Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges Book

Acknowledgments Introduction

1. The Coherence of Politics and the Politics of Coherence
   Two Views of the Book of Judges
   How History Constructs Itself
   The Construction of a Different History
   The Coherence of Dissymmetry
   Heroes of Might and Women of Death
   Lethal Ladies
   Gender, Sex, and Dissymmetry
   Other Female Characters
   The Language of Power
2. Virginity and Entanglement
   Bath-Jephthah: The Daughter's Gift
   Negation and Denial of Womanhood
   Freud Entangled
   Love at First Sight
   Bath's Survival
3. Virginity Scattered
   Paradoxes of Virginity
   Nonvirginal Virgins, Virginal Spouses
   Between Virgin and Wife: Caught Between Men
4. Violence and the Sacred: Contribution to the Ethnography of Fatherhood
   The Raw and the Cooked
   In the Name of the Law: Proper Sacrifice
   Manoah's Failed Fatherhood
   In the Name of the Vow: Improper Sacrifice
   Bath-Jephthah versus Ben-Abraham: A Case for Separation
   Dreaming Fire: Violence without the Sacred
   The Body Became Voice, or the Reinforcement of Culture
5. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: From Speech-act to Body Language
   Speech-acts: The Word Become Flesh
   Samson's Riddle: The Word Became Woman
   The Riddle as Vow and the Vow as Riddle
   The Daughter's Body Language as a Challenge to Fatherhood
   The Mouth of the S/Word
6. The Architecture of Unhomeliness
   Oppositions
   Limits
   Dialectic
   Unhomeliness Revisited
   The Empty House Is Haunted
7. The Displacement of the Mother
   Explicit Mothers: Jephthah's and Abimelech's, Samson's and Micah's
   Explicit Mothers: Sisera's and Israel's
   Displaced Mothers: Yael
   Displaced Mothers: The Woman-with-the-Millstone
   Displaced Mothers: Delilah
   Mothering, Murdering, Making Love: Yael
   Clytemnestra's Absence 
Conclusion
   The I, the Eye, and Objectification
   The Incoherence of Coherence
   Once Upon a Time
   Once More: Body Language 

Appendix 1: A Model for Narratological Analysis Appendix 2: Notes on Language Notes Bibliography Index