Rachel Adelman. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Volume 37, Issue 1. Indiana University Press. Spring 2021.
Daughters, as the most sheltered and vulnerable figures within the father’s household, present the most poignant critique of that household when it comes undone. The story of the rape of Tamar, King David’s daughter, by her half-brother Amnon (2 Sam 13:1-20), is read not only as the beginning of the unraveling of the kingdom, but as a prefiguration of the fate of Bat Tzion (Daughter Zion or Fair Zion), the personification of Jerusalem, Temple, and the Judean people. Like Tamar, Bat Tzion is ravaged and left desolate (shomemah). Unlike her mortal sister, however, who is ultimately silenced, Bat Tzion is given voice in the poetry of lament and consolation (Lamentations and Second Isaiah). While engaging in a historical-contextual approach to the Hebrew Bible, with an emphasis on intertextuality, this article uncovers voices that challenge the patriarchal values imbedded in father-daughter relations in the Hebrew Bible.
Daughters, Victims of Violence
In the past decade, feminist scholars have increasingly focused on the daughter figure in the Hebrew Bible, a young woman under the protective aegis of a father who never emerges into the primary female roles of wife and mother in the Hebrew Bible. Almost all these female figures primarily known by the epithet “daughter of [bat]” meet a tragic fate. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob is debased (Gen 34). Jephthah’s daughter submits to her father’s vow and is sacrificed (Judg 11:34-40). The concubine of Gibeah, whom the Levite reclaims from her father’s house and then hands over to the Benjaminites, is then gang-raped and eventually killed and dismembered (Judg 19). King Saul’s daughter, Michal, is used as a pawn by her father to fell his rival, David (1 Sam 18-19, 25:44), and is ultimately condemned to barrenness, becoming a desolate woman in the Judean court (2 Sam 6:23). And finally, the subject of this essay, David’s daughter, Tamar, is raped by her half-brother, Amnon (2 Sam 13). As a consequence of rape, rejection, or sacrifice, these women never accede to the role of wife or mother, and therefore remain frozen in time as merely “daughter of [bat].” In all these cases, the father is implicated in his daughter’s debasement or sacrifice.
Building upon earlier feminist studies, this essay foregrounds two figures within the Judean kingdom that exemplify the father-daughter paradigm—Tamar, the daughter of King David, and Fair Zion or Daughter Zion (hereafter, Bat Tzion), the personification of Jerusalem throughout prophetic literature, Psalms, and Lamentations. As liminal figures betwixt and between social roles in a patrilocal society, the nubile young woman is the most cherished, sheltered, and vulnerable figure in the biblical household. The father’s honor is contingent upon the integrity of her sexual boundaries—her status as a virgin—and her bride-price is set accordingly. Cultural theorist Mieke Bal, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, argues that the virgin daughter does not only belong to the father, “as a metonymical extension of him; she is part of him, as a synecdochical integration, which causes her loss to be the loss of himself.” I argue that Tamar and Daughter Zion do not serve as extensions of the father but articulate and embody a critique of the father’s rule.
In this article, I engage in a historical-contextual reading, enhanced by a feminist lens that sets the patriarchal values underlying the biblical text in high relief. The primary agenda in this reading strategy, in feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible’s words, is to “depatriarchalize” biblical interpretation and recover themes that “disavow sexism.” I read with an ear toward “counter-coherence” (Bal’s term), which challenges traditional, “coherent” readings that merely “repeat the ideological slogans superimposed on the narrative material.” Instead, a counter-coherent reading “turns the background into a foreground,… does justice to the impact on the lives of women of those social institutions and revolutions out of which the book emerges,… [and] helps think through the relations between text and [historical] context in a quite different, seldom explored manner.” In this paper, I upend the “coherent” reading of both David’s privileged position in the history and the centrality (and invincibility) of the capital, “the city of David.” Both the king’s daughter, Tamar, and the divine “daughter,” Bat Tzion (the feminine personification of Jerusalem), present a profound critique of power and of complacency about the status of sacred place and Temple inherent in Zion theology.
