Eve's Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition

Preface

Eve’s journey is not a single, clearly delineated chronological progress that leads directly from the biblical Eve to the collective feminine protagonist in modern Hebraic letters. It is many journeys, taken by a variety of female characters. All of them are, perhaps, splinters and fragments of the original Eve; but each and every fictional female figure is also a mirror of her times, a product of her creator’s mood and literary imagination, and of his conception of the woman’s role in society and in fiction.

Furthermore, Hebraic literature is a massive body of letters, a rich treasury of creative expressions and ingenious stylistic techniques, written over many centuries and in many different locations. Therefore, in my attempts to trace Eve’s long and manifold journeys through the ages, I have confined myself to a number of images and to certain literary forms. Any critic’s preference is, by definition, somewhat arbitrary, and mine is no different. While the choice of works and figures to be discussed was partly dictated by subjective tastes, the main focus of this study did provide objective criteria for selecting the literary texts.

Before defining the boundaries and limits of the present study, it is important to note that it is not confined to a specific era; instead, it regards the whole historical spectrum of Hebraic letters as a storehouse from which to choose examples and illustrations. The reason for this rather broad perspective is the significance that is given here to the evolution and metamorphosis of a prototype. The present study aims at tracing the migrations of an image or a situation, focusing on the phenomenon of metempsychosis, the Hebraic gilgul, not in its metaphysical but in its literary sense. It follows a feminine prototype or a typical, sometimes archetypal, feminine experience from its earliest literary reflection, the Bible, to its later reincarnations. The vast historical body of Hebraic tradition unfolds the evolution of the female image and reveals the various metamorphoses it has experienced through the ages, and the changing cultural conceptions of women and their place in the scheme of things.

Of postbiblical literature, the present study concentrates on the narrative form, both in its prose and poetic genres, and excludes drama and lyrical poetry. As Gershon Shaked rightly maintains, the play form is the only new literary genre in Hebraic letters, a genre that has no precedence in earlier times.¹ Though the novel form is also young, it has its roots in the storytelling tradition that started in the Bible itself and continued in the Midrash. Thus, while many biblical female figures are reincarnated in Hebrew drama, I chose not to include a discussion of a dramatic figure, even though she may have originated in an earlier female model, so as not to juxtapose a figure that started in the narrative tradition with one that is seen as a dramatic protagonist.² The poetic genre is as old as Hebrew literature itself; nevertheless, a study of feminine images in the tradition of lyrical poetry, and their culmination in the works of several of the prominent modern women poets is outside the boundaries of the present book and would belong in a separate work.

On the other hand, any folk tale, homily, novel, short story, long narrative poem, or dramatic verse that recounts a feminine experience or portrays a feminine image is regarded as a suitable text from which to draw examples. However, a narrative poem or a prose work that recreates a biblical character would not automatically qualify as an example of a stage in Eve’s historical odyssey. The mere fact that the writer chooses the biblical Deborah or Ruth, for instance, as the subject of his work is not enough of a reason for discussing this particular work. Such a text will be noted here only if it actually adds a dimension to, or illuminates a certain aspect of the early female figure, or shows an awareness of the feminine predicament that does not exist in the earlier version. Thus Tchernichovsky’s poem, The Dinah Affair (or The Dinah Portion), is of particular significance not because it has the biblical Dinah at its center, but mainly because it gives an antipatriarchal twist to a story rooted in patriarchal tenets, and therefore opens our eyes to the predicament of the biblical Dinah. The same is true of Y. L. Gordon’s poem, The Love of David and Michal, which is discussed in the present study not because of its biblical theme, but because it romanticizes the original story, thus drawing our attention to the decidedly unromantic qualities of the original tale.

If the first principle of selection is the introduction of a new perspective on an ancient female figure, the second is the submerged presence of an early female archetype in a modern fictional creation. In the cluster of works that belong to this category are included all modern texts that revolve around a female protagonist or that address themselves to the woman’s question, and where an early female type is embedded in a modern-day, realistically drawn individual. Thus Amos Oz’s Strange Fire, in which the contemporary woman Lily is suddenly revealed as a modern incarnation of the legendary Lilith, is of special interest in the context of the present study.

