Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets.

• Author: Cook, Stephen L.
• Position: Book review

Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations. By CARLEEN R. MANDOLFO. Semeia Studies, vol. 58. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2007. Pp. ix + 149. $24.95 (paper).

A growing body of scholarship has focused a pointed critique on biblical metaphors of God as an outraged husband who perpetrates a battered love against his spouse, Daughter Zion (the female metaphorical figure representing the people of Israel as God's wife). Scriptures within Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel ring with the anger of the divine husband but rarely offer us anything of his estranged wife's perspective. In this volume, Carleen R. Mandolfo objects to God's stance of dominance over his wife in the prophetic texts and aims to give Daughter Zion some airtime. She works hard to counter God's nearly complete "cognitive authority" over Daughter Zion, God's "epistemological hegemony."

Mandolfo's resolve to give Daughter Zion back her voice, to help her reclaim her subjectivity and agency, arises from her "dialogic ethic" adopted from a particular reading of the philosophies of Mikhail Bakhtin and Martin Buber. If there is to be any true justice and peace, she avers, Daughter Zion must speak her mind, God must hear her out, and God must own up to the divine mistakes in the history of the marriage. The appearance of such a dialogue will not mean that everything is fixed, she argues, but dialogue is nevertheless the best hope for healing.

Mandolfo's monograph lifts up Lamentations 1-2 as a neglected resource for hearing Daughter Zion's side of things. Zion's authentic words, uttered on her own terms in these two chapters, provide what Mandolfo describes as a theologically legitimate countervoice within the canon. This voice makes ethical demands upon the reader, particularly the demand to hear Zion's raw expressions of suffering beyond all comprehension and value. It impels us to listen to her describe the irredeemable horrors at the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians, when the divine anger burned indiscriminately (Lamentations 2:3), treating infants and babes as collateral damage (Lamentations 2:11).

Lamentations is particularly valuable for a dialogic hermeneutic, Mandolfo argues, because Daughter Zion's minority viewpoint is actually championed by its normative voice (its "Didactic Voice" ["DV"], the voice of its master narrative). To have the text's authoritative rhetoric on the side of Zion is...