¹ For example, Gen 38:8.

² Smith, William Robertson, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1903; 2d ed.; Boston: Beacon, 1972) 199.Google Scholar The first edition was published in 1885. Smith followed his friend John FergusonMcLennan (Primitive Marriage [Edinburgh:Black, 1865]), in defining “beena marriage” broadly as any form of union in which “the woman remained with her kin and chose or dismissed her partner at will, the children belonging to the mother's kin and growing up under their protection” (Kinship and Marriage, 87). It was also McLennan who first suggested the relevance of “beena marriage” to biblical interpretation. See his The Patriarchal Theory (ed., McLennan, Donald; London: Macmillan, 1885) 35–50.Google Scholar Also see Morgenstern, Julian, “Beena Marriage (Matriarchat) in Ancient Israel and Its Historical Implications,” ZAW 47(1929) 91–110;Google Scholar, idem, “Additional Notes on Beena Marriage (Matriarchat)in Ancient Israel,” ZAW 49 (1931) 46–58Google Scholar.

³ Most notable is feminist literary critic Mieke Bal'sconjectural history of Israelite gender and kinship patterns in her otherwise provocative book, Death and Dissymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 85–93.Google Scholar Arguments for the practice of “beena marriage” in ancient Israel were already discounted by Burrows, Millar, “The Complaint of Laban's Daughters,” JAOS 57 (1937) 259–76;Google Scholar and Vaux, Roland de, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) 28–29.Google Scholar For current documentary and archaeological evidence on the nature of Israelite kinship, see Westbrook, Raymond, Property and the Family in Biblical Law (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991);Google ScholarStager, Lawrence, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” BASOR 260 (1985) 1–35Google Scholar.

⁴ Most evolutionary scholars of the day considered matrilineal organization, including beena marriage, to be an intermediate stage between chaotic “primitive promiscuity,” in which no stable bonds of descent were recognized, and well-ordered “patriarchy,” in which theprinciple of blood descent from the father was first recognized and then adoptedas themost natural basis for social organization. Indeed, a common presumption was that patriarchy would everywhere tend to supplant matriarchy, once the fact of blood descent “through the stronger parent” became widely recognized (, McLennan, Patriarchal Theory, 217).Google Scholar McClennan and others held to a reductionist and ethnocentric literalism, which allowed them to identify the immutable “facts of kinship” with a Euro-American rhetoric of shared blood whose metaphoric basis went unrecognized. Anykinship system that departed from Euro-American norms (through matrilineal descent, for example) was subsequently identified with mere “ideas about kinship” and associated with primitive ignorance of the blood relation. See Schneider, David M., A Critique of the Study of Kinship (.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 165–77Google Scholar.

⁵ Trautmann, Thomas R., Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 73.Google Scholar

⁶ One of the accusations leveled against positivist philology and related trends in both biblical and orientalist scholarship has been their presumption that “the linguistic sign and the real signified can be madedirectly to correspond without any mediation,” thereby discounting the necessity of interpretive labor. “Semantics thus gives way to an abstract lexicalism, and the unfounded supposition is made that the meanings of words, of terms…no less than of dogmas, of texts, and of statements, are univocal andcan therefore be uncovered once their origin has been exposed.” Al-Azmeh, Aziz, Islams and Modernities (New York: Verso,1993) 135.Google Scholar Along similar lines, see Alter, Robert, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: Norton., 1996) ix–xxxixGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Sternberg, Meir, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985) 11.Google Scholar A useful discussion of the relationship between poetics and historical readings of the biblical text (in particular source and form critical readings) appears in Berlin, Adele, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983) 111–34Google Scholar.

⁸ , Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 11.Google Scholar

⁹ As , Berlin (Poetics and Interpretation, 14–17)Google Scholar notes, poetic analysis “aims to find the building blocks of literature andthe rules by which they are assembled… If we know how texts mean, we are in a better position to discover what a particular text means” (author's emphasis). There is no reason to presume that these rules are universally intelligible, however, which is why a culturally specific account iscalled for. See , Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 10Google Scholar.

