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

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

NR\Reader checked\30/06/2015

Reference type
Author(s)
Wright, Benjamin G.
Edwards, Suzanne M.
Editor(s)
Géza G. Xeravits
Year
2015
Journal / Book Title || Series Title
Religion and Female Body in Ancient Judaism and Its Environments
Issue / Series Volume
28
Series Title
Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies
Publisher
De Gruyter
Place of Publication
Berlin/Munich/Boston
Pages
73-108
Work type
Label
08/06/2015
Abstract

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.