While feminist scholarship has extensively explored the female personification of Zion (or, more precisely, Israel) as God’s wayward wife, I focus on Bat Tzion as a daughter figure. As a wife, Israel (and her “sister” Judea) are condemned for their adulterous “fornications” (a metaphor for idolatry) and punished through abuse and sexual violation at the hands of strangers—a characterization deemed “prophetic pornography” by astute feminist readers. As daughter, however, Bat Tzion’s relationship to the paternal figure of God is more nuanced. Particularly in Lamentations and in Second Isaiah, the feminine persona of daughter draws out the readers’ compassion and ultimately presents a critique of the paternalism that undergirds the metaphor. In reading the desolation of Tamar as a prefiguration of the fate of Bat Tzion, the critique of the father’s rule is distilled to its most toxic—or perhaps healing—tincture.
The Origins of Zion Theology and the Image of Bat Tzion
The seedlings for the metaphor of the relationship between God, the father, and Jerusalem as Bat Tzion may be traced to Zion theology, the promise that God would establish an eternal covenant with King David and that God would come to reside in the Temple, in the chosen capital, Jerusalem, “the city of David.” Though David could not build a “house” (Temple) for God—deferred to his son, Solomon—God would grant the king a “house” (that is, a dynasty) that would persist forever. This seemingly unconditional “covenant of grant” (Moshe Weinfeld’s term) lies at the heart of Zion theology—the belief that Jerusalem (Zion) would remain central in Jewish cultic practice, and that God would protect Zion, as the locus of Temple and the divine abode, and preserve the House of David forever.
Jerusalem is first introduced in the Bible as Fair Zion or Daughter Zion in Isaiah’s prophecy against Sennacherib (2 Kgs 19; Isaiah 36-37), highlighting the sense of her special protected status. In the context of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judea (circa 701 BCE), Isaiah intones, “This is the word that Yhwh has spoken concerning him [Sennacherib]: She despises you, she scorns you—virgin daughter Zion [betulat Bat Tzion]; she tosses her head behind your back, daughter [bat] Jerusalem” (2 Kgs 19:21; compare Isa 37:22). Bat Tzion defies the royal invader who would penetrate her walls, pillage her treasures, and slay or carry away her people as slaves. Like Tamar, she is a virgin (betulah), but unlike her mortal sister, Bat Tzion is depicted as initially impenetrable, as yet inviolate. Under Hezekiah’s reign (and Isaiah’s prophetic regard), Jerusalem successfully spurns the foreign conquest, for God, the father, protects her, in sending an “Angel of Yhwh” to strike the Assyrian camp arrayed outside her walls, in a replay of the Egyptian plague of slaying the firstborn (2 Kgs 19:35; compare Exod 12:29). The personification of the city and its inhabitants as a “princess,” who is protected by the king, sequestered within the walls of the city or palace—modest and highly honored, virtuous, and coveted—highlights Bat Tzion’s cherished status under divine protection (as in Psalm 9:15 [MT 9:14]).
While this belief in Zion’s invincibility and the eternal status of the Davidic monarchy held sway during the pre-exilic period, it was seriously undermined after the Babylonian exile and the devastation of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The origins of this critique of Zion theology and “the sure house of David” in the exilic period can be traced to the succession narrative (2 Sam 9-20; 1 Kgs 1-2). Tamar, as embodiment of divine retribution, prompts the unraveling of the Davidic kingdom and foreshadows the devastation of Jerusalem, Bat Tzion.
The Fate of Daughters in King David’s Court
In terms of the narrative arc of the history, the cracks in the foundations of the Davidic monarchy can be traced back to his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah, her husband (2 Sam 11). Robert Polzin argued that this episode is not only the turning point in David’s life but the pivot of the entire Deuteronomic history. It is the daughters—by name, Bathsheba, and by legacy, Tamar—that lie, both literally and figuratively, in the fault line. In his oracle of rebuke, Nathan intimates that trouble will begin from within the kingdom (2 Sam 12:10-11). First, as a consequence of Uriah’s murder, punishment will be meted out by the proverbial sword that will never depart from David’s House. Second, in response to the sexual transgression, punishment will be visited upon David with “trouble” from “within his House” (that is, his own family), when another man “will lie” with his wives (or women) “in the sight of this very sun” (v. 11). What began as a transgression committed “secretly” will be exposed and amplified through an act of rape, incest, and treason in public (v. 12) when David’s son, Absalom, sexually possesses his father’s ten concubines, possibly on the very roof where the sin began (2 Sam 16:21-22). Ineluctable justice assures that what is observed by God in private will now be exposed to the public eye, measure-for-measure. As the kingdom unravels, the sons come to mirror and intensify the transgressions of the father.
