Sébastien Doane
sebastien.doane@ftsr.ulaval.ca
Abstract
This article concentrates on the affective impacts of the relationship between the bodies of the father and his daughter in Sirach. It relies on gender studies as well as affect theory to explore how intensities pass from body to body in the biblical text, and also to the bodies of those who read it. The father’s body is marked by gynophobic anxiety about his daughter that causes him to lose sleep, and by fear of being ridiculed by other men (Sir 42:9–11). He recommends controlling his daughter’s body and not radiating joy toward her (Sir 7:24–25). From her birth, a girl is considered a loss for her father and can bring shame and disgrace (Sir 22:3–5). Sir 26:10–12 presents the daughter’s body as an abject, marginalized and sexualized body designed to provoke disgust. This disgust did not cling to a real flesh and blood mother and daughter who participated in an empirical reading experience of these passages. Her emotional and bodily reactions went from anger to laughter, showing affective paths of resistance to Sirach’s androcentric presentation of a daughter’s body.
Keywords
Affect theory; Sirach; Gynophobia; Father-daughter; Reader-response
This article concentrates on the affective impacts of the relationship between the bodies of the father and his daughter in Sirach. It relies on gender studies as well as affect theory to explore how intensities pass from body to body in the biblical text, and also to the bodies of those who read it.
The father’s body is marked by gynophobic anxiety about his daughter that causes him to lose sleep, and by fear of being ridiculed by other men (Sir 42:9–11). He recommends controlling his daughter’s body and not radiating joy toward her (Sir 7:24–25). From her birth, a girl is considered a loss for her father and can bring shame and disgrace (Sir 22:3–5). In Sir 26:10–12, the daughter’s body is portrayed as a sexual machine: opening her mouth to all waters, sitting across from every tent peg, opening herself like a quiver to arrows. Sirach presents the daughter’s body as an abject, marginalized and sexualized body designed to provoke disgust. This affective and rhetorical strategy does not convince all readers. This disgust did not cling to a real flesh and blood mother and daughter who participated in an empirical reading experience of these passages. Her emotional and bodily reactions went from anger to laughter, showing affective paths of resistance to Sirach’s androcentric presentation of a daughter’s body. The pages that follow explore the affective experience that circulates when a real reader’s body interacts with Sirach’s bodily configuration of daughters. Before exposing the physical experience of a real modern reader to the passages that specifically address the father-daughter relationship, I will give a glimpse of the feminist interpretations of Sirach and a brief introduction to affect theory and its use in biblical scholarship since they inform the theoretical framework of this article.
Feminist Interpretations of Sirach
While a few commentators such as Maurice Gilbert see a balanced relationship between men and women in this biblical book,[1] feminist research has clearly established that it is one of the most explicitly misogynistic texts of Second Temple literature.[2] Warren Trenchard’s study reveals the negative bias of the author of Sirach toward women.[3] This bias culminates in Sirach’s presentation of daughters. For Trenchard, Sirach’s control of daughters reflects the monetary value of a daughter and of her virginity when she marries.[4] He emphasizes financial loss as a factor in the negative aspects associated with having a daughter. Jon Berquist conducted a very helpful analysis of Sirach’s control over the body of his daughter, by focusing on the life of daughters in Jewish communities at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. Berquist asserts that Sirach fears women who take sexual initiative and his daughters’ sexuality: “Whereas Sirach’s son-talk focuses exclusively on issues of dominance and honour, his talk about daughters demonstrates an erotophobia: a fear of the daughter’s body and of the father’s inability to control sexuality.”[5] Berquist also explores the possibility of incest even though the text of Sirach does not explicitly address this issue. His analysis presents a parallel between the treatment reserved for daughters in Sirach and the negative reaction to Hellenization: “As Sirach isolates himself from the new hellenized culture, he isolates his daughter inside the house.” [6] Pamila Milne exposes the biblical patriarchal ideology that teaches men to fear women, their words and their bodies.[7] According to her, gender relations in Western societies have their roots in biblical traditions. Thus, a tangible violence toward women today is rooted in the fear of women promoted by biblical texts. Milne briefly presents the gynophobia of Sirach, but the scope of her article does not allow for the exploration of the father-daughter relationship in this book. The recent work of Ibolya Balla and Claudia Camp, both using a socioscientific approach, underscores the androcentric perspective of Sirach’s discourse about daughters.[8] This discourse relates only to the father’s honour, and does not address daughters other than in relation to sexuality. Finally, Nuria Calduch-Benages highlights the intrusion of the father in an educational duty that should fall to the mother, as he feels daughters represent a danger for a father’s reputation.[9]
Most of the feminist interpretations of Sirach reviewed was produced with a historical perspective, to highlight the gender power imbalance in the society and culture that produced the biblical text. This article keeps a feminist approach, but with affect theory proceeds with a different orientation to focus on the affective intensities that flow when reading the text. The feminist research about Sirach demonstrates the importance of making an ethically responsible interpretation of this text, since it conveys a misogynistic and patriarchal perspective. It is therefore important to implement an interpretive strategy for an inverse reading of the oppression ideologies in Sirach. In that respect, I propose to track the affective effects produced by reading this text of terror. The fear and shame of a father are conveyed by a text that could produce fear among its readership, but other affective connections ranging from anger to laughter are also possible. In that respect, I propose to consider affect theory in order to develop a grasp of the affective effects in play when reading a text.
Turning Toward Affect
Affect theories explore emotions in more specific and complex ways than in everyday language. There is not one unified affect theory, and this article does not intend to provide a precise and comprehensive understanding of works related to contemporary affect theories. Indeed, the main characteristic of these theories is living in movement and diversity rather than seeking a fixed stance.
