S2E7: To Have and To Hold: Sexual Violence and the Bible

Season 2
Written By Emily Chesley
 
 

With Dr. Rhiannon Graybill

Dr. Rhiannon Graybill shares her research on sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible and ways of reading such messy stories for then and now. “In our world sexual violence is often grounded in or justified by the Bible, and the Bible is used against survivors of sexual violence. And so reading biblical stories as fuzzy, messy, and icky helps us dismantle our experiences of sexual violence and of rape culture.” We also talk about violent tropes in modern romance literature and Rome's origin stories—and what these kinds of tales do to those who read them.

CW: This episode discusses themes of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.

 
“In our world sexual violence is often grounded in or justified by the Bible, and the Bible is used against survivors of sexual violence. And so reading biblical stories as fuzzy, messy, and icky helps us dismantle our experiences of sexual violence and of rape culture.”
— Dr. Rhiannon Graybill


BIO

Dr. Rhiannon Graybill is the Weinstein Rosenthal Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her works focus on women, gender, and sexuality in the Hebrew Bible using the lens of literary theory.  Her books include Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (2016), Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (2021), and recently two books on Jonah: a co-written commentary (with Steve Mckenzie and John Kaltner, 2023) and an introduction to the text, What Are They Saying about the Book of Jonah? (2023). A current project, tentatively titled This is Not My Beautiful Body, draws on feminist literary traditions to explore metaphorical depictions of the female body in the Hebrew Bible.

 

  • [Podcast theme music begins, and plays over the introduction]

     

    Emily Chesley: Welcome to Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world! I’m Emily Chesley—

     

    Rebekah Haigh: And I’m Rebekah Haigh—

     

    Emily: —scholars, friends, and your hosts!

     

    [podcast music ends]

     

    Emily: In today’s episode, “To Have and to Hold: Sexual Violence and the Bible,” we talk with Dr. Rhiannon Graybill about messy Bible stories, chick lit, and why men can’t start a nation without sexual assault. 

     

    [music interlude]

     

    Rebekah: Everyone knows that in the 1990s, in Washington, DC, Bill Clinton slept with Monica Lewinsky. The what is clear. But the more you sit with the story, the more unclear the boundaries and choices become. When it first made international news, everyone was put into neat categories: he was labeled an adulterer and she was, well, words we can’t say on this podcast. But now, society is beginning to recognize that power structures and power differentials restrict a person’s ability to consent. The power dynamic involved—the man who sat behind the Resolute Desk and an intern fresh out of college—makes fully-voiced consent by definition impossible. Differential status impacts who has the freedom to give consent and who does not, whether a professor and graduate student[1], cinema executive and actor they employ[2], spiritual leader and parishioner.[3] But even that doesn’t entirely explain away agency, choice, or desire. In the White House that year, both were adults. Lewinsky has called the relationship “consensual” in interviews.[4] This is just one example of how stories of sexual encounters can get blurred and tangled.

     

    Emily: We’ll come back to the cloudiness, but let’s start with some stories that are more certain. In 189 BCE, a Galatian woman named Chiomara was captured by an invading Roman army, alongside other women from her region. Chiomara was raped by a centurion, who then demanded a large sum of money from her people to ransom her back. The historian and philosopher Plutarch paints a dramatic scene of their exchange at a river. There on the banks, Chiomara secretly signaled those delivering the ransom to slay her rapist. The Galatians decapitated him. She wrapped the centurion's head in her robe and took it to her astonished husband, Ortiagon. He responded, “‘A noble thing, dear wife, is fidelity.’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘but it is a nobler thing that only one man be alive who has been intimate with me’” (Plutarch, Bravery of Women22).[5] Chiomara’s community seems to understand her experience as unwanted sexual violation, under coercion, and not adulterous.  Plutarch was one of many Roman writers to recount her story  (e.g., Livy 38.24.2; Valerius Maximus 6.1. Ext2.; Polybius, Histories 21.38; Ps-Aurelius Victor, De Viris Illustribus 55.2).[6] Clearly, something about it served their interests.

     

    Rebekah: Chiomara’s story, unfortunately, wasn’t unusual. Whether because of historical reality, literary trope, political agenda, or some combination, stories of rape and violence survive from all over the ancient Mediterranean. For instance, rape narratives lay at the heart of Roman self definition. Two of the foundation myths of the Republic commemorate stories of women’s forcible loss of virginity: there’s the rape of the Sabine women and the rape of Lucretia.

     

    As the historian Livy tells the first myth, a newly-founded city of Rome had no women to produce heirs. After trying and failing to secure marriage alliances with other cities, the young leader Romulus plotted a covert attack. He threw a festival and invited all the nearby tribes, including the Sabines. Men, women, and children entered the city to celebrate. Then, at a planned time, Romulus’s men rushed into the crowd and seized women for their brides. Naturally, the women were fearful and furious, but Romulus told them, preposterously, that actually this whole abduction was their parents’ fault for not marrying them off and eventually they would come to love their new husbands. Of course, the women’s families and tribes were furious, and wars and conflict ensued (Livy, History of Rome, 1.9–13). 

     

    Emily: As a foundation myth, Livy’s story premises the growth of the Roman Republic on men violently taking what they want by force. And, at the end of the story, the Sabine women who were captured and forced into marriage actually accept fault for the whole thing. They rush into the battle, throwing off their veils. They tell their Roman husbands and Sabine families pitched in battle, “turn your anger against us; we are the cause of war, the cause of wounds.” In Livy’s telling, these victims accept the blame as if they were perpetrators. Through this rhetoric, they become double victims. By 89 BCE, the young Republic was commemorating (celebrating?) this event on their coins: a denarius depicts two soldiers carrying away a woman under their arms.[7]

     

    Rebekah: In the other political origin story, Lucretia was a high-born Roman matron raped by Tarquin, the son of the Etruscan king. She tried to refuse his advances, but Tarquin threatened to kill her and his slave and then leave their naked bodies lying together so that her husband would assume she was an adulterer. Rather than have such slander go forth, Lucretia endured his assault. Though her family believed her testimony about Tarquin, they could not dissuade her from taking her own life to prove her innocence and maintain her lost virtue. Lucretia’s death ignited a violent civil war that ultimately brought down the monarchy and launched the Roman Republic (Livy, History of Rome 1.57–59).[8] Death was preferable to dishonor, and sex outside the bounds—even against a woman’s will—brought grave suspicion. 

     

    Emily: Like we said, stories like these were everywhere. Living as we do in a post-Me Too world, it’s easy to imagine that sexual violence was permeating ancient societies, especially ones as literally patriarchal as Greece and Rome. But historical reality isn’t our point today, or at least it’s not our only point. Moving beyond the “what happened,” we also want to think about how these stories are told, what ideas and ideals are embedded in the narratives, and how rhetoric is used for particular social ends. Unlike Chiomara’s story, some women like Lucretia did not have so-called  “happy endings.” What awaited them was death, either to save their chastity or because it had been lost.  Even in the story of Chiomara we see an economic undertone. She is a commodity to be “bought back” by her kinsmen. Her chastity belongs only to her husband, and so she takes drastic action. 