Yet, I would argue that the first of David’s “women” to suffer the punishment for his sins is his daughter, Tamar—raped by her half-brother, Amnon, the king’s firstborn son (2 Sam 13:1-21). The princess, at the very private, sequestered heart of the palace, is rendered vulnerable when she is sent to her brother’s sickbed under the assumption that she is “safe” under the auspices of royal family; Amnon’s position as prince provides cover. Furthermore, the taboo of incest may place Amnon beyond suspicion. Contemporary scholarship of sexual abuse within families provide insight into how sexual abuse is enabled by other family members within the household. Studies show that the perpetrator often relies on the inadvertent complicity of other close family members, who assume the daughter is safe in the house with the older brother, uncle, or grandfather. Jonadab, the “wise” or “clever” cousin, suggests that Amnon secure the consent of his unsuspecting father to provide cover for the fulfillment of his desire.
Amnon is distraught, sick with “love” for his sister Tamar, “for she was a virgin and it seemed impossible for [him] do anything to her” (2 Sam 13:2). So Jonadab, advises him to have the king, his father, send Tamar to his sickbed in order to prepare food and feed him. Under this ruse, Amnon violates her, implicating the king in his own daughter’s rape. Tamar is then condemned to live out the rest of her life in the house of her brother as a desolate woman (shomemah), never to marry or bear children. Her fate thus presents the most poignant critique of her father’s transgression. Just as David “took” the “daughter of Eliam,” Bathsheba (a married woman, forbidden to him), so Amnon “takes” Tamar by force and rapes her, she who is perhaps doubly forbidden to him as a virgin princess and his half-sister. In the shadow of the king’s transgression of boundaries, crossing the line of another man’s “home [bayit]” (wife), David’s own boundaries are violated through his children, in the confluence of the literal and figurative bayit—as palace, dynasty, and kingship.
The three rape narratives in the Hebrew Bible—the story of Dinah and Shechem (Gen 34), the concubine of Gibeah (Judg 19), and Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam 13)—subtly implicate the father in his daughter’s violation. Unaware of Amnon’s plot to feign illness, David sends Tamar to Amnon’s sickbed. Kneeling before him, she prepares his meal (vv. 6, 8). Amnon then sends all his servants out, forcibly takes hold of her, and pleads, “Come lie with me, my sister [b’oi shikhvi ‘imi biti]” (v. 11). Yet Tamar, unlike other victims of rape in the Hebrew Bible, is given voice by the narrative when she resists, saying, “No, my brother, do not force me; for such a thing is not done in Israel [ki l’o ye’asseh khen be-Yisrael]; do not do this outrage [‘al ta’asseh ‘et ha-nevalah ha-z’ot]! As for me, where could I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the scoundrels [nevelim] in Israel. Now therefore, I beg you, speak to the king; for he will not withhold me from you” (2 Sam 13:12-13). In a subtle, eloquent play on words, Tamar warns Amnon that if he were to do this outrage (nevalah)—associated with the collective shame the violated woman’s body would carry—he would be one of the scoundrels (nevelim), the ne’er-do-wells in Israel. Furthermore, in a desperate plea, Tamar suggests that (despite the incest taboo) the king would grant her to Amnon in marriage if he were to ask. Whether or not she would have been permitted is beside the point; the bid for time would cool his ardor and she might be released without (ever) being raped. The king is inserted as an alibi, as a defense for the defenseless, in a plea for the pause of conscience within the violent passion play. Yet, even as a virtual figure invoked by his daughter, the father cannot protect her.
After Amnon rapes Tamar, he is seized with a “loathing… even greater than the lust he had felt for her” (v. 15) and orders her out in two words, “Up, go [qumi, lekhi]!,” the inverse of his initial four-word plea, “Come, lie with me, my sister [b’oi shikhvi ‘imi biti]” (v. 11). Despite Tamar’s request that Amnon not shame her even further in this way (v. 16), he commands his servant to send (shlḥ) “this one [zo’t]” out (v. 17), echoing the summons (shlḥ) to inquire after the bathing beauty on the roof, “Is this [zo’t] not Bathsheba?” (11:3). Both as objects of lust and of loathing, the woman is reduced to the demonstrative pronoun, “this [zo’t]”; when she ceases to satisfy, she is thus more easily cast away. In the narrative and in her own plea, Amnon’s banishment of Tamar is deemed even more heinous than the sexual violation; she has little recourse as a victim of both rape and disgust at the hands of the king’s son. According to the law, the one who seduces or rapes a virgin out of wedlock must pay the bride-price and marry her (if the father approves), and he may never divorce (shlḥ) her (Exod 22:16-17; Deut 22:28-29). Yet, Amnon has his servant banish (shlḥ) Tamar from his chambers and lock the door behind her (v. 17). In response, she tears the ketonet passim, the long-sleeved cloak characteristic of virgin daughters of the king (vv. 18-19). The rending of the cloak foreshadows the rending of the fabric of the kingdom.
