Texts after Terror Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible

Texts after Terror offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, and #MeToo, arguing that rape and sexual violence - both in the Bible and in contemporary culture - are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky, and that we need to take these features seriously. Texts after Terror offers a new framework informed by contemporary conversations about sexual violence, writings by victims and survivors, and feminist, queer, and affect theory. In addition, Graybill offers significant new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 34), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1-2), and the unnamed woman known as the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Texts after Terror urges feminist biblical scholars and readers of all sorts to take seriously sexual violence and rape, while also holding space for new ways of reading these texts that go beyond terror, considering what might come after.

Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021) and Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016). She is the co-author (with John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie) of Jonah: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (Yale Anchor Bible, 2023).