     

    Rebekah: The first book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, presents an origin myth for the nation of Israel, telling stories set in the distant past about their ancestors. Many of the stories involve family dynamics and the women who had to negotiate their place in those families, like Sarah and Hagar, who we’ll talk about. Similarly, various stories of sexual violence show up in 1 and 2 Samuel  and Judges, books that present themselves as histories of the nations of Israel and Judah, but that also have elements of uncertain historicity in them. These, too, present founding stories, often rooted in family, violence, and sex. We are going to talk about some of the most infamous of these stories today: the rape of King David’s daughter Tamar by her half-brother; the story of Dinah—kidnapped and assaulted by a local bigwig; and the story of the married Bathsheba, watched by a peeping tom of a king and then summoned to his bed. 

     

    Emily: Some people avoid these parts of the Bible out of personal principle or past trauma, but scholar Rhiannon Graybill wants to find new ways of reading them and new ways of telling them.[9] She argues that many of these biblical stories of rape and sexual exploitation are are not always clear. And that ambiguity can be a rhetorical feature, not a bug. Many of them are, as she says, icky, fuzzy, and messy. We’re not always sure what happened; there are complicated consequences; and who’s at fault or faulted isn’t always black-and-white.[10] Because of all this, Graybill says we should read biblical stories of sexual violence while holding space for “unhappy readings,” accepting “ambiguity, ambivalence, and non-resolution.”[11] She’ll tell us more about this in our conversation.

     

    Rebekah: We are delighted to sit down with Dr. Rhiannon Graybill. She is the Weinstein Rosenthal Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Her works focus on women, gender, and sexuality in the Hebrew Bible using the lens of literary theory.  Her books include Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (2016), Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (2021), and recently two books on Jonah: a co-written commentary (with Steve Mckenzie and John Kaltner, 2023) and an introduction to the text, What Are They Saying about the Book of Jonah?(2023). A current project, tentatively titled This is Not My Beautiful Body, draws on feminist literary traditions to explore metaphorical depictions of the female body in the Hebrew Bible. We’re excited to share our conversation with you.

     

    [podcast theme music plays]

     

    Rebekah: We've been exploring ancient women's bodies this season, and today we're going to explore the Hebrew Bible and grapple with a darker aspect of women's embodied lives: sexual violence. 

    The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, preserves the story of Susanna, a beautiful woman who is victimized by a legal system and her would-be rapists.[12] In the story, two elders in the town fall in lust with this beautiful-but-married woman. So they concoct a scheme: sneak into her garden before she bathes. Once she's alone, they demand she sleep with them. If she refuses, they threaten to take her to court and say they caught her committing adultery. With two male witnesses, her guilt would be assured, and according to the Torah, the penalty for adultery is death. Sussana's choices were rape or death by stoning. 

    This story alludes to some very specific laws in ancient Israel. So, let's start with the society within which these stories of sexual violence are embedded. What legal system and social expectations were there around sex, adultery, rape, and marriage in the Ancient Near East? 

    Dr. Rhiannon Graybill: So this is a great question, and the answer is not great. I always think about how I was teaching the biblical rape text during the Kavanaugh hearings, which was a little bit triggering for everyone in the class. 

    We don't have access to ancient Israelite practices around sexual violence, except for sort of the laws we have in the Bible. But we do have a pretty– [sighs] We've got some laws that we can talk about.

    So the most important thing is that female sexuality is understood to belong to men. And so a woman's sexuality is controlled by her father, or maybe her brothers if her father isn't around. And then when she's married, it transfers to her husband. And so this is the kind of overarching framework. There's a famous article, “Could a Woman Say ‘no’ in Ancient Israel?”[13] And the answer is no, which is distressing to us.

    Adultery laws in the Bible depend entirely on the marital status of the woman, not of the man. So if a man is married and has sex with a woman that's not his wife, it's not a problem. If a woman is married and has sex with a man who is not her husband, whether or not that's consensual doesn't matter to the text. And so the rape of a married woman and consensual adultery are treated as the same thing. Which is something that we as modern people would treat those very differently, I hope. 

    But they're treated as the same thing. The punishment is the same. It's, the punishment is death. If the woman is unmarried and a man rapes her, then the punishment is going to be a fine. And then he has to marry her. 

    The only exception is if a woman is in a field—so like where people couldn't hear her if she protested—then she's considered to be innocent. And like if you think in the Bible, the story of Dinah starts out with Dinah going to see the daughters of the land. Sometimes people think that that's maybe a reference to her being outside of where she could protest. But otherwise there's this idea, you know, if, she must have consented because otherwise she would have said something and somebody would have heard. So that's kind of what's going on with the rape laws. 

    We also have laws about, for example, how long you have to wait before you have sex with a woman that you captured in war. Which, traditional scholarship would treat this as like a humanitarian law. I think a lot of more contemporary scholars [would say] like this is also kind of horrific because it's about sexual use of women captured in war. 

    Marriage in the Bible is very much concerned with the question of endogamy or exogamy. So do you wanna marry in the group, out of the group. Too in the group you get incesty; too out of the group, right, it’s diluting group identity. 

    Marriage is not so much about love. There's a little bit of love. The Song of Songs is a lot of great sexy love poetry and maybe has to do with marriage. Maybe just about fun sex. But love in the Bible [is] generally not romantic. 

    There's also the question. So laws sound terrible! 

    The other thing I would say is that we have this question of, do people actually follow their laws or do what it says in their texts. Which you all as historians, right, this is your, you know so much more about this than I do. But I would say that there is, we should have a kind of grain of salt in thinking about the way that these sort of horrible laws [laughs wryly] suggest all sexual norms in the text. 

    Emily: I'm curious about this lot about waiting a certain period of time to have sex with someone you've captured in war. Do historians or scholars know what the reasoning behind that is? Cause I'm thinking of a similar or maybe parallel law in the sixth century CE by emperor Justinian that basically says a woman has to wait at least twelve months between the time she ends a marriage with one husband and starts a marriage with another husband. And that's to make sure that any children that she gives birth to, the community can tell who's, who the father is and whose family those heirs belong to. 

    Rhiannon: Mm. 

    Emily: Is that kind of what's going on here? Or is it more about something else? 

    Rhiannon: Yeah, that's probably part of it. There's also a kind of sense that it's a ritual of leaving behind the past, moving to the future. So also the woman has to cut off, shave her head, or cut off her hair. And so there's this also like leaving behind a path.  But yeah, I think paternity of children is definitely part of it also probably. It's much shorter than a year, though. I can't remember. I think it's either two, I think it's two months, it might be one month. Definitely not a whole year. 

    Emily Yeah, so that would seem to be less about inheritance and children.

    Rhiannon But in the story of Bathsheba, too, David has her husband killed. (I know we're gonna talk about in a minute), but he has her husband killed. And then Bathsheba has to mourn. And when she's done mourning, then she goes to live with him. 