While the centrality of a female figure is one of the guiding principles in the selection of texts in the present study, another is the accepted status of the literary work as a major artistic achievement, or as a proponent of contemporary literary trends. In short, the standard for isolating a certain work and highlighting it is aesthetic and not ideological; the inherent sexual politics of a given work is not enough of a reason for its inclusion in the present discussion. As we know, minor works also reflect social premises and can often serve as important sociological documents. Since the present study focuses on the literary imagination, however, the artistic energy with which the female figure, or the feminine predicament, is infused is of major consideration.

The book starts with a brief historical introduction that traces the evolution of the female otherness in Hebraic literature. By definition, this chapter is meant to provide a glancing view of the thread that connects the variety of feminine experiences as depicted in Hebraic letters. This common thread is the role of the other that the feminine figure has been relegated to in texts where the male point of view is accepted as the standard and the norm. The following two chapters are arranged in accordance with the two most prevalent and frequent feminine images that populate the male texts: the woman as the deadly seductress and as the formidable giver of life. The next chapter charts the ordeal of the real-life woman in the male-dominant culture, where her precarious legal standing and sexual vulnerability are exploited by the man. The final chapter delineates the variety of female strategies devised by the woman in order to overcome her role in the male’s mind as the portentous force of mythic dimensions, on the one hand, and her actual wordly status as the silent, insignificant second sex, on the other.

I came to the study of female images in Hebraic literature through many routes and a variety of academic and personal interests. As a woman who studied literature before the rise of feminist literary scholarship, I found myself, in the past decade, going back to familiar texts with a new awareness. On the lecture circuit, I encountered an ever-growing thirst for an exposition of the feminine predicament in the narrative parts of the Hebraic sources. Works that I formerly explicated from a literary perspective, now required a new slant and a new hermeneutical approach. As I reexamined the ancient Judaic works, I found tales of terror that needed to be retold from the perspective of the female victim, side by side with nonsexist enclaves that waited to be recovered and reinterpreted. I also realized that the modern secular and enlightened male writers still draw on old stereotypes, hardened and engraved in the collective Jewish male consciousness, in their creations of contemporary female protagonists. The search for an ancient type in a modern garb proved at once fruitful and illuminating. Consequently, single seminars on women in Judaic sources that I gave to Bible societies and women’s groups, ultimately culminated in semester-long courses that I created for a number of college programs in Connecticut.

Since 1980, I have taught courses in images of women in world literature at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. I start each course in Women in Literature to 1900 with a close reading of the Eve narrative in the Bible, comparing the variety of translations with the Hebrew original. The nonsexist attitudes that this ancient text yields invariably surprise my students, most of whom have never read the biblical text itself, but who are all coming to the old tale with the popular conception that the biblical story pronounces female inferiority and advocates the subjugation of women. Other texts that we study in class also force us to go back to the biblical prototypes. From Chaucer’s Proverbs-quoting, misogynic husband of the Wife of Bath, through Milton’s vain and stubborn Eve, to Hawthorne’s adulterous Hester, cultically sinful yet morally innocent, the literary protagonists reenact and relive biblical attitudes and ambiguities.

The rapid proliferation of works on women in literature in this country, which have aided me in drawing up my courses in women in American, British, and European literature, only illuminated for me the scarcity of studies in English of feminine images in the vast body of Hebraic letters. I hope that Eve’s Journey will be followed by other explorations of the woman in the Hebraic tradition, covering the many other faces of Eve that the present work could not include.

I was fortunate to have a group of the most distinguished critics and writers read different parts of my manuscript and offer their observations. Among them are Robert Alter, Harold Fisch, Blu Greenberg, David H. Hirsch, and Baruch Levine. Cynthia Ozick read an early version of my discussion of the story of Hannah, and also proposed a change in one of the titles, for which I am grateful. I also wish to thank Mr. Arthur Evans, Associate Director of the University of Pennsylvania Press, for the interest that he took in this project and his determination to see it materialize in book form.

