Search

Scholars typically describe the book of Judges as encompassing a cyclical transgress–suffer–prosper–transgress–again trope. Although Israelite peace and autonomy are maintained at various moments throughout the text, hardship inevitably ensues, leading exegetes to focus on the Israelites' repeated demise as opposed to their continual triumphs. As David Gunn notes, 'reward and punishment is often viewed as the book's dominant theme'. Or, in the words of Danna Nolan Fewell, the stories within Judges are frequently read as a collective 'downward spiral for Israel and its leaders'. I question, however, whether such thematic analysis might prove insufficient when engaging a hermeneutic of trauma and survival—or queer survivance, as we will see. Interestingly, of the 400-year period covered in the book of Judges, only 111 of them are spent in subjugation. Nearly three-fourths of the time period covered by the book, in other words, recounts times of judgeship and autonomy. Might this story be less about cultural transgression and more about the creative ways in which the Israelites managed to endure? In this article, I will provide an intertextual comparison of the Judges cycle with the memoir of Holocaust survivor, Gad Beck. In doing so, I will suggest that Judges offers us a literary representation of an ancient culture's fight to persist. Rather than guide readers through the entirety of the Judges narrative, however, I will focus on Judges 3 and 4, as the stories of and events surrounding Ehud and Jael offer a more concentrated instance of the aforementioned cyclical trope. From a stance of hetero-suspicion and with a theoretical view to intertextuality and queer survivance, I will argue that, like Beck, Ehud and Jael subvert oppressive power structures through gender-bending performances and the embodiment of ambivalent, and even comedic, identity markers. Taking such similarities into consideration, I will then suggest that Ehud's and Jael's queer-comic consciousness becomes another thematic trope within the book of Judges as a whole. Yet instead of focusing on the repetition of the Israelites' self-fulfilling demise, this trope spotlights the creative ways in which the Judges narrative becomes one of survival and reflects an ancient culture's will to resist, persist, and indeed, live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We catch glimpses of a culture's memories of trauma and the survival of these memories in an array of discursive formations, including narrative. By naming, shaping, and giving words to traumatic experience, storytelling becomes an act of processing--an act that seeks to make sense of and survive the many haunting associations and dissociations, which, paradoxically, signify events that exceed categorized signification. Though typically not utilizing trauma theory, scholars indirectly describe the book of Esther as taking part in this process. As Timothy Beal writes, Esther is a book "about living beyond the end," often doing so by utilizing humour to lampoon the powers that be. However, rather than simply undermine the enemy via subversive jest, the Jews in the book of Esther eventually turn the tables completely as they call for a mass annihilation of Jewish foes. As such, the creation of a new Jewish identity--one that appropriates Amalekite power and force--becomes another glimpse of the culture's attempt to process, survive, and counter trauma. These tactics become even clearer, however, when cross-read intertextually with the celebration of Purim throughout the Shoah, followed by the solidification of the Israeli Sabra image after World War II. Whereas the celebration of Purim functioned more regularly as hidden resistance, the establishment of the Israeli Sabra created space for both revenge fantasy and revenge reality against any and all lingering "Amaleks." Though differing in strategy, context, and, arguably, productivity, these responses nevertheless illustrate a range of survival strategies employed in the face of communal suffering. Reading the book of Esther alongside these examples of counter-trauma exposes Esther's use of humour and appropriation of enemy ideology as articulations of post-traumatic wish-fulfillment. In short, by reading Esther as haunted by the Holocaust and the creation of the post-Shoah Sabra, we may better recognize the range of survival tactics employed in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]