    Emily:  So that is a perfect segueto what is  [laughs] perhaps the most famous story of sexual encounter in the Hebrew Bible: David and Bathsheba. So in a nutshell, from his rooftop David sees a woman, Bathsheba, bathing. She's already married, but he's the king, so he summons her and she gets pregnant. Then to cover it up, David sends her husband to the front lines of war and the now-widowed Bathsheba becomes his wife. 

    So this story gets preached about, interpreted in pop culture, recycled on Twitter every year or so. And there's a variety of interpretations. So some, right, read Bathsheba as the victim, a woman prey to a man with all the power in the kingdom. Others sometimes read her as a temptress at fault for “seducing” this otherwise ideal king David, the “man after God's own heart.” And motivations are ambiguous and unclear in the text, and depend partly on what the reader wants to find. 

    But that is true of a lot of stories about sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. So Rhiannon, in your book Texts After Terror, you propose a way to read and interpret these biblical stories of sexual violence, which you term “icky,” “messy,” and “fuzzy.” Can you explain this approach for us? 

    Rhiannon: So we often talk about—  When we talk about sexual violence, like in the contemporary world, there's this sort of idea that a rapist is a scary bad man who hides in the bushes, and he jumps out, and he grabs an innocent woman, and he rapes him, and she's like going to bring soup to her grandmother. She's doing something good. So the rapist is unequivocally bad. The victim is unequivocally pure, good, perfect. Often these categories are racialized. 

    We also all know that this is a rape myth. I hope we all know that this is a rape myth. Some rapes happen like this, but most lived experience of sexual violence is not this tidy. And it's a myth that also kind of covers up the way that we actually experience sexual violence. 

    So I started to think about how the way we talk about rape and experience rape and sort of talk about sexual violence in everyday life, is very different from the kind of rape myths that we bring to the idea of sexual violence. 

    I also started to think about this because I was teaching undergraduates. I used to teach at Rhodes College, which is located in Memphis. And I taught a lot of first-year students in particular, and I'd be teaching them about sexual violence in the Bible. But a lot of the scholarship is really old, and the way it talks about rape is as something, the most unimaginable thing that could happen. A truly terrible thing. At the same time, we also know that one in five female college students is sexually assaulted in college. We know there are a large number of male students too. So I started to feel just really gross standing in front of these students telling them that sexual violence was unimaginably terrible while also I knew had a lot of survivors in my class, and also perpetrators in my class. 

    So I wanted to think about a more flexible framework for talking about sexual violence, both in the contemporary moment and in the Hebrew Bible. And I think it applies at other moments too, not just those moments. 

    But so I have these three terms in Texts After Terror. I talk about sexual violence as fuzzy, messy and icky. And I've gotten a lot of pushback, not a lot, some pushback, for these terms not being scholarly enough. But I really wanted to think about the kind of everyday language that we use, especially because of the way that often when we talk about sexual harassment, sexual assault, things like that, there are certain ways that our speech is limited by people in power. If you think about nondisclosure agreements, or you think about the way a Title IX case is resolved, often part of that is you're not allowed to talk about your experience in certain formal terms. And so I wanted to think about other kind of messier language that we could use. 

    So all that to say, here are the three terms. 

    So “Fuzzy” is a way of thinking about the way that memory is often affected by traumatic experience. But memory can also be affected by alcohol, which is something that's a part of a lot of sexual assault on campus, in everyday life, and also in the Hebrew Bible. “Fuzzy” is also a way of talking about how experiences can be difficult to fit into neat boxes or to classify. So many of us have had experiences that we didn't realize until later they were actually really messed up, right? You’re telling someone else, and your friend is like, “Oh, that actually sounds a lot like sexual harassment or sexual assault.” So “fuzzy” is kind of a way of talking about that in-betweenness. So in the Bible a good example of this is the story of Dinah. Because we have this story where Dinah seems to be raped by this Prince Shechem. But there's no oneHebrew word that unequivocally means “rape.” And so there's this fuzziness built into the narrative. 

    The second category I talk about is “messy.” And so with “messy” I want to think about the consequences of sexual violence, the way that a story or an incident will often start with one bad thing and then spiral out to lots of other bad things. We often say things like “oh, it got messy,” right? Which is a way of talking that describes the kind of messiness of a situation without pinning everything on a single actor. I’m also interested in how certain people get described as messy. Typically women, especially a kind of disorganized, maybe sexually active woman, and also gay men. So like virgins and straight men don't get called a “hot mess” in the way that certain kinds of, like, women and queer men do. And so I wanted to think about messy as a way of speaking to that. And I often talk about the story of Tamar, who is David's daughter, who is raped by David's son, her half-brother. That story spirals then and that leads to the revolt of her other brother Absalom. It sort of leads to the kind of, mm, messiness, not the fall of the House of David, but the kind of the … everything spirals out of control in the story because of the story of sexual violence. 

    And then “icky” is a way of talking about what's gross or weird or creepy. Maybe or maybe not like at the level of actionable crime or policy violation, but something that's just sort of– [she pauses] just icky.

    And so a good example in the Bible is we have this story of Lot and his daughters. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, there are strangers who come to Sodom where Lot is living. The men of Sodom want to rape these strangers. Lot offers up his daughters instead. The daughters are spared from being raped. Lot and his daughters and their mother escape from Sodom. Everyone else is destroyed with fire and brimstone. Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt. And then Lot and his daughters are alone in this cave. And they decide that they're the only people left alive. The daughters decide this, is their gonna get their father drunk and have sex with him so that they can get pregnant. And so people debate, is this a story where Lot rapes his daughters? Where the daughters rape their father? Are they getting revenge? Is this like a story about survival? Whatever you think, it's a really icky story, and teaching the story to eighteen-year-olds really drove home just how icky it is. So that's sort of a good way of thinking about “icky.” 

    So I use these three categories to talk about sexual violence in the Bible, but also clearly I'm drawing from contemporary experience. 

    I think like in the story of Bathsheba you see all three. It's fuzzy. It's not clear whether Bathsheba consents, whether she's an initiator, whether she's raped. It's definitely messy, right. Uriah gets murdered. There's a baby who's born from this union, who God then kills as a lesson to David. And it's really icky. I mean, this is another one where it makes some great romantic paintings, and then you start to read it… [she trails off] And again like tell the eighteen-year-olds and you realize how icky it is!… . [all three laugh] 

    Rebekah: Yeah, the. Emily and I were discussing how, like, it circles around on Twitter all the time, 

    Rhianon: It really does. 

    Rebekah: the debates around, you know David and Bathsheba, who was the victim, who you know, was the victimizer. And I had been thinking about the baby 'cause that never comes up right, like the real victim in this story, the clearestvictim is this unborn child who did nothing. 

    Emily: And Uriah.

    Rebekah: And Uriah! Yes. poor guy. 

    Rhiannon: Yeah! That Olympic gymnast wrote about it. The, Rachel Denholander, who was sexually assaulted by the US gymnastics, that horrible doctor and yeah. 