¹⁰ To be sure, these two approaches ought to be seen as complementary. On the anthropological use of poetic analysis, see Herzfeld, Michael, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan MountainVillage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);Google ScholarBauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles L., “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990) 59–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ The importance of oppositional motifs to the patriarchalnarratives has been explored by Fishbane, Michael, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle (Gen. 25:19-35:22),” JJS 26 (1975) 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The use of interiority and exteriority as metaphors for gender and national oppositions has been well documented in comparative ethnographic literature. See Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, “Mixed Metaphors: Native and Anthropological Models of Gender and Kinship Domains,” in Collier, Jane and Yanagisako, Sylvia, eds., Gender and Kinship: Essays Towarda Unified Analysis (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1987) 86–118;Google ScholarHerzfeld, Michael, “Within and Without: The Category of ‘Female’ in the Ethnography of Modern Greece,” in Dubisch, Jill, ed., Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 215–34;Google ScholarArdener, Shirley, “Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women,” in Ardener, Shirley, ed., Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (Oxford: Berg, 1993) 1–30;Google ScholarDelaney, Carol, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology inTurkish Village Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).Google Scholar Also, see , Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 169–96Google Scholar.

¹² Austin, John L., How to Do Things withWords (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Cultural representations and literary images participatein the construction of social reality and can never be presumed simply to represent “the way things are.” This is especially true of representationsdrawn from ancient texts, for which corroborative evidence may not be available.See Black, Alison H., “Gender and Cosmology,” in Bynum, Caroline, Harrell, Steven and Richman, Paula, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon, 1986) 166–95;Google ScholarCorrington, Gail Paterson, “The Milk of Salvation: Redemption by the Mother in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity,” HTR 82 (1989) 393–420;Google ScholarPollock, Susan, “Women in a Men's World: Images of Sumerian Women,” in Gero, Joan M. and Conkey, Margaret, eds., Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (London: Blackwell, 1991) 366–87Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Gen 13:12.

¹⁵ Gen 18:6; 31:33-35.

¹⁶ Gen 4:20; 25:27. See Sarna, Nahum, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989) 181Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Gen 24:63-65; 25:27-29; 30:14-16.

¹⁸ Gen 18:18.

¹⁹ Gen 18:1.

²⁰ Gen 18:6-10; 24:65-67; 30:14-17.

²¹ Gen 18:1-2, my emphasis. Biblical translations are basedon the New JPS version, but have been altered toward less idiomatic, more literal renderings where this makes poetic usage clearer. Otherwise, all Hebrew translations in this essay are my own.

²² Gen 18:6-10, my emphasis.

²³ This disjunction of viewpoints is not uncommon in biblical narrative. Facilitating it here is the focalizing construction “Behold, in the tent,” which draws the reader into assuming the speaker's “spatial and psychological point of view.” , Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation, 64–69Google Scholar.

²⁴ This poetic device was already identified by Solomon, Ephraim of Luntshitz in his commentary Keli Yakar (Lublin, 1602),Google Scholar but seems to have been ignored by modern commentators. , Sarna, for instance (Genesis, 130),Google Scholar follows the medieval commentator Rashbam, in arguing that the question “Where is Sarah your wife?” was actually just a rhetorical device for starting a conversation with Abraham. Luntshitz, bycontrast, notes that the question oflocation often serves to call our attention to a Biblical actor's moral state. An example is Gen 3:9, where the question asked of Adam, “Whereare you?” elicits a response concerning his fear and guilt before God. My own reading departs from that of Luntshitz, however, in suggesting that Sarah's problematic interiority points not so much to her “modesty” (the midrashic reading), as to the problematic nature of her position with regard to motherhood, discussed below.

²⁵ These are the renderings of RSV and the New JPSV, respectively.

²⁶ 1Sam 1:5; Job 3:10.

²⁷ Gen 29:31; 30:22.

²⁸ Gen 19:6; Exod 12:23. See Speiser, Ephraim A., Genesis (AB 1; New York: Doubleday, 1964) 139;Google ScholarSarna, Nahum, Exodus (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991) 60Google Scholar.

²⁹ Gen 16:2; 20:18; 1 Sam 1:5; Job 3:10. All of these verses are cited by Driver, Samuel Rolles and Gray, George Buchanan, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1977) 35Google Scholar.

³⁰ Lev 13:4; 14:38. For the background to this formulation, see Milgrom, Jacob, Leviticus 1-16 (AB 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991 ) 779, 816-24, 871Google Scholar.

³¹ Ezek 3:24-27. See Greenberg, Moshe, Ezekiel 1-20 (A B 22; New York: Doubleday,1983) 120–21Google Scholar.

³² Compare BDB, s.v. , 688b-89a with s.v. , 834b-35a.

³³ Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1977) 120- 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ Ibid., 92.

³⁵ Gen 18:6.

