Rewriting and (Re)negotiating Gender: A Study of the Depictions of the Matriarchs in the Book of Jubilees

Chontel Syfox. Rewriting and (Re) Negotiating Gender: A Study of the Depictions of the Matriarchs in the Book of Jubilees in Relation to Depictions of Heroines in the Greek Novel and Jewish Novella.
Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2019.

It has long been noted that women feature more prominently in the Book of Jubilees than in the Book of Genesis. My dissertation seeks to identify the motives and priorities that guided the author of Jubilees in his rewriting of the biblical stories concerning the matriarchs and asks if Jubilees was unique in its foregrounding of female characters or dealt with them in a manner that was typical of the then literary Zeitgeist. I contend that the author of Jubilees did not rewrite the matriarchs in a systematic way — there was not an overarching aim to improve the images of or elevate the statuses of the matriarchs — and, as such, there are multiple images of femininity in Jubilees that are acceptable to varying degrees. Some women are permitted to temporarily traverse gender boundaries (Rebekah), some women are more rigidly confined within gender boundaries (Leah), and others receive little of the author’s attention (Sarah). By comparing Jubilees to roughly contemporaneous works that similarly give high visibility to women — Chariton’s Callirhoe and Chaereas, the Book of Esther, and the Book of Judith — I illustrate that the author of Jubilees was not unique in the way that he treated female characters. Like the Greek novel and Jewish novellas, Jubilees simultaneously contains images of female characters who defy gender norms, as well as images of female characters who reinforce stereotypically patriarchal ideas about the performance of gender.

I utilize an intersectional approach in this study that draws on the historical-critical method, literary criticism, feminist biblical interpretation, and social-scientific theories of gender. I draw on literary critical methods, considering elements of character, plot, themes, and motifs in each text under consideration. In particular, close attention is paid to the first element — character; for instance, I attend to the ways in which female characters are described, including their appearance, positionality, modality, agency, and relationship to other characters. Drawing from feminist interpretation, I focus not only on what female characters say and do, but also on what they do not say and do, on where and when female characters are positioned as subjects who act and objects who are acted upon, on when women’s voices are heard and when they are silenced, and on when the female gaze is privileged over the male gaze, and I ask who benefits (cui bono?)[1] from these shifts — a male author and his imagined male audience, or historical women? I borrow from Judith Butler’s theory that gender is a socially constructed and performative phenomenon,[2] in combination with R.W. Connell’s theory that in any given culture there are multiple forms of masculinity — the ideal (“hegemonic”) form of masculinity, which is constantly being negotiated in relation to acceptable but non-ideal (“subordinate”) forms masculinity, and unacceptable (“marginalized”) forms of masculinity.[3] I extend this theory to include multiple femininities — hegemonic femininity, subordinate femininity, and marginalized femininity.

The second chapter of my dissertation focuses on Chariton’s Callirhoe and Chaereas. This chapter demonstrates that although Callirhoe is indeed at the center of all of the novel’s action, she nonetheless remains a woman confined within an archaized, strictly gendered world. Callirhoe is far from heroic. Her virtue is tied to her modesty and self-control, which was expected of an elite woman in the Greek polis. The praise and admiration she receives are due to her physical appearance and lead to her being treated as a fetishized object by nearly everyone (male and female) that she encounters. She does not possess a public voice; rather, Chariton and his audience are privy to her internal thoughts and the words she speaks within the appropriate parameters of the oikos. In spite of the visible prominence that this female character achieves in the novel, Chariton’s depiction of his heroine in fact prescribes more archaized limitations on female behavior than his audience would have been accustomed to.

The dissertation’s third chapter focuses on the books of Esther and Judith. These works both feature daring feats from eponymous female leads, which in and of itself was unexpected of women, resulting in the salvation of their people. In this way, both Esther and Judith are depicted moving beyond behavioral boundaries prescribed for their sex. Yet, the means that they employ to achieve salvation for their kinspeople underscores the limits they face as women in a phallocratic world. Judith’s beauty, lies, and the implied promise of a sexual encounter gained her entry into the Assyrian camp. Esther lulled King Ahasuerus and Haman into a false sense of security with her beauty and dinner invitations, so that neither of them suspected her of having a more dangerous agenda. A woman’s beauty and ability to deceive are therefore depicted as powerful weapons that could be used to outsmart men for the benefit of the nation, as well as a source of grave danger that causes men to be manipulated, misled, and killed. In short, whilst both Esther and Judith act in heroically masculine ways to save their people, they are portrayed resorting to stereotypical feminine wiles to achieve their purpose. Thus, we see these female protagonists moving back and forth across gender boundaries throughout their narratives. At their stories’ conclusions, however, their atypically masculine behavior ceases and the gendered status quo is restored. Once the threat to their people is eliminated, the women return to conforming to behavior that was expected of women. Consequently, the visibility of these female characters perpetuates, rather than negates, the male Israelite fantasy about the danger of women’s beauty and sexuality.

