Book Reviews for Judy Klitsner's book: Subversive Sequels in the Bible

This book was selected after careful analysis by a panel of three judges who are authorities in their field. It was chosen as the best written, most comprehensive, and engaging book in its category. [This] book now joins the ranks of the hundreds of well-respected, classic Jewish books that have received a National Jewish Book Award. The National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 59th year, is the longest-running program of its kind in North America. Awarded by the Jewish Book Council.

This book is a study of literary interconnections within the Bible. Judy Klitsner, Senior Lecturer at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem where she has taught for the last 18 years, shows that often parallel passages serve as what she terms “subversive sequels” to texts that precede them and can be seen as “reconsidering” earlier concepts and ideas. Moving skillfully between biblical text and commentaries, Klitsner addresses passages that are often difficult for modern sensibilities. Three chapters examine the evolving role of women in the Bible. Klitsner proposes that the story of Eve should be seen as the foundation for numerous sequels that sometimes reinforce and sometimes overturn its assumptions and conclusions. These sequels are the topic of the separate chapters that follow. Among other insights, Klitsner suggests that Rebekah’s first encounter with Yitzhak leads her to fall down from her camel i.e., becoming more reactive and not as independent as she had been previously. Klitsner’s close reading of the text in the book of Judges gives us insights into the character of Devorah, who defines motherhood in radically new ways—calling herself a “mother in Israel” because of her leadership and impact, not because of having physically given birth to children. In her analysis of the story of Hannah, Klitsner shows how Hannah pleading for herself and being a full and open partner with her husband can be seen as a “subversive sequel” to many of the earlier biblical narratives involving women. According to Klitsner, the way these stories relate to one another expands the view of biblical women beyond simplistic classifications and stereotypes and leaves room for continuous new meanings and interpretations. Singularly faithful to the biblical text, which Klitsner reads closely and with great respect, this book is fascinating and radical in its implications and inspires the reader to see surprising connections in language and in themes.

Henri Zukier, Associate Professor of Psychology and History, The New School for Social Research

In Subversive Sequels in the Bible, Judy Klitsner explores the complex relationship between various familiar Biblical tales in a manner that is at once both surprising and convincing. What is convincing is the degree to which these narratives interact with common theme and language. What is surprising is that the results of such an examination yield a subversive yet stubbornly reverent approach to Bible study. Klitsner is a masterful guide on a thrilling voyage of discovery of hidden meanings and dynamics in the classical texts. Klitsner shakes up all our old certainties about our most ancient and seemingly familiar biblical narratives, with counterintuitive, but ultimately compelling insights. She casts this familiar universe in a very different, bright light.

Written with a minimum of academic jargon, this work is accessible, enjoyable and valuable to scholar and layperson alike and may be one of a very few examples of literary close readings of Hebrew texts that brings the sophistication of ancient Hebrew literature to the English speaking public.

An easily summarized example is Klitsner’s first chapter comparing the narrative of Noah and his ark to that of Jonah (Hebrew for “dove”). Under Ms. Klitsner’s lens, these two stories are in dialogue about the dynamic nature of both human transcendence and Divine compassion. Whereas Noah is the surviving prophet in a drowning world – Jonah is the drowning prophet in a world redeemed. One story (Noah) ends with the sending of a dove and begins with the saving of many animals. The other begins with the sending of a “dove” (Jonah) and ends with a verse about saving many animals.

I won’t spoil the adventure of discovering with Klitsner the intricate inversion of theme and language that creates this theological dialogue between the stories. Yet, the whole treatment is greater than the sum of its parts. The author picks up on the way in which the Jonah story redeems the Noah story and with it the chance for human triumph with its stubborn hopeful “perhaps?” over the gravity and despair of our presumed fate.

What links the various essays in the book is the tight literary analysis and its striking methodology of reading texts as “intertextually” related. Stories are seen as sequels that mine and undermine prior tales. No longer seen as ancient statements of monolithic messages, these stories echo into other stories and eventually resound beyond the pages of the Bible. The result is a highly relevant approach to Bible reading that ultimately invites the reader into an ongoing moral and theological symposium.

