The Bible is a violent book. Its pages are inscribed with an abundance of traditions that bear witness to the pervasiveness of gendered aggression and abuse within biblical Israel. Its narratives attest to the commonality of wartime rape, forced marriage, and sex slavery; we can read stories of stranger rape, acquaintance rape, and gang rape (both threatened and actualized). Turn to the prophetic literature and we are inundated with metaphorical renditions of spousal abuse and intimate partner violence, perpetrated (or at least sanctioned) by Israel’s jealous deity. Its laws uphold the structural violence of patriarchal power, which grants divine mandate to the rigidly prescriptive and proscriptive control of women’s (and sometimes vulnerable men’s) bodies. In essence, both the poetry and prose of these ancient traditions testify to the subjective violence of multiple gendered abuses and grant a voice to the symbolic violence of misogynistic and heteronormative discourses, which marginalize and objectify women (and sometimes men), while normalizing their social, sexual, and religious subjugation.

Bound within the pages of this sacred text, these articulations of gender violence have accrued significant authority and power across space and time; this power remains undiminished today, not only through the religious teachings and traditions of Judaism and Christianity but also by way of contemporary social discourses that (implicitly or explicitly) draw upon the ideologies inherent within biblical texts to justify multiple forms of gender violence. These discourses lie rooted in the foundations of patriarchal culture, constituting part of the framework upon which rape-supportive ideologies and belief systems are built. Such ideologies and belief systems, in turn, create and sustain rape cultures—cultures in which rape and other forms of gender violence are trivialized and normalized, tolerated as acceptable expressions of sexuality (Burnett 2016). In other words, rape cultures create an environment in which gender violence can flourish; and the Bible—with its myriad traditions about gender violence and its endorsement of the patriarchal discourses that sanction such violence—plays an undeniable role in this process. While it would be inaccurate to claim that the origins of rape culture and gender violence lie exclusively (or even predominantly) within the biblical traditions, we must nevertheless acknowledge that these texts are by no means blameless. For no literature (particularly sacred literature) is ever value neutral, nor does it leave the reader untouched by the reading process. Rather, all texts invite their audience to embrace certain discourses, values, and belief systems, expressed through their authors’ rhetorical strategies. Thus, according to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Stories are never just descriptive but always also prescriptive” (2001, p. 136). In other words, biblical texts may reflect the ideologies of the ancient communities in which they are written, but they also have the potential to validate and sanction the same ideologies within communities in which they are read, even today. And when these ideologies are rape-supportive, or endorse the structural violence of gender inequality and patriarchal hegemony, then their power to impact contemporary readers’ lives and worldviews cannot be underestimated. As Patrocinio Schweickart explains, “We cannot afford to ignore the activity of reading, for it is here that literature is realized in praxis. Literature acts on the world by acting on its readers” (1993, p. 615; original italics).

In recent decades, feminist biblical scholars have thus begun to recognize the urgent need to investigate the “texts of terror” which appear throughout the Bible, including those that evoke the violence of rape and sexual abuse.¹ Acknowledging the Bible’s continued influence upon contemporary social discourses, they contend that by failing to engage with the issue of biblical gender violence—taking an aperspectival stance vis-à-vis the misogynistic and patriarchal ideologies expressed in sacred texts—interpreters simply reinscribe these ideologies, thereby maintaining their power within contemporary contexts and communities. Thus, according to Esther Fuchs:

By ignoring the ideological problem posed by stories of rape and adultery, by ignoring the patriarchal implications of the way in which the woman in the text is silenced, the modern androcentric critic reinscribes biblical sexual politics. The poeticist reinscription of patriarchal ideology is made possible by combining on the one hand an aperspectival stance and on the other a submissive stance vis-à-vis the text … The choral harmony of the authoritative narrators and the “objective” critics reencodes the silence about women’s oppression. (2000, p. 138)²

Given the endemic levels of gender violence in innumerable societies around the world today, and the pervasive global presence of rape cultures that sustain such violence, the task of biblical interpreters to challenge rape-supportive biblical discourses and disrupt their inherent symbolic violence is urgent. Indeed, embracing our role as critic and conscience within the academy, the classroom, and the societies in which we live is surely a moral imperative for biblical scholars, given that so many of our everyday experiences are pervaded by rape culture discourses and our communities tainted with scandalously high rates of gender violence. As Susanne Scholz insists, “In the context of a global rape culture, it is crucial to uplift ancient rape legislation and to identify past and present strategies that continue obfuscating the prevalence of rape even today” (2005, p. 2).

