Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories

by Mieke Bal

"Lethal Love" is, in Mieke Bal's words, "first and foremost a study of biblical love stories and how we read them." Bal reads five familiar love stories from the Bible -- David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, Ruth and Boaz, Judah and Tamar, and Adam and Eve. -- differently. In the past, readings of these stories have represented woman' love as lethal -- women are victimizers to be avoided lest one be killed by their love. Ball calls into question these interpretations of the past, revealing a patriarchal ideology of interpretation that has dominated. Borrowing interpretive tools from semiotics and pyschoanalysis, Bal deconstructs this dominant ideology by stressing the different -- the multivalent, heterogeneous meanings possible when one pays close attention to the text. Her powerful, exciting interpretations resonate deeply and raise new possibilities for the ways we read the love stories of the Bible."

Genres: Religion

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Mieke Bal is a Dutch literary theorist, cultural and art historian.

Areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many publications include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (4th edition 2017). Her view of interdisciplinary analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences is expressed in the profile of what she has termed “cultural analysis”, the basis of ASCA. See the video clip on the right side of this page, where I explain the approach.

Mieke is also a video artist, her internationally exhibited documentaries on migration include Separations, State of Suspension, Becoming Vera and the installation Nothing is Missing and are part of the Cinema Suitcase collective. With Michelle Williams Gamaker she made the feature film A Long History of Madness, a theoretical fiction about madness, and related exhibitions (2012). Her following project Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, also with Michelle, is exhibited worldwide. She just finished a feature film and 5-screen installation on René Descartes and his infelicitously ending friendship with Queen Kristina of Sweden.

Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Her co-curated exhibition 2MOVE travelled to four countries. She is currently preparing an exhibition for the Munch museum in Oslo.

Reviews

[Kim Matheson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bal challenges the presuppositions that readers bring to the text, and closely looks at the roles of women and the concept of love in the Hebrew Bible.

The book was far more philosophical than I was anticipating, and consequently challenged both my thinking and my vocabulary.

I was very impressed with her ability to escape the trap of antagonism against patriarchy that many (if not most) feminist authors fall in to.

Her readings were marvelous, and the insights she has into reading all texts will influence everything I read from here on out.

It's well worth the challenge of understanding!

[Dave H · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first pass I found Bal's reading of Samson and Delilah to border on outrageous--but what did she do? Pried open a shallow story that has been glossed again and again. In the end, she makes a good case and it's my favorite chapter in the book. Samson and Delilah is a weird story and the weirdness is lost in the usual telling.

She also covers Adam and Eve, David and Bathsheba, Ruth, and the forgotten Tamar. The writing is heavy in the jagged and murky ways of hard core literary criticism (something of a personal triumph, I suppose, that reading this stuff is easier than it used to be)--worth the time and effort.