The very expression of affect theory originated with psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins (1962–1992), who identifies nine primary affects.[10] Tomkins considers these affects as responses to stimuli, which constitute the biological basis of emotions. A person’s memory causes him or her to interpret a physical affect as a sensorial experience that unfolds over time. Another source of affect theory comes from reflections by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,[11] who rely on the writings of Baruch Spinoza who focused on the power to affect or to be affected.[12] For these philosophers, affects are not emotions, “because affect is not a personal sentiment, nor is it a personality; it is the effectuation of a mob force, that stirs up and shakes the self.”[13] Affect involves intensity, power, animality, and becoming. “For the relationships that make up, deconstruct or alter individuals, there are corresponding intensities that affect them and which increase or decrease their power to act, coming from exterior elements or their own elements. Affects are futures.”[14] Deleuze’s concept of affect evokes the chaotic and sensorial encounter with the material world even before a structuring of sensorial perception, before cognitive awareness or its linguistic representation. Anglophone biblical studies came in contact with Deleuze’s affect theory by way of Brian Massumi, who translated Deleuze and Guattari, and who wrote Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Here is the distinction he suggests between affect, which he calls “intensity,” and emotion:
An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience, which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, the consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progression, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.[15]
While general discourse treats emotions as a personal experience, affects are prepersonal and transpersonal. That is, affects can circulate, as is well explained by the definition of Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg:
Affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, non-human, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion […][16]
Seigworth and Gregg reinforce the in-between-ness and beside-ness of an affect that is found in the gaps between bodies and worlds. Researchers such as Ann Cvetkovich and Sara Ahmed, working from a feminist queer perspective, prefer to not solidify the distinction between affect and emotion, in order to focus on historical constructions arising from affect, emotions, desires, impulses and sensations.[17]
Sara Ahmed’s book Cultural Politics of Emotion is an important example of how affect theories and feminism can be interrelated with a common interest in the political power of emotion. Linda Åhäll states that “What feminist knowledge on affect offers is twofold: First, a way to identify ‘the political’ in the affective-discursive because affect generates questions about how the world works. Second, by feeling differently, a feminist analysis is opening up a space for thinking, acting, and knowing differently.”[18] Ahmed’s feminist version of affect theory inspires this study of gendered relations in a biblical book.
The application of affect theories in biblical studies is relatively new, but is becoming an important trend, as shown by several recent publications.[19] In a similar way to the language shift that shaped poststructuralist biblical interpretation, many authors speak of another important epistemic shift by the expression “affective turn.”[20] Even though this expression clearly demonstrates a change of paradigm, Rei Terada points out that the turn toward studying affect and emotion continue reflections about culture, subjectivity, identity and bodies that began under the influence of poststructuralism.[21] The interest in affect allows us to transcend the classic dualism of Western philosophy between body and spirit, as emphasized by Amy Cottrill: “Mind and body do not exist as separate Cartesian entities […] Affect theory privileges what is happening in our bodily experience, the embodied context in which thought, rationality, and language occurs.”[22] For Cottrill, affect theory leads us to reconsider the body of a reader as the very place where meaning is created during the act of reading. In that respect, affect theory develops insights present in reader-response criticism. For example, literary theorist Stanley Fish focuses on non-cognitive effects of interpretation by a method he called affective stylistics.[23] His reassessment of the reader’s independence via the role of interpretative communities connects with affect theory, because it presumes a deeply social view of the individual, who is always becoming and whose limits are penetrable.[24] An innovative element of affect theory highlighted by Cotrill is to position the act of reading not with the reader in a general sense, but specifically in the very body of this person.
Texts, Effects, and Readers
Practically, Seigworth and Gregg suggest delving into this question: “How does a body, marked in its duration by these various encounters with mixed forces, come to shift its affection (its being-affected) into action (capacity to affect)?”[25] In the rest of this article, I will describe the configuration of the bodies of the father and daughter in Sirach, as it is affected and as it affects in its discursive world, but also how these bodies and this biblical book continue to affect the bodies and worlds of contemporary readership.
The four passages in Sirach (7:24–25; 22:3–5; 26:10–12; 42:9–11) that specifically address the father-daughter relationship will be discussed in the same order as the text presents them. As an exegete involved in the study of gender and affect, these verses fascinate me; however, my personal reaction remains quite cerebral. Even though I have been the father of a daughter for the last year and a half, my familiarity with this text makes it difficult to describe a personal affect when reading the text. I therefore decided to have a reading experience with someone who has a different perspective than mine. This experience allowed me to observe several relevant affective reactions.
The autoethnographical method was the theoretical inspiration for this reading experience, as it relates a personal experience of the researcher, and includes emotion in understanding social phenomena. This method describes and analyses personal experiences in order to understand cultural experiences by recognizing subjectivity, emotions and the influence of the researcher in humanities research.[26] In this case, the description of a female reader’s reactions will give a glimpse of the affects and emotions in her response to the text. Melanie is the mother of a son and daughter of preschool age.[27] As a Christian, she often reads biblical texts in liturgical and familial contexts. As a feminist, equality between men and women is an important value for her. This was the first time she had read these biblical passages.[28] Our friendship and the informal setting of the interview encouraged spontaneity as she expressed her reactions. I filmed this interview, transcribed her words verbatim, and recorded her physical reactions as well as my own. I read the four biblical passages aloud, asking her to react to what she was hearing. This experience challenges the disciplinary norms and boundaries of biblical studies. Even reception-based scholarship has mostly limited itself to theoretical responses or interpretations of professional biblical readers. It is important to note that the Bible is most often read in non-academic settings, but academia does not usually take into consideration religious or personal readings.[29]
The textual tradition of Sirach is complex.[30] It reveals how the body of this text has been modified as it has been transmitted from one generation to another. Since a large percentage of academic publications about this book deal with issues of textual criticism, I will use a different approach. Due to the nature of our reading experience, we read from the book of Sirach in a translation, the NRSV. However, Hebrew and Greek versions do inform my interpretations. This is particularly true for the LXX, since this is the version that has had the most influence on the way Sirach has been read.