Notes

¹ Gershon Shaked, The Hebrew Historical Drama in the Renaissance, in Hebrew (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1970), 9.

² The weaknesses that Shaked has detected in Hebrew historical drama, such as the writers’ tendency to stereotype their characters, and their overriding preoccupations with the crises of their own times, that often proved detrimental to the dramatic and theatrical qualities of their works, also contributed to my decision to exclude Hebrew drama from the present study. See Shaked, 153 et passim.

Eve’s Journey

One

The Mutation of Feminine Otherness: A Historical Overview

Why does the woman walk in front of the corpse at a funeral, and why was the precept of menstruation given to her? Because she shed the blood of Adam (by bringing death to man). And why was the precept of the dough (ḥallah) given to her? Because she corrupted Adam, who was the dough of the world. And why was the precept of the Sabbath lights given to her? Because she extinguished the soul of Adam.

Genesis Rabbah 17, 8

The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men . . . the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent

The purpose of the present study is to examine some of the diverse images of the Jewish woman in Hebraic sources, by closely reading representative literary texts and exploring the conception of women reflected in them. The scope of the works discussed here is broad, covering biblical narratives, Midrash commentaries, Kabbalah sources, Hasidic tales, Hebrew literature of the Enlightenment, and contemporary Israeli fiction. This vast historical spectrum is needed if we want to follow an archetypal or prototypical feminine figure as it travels through generations and cultures, often metamorphosing in the process and changing its original essence or meaning. The historical range also helps in uncovering the ancient roots of female predicaments and male biases, and in tracing the changing cultural perceptions of women in Hebraic letters.

The emphasis in this survey is on Hebraic sources, therefore it follows the route that Hebrew literature took from ancient Israel, through the various European countries where the Jews dwelled during their long exilic journey, to the literature of modern Israel, which is the legitimate heir of the Hebraic tradition by virtue of its use of the Hebrew language. Modern Hebrew literature very often denies its debt to the Jewish exilic experience and tries to sever its ties with the European past; nevertheless, by its sheer existence it provides a link in the long historical chain of Hebrew letters. Language is not only a technical medium; it is a realm of cultural symbols and associations that touch depths that the user is often not completely aware of. No matter how much the Hebrew writer attempts, in theory, to define himself by means of the present cultural and geopolitical realities, the genius of the creative minds of the past asserts itself through the language, very often enriching the contemporary imagination, even though the latter professes to be opposed to the basic tenets of the former. Biblical motifs, as well as images created by the rabbinic and Hasidic imagination, often find their way into modern works, sometimes in disguise, thus attesting to the deep roots of the seemingly new and young phenomenon of modern Hebrew literature.

American-Jewish literature, another body of creative works that gives testimony to a non-European Jewish experience, will not be discussed in the present study. However, to illustrate the persistence of a literary type and its surprising emergence on a new soil, let us consider the now prevalent stereotype of the American-Jewish young woman, thrice removed from the immigrant experience, that has come to be known as the Jewish American Princess.¹ Contemporary scholars find the roots of this denigrating stereotype of a self-centered, vulgar, and materialistic woman in the particular sociohistorical circumstances of the Jewish-American experience—the erosion of the father’s status in the immigrant family, and the awakening of materialism and excessive consumption after years of poverty and deprivation. They also attribute the emergence of this stereotype to general trends in contemporary American culture, including, for example, male writers’ inability to cope with a depatriarchalized society.

