Sacred Witness

Rape in the Hebrew Bible

Susanne Scholz

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781451488050
• eBook ISBN: 9781506482033
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

In Sacred Witness, Susanne Scholz discusses the wide range of rape texts in biblical literaturesome that long have troubled readers, others that should have but didn't, such as texts of marital rape, for example, or metaphorical speech about God as rapist. Assuming the androcentric nature of these writings, Scholz asks how we may read these texts in order to find some redemptive meaning for women, children, and men who have been injured by sexual violence and by "cultures of rape." Sacred Witness provides illuminating reflection on some of the most troubling texts in the Hebrew Bible.

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BREAKING THE SILENCE

THE LEGACY OF ACQUAINTANCE RAPE

The Emerging Discourse of Acquaintance Rape

Acquaintance rape is a form of sexual violence that Western countries have come to recognize only since the 1980s. Feminist scholars and activists have played a major role in this development. Among them is Susan Estrich, whose book Real Rape examines the legal status of acquaintance rape in the United States.^[1] Estrich, a professor of law, begins the book with her own story. In 1974, she, a white woman, was raped by a black man. The police officers believed her immediately when she reported that she had not known her rapist. Many years later, Estrich realized that “her” rape fit a popular cliché: rapists are strangers, often black, who attack white women on the street. Estrich’s study shows that even today American laws favor situations of stranger or “real” rape in contrast to “simple” or acquaintance rape. The legal bias is similar to public opinion, she says. “Many women continue to believe that men can force you to have sex against your will and that it isn’t rape so long as they know you and don’t beat you nearly to death in the process. Many men continue to act as if they have that right.”^[2] In other words, acquaintance rape is still an underrated problem. Books such as Estrich’s have brought attention to the prevalence of acquaintance rape in the Western world.

Another publication stresses that acquaintance rape is an actual crime. Robin Warshaw’s I Never Called It Rape describes women who were raped by male acquaintances, and she also refers to her own experience of rape. She reports that in the early 1970s, she was raped by a man whom she knew. The man had coerced her into sexual intercourse, and she had succumbed to his threats. He raped her although she “never called it rape.”^[3] For many years, Warshaw did not regard the event as rape and named it so only much later when she realized that she was not the only woman who had undergone this experience. As the women in Warshaw’s book demonstrate, many female survivors of sexual violence do not call it rape when a male acquaintance attacks them. One of the interviewed women is Paula. She remembers the evening when a male friend raped her:

I thought how nice it would be to spend a platonic evening with a sympathetic ear. The first couple of hours were just that—good conversation, a wonderful meal, and a bottle of wine. He lived in a nice apartment with expensive furniture. After we finished eating, I felt ready to go. He pleaded with me to stay a bit longer. . . . I remember saying, “No, no, no,” and crying profusely. I remember feeling like it was never going to stop. . . . I was in denial and disbelief up to that point, but when it was over with, I was very much in shock and really quite unable to maneuver around much. . . . I remember somehow getting in my car, somehow driving home.^[4]

Paula liked the man who had invited her into his apartment, and the attack came unexpectedly. He forced her to have sex with him against her will, and she remembers the confusion when she finally left his apartment. Other women, too, remember such situations. Christine Kim recalls how she reacted when her boyfriend raped her:

I didn’t tell anyone for two years that I was raped. I couldn’t because not only did I not really know myself, but I felt ashamed and weak and stupid for what I felt was a foolish act on my part. I didn’t want other people’s pity or their disbelief. It was a secret that I kept inside me. I thought that it would go away if I forgot it, if I tried not to think about it. I didn’t want anyone to know—not my family, not my friends, not anyone. If I told them, I would have to admit that it had actually happened.^[5]

Christine was raped by her boyfriend but suppressed the memory. Like many women in her situation, she tried to forget what had happened. It took feminist courage to name these situations as rape and to bring them into the open. When this was done, overwhelming data began to emerge. Sociologist James D. Brewer showed that seventy-six percent of victim-survivors know their attackers, leading him to say: “Wade out of the ankle-deep statistics and what you find is that we as a nation have a much bigger problem with acquaintance or nonstranger rape than we believed in the past.”^[6]

Despite these numbers, prejudices about women who are raped by a male acquaintance still prevail. Many women continue to be silent about such an experience because acquaintance rape is often not recognized as a sexually violent act. Many people believe that acquaintance rape is not rape because rapist and victim-survivor know each other and the couple may have had sexual relations prior to or even after the rape. This murky situation makes people unable to differentiate between acquaintance rape and consensual sex. Acquaintance rape also challenges deeply ingrained notions about rapists. People often believe that rapists are crazy, wild maniacs who attack women on the streets in the middle of the night. It seems difficult to accept that most rapists are ordinary men. They are brothers, sons, husbands, boyfriends, cousins, or fathers known and liked by family, friends, and coworkers. It is thus easier for people to blame a woman for her so-called provocative behavior, her lack of resistance, or her seductive outfits than to face the hostile aggression of ordinary men toward women in their lives.

Many people also distrust women who have had an active sex life prior to the rape. These people are inclined to blame the victim if she agreed to sexual intimacy before the rape, and they wonder why she went with him voluntarily. It is still expected that a woman sets the limits during sexual courting, and that she, not her male sexual partner, is responsible for upholding restrictions at all times. Many people still believe that the woman should have resisted more and been clearer that she wanted to stop. To those who think this way, the presence of sexual intercourse proves that the woman was “willing” and, as a result, is “untrustworthy.”

