The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible.

• Author: Patton, Corrine L.
• Position: Book Review

The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible. By ILANA PARDES. Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society, vol. 14. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2000. Pp. xii + 211. $40 (cloth); $11.95 (paper).

Pardes provides a Freudian literary analysis of the exodus-wilderness narratives, found primarily in Exodus and Numbers. After an introductory chapter that describes her method of analysis, the book is divided into six chapters, each devoted to a specific phase of Israel's journey. The book's epilogue summarizes her interpretation. The monograph has endnotes, a bibliography, and an index of subjects only.

This literary analysis focuses on the two primary characters of these narratives: God and the collective people, "Israel." For Pardes, the stages of Israel's journey through the wilderness reflect classic stages of human development as outlined by Freudian psycho-analysis, including the desire to stay close to the mother, and anxiety over the conflict with the father. Chapter 2 begins with the killing of the firstborn, which she correlates to the national "birth" story. The blood on the doorposts represents the blood of a vaginal birth, and conflicts between Pharaoh and God display oedipal struggles with the father. The stories of mannah, examined in chapter 3, represent the nation's weaning from its mother, while the language of milk and honey stems from the child's fantasy of an ever-present mother. Sinai (chapter 4) is a rite of initiation, while the report of the spies about the giants in the Promised Land (chapter 5) reflects the child's fear of the father. The wilderness period is read as a kind of liminal adolescence, which ends with the second rite of passage into adulthood accomplished in the conquest (chapter 6). This final rite is fraught with problems of sexual identity as the stories about the foreign women make clear.

Pardes notes that throughout this rather organized narrative of Israel's biography the text often subverts the very model it projects. For example, the accounts of Jacob wrestling in the night contrast with the stories of Israel as God's chosen. "The nation, not unlike the eponymous father, is both the chosen son and the rebel son, and accordingly its relationship with the Father is at once intimate and strained" (p. 38). Similarly, God often plays conflicting roles: sometimes that of loving mother, at other times that of violent father.

This brief...