It is true that this particular stereotype, the Jewish American Princess, is anchored in the Jewish-American experience; significantly, contemporary Israeli writers do not stereotype young women in this fashion. However, the tendency to stereotype women is an age-old tradition, and in attempting to unravel the roots of modern stereotypes we have to go to earlier sources and find how they treat similar feminine figures. While to the unequipped eye contemporary stereotypes are solely the product of present-day social circumstances and biases, cultural roots run deep. The frivolous and materialistic Jewish American Princess sounds very much like the haughty daughters of Zion who earn the wrath of the prophet Isaiah. He describes them as they walk with outstretched necks and ogling eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet (Isa. 3:16). And we wonder what happened to the saintly, chaste daughter of Israel described, for example, in I. L. Peretz’s Three Gifts. Here the young Jewish girl embodies everything that is exalted and admirable in the Jewish people. Condemned to die by being tied to a horse and dragged through the streets of the city for the crime of inadvertently entering the Gentile quarters, she asks only for pins, so that she can fasten her skirt to her skin and retain her modesty.

Interestingly, in all three sources, the biblical, the shtetl story, and modern American writings, the daughter of Israel is the product of the male point of view and is made to epitomize an entire reality. These three images, coming as they are from different literary worlds and historical experiences, can tell us much about cultural attitudes and literary visions. The contemporary writers who have created the unflattering image of the Jewish American Princess are not necessarily expressing the male’s derogatory attitude to women; they attempt to criticize a whole life-style and culture, shared by both men and women. In doing this, they follow a tradition in which the feminine figure is made to symbolize an entire reality or a whole race; Jerusalem lying in shambles after the destruction of the first Temple is likened by the biblical poet to a lonely, desolate widow (Lam. 1:1), and the kingdom of Judah, threatened by the Assyrians, is pictured as a young woman who mocks at her assailant: The virgin, the daughter of Zion, despises thee; the daughter of Jerusalem tosses her head at thee (Isa. 37:22). Therefore, a horizontal view, that is, a comparison of the literary stereotype with other contemporary feminine images created by male writers, would conclude that the Jewish American Princess is the creation of the misogynist mind. However, a vertical view, that is, a comparison of the modern literary type with earlier sources, would show that the contemporary image is part of a long tradition in which the Jewish daughter is made to be a literary vehicle through which the writer condemns, or celebrates, the entire Jewish people.

When, then, is the feminine literary figure the other, and when is she made to transcend that otherness and encompass the total reality or the entire human condition? Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex that women have taken a back seat and occupied a secondary position in Western literary tradition, just as in life. Women have played the role of the other for men; whether they were put on a pedestal as a symbol of virtue and nobility, or blamed as the originators of death and sin in this world, women were not allowed to epitomize the entire human experience. Beauvoir’s thesis generally holds true for the role of women in Jewish literary history, but it fails to exhaust the whole picture.

The theme of otherness in Judaic tradition is replete with various meanings. First, there is the concept of the sitra aḥra, the ‘other side’, which applies not to women directly but to the other side in the cosmos and in man, that is, to the realm of darkness and of the antinomian forces that operate in the universe and in the human soul. Does the woman, who has been the sociological other, come to epitomize the mystical or psychic other as well? Many times she does, and the conversion of one form of otherness into another, the journey that a literary image is making as it shuttles between the psychic-spiritual sphere and the sociocultural realm, will be made clear as we examine some of the feminine images in Judaic literature.

Secondly, the Jewish exilic experience positioned the Jew as the other in the Gentile world and thus created a solidarity between Jewish men and women as both played the role of the stranger, the oppressed minority, in a hostile environment. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the social and cultural otherness of women resulted from the fact that men were the lawmakers and creators of the norms by which women were judged. This was true of the internal relationship between men and women in the Judaic tradition. The men saw themselves as the interpreters of the Mosaic law, and they formulated rules of conduct that applied to the most intimate details of women’s life and their physical cycle. Jewish halaka, the Talmudic law, is the product of the male mind and thus it reflects the man’s conception of the world. In Jewish halaka women are certainly the other since they are being treated and discussed by men, and regarded as part of the male experience. One of the six sections of the Mishnah is titled Nashim (Women), which makes it very clear that to the mind of the Talmudic rabbis, women were an object of study and exploration, an entity apart from the male world, the latter being the norm of the human condition. Man experiences life, and woman is one of the objects to be experienced. However, in their status vis-à-vis the outside world, both the Jewish man and the Jewish woman were the social pariah, the other. The Gentile world created the law which the Jew had to follow if he wanted to survive. The social otherness of the Jew was inevitably transformed into a metaphysical otherness, when the Jew came to be regarded in the popular mind as a sorcerer, an evil demon, or a devil that feasts on Christian blood.

