Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2006 by Bauer-Levesque, Angela

Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books. By Gerlinde Baumann. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003. xii 271 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Biblical images of God as perpetrator of sexual violence have shocked and bothered readers of prophetic literature, especially when heard in the context of Scripture and faith through the ages. In Love and Violence, a translation of her German book Liebe nnd Gewalt (21)00), Gerlinde Baumann acknowledges this dissonance as she analyzes the use of the marriage metaphor in the prophetic books as it is used for YHWH and Israel, personified as male and female respectively. Including imagery of rape, prostitution, adultery, and public shaming, she raises questions as to the use and usefulness of such biblical metaphoric speech for todays readers while offering some biblical counter-images. Repeatedly naming the energy and hardship it takes especially for women to confront violence in the Bible and in daily life, in her introductory and closing chapters, she surveys scholarship on the topic as well as her understanding of the function of metaphor (chapters 1-5), before she moves to a different level of detailed textual analysis of Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Lamentations (in an excursus), Isaiah, and some of the remaining Twelve (chapters 6-10) in the main body of the book.

Tracing the use of the marriage metaphor in the prophetic books historically, Baumann finds the original metaphor in Hosea 1-3, where sexual violence is divine punishment for Israel's adultery, predominantly negotiated as a violation of property with love being secondary if not absent. In Jeremiah the violence of the imagery is magnified by naming YHWH as the perpetrator of the rape that personified female Israel suffers (Jer. 2-3; 13:20-27). The metaphor climaxes in Ezekiel 16 and 23, where the imagery is politicized in coupling personified female Jerusalem with foreign gods and nations in pornographic portrayals.

Lamentations gives voice to the women who suffer most during destruction and war, while maintaining the negative imagery. Meanwhile, in Isaiah the use of the marriage metaphor varies throughout, with more inclusive imagery in Isaiah 40-66. How this might be related to the complex composition of the book through several centuries receives little attention. Besides Hosea the1 Twelve use the metaphor sporadically (Micah 1:5-7; Nahum 3:4-7; Mal. 2:10-16) in the contexts of war and rape.

The closing section of the book (chapters 11-14) briefly summarizes the textual findings and raises further questions about dealing with the prophetic marriage imagery critically, especially in regard to human imagery of the divine. In a final look ahead, Baumann suggests contrasting the problematicmarriage metaphor with more positive imagery from the Bible and searching for alternative theologies.

For anyone interested in close readings of biblical texts on the marriage metaphor-some biblical Hebrew presupposed-and for all wanting to revisit the questions raised by biblical portrayals of God as perpetrator of sexual violence as it relates to sexual violence in contemporary contexts, this study is recommended reading. For those looking for resolutions to the dissonance(s) in biblical portrayals of God, the search continues.

ANGELA BAUER-LEVESQUE

Episcopal Divinity School

Cambridge, Massachusetts