Moreover, people do not recognize that violence is present when an acquaintance rapist relentlessly pressures a woman. Often he merely uses threats and other forms of severe pressure; frequently he manipulates her into “consent” with alcohol or drugs, or tricks her into his apartment. People ignore the fact that the woman may have had little experience, does not dare to resist, or feels that he will not stop or listen to her. Unfortunately, many people do not see threats, alcohol, or psychological pressure as problems and instead blame the woman. They disregard that she acquiesces only temporarily, perhaps exhausted by the pressure.

Finally, people are often confused about acquaintance rape because the woman herself is often unclear about the nature of the sexual intercourse. She knows him; perhaps he is a friend of a friend, a date, or, even her boyfriend. Afraid of being disbelieved, she decides not to tell anybody and to forget the moment when she lost control. Usually she continues her life without proper support, and others will never know that she survived a rape by a man whom they all know. Acquaintance rape is thus a form of rape that is not easily recognized even by the participants themselves, much less by outsiders.

Acquaintance Rape in the Hebrew Bible

Biblical Hebrew does not have a term for “acquaintance rape.” After all, the term is fairly new even in English. Some scholars find it anachronistic to describe biblical texts with terminology of our time, especially when it involves such charged terms as “acquaintance rape.” While the application of modern terminology emerges from contemporary sensibilities, there is no other way of reading biblical rape texts. Though some interpreters say otherwise, we always read from a particular social location, with particular interpretive interests, and within a particular conceptual framework. The scholarly community acknowledges the contextual character of the meaning-making process. Yet when this notion is applied to specific texts and issues, many people—lay and scholarly—often become nervous, worrying that the biblical meaning is lost or skewed, or that “anything goes.” Far from it. A basic hermeneutical insight remains that a reader’s interpretive interests shape biblical meanings.

When the perspective turns to acquaintance rape, the Hebrew Bible becomes a resource—containing four stories of threatened and completed acquaintance rape. They are the narratives about Dinah (Genesis 34) and Tamar (2 Samuel 13), a brief reference to Abishag the Shunammite (1 Kgs 1:1-4), and the story of Susanna (Daniel 13). The four stories illustrate important characteristics of this form of sexual violence: Dinah, Tamar, Abishag, and Susanna are attacked or threatened by men whom they know. Neither Shechem nor Tamar’s half-brother Amnon, neither King David nor the two elders are strangers attacking random women. They live in the neighborhood or even in the same home. Moreover, two of the women do not speak a single word. Neither Dinah nor Abishag is reported to speak during the attack. They do not share their distress with others, nor do they explicitly consent. Dinah’s silence has allowed interpreters to imagine that she consented. While the opposite is more likely, it is rarely mentioned in the commentary literature. Abishag is forced to be a servant of the king and has to acquiesce to her fate because he is the king. In contrast to Dinah and Abishag, Tamar and Susanna resist vehemently, both verbally and physically. Only the story of Tamar is widely known as a rape story, perhaps because this woman’s articulate resistance demonstrates even to the most androcentric interpreters that she does not agree to intercourse with her brother. She even proposes marriage as a way out of the pressured situation. The same cannot be said about Susanna. Despite her outspoken resistance, many interpreters believe she was threatened with seduction, and they stress her piety and virtue. Focusing on the legal procedures and Daniel’s accomplishment, they often mention the attack in a hushed voice.

These stories display prominent characteristics of acquaintance rape, but interpreters rarely name the issue at hand. Perhaps this neglect relates to the fact that none of the women is physically injured. Moreover, some of the women seemingly gain social status, such as Abishag, who lives with the king in the palace. If a woman is threatened with physical harm, she is still blamed for placing herself into a dangerous situation, as in the case of Susanna. Consciously or unconsciously, countless interpreters do not find the situations of these women precarious and overlook the rape. It remains buried, submerged, silenced.

Is it simply a dispute over terminology that defines stories on heterosexual intercourse as stories on acquaintance rape? Perhaps, but the issue is ultimately much more serious. When we begin to read the narratives with terminology meaningful to us today, they inform our understanding about a prevalent contemporary problem. The narratives can then turn into resources that help us develop a deepened understanding about rape and the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural responses to this problem. For centuries, biblical imagery has provided a basis to locate oneself in society. By defining these texts as stories of acquaintance rape, we are encouraged to develop this skill and to read these stories in relation to our world, pondering questions such as these: How do we define sexual consent? When do we identify a man as a rapist? What are our standards for “real” rape, and where do these standards come from? When we begin to interpret biblical texts with such questions in mind, the Hebrew Bible is no longer a dusty and ancient book of the past but a resource for understanding past and present culture.

Seduction, Love, and Marriage? The Rape of Dinah

When Dinah, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Promise for a Blessing
• 1. Breaking the Silence: The Legacy of Acquaintance Rape
• 2. Subjugated by Gender and Class: The Rape of Enslaved Women
• 3. Controlling Wives: Marital Rape Fantasies
• 4. Regulating Rape: The Case of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Laws
• 5. Gang Raping: On the Culture of Misogyny during Peace and War
• 6. Losing Power: The Rape of Men as Male Fear and Reality
• 7. Resisting the Theology of a Rapist: Against the Poetics of Rape in Prophetic Literature
• Conclusion: The Blessing of a Sacred Witness
• Notes
• Index of Authors
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects