Circumscribing the Prostitute

(Hardback)

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In Jeremiah 3.1-4.4, the prophet employs the image of Israel as God's unfaithful wife, who acts like a prostitute. The entire passage is a rich and complex rhetorical tapestry designed to convince the people of Israel of the error of their political and religious ways, and of the need for them to change before it is too late. As well as metaphor and gender, another important thread in this tapestry is intertextuality, within which the historical, political and social contexts of both author and reader enter into dialogue and produce different interpretations. But, as Shield shows in her final chapter, it is ultimately the rhetoric of gender that actually constructs the text, providing the frame, warp and woof of the entire tapestry, and thus functioning as the prophet's primary means of persuasion. This is volume 387 in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement series.

Reviews

"Shield's study makes a number of contributions to Jeremiah scholarship and to the hermeneutical problem of treating difficult texts."- Mark E. Biddle, The Society of Biblical Literature, May 2005
"Mary Shield's dissertation exemplifies the best in critical approaches to the prophets, as it is a careful reading of a circumscribed text, a reading that is attuned to historical context, biblical scholarship and contemporary literary and feminist theory. Shields [has] given us valuable readings of prophetic texts, and [her] serious engagement with [her] respective texts promises to deepen and further encourage the current debate in biblical feminist criticism." - The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2005
'The Jeremain passage is treated as a coherent textual unit. The author invokes the work of M. Bakhtin and J. Kristeva on intertextuality, and of David E. Cooper, Donald Davidson and Wayne Booth on metaphor' ~ Review in the International Review of Biblical Studies, 2004/05
Reviewed in Theologische Rundschau 4.
"[Shields] understands intertextuality as a study of the two-directional interaction and play among texts. She also draws on theories of metaphor and cultural construction of gender."- Kathleen M. O'Connor, 68, 2006 * Catholic Biblical Quarterly *
'It is a fine analysis of Jer 3:1-4:4...informed by sophisticated theoretical assumptions that are deployed in ways that produce a plausible and at times artful reading of the text in its present form....[Shield's] exegetical work and theoretical underpinnings are lucid and generative. Indeed, such an interpretative approach might prove fruitful not only for other prophetic texts in the Bible but also for their nachleben.' Louis Stulman, University of Finlay, OH, RBL, 07/2006 -- Louis Stulman, University of Findlay * RBL *
"Overall Shields' writing was an excellent rhetorical study about the text." - Trinity Seminary Review Summer/Fall 2005 * Trinity Seminary Review *

Author Bio

Mary E. Shields holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from Emory University and a Masters of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the author of numerous articles and scholarly presentations.