A Father’s Control of Positive Affects and of Daughter’s Bodies (Sir 7:24–25)
Do you have daughters? Be concerned for their chastity, and do not show yourself too indulgent with them.Give a daughter in marriage, and you complete a great task; but give her to a sensible man. (Sir 7:24–25)
The first piece of advice for fathers regarding their daughters is to look after their bodies (proseche tō sōmati).[31] The NRSV translates this as a concern for their chastity, which shows a translating assumption in which daughterly bodies are equivalent to their chastity. For Balla, “no work among the wisdom writings of Second Temple Judaism, including Proverbs, where the discipline of children is an issue, places so much emphasis on the chastity of daughters.”[32] The verb describing this action on the daughter’s body can be understood as “look after,” but also as “keep close” or “supervise.” Affect theory focuses on the relationship between bodies. Here, the paternal perspective reveals a fear in connection with daughters’ bodies. These bodies must be monitored and controlled.
The next piece of advice continues to describe the connection between the father’s and daughter’s bodies by recommending the limitation of positive affective intensities that could emanate from the face of the father. While the NRSV renders this as “do not show yourself too indulgent,” it rather means not to turn a bright face toward her, not to smile at her.[33] Basically, it indicates to consciously limit the positive energy that the father might emit toward his daughter.
Verse 25 deals with the gift of a daughter to a husband. As stated by Trenchard, the daughter is a “burden to be unloaded.”[34] The meaning of “great task” is ambiguous. Either finding a sensible husband for his daughter is a difficult task, or raising a daughter is a difficult task that is achieved when she is given to a sensible husband. In both cases, the father’s actions regarding his daughter are described as a great or difficult duty. Instead of “you complete a great task,” Hebrew manuscript (Ms A) uses “and your worries will disappear.”[35] This remark emphasizes that having a daughter causes concerns for a father. These concerns will not disappear until he gives her away in marriage. While the preceding verse dealt with keeping the daughter’s body close in order to keep it under paternal control, here two verbs convey the gift, and therefore the distancing of the body of this daughter. In the Hebrew version of Sirach, this gift will allow for a reduction of paternal anxiety. Nothing is said of the daughter’s reaction. She is only a body to monitor, then to give away.
While reading 7:24–25, I saw Melanie’s eyes open wide as an expression of her astonishment. Then with a tense body and face, she abruptly said, “That’s absolutely ridiculous!” When I heard those three words, I felt the anger she was experiencing at hearing these verses. When I asked her to further explain, she said that it was the paternal control of the daughter’s body that caused this reaction. She identified with this daughter figure and was reacting as if the control of the daughter in Sirach put into words something that involved her personally. Melanie’s reaction displays two paths of resistance to an ideological perspective of the text to which she is opposed. Her anger is certainly a fundamental response. Her body and speech forcefully refused what she felt to be unfair control. Equally, by asserting that “it is ridiculous,” she leans toward laughter as an affective reaction allowing a form of resistance to the “wisdom” of Sirach. While verse 24 seeks to limit smiling, Melanie instinctively rebelled with a smirk.
Erin Runions, the first exegete to use affect theory in biblical studies, has investigated laughter as a resistance strategy to the account of Rahab in the book of Joshua.[36] According to her, this text causes disgust by a racialization of nonheteronormativity. Rahab, the foreigner with abnormal sexuality, conveys disgusting anti-Canaanite sexual and racial conventions. Runions wants to interrupt this disgusting pattern by highlighting the laughter, the humour that is present in this episode. Humour becomes physical energy for resisting the text. Runions laughs to resist the racial and heteronormative ideology of the book of Joshua. Laughter as resistance to the biblical text is also developed by Juliana Claassens in her interpretations of the books of Job and Jonah.[37] She uses the “tragic laughter” of Jacqueline Bussie, who emerges from a traumatic context to interrupt a system of oppression, to resist in the face of the effects of a trauma.[38] Thus, perhaps laughter is an adequate response to the gynophobia and the misogyny of Sirach. When I asked Melanie to elaborate on what she meant by “ridiculous,” she told me, “That has no common sense! To control their bodies. . . (laughter, glowing face, shoulder movements). It’s really idiotic! That doesn’t resonate at all in our world. We live in a different era.” Whereas the negative affect of anger, she experienced resulted from identifying with the character, her laughter was linked to an awareness of the disconnect between the textual world and the world she lives in.
