Marginal(ized) Prospects through Biblical Ritual and Law
Description
This book follows a reader's logic of association through a series of overlapping constructs in biblical prescription of things prized and lofty-holy hair, unblemished beasts, sacred edibles, wholesome wombs, pristine precincts, esteemed ethnicities and, as unlikely as it seems, dismembered members. Thoroughly intersectional in disposition, Bernon Lee uncovers not just the precariousness of the contrived dichotomies through the identity-building sacred texts, but also the complexities and contentions of a would-be decolonizing hermeneutic bristling with its own tensions and temptations. This volume is an intertextual odyssey through law and ritual from impassioned positions fraught with ambivalence, reticence, and anxiety.
Reviews / Votes
"This fascinating combination of legal texts with a deconstruction of Judges 19 fleshes out the concept of 'wandering' as a metaphor for the act of reading itself. Lee brings together post-colonial contextual readings with gender analysis as he demonstrates how all readers interpret texts by placing them in dialogue with both other texts as well as with the reader's (here hybrid) contextual space. Although the book engages complex theoretical categories, his utilization of his own experiences as an Asian-American scholar and teacher illustrates his own deconstruction of the hegemonic discourse of dominant biblical scholarship, resulting in a self-conscious ambivalent reading." (Corrine Carvalho, University of St. Thomas, USA)"Bernon Lee resists the trend to domesticate the complexities of the Hebrew Bible within separate traditions of reading, each of which secure their own conversations against the encroachment of outsiders. He is one of the few biblical scholars to bring postcolonial interests to the legal traditions, writing with a creative and engaging restlessness that is conditioned by his own cultural ambivalence as an Asian American. His hermeneutical wanderings traverse multiple perspectives of interpretation, exploring the gaps and ironies in the biblical texts without losing focus on vulnerable outsiders, past and present." (Mark G. Brett, Whitley College and University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia)
"This is a creative and strong example of the working out of a postcolonial reading (with feminist and Asian-American leanings) that showcases the complexity (and transgressions) of intertextual criticism. The book is a breath of fresh air on the reading of 'biblical ritual and law' texts." (Jione Havea, Charles Sturt University, Australia)
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Bernon Lee is professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Bethel University, Minnesota, USA, and the author of Between Law and Narrative: The Method and Function of Abstraction.