The plot thickens when we shift our perspective and observe the image of the Jewish woman as it was perceived through the lenses of the non-Jewish world in European literature of the Middle Ages and later. An interesting evolution in the otherness of the Jew occurred outside Jewish literature, starting in medieval popular lore and culminating in two famous Renaissance plays, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The image of the Jew was split into that of the villainous, ugly, and often demonic Jewish father, and his gentle and beautiful daughter.² The Jewish daughter helps her Christian lover against her father, who in early sources is an evil magician and in later plays a mean usurer with faint hints of the demonic. By helping her Christian lover outwit her father, and aligning herself with the non-Jewish world (as does Jessica in The Merchant of Venice), the Jew’s daughter is redeemed from her social and spiritual otherness. She abandons her malevolent father and her cursed race, thus shaking off her universal and metaphysical otherness and becoming part of the mainstream, the norm, represented by the Christian world. Yet if she left one type of otherness behind, the Jew’s daughter now entered a literary tradition which, as Katharine Rogers and others have shown, was saturated with the denigration of women and with often unabashed, outright misogyny.³

Within the boundaries of Judaic intellectual creativity and literary lore, the image of the woman continued to shuttle between different, and sometimes contradictory, stereotypical configurations. The feminine image took on new meanings and dimensions that often responded to, and reflected, the vicissitudes of Jewish history and the changes in the Jew’s fortunes.

The Testimony of the Ancient Documents

Much of feminist scholarship today concerns itself with exposing ancient testimonies to deep-seated sexist attitudes that have long been implanted in the collective human consciousness. Some critics turn to the Bible and early Judaic sources in an attempt to uncover the cultural and mythical roots in which misogyny is embedded. Indeed, the Bible has been accused of having had a major role in promoting and cultivating misogyny and in encouraging the suppression and degradation of women. It has been argued, for example, that the roots of condoning wife battery can be found in the Old Testament account of Eve’s sin and her subsequent punishment, a story which helped make women culturally legitimate objects of antagonism.⁴ And the Bible’s apparent acceptance of the patriarchal system—reflected in both its legal portions and the narratives—has been interpreted as a deliberate strategy on the part of the biblical lawmaker and storyteller to perpetuate male dominance and female subjugation.⁵ Biblical language, using masculine pronouns and male metaphors for God, is seen as responsible for the male-sexist bent of monotheism. Some modern feminists argue that social patriarchy and all its accompanying evils were buttressed by monotheism, which they describe—with some justification—as essentially a father religion. They also contend that from a psychological viewpoint, the image of God as a Freudian father figure further conditioned women to submissiveness and self-effacement.

There is no denying that the Bible displays an underlying patriarchal orientation, reflecting a male dominant worldview as well as social system. But it would be simplistic to say that the Bible deliberately promotes male dominion and female subordination. Rather, it reflects an early, primitive socioeconomic reality in which a person’s value was determined by his physical strength and his ability to contribute to the family’s economy and power. The Bible’s legal system is inevitably tied to this premodern, labor-intensive society. Therefore, if many laws, anchored in a patriarchal and patrilineal system, seem as if they discriminate against women, they may have had their origin in necessity rather than a deliberate policy in a society where the survival of the family depended on the number of the males it had.

It is also possible to view the exclusion of women from some of the cultic practices not as a denial of rights but as an exemption from burden, given the hard life of women of childbearing age in biblical and Talmudic times. It is safe to say that biblical law did not create the situation of male supremacy, nor did it openly champion it; it merely responded to a given reality and social structure.