Turning away from shame (Sir 22:3–5)
It is a disgrace to be the father of an undisciplined son, and the birth of a daughter is a loss. A sensible daughter obtains a husband of her own, but one who acts shamefully is a grief to her father. An impudent daughter disgraces father and husband, and is despised by both. (Sir 22:3–5)
Trenchard sums up this passage by stating that “for Ben Sira to think of a daughter is virtually to think of the potential for disgrace.”[39] The birth of this new body affects the father’s body, who experiences this event as something negative. Yet, two avenues are delineated to describe the future of daughters. Sensible daughters, who use wisdom to meet the expectations of this system, succeed in obtaining a man. It is interesting to note that here it is the husband who is designated as the object, the person who is obtained by the daughter.[40] The other possible path for daughters leads to dishonour, to pain associated with grief for the father as well as for the husband. Both men will look at her with contempt. In this passage, the relationship between father and daughter is labelled as a loss for the father, right from her birth. As noted by Camp, “shame is the key ethical sanction in Ben Sira.”[41] Having a daughter is presented as a potential source of shame, grief and disgrace. The passage that deals with children who turn out bad ends by indicating that “a thrashing and discipline are at all times wisdom” (22:6). Physical violence is therefore suggested to the father, who will suffer the consequences of poorly raised children; a common theme in wisdom literature.[42] Thus, the violence of the father toward his children is legitimized by the potential of negative effects that they could have toward him.
I felt my own body tensing while reading what could be seen as a text of terror. However, after hearing this passage, Melanie said, “This connection to shame is distant from me, I feel less involved. It’s another world.” Her words indicate that the discourse on shame and dishonour did not affect her. Then, her body turned in the opposite direction of mine, which marked the end of our discussion about these verses. This movement was not insignificant. Sarah Ahmed contends that social relations are arranged spatially. She studies the affective component of movement toward or away from others and from objects: “We move toward and away from objects depending on how we are moved by them.”[43] She discusses the physical aspect of shame when bodies turn away from each other: “The subject, in turning away from one another and back into itself, is consumed by a feeling of badness that cannot be given away or attributed to another.”[44] For this author, shame is associated with a disgust that clings to the body of someone who is affected by something bad inside. Disgust is an important affective category that goes beyond common understanding of this concept.[45] Ahmed theorizes the stickiness of disgust and the deep ambivalence between the attraction felt for the object or repulsion. Shame is also an important relational element. According to Silvan Tomkins, shame is ambivalent, because people feel shame in the presence of someone who is important to them;[46] this is the case in Sir 22:4–5 which concerns the daughter-father and daughter-husband relationship. These verses describe shame as the affective cost for a daughter who strays from normative scripts. By her words and physical movements, Melanie refused to let herself be affected by the shame the text was trying to associate with daughters. By turning away, she put distance between her and the misogynistic discourse.
A Sexualized Assemblage (Sir 26:10–12)
Keep strict watch over a headstrong daughter, or else, when she finds liberty, she will make use of it. Be on guard against her impudent eye, and do not be surprised if she sins against you. As a thirsty traveller opens his mouth and drinks from any water near him, so she will sit in front of every tent peg and open her quiver to the arrow. (Sir 26:10–12)
For Trenchard, this “obscene material” shows “Ben Sira’s negative bias against women reaches its apex when he discusses daughters.”[47] This passage continues the trajectories previously described: the movement of the father’s control of the daughter in opposition to the movement of the liberty she seeks.[48] While the provoking images appear in verse 12, verses 10 and 11 have already presented the daughter’s body as having a strong head and a bold gaze, which are used to justify the father restricting the freedom of the daughter’s body by supervising her closely. The paternal goal is to protect himself from potential offense. Verse 12 then describes the daughter’s sexuality with an accumulation of vivid and perhaps obscene images.[49] Deleuze’s concept of complex assemblage is helpful in describing how this text develops the daughter’s body and her relationship with the world around her.[50] This assemblage is not just a daughter, but also a thirsty traveller, a quiver that integrates into her body water, tent pegs and arrows. This composite is made up of human parts (mouth, traveller) and also non-human parts (water, quiver, tent peg, arrow). The human part is both feminine (headstrong daughter) and masculine (traveller). In the portrait he displays of a daughter, the father creates this human and non-human assemblage. A machine with only one function: sexuality. In its sexual operation, this machine functions in both active and passive ways.[51] Her mouth is open to receive water, but she drinks; she sits in front of two types of objects and opens herself to receive them. The double use of “any/every” (pantos) in one verse indicates that the machine is not capable of limiting its action, because she drinks all the water nearby and sits in front of all tent pegs. The characteristic of a Deleuzian assemblage is to add up everything that appears in various forms, to represent a singular element: “re-presentation implies active repossession of what appears, therefore including activity and unity that is characterized by the passivity and diversity unique to sensitivity as such.”[52] This re-presentation does violence to what is real. In this case, this assemblage is a sexual machine that has nothing to do with the reality of daughters. Sirach takes up the images to create something repugnant that is likely to produce negative affects of disgust in its intended male readers. The effect is that this disgust clings to daughters’ bodies: the one described by the text, but also extra-textual daughters who will be affected by fathers who read the text. Paradoxically, the disgust that is marked by a physical movement of rejection also functions as a fascination.[53] We can be repulsed and drawn towards that which is disgusting. Sirach’s assemblage of abnormal sexuality without limits may either attract or repel.
Melanie’s reaction to the reading of these verses surprised me. Upon hearing the text, her face started to glow, a smile began, and she said: “Ouch! This daughter’s good! She gets around his control. He doesn’t control her. That’s cool, she holds her ground.” Full of positive energy, she expressed that the text describes what is forbidden, and particularly that it depicts a liberated daughter who has sexual relations whenever she wants, any way that she wants. With her face open and her eyes shining while looking upward, she told me that this text sounds surprisingly like modern poetry. The sexual freedom of this daughter affected her very positively. When I asked her what she thought of the father’s perspective who tries to make her actions into something repulsive, she laughed and said tersely, “Poor idiot!” She recalled the derision she felt during the reading of the first pericope and dared to laugh at paternal control. The discovery of this daughter, who breaks taboos and limits regarding her body and sexuality, impressed Melanie, as was indicated by her open and smiling face. Far from being disgusted by this sexual assemblage, Melanie was fascinated by this headstrong daughter with the impudent gaze and sexuality without limits. In her body, Melanie felt something like a form of liberation while hearing the text. This reaction of a real reader is practically the opposite of the usual interpretation of this discourse as patriarchal control of the body and sexuality of women.
