Circumscribing the Prostitute: The Rhetorics of Intertextuality, Metaphor and Gender in Jeremiah 3.1-4.4

Abstract

Circumscribing the Prostitute: The Rhetorics of Intertextuality, Metaphor and Gender in Jeremiah 3.1-4.4, by Mary Shields. London/New York: TT Shields draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva in her analysis of the interplay between Jer 3:1-5 and Deut 24:1-4. These two texts are particularly disposed such study, as they form a rather natural web of textual (and cultural) voices that converge in engaged dialogue. While the prophetic literature is replete with intertextual and cultural echoes and allusions, here we encounter an undisputed citation with its own distinctive values and meanings. First Shields examines the intertext, Deut 24:1-4, a legal text that addresses the blurring of well-defined social and symbolic categories, specifically the confusing of hierarchy, lineage, property lines and paternity (p. 35). Next she explores the textual workings of Jer 3:1-5, especially the play on the deuteronomic text in Jeremiah. Among other points of interest Shields notes that Jer 3:1-5 functions as a dialogic performance in which a community of readers-both past and present-participates in the developing conversation between Yahweh and the people. The interpretive move from legal citation disputation ultimately serves shatter the community's systems of security. In ch. 2, Shields extends the notion of dialogue to the cultural conventions with which a text plays (p. 51). That is say, Shields broadens the intertextual web beyond literary texts cultural networks of meaning and conventions of gender. Once again Jer 3:1-5 is well suited for such an exploration. It is laden with legal allusions and textual citations, sexual images and innuendos, as well as defining gender categories. The text exploits an array of evocative metaphors and cultural assumptions bring light Israel's religious and political infidelities. When Israel, Yahweh's wife, forsakes her divine husband play the harlot, she transgresses the most fundamental of cultural boundaries-sexual boundaries that are clearly delineated and enforced by an arsenal of social and symbolic restraints. Indeed, such behavior threatens not only the process of power distribution and proper societal boundaries but more importantly the very order of creation. …

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