Book Description

Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era performs narrative-critical readings of the character of Sarah in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus. Recent decades have seen a dramatic proliferation of literary and feminist investigations of female characters in the biblical materials, but this enthusiasm has largely failed to spread to readings of Second Temple Jewish literature. Moreover, most work on "rewritten Bible" compositions focuses on near-context, synoptic comparison of so-called derivative works with their scriptural precursors. This study seeks to extend the successes of readings of women in the Bible by focusing on Sarah in several Second Temple works, and it offers a new approach to these materials by applying a theoretically-informed mimetic poetics of character and characterization to her depictions in these narratives. My readings show that Sarah is a complex and sometimes contradictory figure whose individuality and agency often struggle to escape limitations placed upon her by other characters, such as Abraham and God, and by the narrators of her tales. I argue that one of Sarah's trans-narrative or "deep traits," a quality that is expressed in a variety of unique ways in each of these narratives, is a resemblance to the character of Abraham. This is not the ultimate distillation of Sarah, but symptomatic of the kind of restriction that her character faces in this literature. Throughout my study, I also contend, more broadly, that the preoccupation of rewritten Bible studies with the juxtaposition and contrast of retold narratives and their scriptural sources hinders linear readings of the rewritten works, thus obscuring important aspects of their internal narrative effects.