Imprecise and Temporally Non-linear Anxiety (Sir 42:9–11)
A daughter is a secret anxiety to her father, and worry over her robs him of sleep; when she is young, for fear she may not marry, or if married, for fear she may be disliked; while a virgin, for fear she may be seduced and become pregnant in her father’s house; or having a husband, for fear she may go astray, or, though married, for fear she may be barren. Keep strict watch over a headstrong daughter, or she may make you a laughingstock to your enemies, a byword in the city and the assembly of the people, and put you to shame in public gatherings. See that there is no lattice in her room, no spot that overlooks the approaches to the house. (Sir 42:9–11)
For many authors, anxiety, unlike fear, is characterized by the absence of a specific object.[54] The father’s anxiety is “purposely vague.”[55] This affective intensity has no specific source. It governs the view of the father who perceives multiple dangers connected to his daughter’s behaviour. During his insomnia, the father runs through a series of scenarios that increase his anxiety. The affective intensity accumulates because of this list, to the point where there is an overwhelming impression that the daughter is no longer a person, but an almost endless list of reasons to fear.
This discourse articulated from a father’s position evokes several affective elements in a singular temporal relationship. The father is no longer able to sleep because of the anxious concern he feels regarding his daughter. What has not yet happened, but is being taken from the future, has a very real impact on the father’s current health, because his insomnia is described in the present tense (aphista hupnon). His fear is based on the future: what could happen. Fear is in the potentiality. The events regarding the daughter are uncertain, but all have a negative impact. Using an article published in the newspaper Le Devoir in 2005 that was entitled “Le virus de la prochaine pandémie de grippe n’existe pas encore” [The virus of the next flu epidemic does not yet exist], Brian Massumi explains the present reality of an expected threat, even if what is causing the fear is not real:
The present is shadowed by a remaindered surplus of indeterminate potential for a next event running forward back to the future, self-renewing. Self-renewing menace potential is the future reality of threat. It could not be more real. Its run of futurity contains so much more potential than anything that has already actually happened. Threat is not real in spite of its nonexistence. It is superlatively real, because of it.[56]
Fear is an affective intensity that forecasts a future danger in the present reality. Even if what is perceived as a threat does not materialize, it has an impact. The rhetorical figure of the father feels anxiety arising from the potential actions of his daughter as a real danger; it is a force that affects him in his body to the point of no longer being able to sleep. This paternal fear has a political reach in legitimizing controlling daughters, which in the Hebrew (MS B) and Syriac manuscripts goes so far as to recommend keeping daughters in rooms with no windows or doors.[57] Massumi illustrates the political reach of fear as a potential threat, by the Iraq war which was legitimized by fear of a weapon of mass destruction. The real presence of this type of weapon was not conclusive. It was the fear of a potential danger that resulted in preemptive action. The father’s anxiety in Sirach has a similar political result. Sir 42:11 indicates that the father fears being ridiculed in front of other men, whether enemies of the city or men belonging to the congregation of the people. The father’s fear of being covered in ridicule, and therefore the object of shaming laughter, is used as an affective fact to justify the control of daughters who could potentially have a negative impact on him. The expectation of experiencing danger as a real affect leads to actions attempting to prevent what is described as inevitable. In no way does this logic consider the daughter as a subject. The danger is felt by the father as being truer than what his daughter actually does. However, this abstract anxiety has a concrete impact.
As an affect, fear is contagious. It is transmitted from one body to another: from the author’s body, to the textual body in which the father’s rhetorical body is inscribed, toward the body of those who read the text. Following Milne’s analysis, it is clear that the father’s gynophobia that is incarnated in the rhetoric of Ben Sirach is conveyed to young men who follow his way of thinking, to those who read or hear the text.[58] In this, I see an example of social body memory as discussed by Massumi: “past action and contexts are conserved and repeated, autonomically reactivated but not accomplished; begun but not completed.”[59] The patriarchal social body exists on the back of women. Ahmed invites us to see fear not as a defence against existing limits, but as the source of these limits.[60] A deliberate reading of the power issues between men and women, as it is developed in feminist exegesis, is important for flushing out social mechanisms that can create contempt, hostility and control of women’s bodies.
While reading this passage, Melanie looked upward and sighed: “Phew! That’s heavy! When I hear that, I don’t see any way out.” With her forehead wrinkled, she breathed and said: “Ugh! That’s worse than a prison! It’s as if she has no right to exist.” Then, she realized that she was having trouble breathing and said that she felt like she was suffocating. Finally, she burst into laughter. After this, she returned to the preceding passage, saying that she really likes the liberated daughter, but in the other passages, it’s as if there’s no escape. A feeling of anger returned while she spoke of the daughter, “as a poor obedient fool, an object that doesn’t belong to herself.” Again, she had trouble breathing. She stated that this father-daughter concept was “very harsh!” This last part of our interview was characterized by several negative affective elements (trouble breathing, tension, a feeling of heaviness) that displayed some anxiety that led to laughter. This reaction reveals a resistance strategy by a woman experiencing a gynophobic and misogynistic text.
