Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women

Bathsheba, Michal, Naomi, Delilah--these women play a relatively small role in the Hebrew bible, yet are by-words in our culture, because, as Exum puts it, they have been plotted, shot, and painted. Plotted, in that they have been subjects in literary (or popular) written works; shot--subjects of film; and painted--by artists from early medieval times to the present. The argument she makes is that these representations have very little to do with the biblical narrative, but almost all to do with how various cultures and times put a "spin" on the narrative, which is often ambiguous. However, au fond, Exum is a feminist, so her approach is not without its particular bias. Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 might be considered by some as victim of royal rape. "David sent messengers and took her. She came to him and he lay with her, while she was purifying herself from her uncleanness. Then she returned to her house." But she is not seen as a victim in the 1951 film, David and Bathsheba and the later, 1985 film, King David. Rather, she comes across as a temptress who bathed naked on her roof with full knowledge that David watched her. The former version follows scripture in that David succumbs to her wiles and commits adultery. The latter essentially contradicts scripture and has no hanky-panky until after David and Bathsheba are married--David does arrange to get rid of Uriah who was an abusive husband. So much for Hollywood. So far so good. It can be argued that the Hollywood spin is really the old patriarchal attitudes rearing their ugly heads. As Athanasius had preached, women should not frequent public baths, not because they might be raped, but because the naked female body would invariably arouse men to lust and cause their moral corruption. Bathsheba, because she washed her body, defiled another's [David's] soul. Classic blame the victim. Exum goes on to say that biblical scholars have generally drawn similar conclusions, and are not far from Athanasius. And Exum, the feminist, goes even farther. The original author of Samuel 11, after all, made the decision to portray Bathsheba in a act of washing, presumably naked, thus turning the reader into a voyeur, and shifting the blame from David to the Woman.. He could have simply said that David saw the woman and found her attractive. So there seems to be a seamless strand of androcentric spin from the original authors of scripture to the Hollywood moguls. The same kind of analysis is done for the biblical figures of Michal, Naomi, Miriam, Moses' mother, Jochebed, and another temptress figure, Delilah. In discussing the latter (in the chapter over-cutely entitled, "Why, Why, Why Delilah?" ) Exum provides two sets of analyses. Delilah "painted" addresses the question of whether she was a Philistine prostitute (the biblical account does not state that she is either--again, ambiguity allows the reader to choose an image. Western culture has pretty well accepted the idea tha