More recent postcolonial readings reject the colonizing acceptance of foreign women like Ruth. Laura Donaldson argues: “For ‘Ruth the Moabite,’ the translation from savagery to civilization or from Asherah to God involves the relinquishing of her ethnic and cultural identity.” Musa Dube argues that the foreign sexualized woman, specifically Rahab the Canaanite prostitute in the Book of Joshua, is both a symbol of the conquered land and a colonized woman who is made to identify with her enemies against her own national interests. As such, the foreign woman is a pawn or cipher of colonial ideology: “It is, therefore, proposed that this flexible, yet recognizable and reoccurring, pattern of the use of gender in imperializing rhetoric should be recognized as a literary-type scene of land possession in the rhetoric of God, gold, glory, and gender.” Challenging Dube’s representation of Rahab as a stereotypic “loose woman” and a “sellout,” Kwok Pui-lan defends Rahab’s sexual and political choices as heroic strategies of survival: “Like the story of the colonized, hers is a fragmented, incoherent, and half-erased tale”
Though, the binary of the male Israelite and female foreigner reifies and naturalizes national identity as pre-given and evident. But just as the term “woman” has been recognized as an essentialist abstraction that cannot contain the plurality and complexity of that which it signifies, the nation is also culturally contingent, textually mediated, and ideologically contradictory. (My reference to the nation as imagined community does not mean that the nation is an illusion or phantasm; rather, the nation is a social category of difference which, like gender, is historically reconstructed, reinvented, culturally performed, and continuously contested.) The much quoted imperative, in Ezra 9:12 and 10:3, against marrying foreign women, based on the explicit warning in Deuteronomy 7:3 against intermarriage, is followed neither by Israel’s male progenitors nor by Israel’s leaders. Abraham has conjugal relations with Sarai’s maid, the Egyptian Hagar who bears him a son (Gen. 16:4), and marries Keturah after Sarai’s death (Gen. 25:1 – 6). Joseph marries Asenath, daughter of the Egyptian priest of On (Gen. 41:45 – 46), who bears him two sons who become two tribes in Israel (Gen. 41:45; 50 – 51); Moses marries the Midianite Zipporah who bears him two sons (Exod. 2:21 – 22), in addition to marrying a Cushite woman (Num. 12:1), and Solomon marries the Pharaoh’s daughter and numerous foreign wives (1 Kings 3:1; 11:3). This practice is indicted by the authorial narrator only once, in the case of Solomon. It is therefore arguable that exogamy itself is not indicted here but rather the exaggerated number of foreign women (seven hundred) that he married - in addition to the three hundred concubines he is reported to have had (Kings 11:4 – 5). There is no evidence even in Ezra-Nehemiah that the legal proclamations against exogamy were ever followed or carried out. If postcolonial critics may argue with a measure of justification that these instances of exogamy entail the assimilation of the foreign woman into Israel’s body politic, their position is more tenuous regarding the category of the “unattached” yet sexually desirable foreign women. Positioned at key moments in the nation’s history are the representations of the Pharaoh’s daughter who saves Moses’s life and adopts him (Exod. 2:5 – 10), the Canaanite Rahab who collaborates with the Israelite spies (Joshua 2:1 – 21) the Midianite Jael who smites Sisera ( Judg. 4:18 – 21), and the admirable queen of Sheba who validates Solomon’s wisdom (1 Kings 10:1 – 13)
Why should the narrator highlight the fact that the nation’s male leaders married foreign women, and why would he highlight their contribution to the national weal? Might one argue that at least some of these outsider women are being constructed as border-crossers, or as porous and ambiguous symbolic borders between Israel and its neighbors? Is it possible that on some level they are seen as both foreign and Israelite, as hybrid constructions of bi-national and bi-cultural identity? Rather than framing foreign women as coherent totalizing identities, as postcolonial feminists suggest, I posit a more contingent picture where they are both insiders and outsiders. As a literary trope attributed to women by male writers, it may also reveal repressed heterosexual desire and subliminal rebellion against doctrinal propriety. The contradictory representations of foreign women as threatening and alluring, dangerous and enticing, correspond to a contradiction in the national self-representation of Israel as on the one hand endogamous – rejecting marital associations with foreigners – and on the other exogamous – open to marriage with outsiders
On one hand, Israel is separate and sacred, and, on the other, it is interdependent and interrelated with foreign cultures. The ideology of endogamy may explain the sexualized and threatening representations of foreign women, the likes of Potiphar’s wife, Delilah, and Jezebel. Yet the approving representations of foreign wives such as Hagar, Zipporah, and Ruth suggest a contestation of this injunction, an exogamous ideology that accepted and approved of marriage with foreign women. The tension between these narrative discourses may correspond to what Homi K. Bhabha identifies as the tension between the idealized, prescriptive, or “pedagogic” script and the actual, experiential or “performative” narratives of the nation. Although pedagogic texts, such as laws, prescribe endogamous marriage exclusively within the community for both men and women, the biblical narrative suggests that endogamy was meant for women alone. Thus strictures against adultery (outside marriage) and menstrual purity (inside marriage) were national identity markers meant exclusively for women. Whereas narratives of male intermarriage indict neither the practice nor the practitioner, narratives of female intermarriage are deeply aware of the problem of national boundaries, and they seek to deny that the marriage took place or describe the disastrous outcome of such potential liaisons. The most celebrated biblical woman who escapes criticism, Esther, becomes the queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Esther 17:18) under exceptional circumstances that involve the possible extinction of the entire nation
A comparison of “foreign” and “Israelite” women suggests that, although the boundaries of the nation are inscribed on the body of Israelite woman, this body is often constructed as defective or damaged sexually and reproductively. Israelite women are presented as sexually violated daughters (Dinah, Tamar, and Pilegesh of Gibeah), sexually repressed wives, and barren mothers, whereas foreign wives and lovers are presented as sexually irresistible and assertive (Potiphar’s wife, Delilah, Jezebel, and Vashti). Foreign mothers are also naturally fertile (e.g., Hagar, Bilhah, Zilpah, and Ruth). As a sexual and maternal subject, the Israelite woman is depicted as requiring supplementary assistance. The discursive construction of Israelite women is mediated through strategies of domestication, by which I mean a system of intersecting familial and conjugal dependencies. The production of collective national identity depends on the suppression of female sexuality, and thus it proscribes sexual desire for women and promotes instead asexual motherhood, propriety, purity, and virtue
The reproductive imperative — key to all nationalisms — often denies Israelite women the ability to give birth and attributes to them a barrenness that is reversed only through divine intervention. The repression of sexuality in the Israelite insider group fi nds compensatory expression in the foreign group. The endogamous narrative, which seeks to present insider women as virtuous, is oppressive in its strategies of domestication in ways that are different from, but arguably equivalent to, the exogamous strategies of colonization applied to sexually “loose” foreign women. Foreign women are shown to move about and cross geographic, social, and national boundaries at will (e.g., Rahab, Queen of Sheba, Jezebel, and Ruth), but Israelite women who cross domestic boundaries (e.g., Dinah, Jephthah’s daughter, Tamar, and Pilegesh of Gibeah) are brutally violated and textually silenced. Is the material and discursive repression of Israelite women less onerous than the stigmatic descriptions of foreign women? More important, whose interest is served by constructing their reciprocal functions as antagonistic, as a contest? The sexual suppression of Israelite women marks the inner limits of the nation in much the same way that the sexuality of foreign woman marks its outer bounds. The multiple restrictions on women’s sexual access to outsiders, to men other than their husbands, and to their own husbands during regular periods inscribe the sexual ethos of the nation on the women’s bodies
