Julie Kelso - Böcker

The purpose of this volume is to honor the work of Edgar Conrad. The essays focus on various aspects of Conrad's work, especially the prophetic literature, the Bible as literature, canonical issues, and engaged readings. In developing these lines of scholarship, the authors pay tribute to Conrad and seek to take his work further. The contributions from Korean scholars are especially noteworthy, since Conrad has had significant influence on Korean biblical scholarship through students who studied under him at the University of Queensland.

The purpose of this volume is to honor the work of Edgar Conrad; it is therefore a festschrift. The essays focus on various aspects of Conrads work, especially the prophetic literature, the Bible as literature, canonical issues, and engaged readings. In developing these lines of scholarship, the authors pay tribute to Conrad and seek to take his work further. The contributions from Korean scholars are especially noteworthy, since Conrad has had significant influence on Korean biblical scholarship through students who studied under him at the University of Queensland.

According to Kelso, the Book of Chronicles silences women in specific ways, most radically through their association with maternity. Drawing on the work of two feminist philosophers, Luce Irigaray and Michelle Boulous Walker, she argues that we may discern two principal strategies of silencing women in Chronicles: disavowal and repression of the maternal body. In its simplest form, the silencing of women takes place through both an explicit and implicit strategy of excluding them from the central action. Largely banished from the central action, they are hardly able to contribute to the production of Israel s past. On a more complex level, however, women are most effectively silenced through their association with maternity, because the maternal body is both disavowed and repressed in Chronicles. The association of women with maternity, along with the disavowal and repression of the maternal body as origin of the masculine subject, effects and guarantees the silence of the feminine, enabling man to imagine himself as sole producer of his world. These strategies of silencing the feminine need to be understood in relation to the relative absence of women from the narrative world of Chronicles. Kelso argues that Chronicles depends on the absence and silence of women for its imaginary coherence. This argument is enabled by Irigarayan theory. But more importantly, Kelso suggests that Irigaray also offers us a viable mode (not method) of reading, writing, listening, and speaking as woman (whatever that might mean), in relation to the so-called origins of western culture, specifically the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. She argues that Irigaray enables a not only rigorous, feminist critique of patriarchy and its many texts, but also, somewhat more charitably, a mode of reading that enables women to read the past differently, seeking out what remains to be discovered, especially the forgotten future in the past.