Masculinity, Homoeroticism, Transness, and Yhwh: When Biblical Scholars Attempt to Rehabilitate a Violent God

Reception history explores how the Bible has been translated, interpreted, reinvented, and deployed by exegetes, artists, politicians, and others. Given the Bible’s historical and global significance, reception history must also include evaluating how scholars themselves have “read” the biblical literature. This article examines the work of two influential scholars of Hebrew Bible, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Theodore Jennings. Eilberg-Schwartz’s groundbreaking God’s Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (1994) and Jennings’ Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (2005) both treated an underexplored subject: divine masculinity. In their monographs, Eilberg-Schwartz and Jennings present biblical homoeroticism—divine as well as mortal—as a valuable path for establishing intimacy among men and for “transing” the men of the Hebrew Bible. Both works, however, partake in two long-standing exegetical traditions: mitigating, ameliorating, and even attempting to redeem the Bible’s often violent deity, and reinscribing binary premises that biblical narratives typically feature. The article concludes that scholars must resist the tendency to rehabilitate a violent deity, as well as challenge the Hebrew Bible’s (and scholars’ own) binary premises.