Soundings in Cultural Criticism

Perspectives and Methods in Culture, Power, and Identity in the New Testament

Francisco Lozada Jr., Greg Carey, Francisco Lozada, Greg Carey

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780800698003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451426311
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

A number of disciplines aligned under "cultural criticism" have changed the shape of contemporary biblical studies not only by offering new methods but by questioning old goals and proposing new ones. Soundings in Cultural Criticism offers a collection of succinct essays in these fields by some of the foremost scholars in New Testament studies. Questions of historical reconstruction, textual interpretation, and present cultural deployment are addressed in an ideal second textbook for New Testament courses.

Textual Interpretation

4

The Dog-Woman of Canaan and Other Animal Tales from the Gospel of Matthew

Stephen D. Moore

Narrative time distorts severely and queerly in the Canaanite woman episode of Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28).^[1] The unnamed woman is a grotesquely distended character, as we shall see, impossibly stretched between a remote past and a distant future. First, her name, which, of course, is not a proper name, but rather an archaic designation: “Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out” (15:22).^[2] Matthew has changed Mark’s gynē…Hēllēnis, Syrophoinikissa tō genei (“[the] woman . . . a Greek, Syrophoenician by birth”), terms already bristling with ethnic valence,^[3] to gynē Chanaia (“a Canaanite woman”), an epithet more redolent of ethnic violence.^[4] It has been suggested, perhaps implausibly, that “Canaanite” was a Phoenician self-designation when this Gospel was written.^[5] What is more certain is that the term opens vertiginously onto a scriptural temporal trajectory that extends steeply backward through the conquest narratives and the exodus and wilderness narratives to the patriarchal narratives and the primeval history.

It is impossible in principle to say which of the approximately 170 instances of “Canaan” or “Canaanite” in Jewish scripture swirled about in our implied author’s brain as he made his terminological substitution, but it is tempting to speculate. For instance, the Matthean Jesus encounters the woman in the region not just of Tyre, as in Mark 7:24, but of Tyre and Sidon (Matt. 15:21), and according to the postdiluvian genealogy, “Canaan [was] the father of Sidon” (Gen. 10:15; cf. 1 Chr. 1:13). Consequently, “the territory of the Canaanites extended from Sidon . . . as far as Gaza” (Gen. 10:19). In the Israelite myth of origins, however, the territory possessed by the Canaanites is always already destined for dispossession: “And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you . . . all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding” (Gen. 17:8; cf. Exod. 3:8). How is this dispossession to occur? Deuteronomy 20:17 puts it succinctly: “You shall annihilate them” (cf. Zeph. 2:5). Their annihilation must be absolute, moreover, but why? Because their idolatry is a constant temptation for Israel (cf. Lev. 18:3). But does Israel enact the genocide enjoined on it? No, it does not, insists the tradition (see esp. Ps. 106:38).

Matthew’s Canaanite woman is a representative figure, then, and what she represents is an unerased remnant, a polluted people (cf. 1 Esd. 8:69: “The people of Israel . . . have not put away from themselves the alien peoples of the land and their pollutions”) whose very name connotes idolatry and hence abomination (more on which below). Yet the Canaanite woman pericope also symbolically enacts the completion of Yahweh’s genocidal commission, although by means other than the sword. This is accomplished through temporal distortion—or queer temporality, to invoke a more theoretically charged term.

Queering Canaan

Coupling the term “queer” with the term “temporality” entails a temporary decoupling of queer theory from sex and sexuality.^[6] A scant three years after the term “queer theory” was coined, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was already able to write: “[R]ecent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example.”^[7] One such dimension is that of time,^[8] and, more recently, Rebecca Fine Romanow^[9] has given the notion of queer temporality a more explicit postcolonial spin, arguing that the (post)colonial arena is a cultural and political pressure cooker productive of all manner of fractures and aberrations, temporal as well as geographical.

So how does queer temporality play out in the ethnically and colonially charged space conjured up in Matt. 15:21-28? To state it summarily, polytheism self-deconstructs spontaneously in this scene in the face of a Christian mission from the future that invades the woman’s present and rewrites the mythic past. Midway through the scene, the polytheistic woman is already on her knees before the numinous figure who, other than Matthew’s God, is the only sanctioned object of worship in Matthew’s symbolic world (“But she came and worshiped him [prosekynei autō], saying, ‘Lord, help me’”—15:25), having already hailed him with a messianic title (“Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David”—15:22; cf. 1:1; 21:9).^[10] The new Joshua is accomplishing what the old Joshua could not: “Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the Lord said to him, ‘You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be possessed’” (Josh 13:1). In consequence, even the impersonal name from the distant past, applied to the woman at the outset (“a Canaanite woman from that region”), is drained of its primary (polytheistic) connotations as the episode unfolds and she is possessed by a Christology from the future—that of the Matthean community, retrojected back into the present of the historical Jesus as it tells and retells his tale.

Past and future are thus accessed in this scene. All that is inaccessible is the woman’s present. Can the subaltern speak in this scene?^[11] Not in the present tense, it would seem, except when articulating the plight of her daughter (“my daughter is tormented by a demon”—15:22). Even here, however, the woman is subsumed in an ethnic stereotype with its roots in the archaic past. Canaanites and demons go hand in hand; the idols that Canaanites worship are nothing other than demons, the tradition contemptuously claims (Deut. 32:15-17; Ps. 106:36-37; Bar. 4:7; 1 Cor. 10:20; Rev. 9:20).^[12] In accordance with the deep logic of the narrative, therefore, as soon as the woman engages in sanctioned worship, thereby relinquishing her Canaanite identity, the Matthean Jesus is authorized to trigger the switch that will cause the demon to depart from her daughter.

