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Twice in the Jacob cycle in Genesis, we find a one-chapter long, self-contained story about a woman: Dinah and Tamar. The stories are almost never read together, despite their textual proximity and the clear thematic and idiomatic connections between them. Like Dinah, Tamar is a woman who finds herself in a vulnerable position outside her father's home. Like Dinah, she has unsanctioned sex. And yet, Tamar is the subject of much of her story. Dinah's is a story of rape and massacre, a story of a woman silenced even as she is ostensibly redeemed. Dinah does not act; she is acted upon or acted on behalf of. By contrast, Tamar speaks, she acts, she thinks, she conspires, she challenges. Reading intertextually, we see Genesis 38 inverts key elements of Genesis 34 in a number of ways, thereby possibly serving as a narrative correction of the earlier story.

With the debate about same-sex marriage raging in the United States, this paper asks whether the canonical scriptures of Judaism and Christianity offer any justification for blessing same-sex unions. It looks to the ways that the Bible is used by proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage. It analyzes the hermeneutics of the religious left and the religious right, particularly as they grapple with the "clobber texts" of Lev. 18:22 and 20:13. It then turns to the biblical book of Ruth, which critic J. Hillis Miller describes as having "been alienated from itself, translated from itself" through new uses. The paper puts the book of Ruth to yet another new use/misprision, using it as a prooftext to support same-sex marriage. The book has already been upheld by lesbian readers of scripture because of the intimate relationship between the protagonists, Ruth and Naomi, but this paper "misreads" the text differently. Ruth describes how a marriage made between an Israelite and a Moabite brings about the line of King David, one of the most important figures in the Bible and the man from whose line the Messiah is expected to come. The biblical law, however, is unequivocal: Moabites are not permitted to enter into the community of Israel. Juxtaposing the levitical laws (ostensibly) prohibiting homosexuality with those banning Moabites from Israel, this paper argues that the religious left could hold up the book of Ruth as a biblical model for allowing marriage that seems explicitly forbidden by biblical law.

Throughout the Bible, God repeatedly commands memory: the Israelites are to remember and keep the commandments. This essay considers the role of remembering and keeping a record of past generations as against remembering and keeping religious tradition. It investigates the way that recitation rather than ritual becomes the locus of memory in three contemporary Jewish novels: Dara Horn's In the Image (2002); Katie Singer's The Wholeness of a Broken Heart (1999); and Eileen Pollack's Paradise, New York (1998). All three novels are fraught with biblical imagery, with their female protagonists all functioning as modern incarnations of Serah bat Asher, the biblical woman who remembered and kept the memory of Israel in Egypt. Like Serah, these contemporary women stand apart from the tradition and yet gain their identity by recording its genealogies and recounting its stories.

The world that the Fisher Price toy company has created for its Little People—small plastic figures designed so that two- to five-year-olds might engage in “imaginative play”—includes many familiar aspects of American life: a mechanic’s garage, an airplane, a school bus, and a family home. One anomaly in the mostly modern collection is the Noah’s ark set, which includes one boat, two elephants, two lions, two zebras, and one bearded Noah, in tunic and sandals, carrying a staff on which is perched a dove. Yet Noah and his menagerie are somehow consonant with the Little People universe. The imaginative player who chooses to combine his playsets can introduce the ancient patriarch to modern amenities: Noah fits in the seats of the garage’s cars, the airplane, and the school bus. He can also be made to sit, quite comfortably, on the toilet on the second floor of the dollhouse—no doubt a relief, as the Little People ark has no facilities.