Amy Chase offers a fresh reading of the Proverbial Woman in Proverbs 31 that emphasizes the ambiguities and tensions that a dialogical reading of this text in its social context(s) offers. Attending to the role of narratology, affect theory, and feminist biblical interpretation, Chase helps the reader see that it is not unimportant which narrative we tell as words indeed create worlds.
The Proverbial Woman: Class, Gender, and Power in Hebrew Poetry
Female identity is fraught and fetishized, commercialized and contested--so potent a weapon in contemporary cultural warfare that a sitting US senator had no shame in asking a nominee to the Supreme Court to "define 'woman.'" But the battle over female identity is not of modern invention. Its roots are ancient. And in the Hebrew Bible, one text has served as the focal point of both classical and fashionable conceptions of female identity: Proverbs 31. A timeless pattern of femininity for some and a punchline for others, the poems themselves have received wildly differing levels of analysis, with too much ink spent on "the ideal woman," and far too little on political rebukes and economic displacement.
The Proverbial Woman offers a comprehensive narrative and dialogical approach to the text that unearths the poetry's social, sexual, and political silences and silencings. It highlights the forgotten characters: the women who destroy kings, the silenced poor, displaced peasants, and foreigners. It examines the text's conflict, setting, characters, and dialogue. It encourages the reader to recognize the drama taking place in the text's world and to explore how these features enabled an ancient community pondering these sapiential lines to process their cooperation with empire in an economic system that benefited some and exploited others.
The Proverbial Woman excavates the power dynamics that promote elite ideologies even as gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions enable marginalized perspectives within the text to resist them. The interpretive approach demonstrated in this study can be replicated among communities today wanting to use biblical texts to construct for themselves a more just and prosperous world.
- Publisher Fortress Press
- Format Paperback
- ISBN 9781506491530
- eBook ISBN 9781506491547
- Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5
- Pages 194
- Publication Date October 15, 2024
Endorsements
L. Juliana Claassens, professor of Old Testament, Stellenbosch University
The Proverbial Woman, like its biblical namesake, deserves great praise. Amy Chase has written a smart, compassionate, and compelling study of Proverbs 31. She attends to the complexity and literary art of the text while also inviting us to consider which voices might be neglected or silenced. The Proverbial Woman is a worthy guide to a complicated and important biblical text.
Rhiannon Graybill, Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein & Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies, and professor of religious studies, University of Richmond
You may not recognize the women at the end of Proverbs after reading The Proverbial Woman! Expertly attuned to class and gender dynamics, this analysis reveals both King Lemuel's mother and the eshet chayil as complicated, surprising, and even troubling figures. Many communities and commentators focus on these exceptional women, exalting especially the eshet chayil; Chase's reading exposes multifaceted figures more worthy of resistance than of emulation.
Jennifer L. Koosed, professor of religious studies, Albright College
In The Proverbial Woman, Amy Chase artfully presents a fresh reading of Proverbs 31's poems, uncovering their multivalent meanings regarding the privileged class, vulnerable groups, dynamic dialogues between family members in their respective socioeconomic contexts, the silenced characters, and their elite counterparts. Her carefully crafted questions about the text engage the reader creatively in contemplating the implications of identity construction and deconstruction in the act of reading the text in its context.
Chloe T. Sun, professor of Old Testament and program director of the Chinese Studies Center, Fuller Theological Seminary
Close readings of texts can produce expansive rather than restrictive meanings, and deconstructive as well as generative savvy in theorizing and interpretation. That is what Amy Chase accomplishes in The Proverbial Woman: Class, Gender, and Power in Hebrew Poetry. Deploying insights from the field of narratology to examine questions of genre, gender, economics, cultural context, ethics, and spirituality in the prose-poetry of Proverbs 31, Chase demonstrates how texts and textual interpretations can be damaging to marginalized subjects and, thus, are in need of new and fresh readings. By centering and decentralizing the eshet chayil and placing her alongside other characters, Chase successfully and brilliantly offers an interpretive gift of the values of polyvalence, polyphony, disputation, and ambiguity in the search for the Proverbial Woman. She does this in regard to the text about her as well as interpretive traditions that provoke both admiration and unpleasantness, especially when pressed up against the discrepancies and precarity of personal, communal, historical, and cultural life in the face of power imbalances, empire, and the possibilities of transgressing boundaries that marginalize. Chase's detailed analyses move beyond literary and exegetical minutiae, bringing together epistemological clarity and ambiguity, contextual specificity and nuance, identity formation and ethical/ideological struggle for the interpretation of Proverbs 31. The result is a powerful reading in the field of Proverbs studies that pushes against dominant and binary modes of material, ideological, and male-gendered interpretations of the text--which Chase describes as distortion--to reveal readings in favor of marginalized characters in the text and the ethical work that such marginalization does in the productions of the Proverbial Woman.
Kenneth Ngwa, John Fletcher Hurst Professor of Hebrew Bible, Drew Theological Seminary
The Proverbial Woman--who can find her? If we think we have found her neatly contained and ripe for emulation in Proverbs 31, Amy Chase suggests we think again. In both her guises--the outspoken queen mother instructing her son and the dazzlingly resourceful wife ensuring her husband's success--the contradictory and controversial Proverbial Woman has a complicated story that teems with nameless people, churns with social struggles, and spills beyond the page to capture its audience in its morally compromising currents. In Chase's expert reading, the Proverbial Woman steps firmly off her traditional pedestal and enters a messier fray that reflects, generates, and challenges the elitist impulses to survive and succeed at the expense of others. A truly remarkable study that deepens our knowledge as readers and our awareness as moral agents.
Danna Nolan Fewell, John Fletcher Hurst Professor Emerita of Hebrew Bible, Drew University