    Rebekah: And she referred to this, this story? 

    Rhiannon: Yeah, she writes about it in her book. I never thought I would get to quote an Olympic gymnast, but. (I'm not sure if she was in the Olympics, but she was certainly an excellent gymnast.)

    Rebekah: That is interesting because a lot of times, even on the podcast, we've had people come on and talk about, like, biblical stories and sort of thinking about the reverberations. And some of the most interesting moments are like people who are reflecting on a poem or a story on their own life and experience and reading the text through their own embodied experience, which is something that, you know, the ambiguity of these texts really allows for. 

    We've already alluded to the story of Dinah and the Book of Genesis. So Jacob's daughter goes to visit a city called Shechem and catches the eye of the city's prince. He takes her, sleeps with her, falls in love with her, and asks for marriage (Gen 34:2–3).[14] Dinah herself never speaks. So we have no way of knowing if this is the Disney version of Cinderella, or if it's the Into the Woods version. Was she raped, could she say “no”? Would consent have been possible with the social power dynamics? And you reflect in your book about the limitations of our modern western discourse of consent when applied to ancient texts like these. So, to what extent is our framework of consent useful or limiting for adjudicating sexual violence in the ancient world?

    Rhiannon: So first I wanna say really clearly, I'm not opposed to consent in contemporary sexual encounters. I think that consent is very important! There's a scholar named Joseph Fischel who has a great book called Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent that’s really helped me think through consent.[15] He talks about consent as the “least bad model” for having an equitable and just sexual encounter. And so I think consent is good!

    I think where consent is not good is where we take modern ideas of consent—like you take your campus definition of enthusiastic consent or whatever—and you apply it to the Bible wholesale. I think that that is sloppy. And I think that more importantly, it also ignores some of the limits of consent. And so I think it's important that we understand the ways that consent is a limited framework. 

    In my chapter in my book, I really get into the problems with consent. And so I talk about six of them there. The first thing—and this is again, you’re historians, this is something I'm sure comes up every interview you have—the idea of consent assumes a modern idea of the subject that we can't just transpose onto the ancient biblical text. It assumes this kind of Enlightenment, masculine subject that doesn't work when we think about ancient women in particular. 

    The second thing about consent is that it ignores discomfort or all the times that we agree to something in order to avoid making a situation awkward in some kind of way. Sara Ahmed, who's a feminist philosopher, has written about this. But I think it's really important to just kind of think about how sometimes we consent to make someone else feel comfortable. This comes up a lot when people are talking about, you know, why you did the thing that you didn't want to do. 

    [The] third thing, that's bad about consent is that consent ignores intersectionality and the way that certain people are viewed as more able to consent, and also certain people– Just the way that racism, sexism, misogyny play into sexual encounters. So, many college campuses have rolled out bystander intervention training where, you know, you train bystanders to intervene and prevent a situation of sexual violence. On the one hand this is good. On the other hand, it's important to know that bystanders will intervene to help a white victim more than a victim of color, to help a straight-presenting person more than a queer-presenting person. And so we need to think about that before we're just like, “oh, consent is great.” 

    Consent also is a way of legitimizing subordination, like it doesn't make a relationship balanced. Something that a less powerful person gives to the more powerful person. I think that pharmaceutical trials are a good way to think about this, especially the way that they're outsourced to the Two-Thirds World. 

    Consent is often tied up with this idea of saving women; it can become colonialist. 

    And then the last thing about consent that is a problem is that it's a really low bar. So there's this journalist Rebecca Traister, who's a feminist journalist, she writes for The Cut. She interviewed some college students. The Cut did College Sex Week when I was writing the book. Some great interviews, and these students say, “If the best thing we can say about the sex we had is that it's consensual, like that's terrible.” And I think that's absolutely true. I think we should think about sex beyond just like, is it consensual or not. I mean that's such a flattening, depressing way to think about a kind of sexual imagination. 

    And so– I went on more of a rant about consent than you probably wanted. [laughs] But I think that all of this kind of shows, it's just, we can't take this modern notion up uncritically and apply it to ancient texts. 

    Also, I think feminist and queer critiques of consent are really important to thinking about sexual violence in our own moment. But also we should bring that to our scholarly work. 

    Emily: Yeah. Applying this framework of consent to the biblical texts, I'm assuming you're referring to using this idea of consent to evaluate what's going on in the texts and who's good, who’s bad, and what's happening? 

    Rhiannon: Mm. 

    Emily: Can you say a little bit more about, yeah, this application? Or what, the application you don't want to happen? 

    Rhiannon: I think it’s tempting always to have a nice little tidy thing that you can take and apply to a text, whether it's like a Marxist theory of protection, or Foucaultian theory of surveillance, or like the FBI definition of what is a rape. And if you take that and apply it then you can either say like yes or no, this is or isn't a rape. I think the problem with that is it's using a category in a really rigid way that doesn't allow you any kind of intellectual flexibility and kind of, I mean doesn't do justice to what these categories were designed to do anyway. 

    So I find in particular, when people— People want to talk about sexual violence in the Bible. And often we do that through our own contemporary experience. But there's this sort of– When I was writing the book (so the book came out in 2021) consent was exploding on college campuses like 2016, 2018. It feels to me like that discourse is still around, but it's pulled back a little bit. 

    But there was just this really naive, optimistic enthusiasm. Like if we just taught college kids what consent is, we wouldn't have sexual violence on campus. And it didn't work. Like that, would be so great if it were true, but like it didn't work. And it was something that was pushed the most by the people that knew the least about what it was actually like to experience sexual violence. It was mostly coming from like, well-meaning administrators that were kind of clueless. (I'm not trying to get anyone in trouble with their administration!) But I think that sort of optimism also infects scholarship, then. And it would be great if it worked, but like it's not good scholarship. Just like it's not good policy to just be like, let's slap up some posters about enthusiastic consent. 

    Rebekah: Yeah. It is really interesting to sort of contrast, like the story of Tamar and Dina. Like where one she doesn't speak and the other she says “no, don't do this.” But yet both of these stories are still equally ambiguous, and consent doesn't work for either of them. I found your like contrast to those two stories really, really intriguing. 

    Rhiannon: Yeah, and Tamar says “No,” but it doesn't matter. 

    Rebekah: Right. But then she says “yes, please marry me,” which is like you're like, how do you unpack that? [laughs] And she's still, it's still (we're thinking of agency), she still really doesn't have any. 

    Rhiannon Yeah, and that's messy and icky. 'cause, you're like. “No, no, no, I don't. You say that, like, be my badass feminist heroine. Don't say you want to marry your rapist first!” 