David, as father and king, not only fails to protect Tamar but does nothing when he hears of her violation (like Jacob in response to Dinah’s debasement) (2 Sam 13:5, 21; Gen 34:5, 30). So Absalom steps into the void. “Her brother Absalom said to her, ‘Has Amnon your brother been with you? Be quiet [he-ḥarishi] for now, my sister; he is your brother; do not take this to heart.’ So Tamar remained a desolate woman [shomemah] in her brother Absalom’s house. When King David heard of all these things, he became very angry, but he would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn” (2 Sam 13:20-21). Jacob’s silence upon hearing about his daughter Dinah’s defilement (va-heḥerish, Gen 34:5) is echoed in Absalom’s silencing of Tamar “Be quiet [he-ḥarishi].” One suggests passivity, the other intimates plotting. Jacob, in his silence essentially capitulates to his sons, whereas Absalom’s suppression of Tamar’s cries enables him to plan his revenge while also denying her the right to testify to her own violation. Furthermore, though incensed, David fails to discipline Amnon because, according to some versions of the text, “he loved him.” His indulgence of one son, passivity with regard to another, and utter disregard for his daughter highlight the corruption that has seized both king and kingdom alike.
In the patriarchal narratives and the history, both fathers are passive while it is the brothers who retaliate in response to their sisters’ rape. The mothers, Leah and Maacah, are conspicuously absent from the narrative as advocates for their daughters. Two years later, Absalom takes matters into his own hands and has his henchmen murder Amnon during a sheep-shearing feast to which he has invited all his half-brothers, the king’s sons (an invitation to which David is again made complicit, 2 Sam 13:20-39). Likewise, Simeon and Levi slaughter all the males of Shechem, for the son of Hamor “had committed an outrage [nevalah] in Israel [ki nevalah ‘assah ve-Yisrael] by lying with Jacob’s daughter, for such a thing ought not to be done [ken l’o ye’asseh]” (Gen 34:7). That particular combination of terms, “outrage [nevalah]” and “such is not done [ken l’o ye’asseh],” is used almost ubiquitously across rape narratives to foreground the honor/shame values undergirding the patriarchal social fabric (Deut 22:21; Judg 19:23, 24, 20:6, 10; 2 Sam 13:12). As feminist biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky pointed out, it is the male members of the household who control the chastity of the daughter and her violation; her own experience of shame is erased in deference to the family’s honor.
Though the brothers avenge the rape of their sister, there is no redemption for the daughter. Dinah disappears from the Genesis narrative. Tamar remains effectively silenced and “desolate [shomemah] in her brother Absalom’s house” (2 Sam 13:20). And the daughters of Jacob and David are never heard of again. They are merely removed from view as “abject” (Julia Kristeva’s term), neither subject nor object within the social and symbolic order.
The daughter as figura, however, regains her voice and returns from her abject status in the poetry of lament and the prophecy of consolation. As metaphor, literally that which “carries across” or “over,” Bat Tzion exceeds the social signification of the sign; she surpasses her role as daughter when she “speaks back to the prophets” (to borrow Carleen Mandolfo’s compelling phrase).
The Fate of Daughter Zion
Because Tamar is given such a poignant voice as a victim of sexual violence (despite Absalom’s silencing), she presents the sharpest embodied critique of both her father, King David, and of power politics within the kingdom. This critique is amplified in the resonance between the shared fate of Tamar and Bat Zion, as it echoes through the coded term desolate. After she is raped by her half-brother, Amnon, Tamar remains a “desolate [shomemah] in her brother Absalom’s house” (2 Sam 13:20). The Hebrew term sh.m.m. is deployed almost exclusively to refer to the devastation of home, city, or land—often as a consequence of the collective abrogation of the covenant. Yet, only here and in Second Isaiah (Isa 54:1), does the term shomemah in the Bible refer to a woman. The metaphor of the desolate woman, who is redeemed and bears children in the prophecy of consolation, transforms the images of Daughter Zion’s devastation in Lamentations, where the city gates are deserted (shommemim, Lam 1:4), her collective body laid desolate (shomemah, v. 13), and her children forlorn (shommemim, v. 16). While scholars have noted these intertextual parallels, few have noted the resonance with Tamar’s story. In reading Tamar and Bat Tzion in dialogic relationship, we not only deepen our understanding of the city’s personification but also enhance our reading of the King David story in tracing it forward to the fate of the city.
