spin

You seem to be agreeing with me, though I don't think you draw the entrails far enough out to examine them in any detail. But...

I would agree that those explanations do not reflect the experiences of the women of the time. However, I don't think this is the issue. It is not the women's experiences that construct or reflect the power structures of the time.

I see no reason to discount the content of those explanations on the grounds that they are self-serving. The fact that they are indeed self-serving helps us to trust them to a certain degree as reflecting something meaningful of the structure of the society at the time.

I don't necessarily agree with this at all. It can be expressly important and indicative that elements are included in narratives, whether they reflect the writer's intentions or not. There is no point in shutting the door to real possibilities. Butchering Philistines could easily have been seen either as a good thing or as a way of edifying oppressed people. The medium as message is often an important idea.

I have no problem with this. My task is to explain something about the past to people of the present time. Any discussion now about condoning something in the past is based on values of the present. Sociology is an attempt to make sense of something in its own environment for our benefit. You haven't actually made a complaint, for we all tell stories to explain things. YOu can't really do much else.


spin

Gamera

It's certainly legitimate to derive a "meaning" of rape based on what the texts say and our sociological knowledge of the culture at the time. But I thought the issue was whether original thread post was retrojecting modern ethics onto a prior culture that didn't recognize rape as we do. I guess my point is that the "explanation" of the meaning of rape in that culture doesn't happen in a vaccuum. It happens in a context where raped women experience rape as one thing, and the discourse of powerful institutions describe it as something else (family honor, property despoilation, whatever). This can only happen BECAUSE there is a tension between two meanings, two experiences. The voice of male property owners in the text tries to divert the experience that women have into something it can use (remember -- they want to rape the other tribes women, so they come up with a "meaning" that will allow them to do so).

So the ethical disappropation of rape is there; which is the reason the voice of the male property owners had to come up with some other explanation to supplant or efface it.

As I discuss above, I don't think it's that simple. It's self-serving in a context of other meanings that have to be effaced, not a blank slate. So I would argue that it isn't an ethical retrojection to see rape as a bad thing in the text -- BECAUSE it is a morally despicable act, the voice of male property owners have to reinterpret for their benefit.

I guess we're arguing along the margins here. It's possible that an element has a meaning no different than its use in the narrative. I would simply argue that given the preoccupation with "righteousness" in the Hebrew scriptures, it might pay to look for a metameaning, and not take a particularly odious action ordered by God at face value.

Needless to say, I agree with this, but I"m a bit surprised you do. It's the post-modern position in a nutshell. And if true, it's not so much the original post was a retrojection but a naive or uninteresting or some other kind of retrojection.

spin

What you don't seem to understand is the full extent of its applicability and therefore its general insignificance.


spin

spin

I see no ethical disapprobation of rape qua rape in the text. I see property owners showing disapprobation of property damage. They deal with the financial aspects of such property damage. There are no infratextual signs that there was any "ethical disapprobation of rape". There may have been in parts of the society, but from the text it cannot be divined.

This seems to me to be you retrojecting your ethical concerns into a society through a text which refuses to give you grounds for finding the ethical disapprobation of rape which you are concerned with. Your approach seems to me to be purely eisegetical. If what you were saying had currency in the text you should be able to demonstrate it.

What one finds is material used with an abundance of overdetermination. The creation is not simply a story of how god created the cosmos, but an institution of the sabbath and a representation of a god who can act on the world merely through fiat, a far cry from the rolling up the sleeves type creator gods and of course more. Elements in texts often reflect more than their role in the narrative.

Righteousness is a concept relative to the ethical mores of the epoch. If slavery is considered normal for that epoch then righteousness precludes the consideration of the discrepancies involved in maintaining slavery. If women are family chattels then righteousness as a concept is oblivious to the plight of women in such a society.

We live in a society which is still prejudiced against women and has become moreso in recent years when the efforts of staunch defenders of women's rights have passed into history rather than maintaining their vigor, as they have been co-opted into the morass of social expediency. Women were still to a large degree chattel in the mid-19th century in English society and they only gained the vote in America in 1920 (in Switzerland in the 1960s?). It was very common until recently for numerous members of western societies, both male and female, to think that women who didn't fit certain codes of conduct actually deserved being raped. Now go back a few millennia to a society which was much less "learned" than ours, that was extremely ritualistic and far, far less humaine.

In -- to my mind -- oppressive societies in which women suffer clitoridectomy and infibulation, it is often women who are among the staunchest proponents of these acts. It's very hard to make claims about members of societies showing ethical approbation regarding things that are not evidenced in the cutural artefacts of those societies. It is therefore very hard to look at the society we are investigating and make meaningful comments about the mores of that society without any substantive evidence.

By all means, though, seek metameanings if they can be adjudged not to be eisegesis.


spin

Vinnie

http://www.christian-thinktank.com/virginity.html


Vinnie