This reading experience allows us to illustrate the degree to which people are affected in their bodies by auditory contact with an ancient discourse. This female reader reacted to violence toward women in a biblical text. She shows that this Sirach discourse creates physical reactions that leave an intensity such as fear, anxiety or threat during the reading. The fear of daughters in Ben Sirach has dangerous political reach because his control of the bodies and sexuality of women still affects bodies today. The rhetoric in Sirach is not only rational, but it is emotionally charged. This affective rhetoric has a political impact and summons an affective response on the part of its readership.
From her political and sociological perspective, Sara Ahmed shows that fear is very mobilizing in regard to controlling collective identities. “Fear functions as a technology of governance,” she writes. “The sovereign power either uses fear to make others consent to that power.”[61] Ahmed emphasizes that fear aligns bodies against other bodies. Fear shared by a group of people becomes a binding force. Thus, the fear of being ridiculed causes men like Sirach to keep control over the daughters they are responsible for. This fear then justifies binding force over the bodies of their daughters. The physical affective load of the fear felt by the father has political effects. The threat touches his masculinity in regards to his honour, his name, his possessions, his place in the community, and his posterity.
Father’s Fear and the Fear of the Lord
Claudia Camp points out that the anxiety expressed by the father is connected to the men in his community, but also to divinity: “God may be the biggest source of anxiety of all.”[62] Is Sirach’s gynophobia based on a theology, on a discourse about God? I dare to respond in the affirmative. The purpose of the advice provided by Ben Sirach is to convey the wisdom that comes from the Lord (Sir 1:1). The “fear of the Lord” plays an important role in this book, which favourably presents the affective relationship that should be nurtured between the bodies of worshippers and the body of their God. Matthew Schlimm exposes the ambiguity of this expression used in positive contexts of blessing and learning, but also refers to the terrifying power of a divinity.[63] Schlimm’s article ends by continuing the thoughts of Jason Fout who underscores the fact that paradoxically, fearing God relativizes everything that might cause fear: “To Fear God and not fear others means placing all of one’s hopes, trust, status, identity—indeed, one’s very life—in God.”[64] Thus, when the father in Sirach fears being ridiculed by other men because of his daughters, maybe he is lacking trust in God. With a tinge of irony, we could perhaps recommend that the author of Sirach fear God and rely on him to help him respond to his fears without oppressing his daughters. . . or his readership.
Reading, a Physical Experience
The connection between affect theory and reader-response developed by Amy Cottrill and furthered by this article is not uncontested and has its limits. Responding to Cottrill’s “thought-provoking” essay in a collection of articles on affect and the Bible, Stephen Moore notes that she develops a post-poststructural performance affective criticism that leads to autobiographical criticism since it leads to write about one’s own bodily experience of a biblical text[65]. Erin Runion’s response suggests an important distinction between personalized emotion and, “socially and structurally produced affect.” One could ask: What does one person’s emotional response have to do with Ben Sirach in more than just an individual even idiosyncratic way? This question brings other important questions such as what is an author, what is a text and what is the goal of biblical interpretation? Against major currents in biblical scholarship, this approach does not aim to recover authorial intent or the “original meaning.” It does not view the text as a stable object. Sirach’s textual difficulties and the many layers of its redaction is a great example of textual fluidity. The approach developed in this article is invested in the act of reading a biblical text as an experience. Geert Van Oyen states, “all exegesis is also autobiographical.”[66]To become attuned to a real reader instead of positing a theoretical or neutral reader is an epistemological stance that has its own merits and limitations, but that beckons for more scholarly involvement.
Reading as an experience has an important affective component that invites us to move from exegesis conceived an intellectual process to becoming attentive to the bodies that interact with biblical texts. As Elspeth Probyn notes, “Writing is a corporal activity. We work ideas through our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers.”[67] Affect theory reveals that the reception of a text does not only occur in terms of rationality, in a disembodied way. By contact with this theory, biblical studies can open itself to affective intensities and thus orient itself in a way other than the search for the “meaning” of a text. I fully subscribe to what Amy Cottrill asserts in this regard: “The physical experiences of modern readers may give us valuable insight into how the physical experiences of readers contribute to the persuasiveness of textual arguments. Affect theory brings into focus the body in the text and the body of the reader as part of meaning-making.”[68] The description of Melanie’s physical and affective response aimed to develop Cottrill’s challenge by tending to a real reader. The study of affects by their physical impact offers a way to map the relationship between a text and the people who experience it. I hope that this contribution will trigger others who will be able to elaborate on other biblical texts that are affectively charged, and explore other ways to intersect affect theory with methods and approaches already developed in biblical studies.
The fear of the father toward his daughters, his gynophobia, directed our attention to these texts. This paternal fear inscribed in the body of a text also causes a type of fear in its modern readership, but other affective reactions such as anger and laughter have also been observed. These physical reactions to the act of reading have been interpreted as paths of resistance of a contemporary woman to the misogyny of a biblical text.
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[1] “Ben Sira is not misogynistic; he is well aware of a woman’s value for a man, and he also knows a man’s weakness in the presence of a woman.” Maurice Gilbert, “Ben Sira et la femme,” Revue théologique de Louvain 7.4 (1976): 426–442 (442, our translation).
[2] “In many ways, Sirach is a disheartening and misogynistic book that denigrates women repeatedly and viciously” Jon L. Berquist, “Controlling Daughter’s Bodies in Sirach,” in Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity, ed. Maria Wyke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 95–120 (96).
[3] Warren C. Trenchard, Ben Sira’s View of Women: A Literary Analysis, Brown Judaic Studies 38 (Chico CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 2.
[4] “It seems that the imperative reflects the ancient reality that a daughter’s marketability as a wife and her virginity were unquestionably related.” Trenchard, Ben Sira’s, 132.