    Emily: Yeah. And for listeners, who might not know this story. It's even more messy and fuzzy, cause Tamar was raped by her half-brother. [several people speak over one another]

    Rebekah: Which you're not supposed to do! You're not supposed to sleep with your family! Unless you're a patriarch, in which case it's fine. [laughs sarcastically] It's totally fine. [laughs]

    Emily:  So, I'm curious a bit about the ties between sexual violence and ownership. Speaking of the patriarch. In Genesis, we encounter several stories of enslaved persons or servants who are transferred as property and then sexually violated. So in one, after years of being unable to birth children of her own, the matriarch Sarai gave her Egyptian slave Hagar to her husband Abram to bear him children (Gen 16). Abram slept with her, and in due course Hagar bore a son. And then two generations later, Abram and Sarah's grandson was caught in a similar web where, competing to give Jacob heirs, his two wives, Leah and Rachel, gave him their servants Zilpah and Bilhah to bear children  (Gen 30:1-24). And in these stories the exploitation and sexual violence is facilitated by other women. 

    The perspectives of Hagar, Zilpah and Bilhah are less prominent, although Genesis 16 comments that Hagar began to “despise her mistress” (which yeah, no kidding!) But when it comes to ownership, sex, and bodies, how different are Sarai and Hagar? These wives and their handmaidens or slaves? And what did biblical writers think about these sexual encounters between a male head of household and the women in his household? Are Hagar and Sarai, Zilpah, Bilhah, Leah and Rachel on different levels of status? Or in relation to the male patriarch, are they too similar to really have this conversation about exploitation? 

    Rhiannon: So Hagar is always referred to as “Sarah’s slave,” which is interesting. She’s never referred to as Abraham’s slave. And there's some cognate evidence from the Ancient Near East that So-and-So is a wife to So-and-So, and a slave to the other woman in the household. So it seems like there's some kind of framework for this kind of relationship. 

    It's not in the text, but there is a Midrashic tradition that Sarah gets Hagar (Hagar is an Egyptian slave). She gets Hagar when she's in Egypt in Genesis 12 as a present, basically as a bribe from Pharaoh after he's taken her into his household, and possibly it comes real close to suggesting she is possibly sexually assaulted. She's certainly in sexual danger. And this is because Abraham—like speaking about bad things patriarchs do—Abraham has pretended that Sarah is his sister to avoid getting killed because he has a hot wife. So you've got this kind of sexual exploitation. “We'll make it all better by giving her the slave” And then the slave herself becomes a sexually exploited woman. Genesis is very messy as a book. 

    To be clear, these are stories about the sexual abuse of enslaved people. And I think that. [Rhiannon sighs] It's interesting though, because it's important to keep in mind that these are stories about the sexual abuse of slaves. I also think that's a really kind of straightforward reading. And I also wanted to kind of think carefully about how we could think about complicated female relationships in these stories, in addition to thinking about the way that this is about the sexual abuse of enslaved persons. And a lot of people have done great sort of historical work on this, more in New Testament than Hebrew Bible. But some in Hebrew Bible too.

    And so in my chapter thinking about this story, I talk about the slavery dimension. But then I also kind of am interested in thinking about complicated female relationships in literature, and how that might let us think kind of more richly about Sarah and Hagar. One thing that's interesting is that there is a kind of contemporary interpretive tradition of thinking about Sarah and Hagar as having this, fraught, dangerous, but emotionally much more interesting relationship than the relationship either of them has to Abraham. 

    And so, I couldn't quote it in the book because of permissions, but there are these great poems by Mohja Kahf called the Hagar Poems, which are poems that Hagar has written to Sarah about her relationship with Sarah.[16] There's one that's called like “a letter to Sarah from Hagar, balled up in the trash can.” And like they're just, they're beautiful. There's a short story by Sara Maitland, who is a British sort of feminist, fairytale fiction writer, imagining if Sarah and Hagar were lovers. And then there's also this piece by philosopher Lynne Huffer called “What if Sara and Hagar were lovers?”[17]  And all these are kind of thinking through that kind of complicated relationship

    So I wanted to think about, sort of how we could think about them both as a relationship of exploitation, but also not preclude the fact that you can exploit people and also care about them or have some kind of complicated relationship. So I didn't want to just do a kind of economic analysis. So I guess the big takeaway is just that it's a complicated kind of relationship. 

    Think it's important that we don't let Abraham off the hook. Right, like, he is also a rapist in the story. And sometimes there's this desire (and I think you see this even more with Leah and Rachel, and then Bilhah and Zilpah) to sort of be like, “oh, ladies are fighting, you know, it's just like girls are fighting with girls, the poor man who has to put up with these women.” The text bends over backwards to protect Abraham and also to some degree, Jacob. So I would say there's male complicity, but also it's an interesting way of kind of getting at these complicated relationships even as they have this incredibly unequal power structure built in. 

    It's also interesting with Sarah and Hagar, because Hagar is an Egyptian slave. She's represented as ethnically other. Sarah is infertile, so she's represented in some ways as a kind of disabled character. So it's like a very rich intersectional, kind of ambiguous, relationship. 

    Rebekah: It's also interesting, too—circling back to the actual question about “how different were Sarah and Hagar?”–-Sarah is like, her husband is like, “you know, it's fine, go sleep with the pharaoh,” and then Sarah herself is like “here, take my maid servant.” And both of them have zero control over what happens to their body. So it is interesting to sort of think about the parallels.

    Rhiannon: I mean it's also interesting, so Sarah gets to overhear God talking to Abraham in the tent, which is why Isaac is named laughter. Hagar is in the wilderness. She sees a messenger, but maybe she sees God. She says “I’ve seen God.” So she's the only character who sees God. She also is described as like the patriarch or the matriarch of a nation in a way that Sarah is [not]. So like, she's got her own nation. So it's interesting.  It's worse, but then she has this kind of status also in the text. 

    Rebekah: Oh, yeah. That story too is ambiguous, though, like what's going? There's been so many readings with the villainization of her [hagar] and her actions, and then trying to sort of rescue Sarah so she's, you know, just the victim in her own generosity to give her husband a child. And it is really— again trying to save the story, or you know, to read everybody is bad, that sort of impulse.

     We're not getting any lighter. [Rebekah and Rhiannon laugh]

    So, like several ancient societies,[18]  biblical authors associated invasion and war with sexual violence as ideas of power, domination, shame, and control worked for both. The Hebrew Bible describes the invasions of Israel and Judah, first by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE and then the Babylonians in the 6th century [BCE]. For the prophets, sexual violence becomes a metaphor for Israel's interaction with and domination by other empires. And of course her relationship with God. So Israel's conquest is compared to a woman's rape, an act of violence Israel herself is to blame for. As Jeremiah puts it, “If you say in your heart, why have these things come upon me? It is for the greatness of your iniquity that your skirts have been lifted up and you are violated” (Jer 13:22). So Israel's historic invasions were imagined as divine punishment for her crimes. 

    In the text of the Bible, sexual violence seems to be pervasive, both in the narrative stories we've talked about and here in these metaphors about Israel as a kingdom.  So first, what is a “rape culture,” and does ancient Israel and its wider Ancient Near Eastern context represent one? 

    Rhiannon: So the term “rape culture” is really associated with feminist and queer activism against sexual violence. And so there's a great book called Transforming a Rape Culture.[19] I think it came out already in 1993, so the term has been with us for a while. It really picked up in activist circles, sort of as the campus movement against sexual violence really sort of took off in the 2010s. 

