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AUSTRALIAN BIBLICAL REVIEW
ISSN 0045-0308 |
BOOK REVIEW Published in Volume 50, 2002
F. C. Black, R. Boer & E. Runions (eds), The Labour of
Reading: Desire, Alienation and Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1999)
The Labour of Reading is a collection of essays in honour of
Robert C. Culley on his retirement. Referring to the work (rather than
the bringing to birth) of an interpretation, the notion of ‘labour’ forms
a broad umbrella under which a variety of readings and reading practices
are gathered. The introduction includes a helpful biography and bibliography
for those unfamiliar with Culley and his work. In a variety of ways, the
essays in this volume successfully exemplify Culley’s interest in the ways
“theory works in the reading of texts” and his concern for “the production
of plausible new angles on the biblical text in question” (p. 7).
Under the heading “Pleasurable Labour/Laborious Pleasure”, Part 1 begins
with Francis Landy’s “Seraphim and Poetic Process”, an intertextual encounter
with the occurrences of ‘seraphim’ in Isa. 6:1–7; 14:28–32; 30:6 and Num.
21:4–9. Fiona C. Black, “What Is My Beloved? On Erotic Reading and the
Song of Songs”, and J. Cheryl Exum ”In the Eye of the Beholder: Wishing,
Dreams and Double Entendre in the Song of Songs” stand as companion
pieces concerned with ‘readerly relationships to the Song of Songs’ (p.
36). These essays frame Adele Reinhartz, “To Love the Lord: An Intertextual
Reading of John 20”, focusing on the figure of Mary Magdalene in a reading
that labours pleasurably with intertexts from Genesis 3 and 16 and from
the Song of Songs. Reinhartz argues for an alternative authority structure
in John 20 to that ‘which plays upon the text’s surface’ (p. 67). Robert
R. Robinson, “Sing Us One of the Songs of Zion: Poetry and Theology in
the Hebrew Bible” helpfully considers the theological effects of biblical
poetry, but his conclusion that ‘poetry simplifies?by bringing order to
experience’ (p. 105) is both unsatisfying and unconvincing.
The final three essays of Part 1 turn to intersections between the Bible
and relationship to ‘place’. Susan Slater, “Imagining Arrival: Rhetoric,
Reader, and Word of God in Deuteronomy 1–3” describes how in the act of
reading the dream of coming home is repeatedly evoked while the ‘homecoming’
itself is simultaneously deferred. What happens when the ‘homecoming’ is
enacted? David M. Gunn’s “Yearning for Jerusalem: Reading Myth on the Web”
offers an important analysis of the way in which the use of biblical (proof)
texts on the Israel Foreign Ministry Home Page is symptomatic of an imaginative
framework of romance, ‘which may indeed empower, yet blind the yearning
subject to an Other subject’s “country”’ (p. 138). In a different way,
Burke O. Long, ”Reading the Land: Holy Land as Text of Witness” looks at
how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries biblical texts
formed a lens through which European and North American Christians constructed
Palestine as an object of desire.
Where the essays of Part 1 moved from the pleasure of reading and the
reading of pleasure to a focus on the ways in which certain readings are
implicated in readers’ material relationships to lands, the heading of
Part 2, “Writers, Power and the Alienation of Labour” signals a stronger
focus on oppression and justice. Roland Boer’s “David is a Thing” and David
Jobling’s “A Bettered Woman: Elisha and the Shunammite in the Deuteronomic
Work” represent different approaches to the trope of Davidic kingship.
While Boer’s reading focuses on the symbolic operation of monarchy, Jobling
considers the narrative treatment of the Shunammite woman as a key moment
in the textual repression of the ideal of egalitarian Israel. Susan Niditch,
“Reading Story in Judges 1” reads the multifaceted character of Judges
1 in relation to the ambivalent nature of ancient Israelite identity. Norman
K. Gottwald, “Icelandic and Israelite Beginnings: A Comparative Probe”
offers an inter-reading of Icelandic and Israelite beginnings. John Van
Seters, “On Reading the Story of the Man of God from Judah in 1 Kings 13”
argues that at times readerly difficulties with a particular text may reflect
a “lack of literary skill by the author” (p. 233). John Dominic Crossan,
“The Labour of Sharing” reads comparatively between Matthew, Luke, the
Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas to suggest an ethic of distributive
justice that “has its roots in the Jewish God” (p. 235).
In different contexts, Gary A. Phillips, “The Killing Fields of Matthew’s
Gospel” and Pamela J. Milne, “Labouring with Abusive Biblical Texts: Tracing
Trajectories of Misogyny” consider the ongoing legacies of violence in
the reading of the biblical text. Both Phillips’ evocation of the Holocaust
and Milne’s response to feminist labours of reading raise significant questions
for an ethics of reading. Erin Runions, “Playing it Again: Utopia, Contradiction,
Hybrid Space and the Bright Future in Micah” engages Bhabha to confront
and “revision” the colonising potential of the text.
Finally, Edward Greenstein, “In Job’s Face/Facing Job”, presents parallel
readings of Job in two columns, visually confronting the reader with the
choice of how to read Job in reading Job. Thus the selection concludes
with this destabilising of the reader. More than a focus on the work of
interpretation, what holds together this eclectic mix of essays is a sensitivity
to the ways in which texts work on readers, a taste for intertextuality,
and a feeling for the material effects of biblical interpretation. Of particular
note are those essays, such as Gunn’s, which emphasise the ways in which
the text, its interpretations and its interpreters have material effects
on the bodies and lands of others.
Review by
Dr Anne Elvey
Centre for Women’s Studies
School of Political and Social Inquiry
Monash University
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