[5] Berquist, “Controlling Daughter’s,” 101.
[6] Berquist, “Controlling Daughter’s,” 119.
[7] Pamela J. Milne, “Voicing Embodied Evil: Gynophobic Images of Women in Post-exilic Biblical and Intertestamental Text,” Feminist Theology 30 (2002): 61–69, doi:10.1177/096673500200003006.
[8] Ibolya Balla, Ben Sira on Family, Gender, and Sexuality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011); Claudia V. Camp, Ben Sira and the Men Who Handle Books (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013).
[9] Nuria Calduch-Benages, “‘Tesoro fallace è per il padre una figlia’ (Sir 42:9) Le figlie nel libro di Ben Sira,” in La vita benedetta. Fs Bruna Costacurta in occasione del suo quarantesimo anno di insegnamento, ed. Luca Mazzinghi, Grazia Papola and Fabrizio Ficco (Roma: GB Press, 2018).
[10] Distress-anguish; interest-excitement; enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; anger-rage; fear-terror; shame-humiliation; disgust; dissmell. To familiarize yourself with this perspective, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
[11] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1980).
[12] “By affects, I mean attachments to the body by which this very body’s power to act is increased or diminished, enabled or hindered” (Spinoza 1661, Eth, III, def. 3).
[13] Deleuze and Guattari, Milles plateaux, 294.
[14] Deleuze and Guattari, Milles plateaux, 314.
[15] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 28.
[16] Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25 (1), doi:10.1515/9780822393047-002.
[17] Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings. Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015).
[18] Linda Åhäll, “Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion,” International Political Sociology 12.1 (2018) 36–52, doi:10.1093/ips/olx024.
[19] For example: Jennifer Koosed and Stephen Moore, eds., Biblical Interpretation 22/4 (2014); Maia Kotrosits, Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015); Maia Kotrosits, “How Things Feel: Biblical Studies, Affect Theory, and the (Im)Personal,” Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation 1.1 (2016): 1–53, doi:10.1163/9789004326095; Stephen D. Moore, Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism (Atlanta: SBL, 2017); Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Fiona C. Black and Jennifer L. Koosed, eds., Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible (Atlanta: SBL, 2019).
[20] Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean O’Malley Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Athena Athanasiou, Pothiti Hantzaroula and Kostas Yannakopoulos, “Towards a New Epistemology: The “Affective Turn,” Historein 8 (2012): 5–16, doi:10.12681/historein.33; Rachel Greenwald Smith, “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn,” Twentieth Century Literature 57.3/4 (2011): 423–46, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41698760; Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 434–472, doi:10.1086/659353; Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson, Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Amanda K. Kennedy, “The Affective Turn in Feminist Media Studies for the Twenty-First Century,” in eds., Dustin Harp, Jaime Loke and Ingrid Bachmann, Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 65–81, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0_5.
[21] Rey Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 205–206 also criticizes the expression “affective turn,” because it can overlook the work of queer and feminist criticism that allowed for the emergence of affect theory.
[22] Amy C. Cottrill, “A Reading of Ehud and Jael through the Lens of Affect Theory,” Biblical Interpretation 22.4–5 (2014): 430–449 (434), doi:10.1163/15685152-02245p04.
[23] Stanley E. Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History 2.1 (1970): 123–162. For an introduction to Reader-response, Stanley Fish and biblical studies: Sébastien Doane, Analyse de la réponse du lecteur aux origines de Jésus en Mt 1–2 (Leuven: Peeters, 2019), doi:10.2307/j.ctv1q26r16.
[24] Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Cottrill, “A Reading,” 436.
[25] Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 2.
[26] Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones and Carolyn Ellis, Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[27] This is a fictitious name, as the participant wishes to remain anonymous.
[28] A reader experiencing a text for the first time is helpful for this experiment since affective reactions are stronger and more noticeable for such a reader than for someone who has prior knowledge of the text.
[29] An interesting empirical reading experience was held by Mark Allan Powell who compared interpretations of 50 lay Christians and 50 seminarians or pastors to a biblical text. Chasing the Eastern Star: Adventures in Biblical Reader-Response Criticism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).
[30] Maurice Gilbert (in “Où en sont les études sur le Siracide?” Biblica 92.2 [2011]: 161–181 [163], https://www.jstor.org/stable/42615029) presents four textual traditions: Hebrew manuscript fragments, major Greek uncials, a few minuscules, and the Syriac version. See also Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 1–92.
[31] For an overview of daughters in the Hebrew Bible: Kimberly D. Russaw, Daughters in the Hebrew Bible (Lanham: Lexington, 2018).
[32] Balla (Ben Sira on Family,39) states that this shows the loveless relationship between father and daughter.
[33] Cf. Qoh 7:3–4.
[34] Trenchard, Ben Sira’s, 165.
[35] See Eric Reymond “Wordplay in the Hebrew to Ben Sira” in The Texts and Versions of the Book of Ben Sira, ed. Jean-Sébastien Rey (Leiden: Brill 2011), 46–47, doi:10.1163/9789004207189_004; Alexander A. Di Lella, The Hebrew Text of Sira (London: Mouton 1966), 58–60.
[36] Erin Runions, “From Disgust to Humor: Rahab’s Queer Affect,” Postscripts 4.1 (2008): 41–69, doi:10.1558/post.v4i1.41.
[37] Juliana Claassens, “Tragic Laughter: Laughter as Resistance in the Book of Job,” Interpretation 69 (2015): 143–55, doi:10.1177/0020964314564844; Juliana Claassens, “Rethinking Humour in the Book of Jonah: Tragic Laughter as Resistance in the Context of Trauma,” Old Testament Essays 28 (2015): 655–673, doi:10.17159/2312-3621/2015/v28n3a6.
