reason for this, he replied, So that I may not think of another woman, lest my children be as mamzerim" (bNed 20b). Julius Preuss traces this construction back to the famous biblical story of Jacob's "genetic experiment" by sight with his goat and sheep in Gen 30:37, adapted in the Talmud for similar experiments with animals (bA.Z. 24a) (Julius Preuss, Biblische und Talmudische Medizin, 454) .For a discussion of this passage see David Biale, Eros and the Jews, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp.50-52 and Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Berkeley and California: University of California Press, 1994, ch.6.
[19]Cp. Louis Ginzberg's note in his summary of the midrashic story, that "David's ruddy complexion ... was due to Jesse's great passion at the time of begetting his youngest son. And this unusual color nearly caused the death of David and his mother, as his brothers suspected her of adultery" (Legends of the Jews IV, 247, n.13). He does not supply any reference to rabbinic literature for this reading. I am uncertain how Ginzberg imagines the mechanics of the "heat of passion" here.
[20]See also NumR 9:34: "The king of the Arabs asked Rabbi Aqiva: `I am Kushi (i.e., black), and my wife is Kushit, and she gave birth to a white child. I want to kill her, since she was adulterous.' Said he [R. Aqiva] to him: `Are the statues in your house black or white?' He answered: `White!' Said he [R. Aqiva] to him: `When you had sex with her, she gazed at the white statues, and gave birth to [children] like them!" This midrashic tale draws on the Jacob story as a proof-text.
[21]See bA.Z. 24a, bB.M. 84a, GenR 26:7 and NumR 9:34, fn.OO above. However, the story of Imma Shalom and Rabbi Eliezer's sexual behavior points in the direction of our midrashic narrative.
[22]See above, n. 000.
[23]Significantly, this midrash rewards the daughters not with the producing or enabling the seed of the messiah, but with a halakhic ruling: "It was because the intention of Lot's daughters was good that in the matter of marriage between the children of Israel and the Ammonites and Moabites, God prohibited an Ammonite man [from marrying an Israelite woman], but did not prohibit an Ammonite woman [from marrying an Israelite man]; God prohibited a Moabite man [from marrying an Israelite woman], but did not prohibit a Moabite woman [from marrying an Israelite man]." On this latters halakhic ruling, see mYev 8:3.
[24]Significantly, this midrash rewards the daughters not with the producing or enabling the seed of the messiah, but with a halakhic ruling: "It was because the intention of Lot's daughters was good that in the matter of marriage between the children of Israel and the Ammonites and Moabites, God prohibited an Ammonite man [from marrying an Israelite woman], but did not prohibit an Ammonite woman [from marrying an Israelite man]; God prohibited a Moabite man [from marrying an Israelite woman], but did not prohibit a Moabite woman [from marrying an Israelite man]." On this latters halakhic ruling, see mYev 8:3.
[25]This midrashic plot betrays perhaps the commentators' discomfort with Tamar's agency and power of seduction, since the comment puts the agency in angelic hands. However, even the angelic hands are responding to Tamar's seduction plot.
[26]Similarly, Bloom points out that: "pragmatically Tamar is a prophetess, and she usurps the future beyond any prophet's achievement... Most crucially, she knows that she is the future, and she sets aside societal and male-imposed conventions in order to arrive at her truth, which will turn out to be Yahweh's truth, or David" (The Book of J, 223).
[27]This midrash is also quoted by Rashi in his commentary on Ex 38:8: "And he [Bezalel] made the laver of brass, of the mirrors of the serving women [mar'ot hazov'ot]...". Explaining the somewhat enigmatic place of the women's mirrors in the construction of the tabernacle, Rashi draws on Midrash Tanhuma. The mirrors are introduced, because in Ex 38:8 the mirrors of the zov'ot (literally "serving-women") are a contribution to the construction of the laver for the tabernacle. These mirrors are then the same ones which the women used to seduce their husbands in slavery, with the help of which the women aroused the zeva'ot (masses) to leave Egypt.
[28]In a recent article, Devorah Steinmetz has analyzed the midrashic representation of Miriam. In this context she has also analyzed this story as one of the most famous midrashim on Miriam. This story appears in various versions in rabbinic texts earlier than the Babylonian Talmud, e.g. in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishamel, in the Mekhilta de-Rashbi, as well as in later texts, such as Exodus Rabbah 1:13 and Numbers Rabbah 13:20. It is also found in two extra-rabbinic texts, Josephus and Pseudo-Philo. In what follows, I am partially drawing on her essay, but also diverging from it. Steinmetz discusses the differences between the versions which is not of primary significance to this essay. Further, she focuses on Miriam exclusively, and her midrashic transformation. However, I read Miriam's midrashic transformation in the context of the overall pattern of midrashic plot-structure, which makes her transformation appear less unique.
[29]In the version in Exodus Rabbah, the despair is specified more precisely: "Amram said that it was useless for the Israelites to beget children. From then on he ceased to have intercourse with his wife Jochebed and even divorced his wife..." (ExR 1:13).
[30]For a more detailed discussion and explanation of the midrashic argument on this point, see Devorah Steinmetz, "A Portrait...," 42-43.
[31]"Kingship is a form of government which, in the Bible, guarantees a degree of stability. Leadership is hereditary, and no chaotic gap between leaders will, ordinarily, threaten the well-being of a monarchic state" ("A Portrait," 43). I do not find this representation of biblical kingship too compelling, since biblical monarchy is anything but stable. In a footnote she qualifies her characterization somewhat: "Although kingship never is particularly stable in the Bible, it is still seen as better than the chaos of the pre-monarchic era illustrated in the book of Judges" ("A Portrait," 60, fn23).
[32]This is how Harold Bloom characterized the function of the irony that the author of The Book of J employs when representing male characters, including God. James C. Scott similarly has argued that trickster tales are "the public face of an oral culture that reinforced a certain hatred of the powerful and a worship of the persistence and agility of the underdog" (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 164).
[33]The exception is Miriam's case, since she merely argues with her father in order to convince him to reunite with another woman, her mother, and not with herself.
[34]bB.B.91a provides a list of women's names absent from biblical narratives. In that somewhat obscure list the name Nazbat bat Adiel appears as a name for David's mother. The Midrash Makhiri, however, in its narrating of the birth of David does not mobilize the name.
[35]Cited in Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics and the Question of Difference, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 10.
[36]See D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, particularly chapter 7, "(Re)producing Men" and David Biale, Eros and the Jews, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
[37]D. Boyarin has analyzed this phenomenonin a different context. In the talmudic tales involving grotesque male bodies, he reads "the tremendous tension ... around the male reproducitve body: anxiety about the role of the rabbinic community in the reproduction and genealogy of Israel, and first and formeost about their own geneaologies, their own continuation through replication in their offspring" (Carnal Israel, 205).

European Conference of Women Rabbis, Cantors, Scholars and all Spiritually Interested Jewish Women and Men
Tagung europäischer Rabbinerinnen, Kantorinnen, rabbinisch gelehrter und interessierter Jüdinnen und Juden

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