Most of the book is dedicated to a rereading of various women’s narratives in the Bible –from Eve and Sarah, and Rebecca and Rachel of Genesis to Deborah and Hannah, and Mrs. Manoach. Here too, to the satisfaction of traditionalists and feminists alike, the stories are read with a respect for the original stories together with a mindfulness of the ways in which later stories subvert and elevate the status of Biblical women in an ongoing conversation about biblical woman’s relationship to self, to man, and to God. Be prepared for a ride. Very highly recommended.

What can we learn from the story of Jonah and the whale to improve our understanding of Noah's ark? No, this isn't a quiz or a joke. It's an example of one of the operative questions at work in distinguished Jerusalem Bible teacher Judy Klitsner's first book of commentary, Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other. Klitsner's forte is demonstrating how the careful reading of one related biblical narrative can alter or extend our appreciation of another, yielding rich new insights.

For 18 years, American-born Klitsner has been demystifying Torah for students at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem and for far-flung Jewish communities and college campuses abroad. Her method begins with a meticulous examination of the language and themes of the text and an examination of the traditional commentaries.

As a teacher, she sensitizes students to word choice, to names, to cadence. She goes on to encourage students to engage the text with their own experience and thinking. In a sense, she's done the same for herself. Klitsner studied under Torah giant Nehama Leibowitz, and set out to write her own explication of her teacher's method. But her own voice kept breaking through, and several years into the writing process, she decided to give it full expression. The result is a provocative way of looking at the text, understanding how one story within the biblical opus might build on or take issue with another.

Take Noah and Jonah. Instead of looking at the stories as separate, see instead “two prophets navigating perilous waters aboard their boat, apart from the doomed populations they might have saved.” The shared language, setting and themes make these two stories organically related. But more important are the troubled prophets, recruited for divine service. In the flood narrative, points out Klitsner, the prophet floated safely in his boat, as the world around him drowned. In the Book of Jonah, the world floats as the prophet faces death by drowning when the sailors reluctantly throw him overboard.

“Taken together, the two stories will chronicle a remarkable potential for change within several fundamental relationships. In the divine-human bond, we will note God's emerging desire for human survival as He offers second chances to those who have erred. In the inter-human relationship, we will trace the prophet's struggles in facing his responsibility toward those around him. And in the sphere of intra-human relations, we will observe the hero's progress as he is called upon to begin healing his connection with himself. As he begrudgingly accedes to God's demand to help save others, Jonah will face opportunities to rescue himself as well.”

Noah survives the flood to drown himself in alcohol. Although Jonah unenthusiastically and succinctly conveys his message of warning to Nineveh, the citizens immediately heed him and repent. But when God Himself teaches Jonah a moral lesson by creating and then destroying a gourd that shades the prophet, Jonah doesn't seem to catch on. He remains silent. Says Klitsner, “Possibilities of self-transformation exist, but there is no guarantee that anyone will take advantage of them.”

After Klitsner's pairing of the stories, it would be hard to imagine one without the other. But the connection between the stories of the Tower of Babel and the midwives of Israel is less obvious. (Think for a moment - what do you come up with?) In addition to the literary devices she elucidates, Klitsner points out that both stories are centered on totalitarian city-building. In Egypt, the Israelites build cities in mortar and bricks, evoking the bricks and mortar used in Babel.

“The reversal of the order of the ingredients holds its own significances, hinting that these two stories will not merely parallel each other, but that in significant ways one will reverse the other as well.”

Although the second book of the Hebrew Bible is called Shmot, “names,” they are few in the description, reflecting the subjugation of the people. Then suddenly, “two flashes of light” appear: Shifra and Puah, the two midwives, pitted as equals of Pharaoh, and ultimately as superior to the mighty king of Egypt.

“In Babel, the individual is blotted out, and as a result, so is the entire generation. In the story's subversive sequel, the enslavement in Egypt, the individual is seriously eroded, but two distinctive women arrive in time to reverse the process. Shifra and Puah set off a chain of events that will ultimately lead to the defeat of the tyrannical Egyptian regime and to the salvation of the Israelite people.”

