Memories of Mixed Marriage: Women's Mobility and Subaltern Agency in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond
This article explores memories of royal intermarriage in the Hebrew Bible and beyond. I demonstrate that the sources either promote or downplay women's mobility depending on how the story functions for the subaltern group remembering it. I first investigate the book of Esther in which the prota...
| Autor principal: | |
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| Tipo de documento: | Electrónico Artículo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Verificar disponibilidad: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| En: |
Die Welt des Orients
Año: 2025, Volumen: 54, Número: 2, Páginas: 291-307 |
| Clasificaciones IxTheo: | BC Antiguo Oriente ; Religión HB Antiguo Testamento HD Judaísmo primitivo NCF Ética sexual TC Período pre-cristiano |
| Acceso en línea: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Sumario: | This article explores memories of royal intermarriage in the Hebrew Bible and beyond. I demonstrate that the sources either promote or downplay women's mobility depending on how the story functions for the subaltern group remembering it. I first investigate the book of Esther in which the protagonist becomes a queen and gains a position of power that enables agency, albeit subaltern, and the exercise of influence on imperial male elites. I then compare Esther to its much later reworking, the Šīšīnduxt story known from The Provincial Capitals of Ērānšahr, in order to understand how medieval Jews imagined their past engagement with Persians. I argue that the Šīšīnduxt story is another fictive account of an upward mobile Jewish woman who is placed at the imperial male centre, becomes a Persian/Sasanian queen, and is credited with afterlife in the collective memory. Importantly, both Jewish women enter and succeed in foreign courts. In the second part of the article, I expand the discussion to the accounts of the Egyptian princess and Athaliah with an aim to understand the range of functions played by royal intermarriages in the biblical narrative. Unlike the stories celebrating Esther and Šīšīnduxt, these texts stress the foreign women’s failure in the Israelite/Judahite court. I argue that both imagine, from the viewpoint of their subaltern authors and editors, the subjugation of foreign powers; as such, they can be read as celebrating the subaltern group. Finally, I address the case of Berenice, a Jewish woman and Titus' lover who fails in Rome, in order to show how ancient imperial politics were more complex than the Hebrew Bible record with its ideological imaginations suggests. |
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| ISSN: | 2196-9019 |
| Obras secundarias: | Enthalten in: Die Welt des Orients
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.13109/wdor.2024.54.2.291 |