The personification of Zion as a daughter turns darkly upon itself in the poetry and prophecy of lament dating to the exilic period, when she (Jerusalem) is devastated, a victim of sexual violation at the hands of foreign nations (Isa 1:8; Lam 1:6, 2:1, 4, 8, 10, 13, 4:22). The mid-eighth-century prophet, Amos, first draws upon the motif of the “fallen maiden,” with regard to Israel (betulat Yisrael) in his lament for the northern kingdom; “forsaken on her land, with none to raise her up” (Amos 5:1-2; compare Jer 31:2, 4). Likewise, in Isaiah’s prophecy of doom against Jerusalem, Daughter Zion will be abandoned like a “booth [sukkah]” in the fields (Isa 1:8; compare Lam 2:6), a temporary dwelling exposed to wind and rain, her stone walls crumbling, her inner being exposed. Unguarded and under siege (ke-‘ir natzurah), the “faithful city has become a whore” (Isa 1:21). Her vulnerability and violation contrasts with the proud sense of her own invincibility, which she flaunted in the face of the Assyrian invasion. In Isaiah’s rebuke, the prophet turns the image of a princess who scorns and tosses her head (37:22) into a pauper, reduced to rags, exposed to the elements, and even raped.
In the book of Lamentations, multiple voices decry the destruction of the Temple and the banishment of the Judeans into captivity in 586 BCE. Initially, we see Jerusalem, once “thronged with people,” sitting alone as a widow, “noble among the nations, princess among provinces, she has become a forced laborer” (1:1). Like Tamar, who mourns with ashes on head and torn robe, crying aloud (2 Sam 13:19), the female persona weeps bitterly (Lam 1:2). Later, she is explicitly identified as Bat Tzion with “all her splendor [hadarah]… gone” (1:6). She is publicly humiliated and shamed. All who once admired her now despise her for they have “seen her nakedness” (v. 8), “her impurity [tum’atah] is in her skirts” (v. 9). As the lament unfolds, the narrator who bears witness to her degradation impugns her; she has brought this upon herself through her own sins (vv. 8-11a).
The imagery of sexual violation intensifies through the lament, alluding not only to the fate of the metaphorical city but to the female inhabitants as well (made explicit in 5:22). Women are often victims of rape in the context of war, and in this case, the enemy stretches out his hands, groping, “over all [of Bat Tzion’s] precious things [maḥmaddim],” as he “entered [ba’u]” her sanctuary (v. 10). Drawing on Hebrew literature scholar Alan Mintz, feminist Old Testament scholar Christl Maier argues that “the allusion to sexual intercourse hinges on the correspondence of woman//city, body//temple, and genitals//inner sanctuary in the passage.” Likewise, passages in Ezekiel blame the female figure for her own defilement and rape. Stripped, left naked and bare, and exposed for her harlotry and whoredom (Ezek 16:39, 23:29), the woman’s sexual “transgression” becomes a metaphor for the people’s apostasy. Like Tamar (2 Sam. 13:14), those who defiled her now despise her (Ezek 23:29). But unlike Tamar, Bat Tzion is initially implicated in her own violation.
Lamentations, however, does not wholly abandon the daughter to her shame and abject status. The tone of condemnation shifts after she is given her own voice. Speaking in first person, Bat Zion begs the outsider to bear testimony, to witness her suffering (not to scorn her). “Look, Yhwh, and see what a beggar I have become. May it not happen to you, all you who pass by. Look, see: Is there any pain like my pain, which befell me, which Yhwh made me suffer on the day of his anger. From on high he sent fire into my bones, and he brought it down. He spread a net for my feet and he held me back. He made me desolate [shomemah], all day long languishing” (1:11b-13). When Bat Zion “talks back to the prophets,” chafing against the misogynist tropes of Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the reader’s compassion is stirred. This is integral to the anti-theodic tendency in Lamentations. While the history and earlier prophecies explain the fate of Zion in terms of divine retribution, the lament genre resists that discourse. The people’s suffering through hunger, sexual violation, enslavement, or death, and their banishment into exile is not conveyed merely in terms of God’s ineluctable justice.