By what narrative logic, however, is Canaan represented as a woman in this scene? The scriptural echo chamber activated by the term “Canaanite” again suggests possible answers.^[13] Canaan is styled a slave from the outset in the primeval history: “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers” (Gen. 9:25; cf. 9:26-27). In the hegemonic gender ideology of the ancient Mediterranean world, slave and female occupied contiguous positions on the gender gradient, both imagined to be automatically at the disposal of a free elite male, to do with as he pleased (cf. Neh. 9:24, LXX, where the Canaanites are delivered to Israel “to do with them as it pleased” [poiēsai autois hōs areston enōpion autōn]). Confronted with such a paragon of masculinity, the only appropriate response from a social or ethnic inferior was fawning obeisance. In our pericope, slavish Canaan, represented as a woman, debases herself before Israel, represented by the Son of David, submissively picking up the humiliating dog epithet hurled at her (15:26-27).^[14] The scene is thus intensely racialized and eroticized—and, again, temporally out of joint. The obeisance luridly on display represents a nationalistic fantasy less oriented to the actual conditions of the Roman-dominated present than the mythic conditions of the archaic past. The colonial cauldron has once again produced displacement and distortion in the temporal plane—“a ‘queer,’ nonnormative . . . temporality,” as Romanov might phrase it.^[15]

An important question remains, however, perhaps the most pressing question of all. Why is the Canaanite woman represented as a dog in this scene?

The Dog-Woman and the (In)human One

“Do not give what is holy to dogs,” the Matthean Jesus earlier enjoined his audience (7:6), anticipating his initial refusal of miraculous aid to the Canaanite dog-woman. But why are dogs not worthy of what is holy? Ancient Mediterranean and ancient Near Eastern culture provides a chorus of similar-sounding answers. Sextus Empiricus, a philosopher and physician active in the late second and early third centuries C.E., voices an already ancient prejudice when he declaims, “[T]he dog . . . that animal reckoned the most worthless of all” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.63). Neither is ancient Israelite or early Jewish tradition kind to dogs (for example, 1 Sam. 17:43; 24:14; 2 Sam. 9:8; 16:9; 2 Kgs. 8:13; Ps. 22:16, 20; Prov. 26:11; cf. Phil. 3:2; 2 Pet. 2:22; Rev. 22:15). All of this, however, is well-trodden ground, and so a fresh approach to the dog epithet is in order. Jesus’ exchange with the woman participates in a more extensive Matthean discourse on human-animal relations and so may be contextualized within it. The Matthean Jesus is himself fully enmeshed in that discourse and partially constructed by it. The first question to consider, then, is this: What kind of creature is the Matthean Jesus? Oceans of ink have been spilled on his relationship to divinity. What of his relationship to animality?

The “Son of Man” title provides the most illuminating answer to that question. Already a major title for Jesus in Mark, hohuios tou anthrōpou occurs about twice as often in Matthew, as it also features prominently in Matthew’s Q source. I have argued elsewhere^[16] that a return to Daniel 7, the major source of the Son of Man title, enables an instructive reframing of human-animal relations in Mark. This is yet truer of Matthew, hence the brief recapitulation of my reading of Daniel 7 that follows.

Daniel 7 presents us with a cosmology that both anticipates and complicates the absolutized, hierarchical, human/animal dichotomy characteristic of modern Western philosophy since Descartes. On the one hand, Daniel 7 articulates an analogous dualism. The expression “son of man” (bar ’ĕnāš)—or, better, “one like a human being” (7:13)^[17]—means, in this context, “one who is not a beast,” the beast or beasts in question being those of Daniel’s terrifying vision (7:3-8) with whom the bar ’ĕnāš is explicitly contrasted. On the other hand, the human in Daniel 7 is anything but “Cartesian man”—a deep interior repository of essentialized humanity constituted in absolute contradistinction to the animal. Instead, the human is a flickering, interstitial element in Daniel 7, a hyphen between the animal, the angelic, and the divine.^[18]

The unstable positioning of the “one like a human being” in Daniel 7 invites a radical reconsideration of the huios tou anthrōpou title in Matthew no less than in Mark. Against the Danielic backdrop, one explicitly evoked in certain of the eschatological huios tou anthrōpou sayings in Matthew (24:30; 26: 64; cf. 16:27-28; 19:28; 24:15, 27; 25:31), the title might be said to parse out fully only in relation to the nonhuman animals from which it acquires its meaning; for what does it mean to say that the Matthean Jesus is “the human being”—or “the human animal,” as we might say today—if not that he is not a nonhuman animal or beast?

But it is not only the imperial beasts of Daniel’s vision that the Son of Man is not. The Son of Man is also, and more immediately, not the more mundane beasts that populate his own discourse—metaphoric beasts, like the Danielic beasts, for the most part, and hence further human entities in animal masks. We hear of metaphoric sheep in particular (7:15; 9:36; 10:6, 16; 25:32-33; 26:31; cf. 2:6), including in the Canaanite woman pericope (15:24), but also of metaphoric fish (4:19; 13:47); swine (7:6); wolves, serpents, and doves (7:15; 10:16); other birds (13:4, 32); goats (25:32-33)—and, of course, dogs (7:6; 15:26-27). In contrast to Daniel’s bestiary, then, the Matthean metaphori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction and a Proposal
• Historical Reconstruction
• Textual Interpretation
• Cultural Interventions
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Biblical and Ancient Texts Index