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This work offers an overview of trauma theory’s relations to biblical studies. In addition to summarizing the theoretical landscape(s), it provides exegetical forays into Ezekiel and, in part, Exodus and the Eucharist. The analysis will engage these materials’ traumatic ethoi, including their connections to trauma informed eating and queerings, so as to offer entryways into the wider critical conversation. While these exegetical foci may seem arbitrary, that is in part the point. As readers will see, trauma defies sense-making. Akin to postmodernist poststructuralist intertextualities, trauma cannot be flattened into neat narration. Trauma is capricious, leaving survivors to carry with them multivalent and even paradoxical connections to their experiences. This project thus attempts to perform trauma’s plurisignification as much as it tries to explain it, using a set of traditionally unexamined pairings to do so. While not an exhaustive survey on trauma theory and the Bible – such work could fill the space of multiple publications – the following work provides a representation of both the theory of trauma and its applications within the biblical field.

When situating the Gospel of Mark within a Jewish context, incongruities concerning both Jesus’s character and the collective character of Jesus’s disciples become apparent. The Markan Christ, for ...

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.

John 8:37-47 is arguably the most dangerous passage for Jews within the entire New Testament. Repeatedly used to fuel anti-Semitism, it remains haunted by the events of the Holocaust. Its statements about “the Jews” are delivered with all the incomparable authority and divine assurance that the implied author has worked unremittingly to establish for Jesus. However, examining the passage with a poststructuralist psychoanalytic lens, I propose that the reader may not only confront the text’s apparent anti-Jewishness, but may also find that this narrative is far less coherent than it seems. Reading with theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, I argue that this textualized Jesus subtly contradicts himself, suggesting a textual unconscious filled with conflict and ambivalence. In fact, by using Genesis 22 as a possible intertext, I demonstrate that it is not necessarily the Jews who resemble “their father the devil” so much as the Johannine Jesus himself.