Stories of Sexual Violence as Boundary Markers in Early Jewish Reception of the Hebrew Bible

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Stories of Sexual Violence as Boundary Markers in Early Jewish Reception of the Hebrew Bible

Stories of Sexual Violence as Boundary Markers in Early Jewish Reception of the Hebrew BibleSmith, Julianna Kaye

Stories of sexual violence are central to the Hebrew Bible. This dissertation examines three of those stories found in Gen 34, Gen 19 and Judg 19–20 through a feminist critical lens. The analysis of the three stories focuses on the politics of sexual violence at play in each of them. It argues that a primary function of these stories is marking out social boundaries betweenvarious communities. Furthermore, the dissertation traces the reception of the three stories in early Jewish literature. It finds that early Jewish writers recognized the boundary-setting function of the stories and engaged with them in their own contexts to explore communal boundaries. The dissertation demonstrates that the biblical and early Jewish writers’ use of stories of sexual violence as boundary markers is rooted in a larger phenomenon, historical and modern, of using stories of sexual violence to mark out boundaries.