Having Men for Dinner: Deadly Banquets and Biblical Women
This essay looks at several biblical women who use the power of food and drink, the banquet with its implications of seduction, to kill men or to determine whom the dining men kill. I will be asking in particular how the symbolism of food and drink interacts with gender, sexuality, and killing in th...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Sage
2005
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| In: |
Biblical theology bulletin
Year: 2005, Volume: 35, Issue: 4, Pages: 117-124 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Electronic
Non-electronic |
| Summary: | This essay looks at several biblical women who use the power of food and drink, the banquet with its implications of seduction, to kill men or to determine whom the dining men kill. I will be asking in particular how the symbolism of food and drink interacts with gender, sexuality, and killing in the tradition. Jael (Judges 4:17—22) and Judith use drink along with the promise of sex, as though one conveys the other, to reassure, sedate, and deceive the men they need to kill. Herodias (Mark 6:14—30) and Esther (Esther 4—7) have equally deadly aim and also use food and more importantly drink to meet that aim, but in their cases, the drunken man is not the man who dies, but the one who kills. Thus the stories of Jael and Judith advocate a more direct subversion of the female role as nurturer—the nurturing turns to killing; the nurturing role was in fact all along a disguise for a female warrior. The stories of Esther and Herodias, on the other hand, propose more complicated and less subverted use of the nurturing role. While Jael and Judith take up masculine weapons to kill, Esther and Herodias manipulate men themselves as weapons, working within their traditional gender role. |
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| ISSN: | 1945-7596 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Biblical theology bulletin
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1177/01461079050350040201 |