Ironically, Pharaoh plans to kill the sons of the Israelites and let the daughters live, but he is defeated by a series of daughters, including his own. Klitsner shows how the women's defiance not only confronts the oppressive totalitarian society but rebuilds the disintegrated Jewish families.

Klitsner likes conversation about biblical texts in her classrooms and in her commentary. She sees vibrant conversation taking place within the biblical canon, rather than viewing the Bible as a series of declarations. “If texts declare, the results may be cogent, complex and inspiring , but ultimately they may also be static, one-directional and circumscribed. If, however, texts converse, the result is an invitation to creative engagement and to a perpetual reconsideration of assumptions and conclusions.”

That is, of course, an articulate description of what living Torah means, particularly evolving in the rich environment of Jerusalem.

Klitsner's writing is carefully considered and always lucid, devoid of complex ideas but providing sufficient proof texts so that beginners less familiar with the Bible and more advanced students will find the ideas and their presentation illuminating and fascinating. My only complaint is that the text, at 170 pages, is on the short side. I'm already looking forward to the next volume.

This is insightful, top-cabin Jewish biblical scholarship. The author, a biblical scholar and exegete, unpacks surprising and revelatory meaning when she compares various biblical stories. And she goes deep enough in an almost rabbinic sense to help readers understand her methods and conclusions. Klitsner's work is evidence that words thousands of years old continue to hold new and deep meaning for people who arrive long after they were written.

I have been privileged to study with Judy Klitsner on a number of occasions, including at Pardes, Hadar, JTS and Limmud. Every time I hear her give a lecture, I ask: how could I recreate the magic of that teaching to tell my friends about her main points? Finally, Judy has done that herself in this book. This represents an expansion of the thoughts and ideas she has been teaching for years, and it is a blessing that this exists for anyone who wants to take hold of it, anywhere in the world. You will never read the Bible in the same way once you catch a glimpse of Judy's method. I won't spoil the contents, but the juxtapositions she puts forth between Biblical narratives are simply brilliant. Enjoy this fantastic book.

In her new book, Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other (Jewish Publication Society, 2009), Judy Klitsner explores how biblical stories act as sequels to one another: interpreting, continuing, and frequently subverting and undermining one another's assumptions and conclusions. In a fresh, original voice, Judy Klitsner illustrates the dynamic nature of biblical attitudes regarding issues of ongoing relevance, such as the self, gender relations, and relations between Jews and non-Jews.

In this excerpt from her book, Klitsner presents the narrative of Deborah and Jael, which in many ways acts as a “subversive sequel” to the fertility-centered stories of the early matriarchs of Genesis.

Even after our best efforts to decode the Bible’s sometimes difficult language and familiarize ourselves with its style, we may find ourselves distanced and at times offended by its ethos. For instance, how is a modern sensibility to relate to a text that has God proclaiming to woman, “to your husband is your desire and he shall rule over you?” How are we to understand man’s naming woman “the mother of all the living,” a label given in the wake of humanity’s disobedience—and of man’s resulting dominion over woman—and that seems to limit her definition to childbearing alone?

I propose a particular method of reading, which I refer to as the Bible’s “subversive sequels.” As if aware of its own problematics, the Bible engages in a lively interaction between its passages that allows for a widening of perspective and a sense of dynamic development throughout the canon. If certain gnawing theological or philosophical questions remain after studying one narrative, a later passage may revisit those questions, subjecting them to a complex process of inquiry, revision, and examination of alternative possibilities. Like all sequels, the subversive sequel continues and completes earlier stories. But it does so in ways that often undermine the very assumptions upon which the earlier stories were built as well as the conclusions these stories have reached.

To return to the example of the Bible’s women: the tent-dwelling matriarchs of Genesis seem to follow in Eve’s footsteps. They are almost exclusively focused on childbearing, and they are dependent on their husbands—their only conduits to God—for redemption. When they are unable to conceive, the matriarchs question their very worth as human beings, as in Rachel’s anguished cry to her husband, “Give me children or I shall die.”

In a radical revisiting of these narratives—a “subversive sequel”—the book of Judges presents a story of two women, in which there is no mention at all of infertility, childbirth, or spousal relations. Instead, we meet Deborah, religious and martial leader of Israel and Jael, political assassin.