    The term “rape culture” is seeking to push back against the idea that rape is something exceptional. And that it, there are, so there's everyday, we're all good people, and then the rapist is a bad thing that interrupts, right. So “rape culture” the term is interested in thinking about rape as on, part of a larger kind of cultural system that sustains sexual violence, that ranges from microaggressions to things like sexual assault. And so it's intentionally kind of like destabilizing the, like, “rape is a special bad thing that's different from everything else.” 

    It's been used a lot by activists, so especially like in the 2010's, Roxane Gay, Kate Harding, Jessica Valenti. It sort of has this sort of activist currency, which is also partly why I wanted to use it in my book to signal allyship with that kind of readership and that sort of approach to sexual violence. 

    So rape culture is just a culture where sexual violence is sort of, you know, it's in the water. It's part and parcel of the culture. And there is a sort of understanding of the way that smaller things and larger things are linked. 

    Hebrew Bible, absolutely a rape culture. This is an argument that's been made by a lot of scholars. I mean the, like you say, like sexual violence is pervasive in the Hebrew Bible. It’s filled with it. I mean, the prophets are especially terrible. I don't talk a lot about the prophets in this book, which is partly why I'm writing another book about sexual violence. My first book is about prophets but not so much about sexual violence, then I wrote this rape book. [And now I] need to bring it all together, but yeah. So absolutely, the Hebrew Bible is filled both with stories about rape, rape metaphors; but then also the kind of larger attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and the body feed into that kind of culture that sustains rape and sexual violence. 

    Emily: Yeah. So speaking of one of these prophetic stories a bit. Almost all the stories of sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible are written from a man's perspective. And sometimes these stories are even from the perspective of the perpetrator. But the book of Lamentations has this very poignant twist where the personified Daughter of Zion reflects on her own devastation and violent assault—again, picking up on these prophetic metaphors of the invasion of Israel as an assault. And in one verse, she says “My eyes are worn out from weeping. My stomach is in knots. My heart is poured out on the ground” (Lamentations 2:11). So this daughter of Zion, as you say in your book, is not a human “real” rape survivor, and she doesn't offer us an “unmediated access to sexual trauma.”[20]But you find in her a model for how to tell a complex, powerful story of survival. Could you share your reading of this messy text?

    Rhiannon: Daughter Zion is a really rich, amazing character. So like you say, the Bible is overwhelmingly centering male perspectives. You might know the Bechdel test, right, which is—

    Rebekah: Yeah.

    Rhiannon: It's a test for movies like when are there two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. There are debates about whether the Bible passes this at all. So you don't have a lot of women talking. You’ve got the Song of Songs which is amazing because the Shulamite talks. And then you’ve got Lamentations where you also have this female character who talks. This Daughter Zion, she's like a gynomorphic or like a feminized representation of Jerusalem. And it's especially compelling because she, it feels like she's responding back to the sexual violence in the prophet. 

    So the book of Lamentations is poetry. It’s traditionally attributed to Jeremiah; it's not by Jeremiah. But it's sort of, it's taking a similar, the metaphors that we find in the prophets and talking back to them. There’s a great book by Carleen Mandolfo that's called Daughter Zion Speaks Back that kind of makes this argument.[21]

    And so Daughter Zion is a woman who speaks. She's a woman who's been sexually violated. And so it's perfect for kind of thinking through this project. 

    But what's interesting, is when you read what she says, it's really beautiful, it’s really poetic, it's really harrowing. She doesn't actually want to talk about her sexual violence. So often, there's this kind of tendency in scholarship to talk about her as a rape survivor. When you look at what she actually says versus what the other kind of poetic voices say about her, most of the descriptions of sexual violence happening to her are not actually in her voice. 

    And so I got interested in the way that Daughter Zion, who's our sort of marquee survivor in the text, is also not a very good survivor. My chapter is called “A Grittier Daughter Zion,” and I'm interested in this kind of idea of a gritty survival story. There's this great book called Queering Sexual Violence, which is written by queer and trans survivors of sexual violence.[22] It’s a collection of essays. And they push back really strongly about, against the idea of like the expectation that you are a certain kind of victim or a certain kind of survivor. And so I was interested in sort of taking that and using it to think through Daughter Zion. 

    And so I make three kind of points about her. 

    I talk about how, we can think about this story as pushing back against the good survivor. So the “good survivor” is like the survivor who goes to take back the night. She tells her story. She has, you know, a perfect background. You can think about the kind of way that we want rape victims to be, in the way that they never are. 

    There’s also the kind of, the good survivor has also processed and overcome her trauma. Right, she’s not a victim; she's a survivor. It's so empowering, hooray. And a lot of survivors or victims (and I use both terms, I use them awkwardly with a slash) survivors and victims will often say that they feel like they're not a good survivor because they're not the right thing. Or “I'm not a good victim because I wasn't this or that.” And so first I think Daughter Zion helps us think about these expectations that we put on survivors, both in texts and in the contemporary moment. 

    The second thing Daughter Zion shows us, is there's this desire to ask victims and survivors to prove it, that it really happened, and in particular to narrate the worst thing that ever happened to you. And this is something that survivors have also written about and talked about how traumatic this is. I think, it would be easy for all of us name well-known cases of rape or sexual violence where the legal system gaslit the survivor. And survivors have said, you know, “This was a worst process than the actual experience of being raped.” 

    So I think that the fact that Daughter Zion talks about all of this horrible trauma but doesn't actually really tell about the sexual violence is an interesting way to kind of resist that desire to narrate the worst thing. She says a lot of terrible things. I mean, she talks about cannibalism of children. But she doesn't talk about rape. And that kind of lacuna, I think, is really important. 

    And then the other thing that's so interesting about Lamentations. So I made it sound like [it’s] this just like raw outpouring of emotion. It's acrostic poetry, alphabetic acrostic poetry. So it's both really emotionally moving and incredibly formally complex and not at all naturalistic. Which I think also asks us to sort of just think about the literary form of survival stories. I think also sometimes we want pain to be like, raw and unprocessed. We want a certain kind of– It's like something between like Special Victims Unit and then there's like a high art version and there's like a Lifetimemovie. But we want this sort of raw outpouring of pain. But we've got this really formally interesting pack. 

    And so one thing I do in reading this is I read Lamentations together with Carmen Machado's memoir about domestic sexual abuse, which is called In the Dream House. It’s amazing if you haven’t read it. It’s a beautiful, formally structured memoir about sexual violence, and I think Lamentations does a similar thing with form. And so I think we should think about sexual violence, and not sort of pit that against literary form or art. 

    Emily: I really appreciate thinking about how the experience of being a survivor or victim of sexual violence is almost mirrored in the text literarily, where you have silences and refusal to speak, needing to have other people speak on behalf of, having to kind of talk around the most traumatic moment. 