³⁶ Sarna, Nahum (Understanding Genesis [New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 1966] 132)Google Scholar goes so far as to discount any meaningful comparison between biblical and non-biblical forms of circumcision. He has been vigorously challenged by Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, (The Savage in Judaism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990] 141–76),Google Scholar who argues that biblical circumcision is a “natural symbol” of male fertility and patrilineal descent. For an anthropological critique of this position see, however, Goldberg, Harvey, “Cambridge in the Land of Canaan: Descent, Alliance, Circumcision, and Instruction in the Bible,” JANES 24 (1996) 9–34.Google Scholar Goldberg argues that one must understand biblical circumcision in light of the tension that exists in biblical narrative between descent and alliance (or covenant) as principles of social organization. Covenant is typically invoked in opposition to the principle of patrilineal descent, but is then transformed into a hereditary principle (1 Sam 20:29). Unlike patrilineal descent, the principle of alliance depends explicitly on the role of women and of correct marriage, as wellas of memory (of the covenant) in making social reproduction possible. As a markof covenant, therefore, circumcision relates to fertility in a more complex, culturally ramified way than Eilberg-Schwartz suggests. See Goldberg'ssubtle reading of the Abraham story in this regard.

³⁷ This also is one of the explicit meanings given to male circumcision by the north Sudanese villagers among whom Janice Boddy conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the 1980s. Boys become men through the removal of “enclosing” flesh, which is considered more appropriate to women. Boddy, Janice, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the ZarCult in Northern Sudan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) 56Google Scholar.

³⁸ Also see Rashi's gloss to Ex 6:12.

³⁹ On the importance of the “correct” mother tocovenantal transmission, see Donaldson, Mara E., “Kinship Theory in the Patriarchal Narratives: The Case ofthe Barren Wife,” JAAR 49 (1981) 77–87.Google Scholar See also , Goldberg, “Cambridge in the Land of Canaan.”Google Scholar

⁴⁰ , Sarna (Genesis,129)Google Scholar unwittingly replicates thispoetic usage when he writes that “Abraham's openhearted, liberal hospitality to the total strangers knew no bounds.”

⁴¹ Gen 18:11-14.

⁴² Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney, “Sarah and the Hyena: Laughter, Menstruation, and the Genesis of a Double Entendre,” HR 36 (1996) 13–41.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ibid., 28.

⁴⁴ Gen 18:11.

⁴⁵ , Sarna, Genesis, 130.Google Scholar Also see Greenfield, Jonas C., “A Touch of Eden,” Acta Iranica 23 (1984) 219–24;Google ScholarMillard, Alan R., “The Etymology of Eden,” VT 34 (1984) 103–6Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ See Gen. R 48.17.

⁴⁷ , Stetkevych, “Sarah and the Hyena,” 34.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ BDB, s.v. ;, 783b. Also see , Driver and , Gray, Job, 35Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1966). For a somewhat different elaboration, seeCrossRefGoogle Scholar, Eilberg-Schwartz (Savage in Judaism, 177–94),Google Scholar who posits a structural opposition between (purifying) circumcision and (defiling) menstruation, whichdoes not easily apply to this Genesis narrative.

⁵⁰ There are also regional ethnographic parallels to the association between menstruation and metaphoric “opening” of women. As in the Bible, however, the local evaluation of such openness remains context dependent, and is sometimes ambivalent, although not necessarily negative. See , Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits, 66–75;Google Scholar, Delaney, The Seed and the Soil, 87–92Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Gen 24:65-67, my emphasis.

⁵² , Sarna, Genesis, 170.Google Scholar

⁵³ Gen R. 50.16.

⁵⁴ , Morgenstern, “Additional Notes,” 51–52.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Donaldson, “Kinship Theory in the Patriarchal Narratives.” Fishbane (“Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle”) notes that the precariousness of “birth, blessing, and inheritance” are dominant themes in the patriarchal narratives.

⁵⁶ Gen 30:14-17, my emphasis.

⁵⁷ This poetic construct of fertility can be usefully compared with that described by Delaney (The Seed and the Soil), in which women represent the passive earth into which male procreative power (seed) must be deposited for growth.

⁵⁸ Moldenke, Harold N. and Moldenke, Alma L., Plants of the Bible (Waltham, MA: Botanica, 1952) 137;Google Scholar, Speiser, Genesis, 231Google Scholar; , Sarna, Genesis, 209Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Gen 29:31; 30:22.

⁶⁰ Gen 24:67.

⁶¹ , Smith, Kinship and Marriage, 199–201.Google Scholar Also , Morgenstern, “Additional Notes,” 48–50.Google Scholar One of my reviewers has chided me for ignoring “the more obvious referenceto sexual intercourse” apparent in this usage. I would argue, however, that the implication of sexual engagement is just one possible elaboration of the interior poetics (i.e. intimacy, fertility, continuity and blessing) that I have been discussing.