Over the course of Lam 2, in the voice of the narrator, we see an intensification of sympathy with the daughter, variously referred to as Daughter (Fair or Dear) Zion (Bat Tzion), Daughter (or Fair) Judah [Bat Yehudah], and Daughter, My People [bat ‘ami]. After the acrostic litany of destruction (at God’s hand) of the city citadel, strongholds, walls, and ramparts and a gruesome account of starvation, with children and babies collapsing in the city square and dying in their mother’s arms (2:11-12), the narrator finally calls out for a witness and a source of consolation. “How can I affirm you (or bear witness to you [‘a’idekh]), what can I liken to you, Dear [bat] Jerusalem? What can I compare to you so that I may console you, Dear Maiden Zion [Betulat Bat Tzion]? For as vast as the sea is your devastation. Who can heal you?” (2:13). The call to witness and to comparison draws Daughter Zion out of her isolation, like the contemporary answer of #IBelieveYou and #MeToo to victims of sexual assault. It is the call, ultimately, to hear the daughter’s charge—a sequel to Tamar, set up by her father, raped by one brother, and silenced by another. Though she remains publicly scorned—passersby clap their hands, “whistle at [her,] and wag their heads” (2:15), decrying the loss of her beauty—the narrator finally acknowledges that Yhwh has more than fulfilled his punitive decree, and she is now “more sinned against than sinning.”
Finally, the narrator adjures her to call out to God in a desperate plea for compassion:
Their heart cried out to Yhwh. Wall of Dear Zion [Bat Tzion], let tears stream down like a torrent day and night. Give yourself no rest, your eyes no respite. Arise, cry aloud at night, at the beginning of every watch. Pour out your heart like water before the presence of Yhwh. Raise your hands towards him for the lives of your little children, collapsing from starvation on every corner. See, Yhwh, and look, to whom you have done this. Should women eat their own fruit, the little children they care for? Should priests and prophets be killed in Yhwh’s sanctuary? (2:18-20).
This is the turning point, when the ultimate biological bond between mother and child is broken in the horrors of starvation. God’s paternal, punitive hand against his daughter is finally stayed, and the reader is granted a hint of consolation, “Your punishment is completed, Dear Zion [Bat Tzion]. He will not keep you exiled any longer” (4:22). The lament ends on a call for God’s return or restoration, “Take us back [hashivenu], Yhwh, to yourself; O let us come back [ve-nashuvah]. Make us again as we were before” (5:21). The demand is that God make the first move toward restitution or return (hashivenu) in bringing the exiles home; only then might they return (ve-nashuvah) to God. The princess—once desolate, abject, and removed from the social order—now asks to be restored.
The Daughter’s Redemption
In later prophecies of consolation and return, the daughter (Bat Tzion or Bat Yerushalayim) is promised full restoration, a return to her former joy. No longer would the defiled and uncircumcised enter her (Isa 52:1), no longer would she be held as a “captive daughter” (v. 2); instead, God would deliver her (Isa 62:11) and come to dwell in her midst (Isa 52:8; Mic 4:2, 7-8; Zech 2:10), as in the original Tabernacle (Exod 25:8). She is then called upon to sing aloud and rejoice (Zeph 3:14; Zech 2:10, 9:9). These prophecies anticipate (or are coterminous with) the period of the “return to Zion” (Shivat Tzion), after the conquest of the neo-Babylonian Empire and the decree of the Persian king, Cyrus, that the Jews could return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple (539 BCE). Most importantly, Zion as the figurative daughter is depicted as a barren or desolate woman who is summoned to shout out, to burst into song, in the passage that opens Isa 54, one of the seven Haftarot of Consolation (tanchumim) in Jewish liturgy following the Ninth of Av. In this consolation, the ravaged daughter, the virgin princess, Tamar—raped by one brother, then avenged but silenced by another—is figuratively provided with a redemptive ending to her story.
Sing out, you barren woman, who has borne no child;
Break out in shouts of joy, you who have never been in labor!
For the children of the wife who has been made desolate [shomemah]
will outnumber those of the wife with a husband [be’ulah]…
Yhwh has summoned you back
Like a wife once forsaken [‘azuvah] and sad at heart,
A wife still young, though once rejected,
Says your God.