In the fourth chapter, I turn my attention to the matriarchs in Jubilees, beginning with Rebekah. The scholarly consensus has long held that Rebekah’s role in Jubilees is elevated and that this is a reflection of the author’s positive outlook on women.[4] I contend that using gender nuanced lenses to read Rebekah’s story complicates this way of understanding the role and status the author of Jubilees ascribed to her and other female characters. As in Genesis, in Jubilees Rebekah performs her femininity in the way that she is expected to. She produces children and because she is subservient to her husband, however incompetent he may be, she utilizes stereotypical feminine trickery to protect the child that she perceives will be her husband’s heir. But Jubilees provides justifications for her behavior, lest her deceitful manipulations cause Jacob succeeding his father as heir to the covenant to be viewed as illegitimate. Rebekah also moves beyond the functions ascribed to her sex, taking up the mantle of the patriarch to perform masculine functions such as passing on the covenantal blessings to the correct heir and instructing that heir in the ways of the covenant. However, she is only temporarily permitted to behave like a patriarch. Once Rebekah ensured that Jacob received the patriarchal blessing and he was protected from his scorned brother, her gender-bending behavior begins to decrease, her words bear less authority in Jacob’s eyes, and Isaac resumes his duties as the head of the family. I proffer that Rebekah is never lauded for the important role she plays in covenant history, because in the author’s view Rebekah’s was not an example for other women to emulate. She does not represent ideal female behavior or the hegemonic construction of femininity in the text, but rather a subordinate femininity that is permissible because it serves divine purposes.

 The fifth chapter of the dissertation focuses on Leah and proposes that she is a cipher for the author of Jubilees’ idea of hegemonic femininity. I argue, firstly, that although Leah appears and speaks infrequently in Genesis, she deserves more credit than the history of scholarship has permitted her. In Genesis, Leah is a woman with a voice; every time she names one of her children she vocalizes her despair at being unloved by her husband. The Leah who bemoans her unloved status in Genesis, gives way in Jubilees to the docile Leah, who quietly endures being hated and honors her husband. I argue, secondly, that it should come as no surprise that the matriarch whom Jubilees manages to silence altogether is the matriarch to whom the author gives unparalleled praise. Not only does Jubilees portray Leah as being elevated to the status of the wife whom Jacob loved the most, the author crafts an encomium for the woman lauding her as the “perfect” wife (Jub. 36:21-24). By praising Leah’s silence and submission to her husband, the author implicitly prescribes the same behavior for all other women, thereby transforming Leah into an exemplar. Leah, thus, comes to represent the hegemonic image of femininity in Jubilees.

In the next chapter of the dissertation, I posit that the author of Jubilees betrays minimal concern for the character of Sarah. Unlike Esther, Judith, and Rebekah, Sarah is never given the opportunity in Jubilees to move beyond the reproductive and protective functions of her gender. Unlike Callirhoe and Leah, Sarah’s character is not used by a male author to model and prescribe a particular understanding of ideal behavior for women. As in Genesis, Sarah’s main function in Jubilees is reproductive. Some alterations are indeed made to Sarah’s portrayal in Jubilees; for instance, she is given ideal credentials, her expressions of anger are mollified, and she is made privy to the covenant. However, these changes do not result in a drastically different image of the matriarch than that which is found in Genesis. I proffer that the fact that the rewritten Sarah undergoes very little development, combined with the very different roles served by Rebekah and Leah, points away from an overarching goal to systematically elevate all of the matriarchs in Jubilees.

The final chapter of the dissertation summarizes the study’s findings and offers two conclusions. Firstly, the author of Jubilees did not rewrite the matriarchs in a systematic way. There was not an overarching aim to improve the images of or elevate the statuses of the matriarchs, as some scholarly opinions hold. Some matriarchs traverse gender boundaries (Rebekah), some matriarchs are confined within them (Leah), and other matriarchs receive little attention (Sarah). These women are treated differently depending on the ideological concerns and exegetical questions the author of Jubilees sought to address with each character. As a result, different types of femininity are represented in the depictions of the matriarchs. Secondly, the author of Jubilees was not unusual in the way he treated female characters. Like the Greek novel and Jewish novellas, Jubilees simultaneously contains images of female characters who defy gender norms and images of female characters who reinforce stereotypically patriarchal ideas about the performance of gender.

Dr. Chontel Syfox is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She received her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, where she subsequently served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. Dr. Syfox also holds an MTS from Emory University, where she was a Robert T. Jones Graduate Fellow, and a First Class Honours MTheol from the University of St Andrews. She has published peer-reviewed articles on the Book of Jubilees in both the English and Chinese languages. Dr. Syfox was named a national winner of the 2018 Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar Award.

[1] Esther Fuchs, “Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible for Women: A Neoliberal Turn in Contemporary Feminist Scholarship,” JFSR 24.2 (2008), 60.

[2] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990; repr., New York: Routledge Classics, 2006).

[3] R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

[4] Betsy Halpern-Amaru, The Empowerment of Women in the Book of Jubilees (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 1-5; John C. Endres, Biblical Interpretation in the Book of Jubilees (CBQMS 18; Washington DC: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1987), 74; William Loader, Enoch, Levi and Jubilees on Sexuality: Attitudes Towards Sexuality in the Early Enoch Literature, the Aramaic Levi Document, and the Book of Jubilees (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 2007), 260;  James C.VanderKam, Jubilees 1: A Commentary on the Book of Jubilees 1-21 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 63.