[38] Jacqueline Bussie, The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo (London: T&T Clark, 2007).
[39] Trenchard, Ben Sira’s, 140.
[40] “Thygatēr phronimē klēronomēsei andra” (Sir 22:4).
[41] Camp, Ben Sira, 39–40. For Camp, the root of the problem lies in “the endemic and gendered, cultural drive to obtain honor and avoid shame.”
[42] The book of Proverbs contains several examples in this regard: Prov 13:24; 19:18; 22:15; 23:13–14; 20:15.
[43] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) 28.
[44] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 104.
[45] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 107. For the crucial political roles of discuss in creating and maintaining social hierarchy, see William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). In literary studies, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). For examples of biblical interpretation of discuss, see Juliana Claassens, “From Fear’s Narcissism to Participatory Imagination: Disrupting Disgust and Overcoming the Fear of Israel’s herem Laws,” in ed. F. Scott Spencer, Mixed Feelings and Vexed Passions in Biblical Literature: Emotions of Divine and Human Figures in Interdisciplinary Perspective (Atlanta: SBL, 2017) or Joseph A. Marchal, “The Disgusting Apostle and a Queer Affect between Epistles and Audiences,” in eds. Black and Koosed, Reading with Feeling 113–140. On disgust in the Hebrew Bible, particularly surrounding the purity laws, in ancient Judaism see Ari Mermelstein Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge, 2021) and in Rabbinic Judaism see Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “The Role of Disgust in Rabbinic Ethics,” in ed. Michael L. Satlow, Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J.D. Cohen (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018), 421–436.
[46] Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Negative Affects, volume 2 (New York: Springer, 1963), 137.
[47] Trenchard, Ben Sira’s, 145–146.
[48] The passage begins by speaking about the wife in 26:1–9 and picks up again with the wife in 26:13. Some scholars think that verses 10–12 that discuss daughters originally were also about a wife. See Balla, Ben Sira, 52–52 and Nuria Calduch-Benages, “Good and Bad Wives in the Book of Ben Sira: A Harmless Classification?” 109–126 (114) in eds. Christl M. Maier and Nuria Calduch-Benages, The Writings and Later Wisdom Books (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014). Since there is no textual evidence for reading “wife” rather than “daughter” this interpretation is hypothetical. By reading “daughters,” I follow Berquist, “Controlling Daughter’s,” 98; Milne, “Voicing Embodied Evil,” 66; Trenchard, Ben Sira’s, 146 and Camp, Ben Sira, 76.
[49] Trenchard, Ben Sira’s, 145.
[50] This concept is presented by Stephen D. Moore (Gospel Jesuses, 45) as an important element in designing a biblical interpretation using affect theory and non-human theory. As examples of assemblage, he presents a book shaped by countless preceding texts; an author’s brain; the pulp of a tree; electrical circuits; gender laws; discursive agreements; sensors; university promotion committees; publishing houses; a reader’s brain; interpretative communities, etc. Anglophone authors choose to translate Deleuze’s original French term “agencement” by “assemblage.”
[51] Berquist (Controlling Daughter’s, 133) emphasizes the problem with this active and passive sexuality: “The dichotomy of activity and passivity becomes highly problematic; though he condemns the daughter’s active interest in sex, he also condemns her passive acceptance of lovers.” Berquist describes the daughter as a dehumanized rhetorical object who is no longer the subject of her own sexuality. Balla (Ben Sira, 52) only sees the women’s active role as problematic since it “emasculates men.”
[52] Deleuze, Milles plateaux, 15.
[53] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 85–92.
[54] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 64–65.
[55] An expression taken from Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact. The Political Ontology of Threat” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 58, doi:10.1215/9780822393047-002.
[56] Massumi, “The Future Birth,” 53.
[57] See Balla, Ben Sira, 42–47.
[58] Milne, “Voicing Embodied Evil.”
[59] Massumi, Parables, 46.
[60] Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 67.
[61] Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 71.
[62] Camp, Ben Sira, 183. Balla (Ben Sira 33–56), also speaks of anxiety as shown by the title of her second chapter: “The anxiety of bringing up children: teaching on sons and daughters.”
[63] Matthew Schlimm “The Paradoxes of Fear in the Hebrew Bible,” Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 84 (2019): 25–50.
[64] Jason A. Fout, “What Do I Fear When I Fear My God? A Theological Reexamination of a Biblical Theme,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 9 (2015): 23–38 (33), https://www.jstor.org/stable/26373871. For example, “In God I trust; I am not afraid; what can flesh do to me? […] In God I trust; I am not afraid. What can a mere mortal do to me?” (Ps 56:4.11); “Ye who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord!” (Ps 115:11)
[65] Stephen D. Moore “The Rage for Method and the Joy of Anachronism” in Black and Koosed, Reading with Feeling, 187–211; Erin Runions “Palpable Traumas, Tactile Texts, and the Powerful Reach of Scripture” in Black and Koosed, Reading with Feeling, 175–186.
[66] Geert Van Oyen, “À bon lecteur, salut! La lecture du Nouveau Testament comme dialogue entre lecteurs,” in Le lecteur, Sixième colloque international du RRENAB, eds. Régis Burnet, Didier Luciani and Geert Van Oyen(Paris: Peeters, 2015) 19–41 (32).
[67] Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 71–90 (76), doi:10.1215/9780822393047-003.
[68] Cottrill, “A Reading,” 430.