For a brief space of time I forsook you,
But with love overflowing [u-veraḥamim, womb-compassion][109] I will bring you back.
In an outburst of anger I hid my face from you a while,
But with love never failing I have pitied you,
Says Yhwh, your Redeemer. (Isa 54:1, 6-8)
Though never addressed by name in this passage, most scholars agree that the female figure stands for Bat Tzion. At last, God admits to having abandoned her (in response to her accusation, “Yhwh has deserted me [‘azavani]; my lord has forgotten me” in Isa 49:14). The image of the abandoned woman, taken back in love, resonates with Hosea’s prophecy against Israel (Hos chs. 1-2) and Jeremiah’s question, “Can a woman who has whored with many lovers, return to her husband?” (Jer 3:1). However, in Hosea, the woman’s restoration only follows a period of severe abuse (2:4-15, MT). Isaiah likewise alludes to a period of forced separation, but does not mention other lovers or liaisons before the reunion of husband and wife. Furthermore, instead of characterizing her as faithless, Zion is portrayed as abandoned—barren, abandoned, desolate, rejected—like the barren matriarchs of Genesis (‘aqarot), the abandoned married women or “grass widows” (‘almanut ḥayut) of the history, and the desolate daughter of David, Tamar (shomemah). It is this critique, of not only the strictures of patriarchy but also God’s ineluctable justice, that Bat Tzion and these female figures articulate. The deflection away from the principle of divine retribution, and the turn toward God’s acknowledgment of his rash anger—”in an outburst of anger I hid my face from you a while” (Isa 54: 8)—presents an alternative theodicy. Ultimately, the daughters’ debasement (both literal and figurative) implicates the fathers (and “the Father”). In the prophecies of consolation, the message to the woman, Bat Tzion, is not framed in terms of sin and punishment—”she deserved it”—but, rather, acknowledges her anti-theodic claim that her suffering far exceeded the bounds of strict justice. The return, when God responds to the plea “take us back [hashivenu]” (Lam 5:26), entails a feminization of the divine rather than a rejection or sidelining of the mother. God then takes on the maternal attributes of womb-compassion for Bat Tzion, saying “As a mother comforts her child so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted, in Jerusalem” (Isa 66:13; compare Jer 31:20).
As feminist readers, what do we make of these stories of women’s debasement and their consequent abjection—the story of Dinah’s debasement, the gang rape of the concubine of Gibeah, Amnon’s rape of Tamar, and the fate of Bat Tzion? Do we adhere only to a reading of the biblical text within its historical context—where the daughter is an extension of the father’s control—or do we open ourselves up to her agency, her voice as challenging paternal power or passivity? These narratives were not intended to applaud women’s oppression and silence the victims but rather to convey the full horror of the women’s violation. Frymer-Kensky maintains that “these stories are frequently told as critiques of the social situations that they portray.” She urges the contemporary reader to “read with a ‘hermeneutics of grace,’ a method of interpretation that recognizes the basic decency and well-meaning character of the biblical authors,” but warns that “if we tell the biblical stories about women without taking note of the social system that gives them symbolic value, and naming its inequities, then we unwittingly help to perpetuate the skewed system that the Bible assumes.”
The protected status of the daughter and her vulnerability undergird the rape stories, given that, in the patriarchal world of the Bible, she is under the aegis of her father and deprived of sexual agency in betrothal and marriage. Yet, it is precisely because the daughter is under his control, either as a literary trope or as a character and agent in her own right, that she presents the most searing critique of the integrity of his household. So, the rape of Tamar is the beginning of the unraveling of David’s household—one by one, his sons sin “in the image of the father” and fall. She is given voice—repeatedly she says, “Don’t!” We hear her voice resound against not only her violator, Amnon, but also her father, King David, and indeed, the entire kingdom. Bat Tzion serves as a theological sequel to Tamar. Here, God, in contrast to the mortal king, responds to the daughter’s call in Second Isaiah, through the prophecies of consolation. By exposing the patriarchal assumptions embedded in the text and inviting the women to speak from between the lines of the narrative, we can transform Tamar from an object of male abuse into a subject of feminist critique. Yet, I want to end with a cautionary note, wary of concluding with a “happy,” redemptive ending that might reinforce the paternalism imbedded in the metaphor of figurative daughter and elide the anguish of the very real, vulnerable, and violated daughters under the aegis of patriarchy.