To learn more of the Bible’s perception of women and their place in the scheme of things, one has to turn to the stories in which women play a role, whether central or marginal. Again, feminists are right in complaining that the bulk of biblical narratives is centered on men, and that women are usually relegated to a minor position in them. The few token prophetesses and extraordinary female characters are an exception and further illuminate the inferior position of the majority of women in the biblical culture, as well as the male writers’ lack of interest in women as literary protagonists. Furthermore, the biblical term for sexual relationship, ‘to know’, puts woman in a position of the other in the realm of life’s experiences. The phrase And Adam knew Eve his wife (Gen. 4:1) suggests that man knows and woman is the known; he experiences, and she is the territory that is explored and acted upon. Before the expulsion from the Garden of Eden they both knew that they were naked (Gen. 3:7), but outside the Edenic experience man is the subject, the knower, and woman is the object, the known. The sexual act is the possession of woman by man; man is active and woman is passive in the way they know life, that is, understand and experience it.

Still, a close reading of many biblical tales that revolve around women yields mixed results as to the Bible’s conception of women. If some tales appear to be imbued with male chauvinistic attitudes, others seem to be free of any sexist bent. Even those stories that throughout the ages have been read as paradigms of female subordination may sometimes reveal a surprisingly unbiased attitude to women and an egalitarian conception of the roles of the sexes. Today’s new feminist awareness has lent an added dimension to the reading of many earlier works and uncovered in them voices unheard before. Therefore, a fresh reading that goes beyond the surface layer and that looks for meanings that were never sought before may be applied to the biblical text as well.

A number of studies that challenge the traditional patriarchal reading of the Old Testament have opened up new avenues of approaching the biblical texts that deal with women. These works—coming from both inside and outside the feminist movement—probe suppressions and misconceptions in biblical interpretation, thus offering a fresh view of biblical heritage and forcing us to reconsider unquestioned age-old teachings. Of special interest is the work of Phyllis Trible who applies the depatriarchalizing principle in her reading of the biblical stories.⁶ For example, when considered with the aid of this principle, the two creation stories in the Book of Genesis reveal an egalitarian approach which views man and woman as complementing each other. Interestingly, the Talmudic sages recognized very early that the phrase So God created Mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Gen. 1:27) refers to the creation of a double-faced, bisexual human, a creature who enfolded within itself both male and female attributes.⁷ The second version of the creation story, the one in which the woman is created out of man’s rib, can thus be seen as a sequel to the first story. The first story describes the creation of a bisexual being, while the second describes the splitting of that creature into man and woman. Furthermore, after the act of disobedience Adam and Eve are not cursed, but judged, and God’s words telling the woman that her husband shall rule over her are not to be taken as a mandate for male supremacy, but as a description of the faulty and perverse nature of human life after the expulsion from Eden.⁸ Significantly, a comparison of the Genesis story with the Gilgamesh tale of the initiation of man and the primal woman makes it very clear that, unlike in the latter source, the creation of Eve is a climactic moment in the Genesis story, not an afterthought. In contrast to the Gilgamesh story, the woman in the Genesis narrative is not presented as a negative character but as an agent of civilization.⁹

The nonsexist bent of many of the scriptural stories becomes evident when we compare them with later texts that either recreate these stories or comment on them. The Jewish sages who produced the Midrash attempted to steer many stories, originally free of sexist biases, into the patriarchal orbit. Eve is seen in the Genesis tale as an intellectually curious person whose quest for knowledge ends in the rash act of violating God’s law. As a consequence of this act, man and woman are forced to make themselves clothes, till the land, and invent tools—in short, to launch human civilization as we know it. There is no indication in the original story that Adam is perceived as superior to Eve in any way; man and woman are equally culpable in the eyes of God, and equally responsible for the consequences of their deed. However, in the Midrash cited at the opening of the present chapter, Adam is described as far better than Eve—he is the dough of the world—and as a victim of woman’s pernicious and evil nature. Eve took away the splendor of the crown of creation, Adam, and reduced him to a mere mortal. Eve’s female descendants are assumed to be equally destructive, and will constantly have to make amends for corrupting and debasing man’s life. If the biblical Eve is the instrument through which civilization comes into being, the midrashic Eve is, to use Freud’s words, a retarding element, a force opposed to the progress of civilization.