Nevertheless, some scholars and readers of the Bible may contend that it is anachronistic to use contemporary definitions of gender violence in order to evaluate the presence or absence of such violence within the biblical texts. To do so, they argue, is to impose conceptualizations of gender and sexuality upon the biblical traditions that bear little or no relevance to those held by their ancient authors. Yet we would contend that, while some of the gender discourses articulated in these traditions may differ to those we encounter within our own cultural contexts, the gendered violence evoked therein is all too familiar. Our ability to recognize episodes of coercive sexual behaviour, sex slavery, or brutal gang rape in the biblical texts need not be hindered by our acknowledgement that Israelite women appeared to have no cognizable right of consent. The fact that the abduction and rape of female prisoners of war is mandated in the legal codes (Deut . 21:10–14) ought not to stop us from seeing the horrific violence inherent within this law. The gender violence is there, in the text—this is undeniable. By refusing to acknowledge this violence through appeals to epistemological rigour, readers simply become complicit in its erasure, allowing it to remain unchallenged, even accepted. Our task in this volume, then, is to contest this erasure, and to name (and shame) the multiple forms of gender violence present within the biblical traditions, in the hope that by so doing, we can undermine the influence and power that biblical texts of terror continue to have within contemporary rape cultures. For, as writer and poet Adrienne Rich avers, “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (1980, p. 35).

Moreover, while we are pragmatic enough to acknowledge (a little ruefully, perhaps) that the chapters in the volume will not vanquish rape culture or gender violence overnight, each author nevertheless invites critical conversations and reflections on the continued complicity of biblical traditions and their reading communities in the perpetuation of rape-supportive discourses. They do so by engaging critically and creatively with the biblical texts, demonstrating the richness of methodological approaches (including historical criticism, literary criticism, and reception history) and hermeneutical lenses (such as feminist, queer, and other critical theories) that can be employed to tackle this subject fruitfully.

Starting us off in Chap. 2, Lucy Skerratt reads the book of Lamentations intertextually alongside Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push and Lee Daniels’s 2009 film adaptation, Precious. Particularly, she focuses on the literary metaphor of Daughter Zion, as well as the lamenting voices of the destroyed Jerusalem, to explore human experiences of loss, loneliness, stigma, and gendered violence in the midst of war. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, Skerratt reads this biblical text in light of the continuing HIV pandemic in the United States, which, as articulated in Push and Precious, disproportionally affects black and minority ethnic (BME) women. Her intertextual reading brings together the shared experiences of Daughter Zion and Precious Jones, using this dialogical encounter to explore how the biblical text can give a face and voice to the intersectional oppressions encountered by BME women living with HIV and AIDS. She also suggests, however, that Lamentations and Push are ultimately texts of survival, and that by voicing their own pain, Daughter Zion and Precious Jones transform their suffering into a moment of liberation from the inevitable finality and fragility of life.

Continuing this intertextual exploration of gender violence within biblical and popular culture texts, Chap. 3 raises the subject of brother-sister incest, which Johanna Stiebert suggests has become a topic of titillation, both in public discourses around sibling incest and on screen (where such relationships are portrayed with some regularity in film and popular television). Stiebert argues, however, that this trope of the “up-for-it sister” is a myth, a “figment of voyeuristic fantasy,” which taps into patriarchal predilections for women’s exploitation and objectification. She notes a disturbing tendency within this trope to undermine the sister’s ability to consent within her sexual relationships, typically through her vulnerability or compromised mental health. Relating this back to a number of brother-sister relationships in the Hebrew Bible, Stiebert contends that these biblical traditions accentuate this same discourse of exploitation. Considering these biblical texts in depth, she thus suggests that, in both the Hebrew Bible and contemporary popular culture, the brother-sister relationship is eroticized and that this eroticization has overtones of rape and of legitimating rape. By drawing attention to the troubling implications of these portrayals of sexual violence and compromised consent, she therefore attempts to detoxify them.

In Chap. 4, Teguh Wijaya Mulya engages with another familiar trope within both the Bible and wider contemporary culture, which is likewise complicit in the perpetuation of rape culture—the “virgin/whore” binary. Drawing on his previous research among Indonesian Christian youth, he suggests that this binary continues to be used to justify and normalize certain acts of sexual violence. In order to begin his own act of “detoxifying” the binary, he juxtaposes two biblical characters who best represent the virgin and the whore categories—that is, the Virgin Mary (Luke 1) and the Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17). Analysing these biblical traditions alongside each other through a queer reading lens, Wijaya Mulya interrogates the typical placement of Mary and the Whore at opposite ends of the binary, arguing that these two figures may in fact have more commonalities than contradictions. He first considers the sexual violence inherent in both of their engagements with the divine, before asking how their relationships with their adherents might be considered idolatrous. He then suggests that dichotomized roles of virgin and whore may prove to be far more fluid and unstable within different historical and social contexts. Based on this queer theological reflection, Wijaya Mulya argues that the virgin-whore binary ought to be deconstructed, given its complicity in gender violence discourses that render particular women vulnerable to sexualized aggression.

Both Wijaya Mulya’s and Stiebert’s desire to dismantle rape-supportive discourses is likewise shared in Chap. 5 by Jessica Keady, who invi...