    Rebekah: Yeah. And that kind of nicely segues into our seventh question. There are at least two distances between ancient women and us. The first is the distance between the actual embodied experiences of historical women and the text that described them—perhaps turned into poetry, made metaphorical, wrapped up in myth, and worked into teaching tales. And then there's another distance between those texts and us, women living embodied lives today. But despite their inadequacies, these poems and narratives are some of our only access points for ancient women and their bodily experiences. Their pain, their sorrow and devastation. Their grit, as you put it. Is there anything we can learn about historical Israelite women or their world from these highly rhetoricized literary stories? 

    Rhiannon: So yes and no. So I mean, like you say, the texts are literary creations. They're written by elites. They are very likely written by men. They reflect the ideology of the people that write them. And so there is a huge distance there. 

    That being said, I think that it is too simplistic to say that they are only ideological representations and nothing ever slips through. And I think that, so like, I read a lot of novels. I'm a big like novel fan. And I think about somebody like Thomas Hardy. And so like, I think Thomas Hardy writes great female characters even though it's very problematic in a lot of ways. And I think that so, too, the biblical authors, there is an ideology, but I think there is a way that— I don’t want to say that like, great art transcends its moment because that sounds cheesy, but I think that there are kind of glimmers here. Right, there are cracks in the text where we can see something both about the norms, right we can certainly see the norms of the world that produces the text, but we can also see glimmers of a subjectivity or of resistance. 

    I mean, this is the big problem in feminist biblical scholarship. Ilana Pardes has a great book called Countertraditions in the Hebrew Bible, where she argues that there are kind of countertraditions preserved in the text.[23] Gerald West has done some work on this more recently. So I think there are fragments of countertraditions. 

    I think also, there's a kind of way that the literary imagination of the text is not limited to the ideology of the authors. And I think also the texts are important because of the way that they've been used, and the way that they sort of help us understand our present moment. Whether or not that is an accurate representation of ancient Israel.

    So like of course there's a huge gap. But I think there's still value in thinking about these questions in biblical texts. 

    I think also just, human life is pretty messy in all historical moments, I would hazzard. And so I think if I can even get us to not think so flatly about life in ancient Israel. You know, [readers who say] “Back then it was like that, it was terrible. They were bad, not like us. We're good, we have sexual justice. They had bad oppression.” Like I think if I can even challenge that a little, I think that's something valuable. 

    Emily:  I've been reading a lot of fantasy novels this year, and one of the things that frustrates me with a lot of the genre is that often times the main male character, whoever is sort of set up as the romantic opposite for the female antagonist [editor’s note: protagonist] is so often portrayed as silent, domineering, angry. And those character qualities are presented in the narratives as sexy and sort of appealing. And whether or not we think that reflects our world today, it does definitely say something about the idealized image of a man for a large group of people, you know. So I think of that maybe as a parallel. You know, these texts, there aren't gonna tell us necessarily about specific historical women, but they will tell us about a historical era and ideas that were circulating—and continue to circulate. 

    Rebekah: Yeah, that's really interesting, Emily, because I read a piece last year, it was an article, I don't remember who wrote it. It was a journal article, and it was like tracking trends in novels. The popular genres of novels that women read and what those characters tell us about women's own sexual like desires and also cultural like you know, all this stuff. And I was like, wow, I had never ever thought about that! You’re like, that's fiction; and then our world is not. But no. 

    Emily: No, in some ways it's much easier to see what, like, an ideal persona or character quality is when it's in fiction I think.

    Rhiannon. Yeah. 

    Emily: So in a world where reports of sexual violence emerge in the news almost every week and where sexual violence is very close to our communities, why is it so important to read the Bible stories of sexual violence as messy and complex? 

    Rhiannon: So the Bible is like our world in that it is filled with sexual violence. [In ]our world sexual violence is often grounded in or justified by the Bible, and the Bible is used against survivors of sexual violence. And so reading biblical stories as fuzzy, messy, and icky helps us dismantle our experiences of sexual violence and of rape culture. 

    [podcast music interlude]

    Rebekah: Despite the ubiquity of sexual violence in antiquity, there is a glaring silence when it comes to the voices of the actual victims. As Ulriika Vihervalli points out, our accounts of ancient rape do not permit us a window into the lived experiences of its victims.[24] Their voices are lost. Perhaps intentionally silenced. For it is only in leaving out the perspectives of the victims that these stories can do what they are meant to do. Shore up the authority of men. Underscore the might of the empire. And in the process justify sexual assault so that  the violent, perpetrating men can to do it again. And in the pens of the male scribes copying and recopying these stories, there was a perfect choke point at which to edit out any inconvenient voices. 

     

    Emily: The thing is, though, myths belong to societies, not just to the men in them. Women could have also been telling these stories around their hearths, creating paintings of Lucretia, sculpting images of Bathsheba. Did Roman women also see them as empowering myths from a glorious past? Did the violence disturb them, like it does us? Maybe they didn’t even think to interrogate it because it was such a common side to their world. These stories also shaped future generations as they retold, reshaped, and reinterpreted those stories for their own time.  If you were to do a Google search of famous biblical or classical stories you might notice that the more salacious, sexually violent ones appear frequently in artwork from the Middle Ages onward. Stories by nature aren’t static.

     

    Rebekah: Fascination with fictional stories about assault is not just a phenomenon of yesteryear. Sexual assault often features as a plot point in TV shows and novels, sometimes even as a punchline. In How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014), the character Barney’s whole personality for multiple seasons is trying to sleep with as many women as possible, no matter if he needs to get them drunk or semi-conscious to do so. If you search on the book site Goodreads, you will find reading lists such as “Romances with forced seduction or rape by the hero,” which to date has 331 books on it.[25]Women also create and fantasize about sexual assault. Today, you can’t walk into a Barnes & Noble without passing chicklit filled with the “rape and forgive” trope. The abusive male heroes in these stories are walking red flags, the sort of men you’d (hopefully) never walk down the street with in real life, let alone date. Some of these stories, like Shades of Grey, were turned into multimillion dollar movies or TV shows. The plot is basically the same: Girl meets guy, guy rapes girl, and girl responds in the most natural way, by falling completely in love. Counterculturally, sometimes the heroine rapes the hero, as in the first season of Bridgerton.[26]

     

    Emily: You might retort, “It’s all fiction, it doesn’t matter.” Not unlike some of the stories in the Bible. But as we saw with the Roman foundation narratives, fictional worlds can help create ours. Ema Klugman argues that when novels normalize a woman saying no when she “really means” yes, this not only justifies the assault within the context of the novel, but it also begins to muddy the reader’s conception of consent. “Romance novels that espouse…the rape and forgive trope normalize violence against women, which has serious psychological effects for women and girls, whose subordination becomes systemic and expected, and [for] men and boys, whose prescribed roles of dominance and hyper-masculinity harm them as well.”[27]

     

    Rebekah: So our challenge to you and to ourselves is to pay attention. To interrogate the cultural world around us. The music we listen to, the movies we stream, the porn we normalize, the images we scroll past. It’s worthwhile to stop and think, why are we  compelled to finish this book? And what effect could it have on us and society? After all, as Graybill reminds us, sometimes the stories we tell are messy and fuzzy, as well as icky.

     

    Emily: We’re not telling you to black and white judge everything or or cancel all your subscriptions. That’s not realistic. But let’s consciously pay attention to power structures and how they’re being perpetuated. Maybe we stop listening to the song with that one line about assault, maybe we don’t—but we should absolutely clock what we’re listening to. It doesn’t have to be “real” to be dangerous.

     

    [podcast theme music plays over outro]

     

    Rebekah: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore. 

    This podcast is written, produced, and edited by us, Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun. The podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University. 

    Emily: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before! And don’t forget:

    Both: Women were there!

    [theme music wraps up]


    [1] E.g., Zoe Greenberg, “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?” The New York Times, August 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual-harassment-nyu-female-professor.html; Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida, “She Said Her Professor Sexually Harassed Her. His Wife Won Damages,” The New York Times, published May 29, 2023, updated May 30, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/world/asia/japan-sexual-harassment-women.html.

    [2] E.g., Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,” The New York Times, October 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html; Ronan Farrow, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories.

    [3] E.g., Daniel Silliman and Kate Shellnutt, “Ravi Zacharias Hid Hundreds of Pictures of Women, Abuse During Massages, and a Rape Allegation,” Christianity Today, February 11, 2021, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/february/ravi-zacharias-rzim-investigation-sexual-abuse-sexting-rape.html; Jeff Coen, “Claims against Willow Creek’s Bill Hybels of ‘sexually inappropriate’ conduct are credible, new report says,” Chicago Tribune, updated May 23, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-willow-creek-church-bill-hybels-report-20190228-story.html; Emily McFarlane Miller, “Willow Creek confirms abuse allegations against Hybels' mentor Gilbert Bilezikian,” Religion News Service, January 28, 2020, https://religionnews.com/2020/01/28/willow-creek-confirms-abuse-allegations-against-hybels-mentor-gilbert-bilezikian/; Rebecca Hopkins, “EXCLUSIVE: Woman Says IHOPKC Founder Mike Bickle Used Prophecy to Sexually Abuse Her,” The Roys Report, November 30, 2023, https://julieroys.com/woman-says-international-house-of-prayer-founder-mike-bickle-used-prophecy-to-sexually-abuse-her/.

    [4] Monica Lewinsky, “Shame and Survival,” Vanity Fair, May 28, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2014/06/monica-lewinsky-humiliation-culture; “Clinton lying about relationship: Lewinsky,” CBC News, June 25, 2004, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/clinton-lying-about-relationship-lewinsky-1.509604.

    [5] Plutarch, Moralia, Volume III: Sayings of Kings and Commanders. Sayings of Romans. Sayings of Spartans. The Ancient Customs of the Spartans. Sayings of Spartan Women. Bravery of Women, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library 245 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 557.

    [6] Adrienne Mayor, “Imagining the Captive Amazon in Myth, Art, and History,” in Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, eds. Keith Moser  and Ananta Charana Sukla (Boston: Brill, 2020), 83–110 esp. 97–99. For further reading see Sandra Péré-Noguez, “Chiomara, Camma et autres princesses…. Une histoire des femmes dans les societes ‘celtiques’ est-elle possible?,” Pallas 90 (2013): 159–76; and Stephane Ratti, “Le viol de Chiomara: Sur la signification de Tite-Live 38.24,” Dialogues d’Histoire Ancienne 22, no. 1 (1996): 95–131.

    [7] Silver Coin minted in Rome, ca. 89 BC. The British Museum, accession number R.8233. 

    [8] Livy, History of Rome, Volume I: Books 1-2, trans. B. O. Foster, Loeb Classical Library 114 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919).

    [9] Rhiannon Graybill, Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–2. “In working on sexual violence more generally, I  had become increasingly frustrated with the ways in which both scholarship and advocacy frequently repeat a small handful of narratives and predetermined scripts without assessing the degree to which those scripts and stories might limit our ability to talk about sexual violence, even as they also provide a language for it at all.” (p. 2)

    [10] Graybill, Texts After Terror, 2–3.

    [11] Graybill, Texts After Terror, 4.

    [12] LXX Daniel 13.

    [13] ​​Robert S. Kawashima, “Could a Woman Say ‘No’ in Biblical Israel? On the Genealogy of Legal Status in Biblical Law and Literature,” AJS Review 35, no. 1 (2011): 1–22. 

    [14] In Genesis “Shechem” is used to refer both to a place (Gen 33:18) and to the prince of the city (Gen 33:19, 34:2). 

    [15] Joseph J. Fischel, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

    [16] Mohja Kahf, Hagar Poems (University of Arkansas Press, 2016).

    [17] Lynne Huffer, “Chapter 7: What if Hagar and Sara Were Lovers?” Pp. 142–160 in Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

    [18] See Julia Watts Belser, Rabbinc Tales of Destruction, 39–59.

    [19] ​​Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth, eds., Transforming a Rape Culture (Milkweed Editions, 1993).

    [20] Graybill, Texts After Terror,114.

    [21] Carleen R. Mandolfo, Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007).

    [22] Jennifer Patterson, ed, Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement (Riverdale, NY: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016).

    [23] Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

    [24] Ulriika Vihervalli, “Wartime rape in late antiquity: consecrated virgins and victim bias in the fifth-century west,” Early Medieval Europe, 30, no. 1 (2022): 3–19. See also Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce, eds., Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, (London: Classical Press of Wales, 2002). 

    [25] “Romances with forced seduction or rape by the hero,” Goodreads, list, created November 8, 2012, by Mary Morstan, https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/27204.Romances_with_forced_seduction_or_rape_by_the_hero. Count of 331 books as of December 16, 2024; as of March 17, 2025 the list had increased to 332 books. 686 Goodreads users have voted on the list. 

    [26] “The Problem of Julia Quinn: Rape Isn’t Romance,” Jane Lied blog, February 5, 2021, https://janelied.wordpress.com/2021/02/05/the-problem-of-julia-quinn-rape-isnt-romance/

    [27] Ema Klugman, “Rape-and-Forgive Trope: ‘They Are Like Printing Money’: Sex, Rape, and Power in Romance Novels,” Unsuitable blog, Duke University, 2017, https://sites.duke.edu/unsuitable/rape-forgive/.

 

Image Description Icky scenes of sex and violence from the Bible were favorite subjects of Renaissance period artists. This painting depicts the biblical story of the rape of David’s daughter Tamar by her half-brother Amnon. Although the original text does not directly state Tamar’s feelings, Eustache le Sueur has given her a horrified expression. Her body turns from Amnon; her right arm tries to keep him away.

Image Attribution Eustache Le Sueur. “The Rape of Tamar.” Oil painting on canvas. Probably ca. 1640. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1984.342. Open Access.

 

Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. Theme music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.

Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University

Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.

 
Emily Chesley
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S2E6: Bad Blood: The Period Talk in Rabbinic Judaism and Zoroastrianism