Deborah is introduced as a woman of Lappidoth – literally, of torches. Barak, her general, has a name that means lightning. Their combined luminescence would extinguish the mighty Sisera, who had “oppressed Israel ruthlessly for twenty years” (Judg. 4:3). But sparks of irony find their way into the story as one of the flames is reluctant to shine: after Deborah conveys God’s wishes for Barak to go to battle, he agrees only on condition that Deborah will go with him. In this tale of reversals, not only are the spiritual positions of man and woman completely transposed (woman is now man’s conduit to God); man will not even take steps toward fulfilling God’s word without a reassuring feminine buffer.

After the battle is won, with the enemy Sisera still at large, a new heroine ascends the stage: Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite.

Jael’s story takes place in the tent, formerly the protected, interior space of the biblical matriarch. The Book of Judges, in its continued efforts to overhaul our assumptions about biblical woman, now takes aim at the primary symbol of woman’s narrow definition, the tent. Jael, like Sarah, is in her tent. But in a brazen rejection of earlier role delineations, Jael grabs hold of the tent’s very foundation, the tent pin. By using it as a weapon, she strikes not only at Sisera’s temple, but at the very notion of matriarchal limitation to the confines of the tent. With her action, Jael delivers a crushing blow both to the mighty general and to our stereotypes regarding biblical woman.

Together, Deborah and Jael expose a new and seemingly limitless gamut of women’s capabilities, which rings out in Deborah’s song of triumph:

“In the days of Jael pathways ceased; And wayfarers went by roundabout paths. Deliverance ceased…Till I Deborah arose…a mother in Israel!” (Judg. 5:6–7)

An oblique reference to Sarah, the woman of the tent, infuses Deborah’s poem with ironically seditious intent. The Hebrew words h-d-l orah, which literally mean a pathway that ceases, occur in only two verses in the Bible: in Deborah’s poem and in reference to Sarah’s infertility. When Sarah overheard the prediction of her pregnancy, the text informs us that “Abraham and Sarah were old… Sarah had ceased the menstrual periods, literally ‘the pathway,’ of women, hadal lihyot le-Sarah orah ka-nashim (Gen. 18:11). As a result, Sarah had scoffed at her own value (Gen. 18:12). Deborah uses the language of Sarah’s hopeless infertility, h-d-l orah, in an ironic manner, to refer to the Israelites, for whom traditional avenues of salvation have ceased. With her choice of words Deborah strongly hints that even when traditional “pathways” are closed off to both the Israelites and to women, there are new paths – unorthodox, unexpected, and previously unimagined – to pursue.

In the story of Deborah and Jael, the female protagonists do not merely speak of new paths; they embark on them as well. Despite the absence of children in the biblical record of her life, Deborah calls herself a “mother in Israel” (Judg. 5:7). She nurtures her people by prophesying, judging, and leading them to military victory. Jael, too, is a mother of sorts, using her tent to tend to the physical needs of others. But, like Deborah, she breaks all maternal molds, as Jael kills a man in order to save many others.

In this satirically subversive sequel to the early matriarchal stories, with their focus on tents and on childbearing, Deborah and Jael define motherhood in radically new ways. Different as they are from the tent-dwelling mothers, they too are blessed. Moreover, in the words of Deborah the prophetess:

Most blessed of women be Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite, more blessed than women in tents. (Judg. 5:24)

The story of Deborah and Jael provides an ironic, and extreme, counterweight to the narratives of the matriarchs of Genesis. When viewed as opposite poles of a very broad spectrum, these stories hint at a multitude of possibilities of feminine potential that lies between.

What emerges from a study of the Bible’s subversive sequels is that as the Bible repeatedly sets up its paradigms and then takes artful aim at them, woman’s story is constantly under review. In fact, no biblical woman may be labeled the definitive “biblical woman.” In the expansive gamut of her occupations and preoccupations, biblical woman is righteous and she is wicked; she is martial leader and she is chattel; she is a victim of rape and violence and she is a perpetrator of sexual harassment and violence. Woman is prophet and prostitute; midwife and murderer; maidservant and monarch. And when she so chooses and when she is able, she is, blessedly, the mother of all the living.