It is easy to see the metamorphosis of a nonsexist story into a male-biased, and sometimes even misogynist, document, when we observe texts from different periods that treat the same ancient character. Another Old Testament heroine who is obviously depicted through egalitarian, unbiased lenses, and whose story is whipped into the patriarchal mold by the Midrash sages is Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel. Hannah, the barren woman whose prayers are answered by God, is the central protagonist of 1 Sam. 1; her story launches an important historical narration, the Book of Samuel.

At first sight, Hannah’s tale seems to be the prototypical story of maternal yearnings and their eventual gratification. Hannah, one might argue, is not significant in her own right, but only as the begetter of a glorious man. Yet it soon becomes very clear to the careful reader that, though the larger context of this narrative does not require it, the narrator has painstakingly etched a character of great strength and forcefulness and that, within the boundaries of this self-contained tale, it is the single-minded and determined woman, not her famous offspring, who is meant to sustain the reader’s interest and sympathy. Ultimately, the tale transcends its initial thrust and becomes a drama of human aspirations and of an individual’s iron-willed determination to achieve them. That this individual’s particular aspirations take the form of maternal yearnings becomes incidental to the essence of the story. Hannah is dignified, determined and extremely eloquent, and her vision transcends the immediate and the domestic. She maps out her son’s future as a man of God even before she is assured that her prayer will be answered. By the force of her language she makes the longed-for child a reality. Hannah’s diversified talents seem to be incongruous with her monolithic pursuit of motherhood, and indicate the paucity of opportunities that existed in ancient times for expression of creativity. Only by having a child, by educating him and shaping his life could such a woman find release for all her hidden talents.

Hannah’s husband further introduces an egalitarian, nonpatriarchal tone to the story when he says: Am I not better to thee than ten sons? (v. 8). In a male-centered economy, where sons were important as a means of strengthening the extended family and a woman’s function was, of necessity, that of procreating, one could expect a loving husband to solace his barren wife by reassuring her that she satisfied him in other ways: You are as good to me as ten sons. Instead, the husband views himself as the loving partner whose duty it is to make his wife happy. He does not define his relationship with his wife in terms of her familial or sexual duties, but in terms of his contribution to her contentment. Erich Fromm’s description of love as an active practice rather than a passive experience applies to Hannah’s husband: he must actively overcome the prejudices of his culture to be able to address his wife in this manner.¹⁰

The incongruity between Hannah’s great potential and the narrow path that she chooses, motherhood, creates a certain tension in the story that perhaps rings louder in the modern ear, but that was vaguely sensed by the postbiblical sages as well. The midrashim revolving around Hannah prove without doubt that the sages attempted to bring the biblical story into conformity with prevalent sexist attitudes. The Midrash, for instance, elaborates on the husband’s meritorious qualities, thus implying that the son’s leadership qualities were already revealed in the father and minimizing the mother’s forceful presence in the original story. Furthermore, the sages attribute to the barren Hannah the complaint that her breasts have not been put to use.¹¹ Thus the Midrash steers Hannah’s predicament to the orbit of exclusive feminine fate and anchors her need for a child in her uncontrollable biological drives. As the story is reshaped by the rabbinic mind, it becomes an early example of Erik Erikson’s theory of women’s biological destiny and the tyranny of their biological empty space.¹²

The validity of the search for an underlying nonsexist attitude in the biblical story might get an additional support when we consider the question of the authorship of the biblical narratives. Biblical scholars suggest that in ancient Israel, as in the neighboring cultures, there was probably a class of professional storytellers who