Authors: Adele Reinhartz
ISBN-13: 9780195099706, ISBN-10: 0195099702
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: November 1998
Edition: (Non-applicable)
McMaster University
Unnamed characterssuch as Lot's wife, Jephthah's daughter, Pharaoh's baker, and the witch of Endorare ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible and appear in a wide variety of roles. Adele Reinhartz here seeks to answer two principal questions: first, is there a "poetics of anonymity," and if so, what are its contours? Second, how does anonymity affect the readers' response to and construction of unnamed biblical characters? The author is especially interested in issues related to gender and class, seeking to determine whether anonymity is more prominent among mothers, wives, daughters, and servants than among fathers, husbands, sons and kings and whether the anonymity of female characters functions differently from that of male characters.
Abbreviations | ||
Introduction | 3 | |
Pt. I | Anonymity and the Effacement of Personal Identity | |
1 | The Bit Players | 19 |
2 | Servants, Stewards and Armor-Bearers | 32 |
3 | Transmitters of Information | 45 |
Pt. II | Anonymity and the Expression of Personal Identity | |
4 | Wise Women and Unworthy Levites | 63 |
5 | Wayward Wives, Multifarious Mothers and Doomed Daughters | 82 |
Pt. III | Anonymity and the Boundaries of Personal Identity | |
6 | The Convergence of Characters | 137 |
7 | Character Confusion in the Heavenly Realm | 154 |
8 | Crossing the Threshold between Reader and Text | 178 |
Conclusion | 187 | |
Selected Bibliography | 193 | |
Index of Scriptural Citations | 209 | |
Index of Modern Authors | 215 | |
Subject Index | 218 |