Regaining Momentum

Having spent the week dealing with large number of strawberries from my mom and some final moving-in work, I'm turning back to reading.

Most of the reading has been on pedagogy and biblical language studies for my TA work, but I did work through Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. While she deals more with gender issues than sex ones (not that they can easily be divided), she does deconstruct the story of Genesis 2-3 rather beautifully and also works quickly through Song of Songs read in the light of Genesis.

Specifically, she shows Genesis 2-3 to be God creating humanity in Eros, in an erotic two-as-one wholeness that is destroyed when humanity disobeys. It echos a good deal of Bonhoeffer's interpretations of the text. (Which I mean to look at soon.) From there, she shows how Song of Songs revels in that two-as-one and rebuilds the unity that is spoken of after gender is differentiated but before the Fall. An interesting read, especially with the implication that patriarchy was a result of the Fall, and not something ordained by God from the beginning. (Though she is perhaps a bit more circumspect about the erotic elements of Song of Songs.)