“She Undid Him with the Beauty of Her Face” (Jdt 16.6): Reading Women’s Bodies in Early Jewish Literature

This paper examines discourses of gendered embodiment Second Temple Jewish narrative and sapiential texts. We attend, in particular, to the construction of women's bodies as sites of interpretive instability, read in divergent and sometimes contradictory ways. Women's Bodies become interpretive cruxes, registering the moral, spiritual, and political insights available to various readers represnted within the text - and to readers of the text. Reading women's bodies was at once crucially important and fundamentally contested. As such, men and women strategically cultivated the representation and interpretation of gendered embodiment. The negotiaitions among characters and between characters and readers reveal a sophisticated consideratio of gendered agency and its relationship to social concerns.