⁶² Bal, Mieke, Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre and Scholarship on Sisera's Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 66.Google Scholar

⁶³ See , Fishbane, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle.”Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Gen 25:23.

⁶⁵ , Speiser, Genesis, 196.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Ibid., 195.

⁶⁷ Gen 30:14-17.

⁶⁸ , Herzfeld, “Category of ‘Female,’” 215–34.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Ibid., 217.

⁷⁰ On the Hebrew Bible's negative assessment of hunters, see , Sarna, Genesis, 181.Google Scholar On the ambivalence of Jacob's portrayal in this passage, see , Fishbane, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle,” 16Google Scholar.

⁷¹ , Herzfeld, “Category of ‘Female,’” 219.Google Scholar

⁷² Gen 27:15; 48:19.

⁷³ This is not, of course, a representational strategy limited to the Hebrew Bible. See , Ardener, “Women and Space,” 11Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Gen 34:1-7.

⁷⁵ , Sarna (Genesis, 233)Google Scholar argues on the basis of Akkadian and Aramaic parallels that the verb “to goout” used of Dinah actually connotes “coquettish or promiscuous conduct” even in biblical usage. Certainly, this has been the reading of many Jewish and Christian commentators. The printed edition of Midrash TanhumaGen 34:1 labels Dinah a “gadabout” (). The prevalent concern in classical Jewish texts with an interior/exterior opposition, however, is transformed by Luther, Martin (Lectures on Genesis [Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1970] 193)Google Scholar into a characteristically modern distinction between public and private spheres, in which Dinah is criticized for abandoning her “domestic” role, rather than for leaving the house per se. On the importance of this distinction, see , Yanigisako, “Mixed Metaphors”. One of the few exceptions to this interpretive trend is Isaac Abrabanel (Venice, 1505),Google Scholar who argues that the text itself declares Dinah's motive to have been a chaste one: “to see the daughters of the land” (Gen 34:1).

⁷⁶ , Speiser, Genesis,268.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Abrabanel suggests this reading.

⁷⁸ , Sarna (Genesis, 234)Google Scholar has made a similar observation.

⁷⁹ Gen 34:25.

⁸⁰ On the importance of this theme to the Jacob cycle as a whole, see , Fishbane, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle,” 35–36Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Gen 34:2, 5, 13, 27. Similar cultural dynamics have been analyzed by Douglas, Purity and Danger; Dubisch, Jill, “Culture Enters Through the Kitchen: Women, Food and Social Boundaries in Rural Greece,” in Dubisch, Jill, ed., Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 195–214;Google Scholar, Boddy, Wombs, 47–122Google Scholar.

⁸² Pitt-Rivers, Julian, The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge Studies and Papers in Social Anthropology 19; London: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar A similar reading is offered by Abrabanel, who explains that the honor of Jacob and his sons would have been compromised by failing to exact vengeance because it would have appeared “as if Dinah had no redeemers” (that is, male kin capable of exercising force to keep her from being taken by outsiders). Lackof strong male kin would perforce have transformed Dinah into a zonah, a woman who is considered free for the taking. The brothers had to risk death, writes Abrabanel, because “death with honor is better than a life of dishonorand shame.”

⁸³ Pitt-Rivers was misled by his reliance on Levi-Strauss to frame this argument within a conjectural history of kinship systems in ancientIsrael. He deductively argued (with no corroborating evidence) that the incidentof Dinah and Shechem represents the literary record of a transition between “elementary structures of kinship,” in which women are freely “exchanged” between groups, and “political marriage,” which is defined by a strategic concern for the maintenance of endogamy. See Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (trans. Sturmer, J. R. von and Needham, R.; London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1969.Google ScholarHerzfeld, Michael (“The Horns of the Mediterraneanist Dilemma,” American Ethnologist 11 [1984] 439–54),CrossRefGoogle Scholar among others, has called into question Pitt-Rivers's pan-Mediterranean theorizing.

⁸⁴ Gen 34:24-27

⁸⁵ , Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 209.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ , Sarna, Genesis, 237Google Scholar; , Speiser, Genesis, 265Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ , Sarna, Genesis, 237.Google Scholar, Sternberg (The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 456)Google Scholar writes that “the verb accumulates a range of connotations, so that each new appearance looks back to all the different and/or analogous meanings packed into its mates.”

⁸⁸ Gen 34:27.

⁸⁹ Gen 34:27-29, my emphasis.

⁹⁰ , Herzfeld, “Category of ‘Female,’” 216–17.Google Scholar

⁹¹ See , Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation, 112, 121.Google Scholar

⁹² For example, Exod 33:7-11.

⁹³ Judg 4:5; 13:9.