The Foreign Wife

Modern readers can get themselves into trouble if they treat the Bible as a single voice following a monologic.
Tensions and dialog exist. How best do we maintain covenant fidelity to God?
What is the meaning of history and God's hand in it?

Today we are going to begin our discussion by identifying one particular tension, the prohibition about marrying a foreign wife. This prohibition makes evident the inconsistencies inherent in the social ideological system of patriarchy. We shall also see how the narrative provides multiple voices that push at the edges of what is permissible to show that exceptions to the fulfillment of the particular stipulation do not necessarily violate the covenant.

Begin with the incestuous picture of the patriarchal family. In the attempt to maintain this minority tradition as foreigners in a strange land, they marry within the family.

Then as the Israelites in the exodus wander through the desert interaction with women they encounter causes problems
Numbers 25:1-2 When the Israelites were in Shittim, the people began to have intercourse with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices offered to the gods; and they ate ht sacrificial food and prostrated themselves before the gods of Moab.

Before entering the land the people are given strict instructions against intermarrying

Deut 7:3-4 When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you ­ the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanitees, the perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you ­ and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods.

Deut 23:3-4; No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam son of Beor, from Pethor of Mesopotamia to curse you. 8-9 prohibitions against marrying foreign wives.

Deut 2:2-9 Moab and Ammon in particular are to be kept out of Israelite's community.

When the covenant is restored after the exile it is marriage to foreign women that Ezra makes a central reason for Israel's failure in the past and the stumbling block to success in the future.

Ezra 9-10 and Neh 9:2; 13:1-3.

Which experiences affirm this?

Samson and Delilah
Solomon and the daughter of Pharaoh 1 kings 9:16
9:24 But Pharaoh's daughter went up form the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her; then he built the Millo.
Story of the Queen of Sheba and her effect upon Solomon. 1 Kings 10
Chapter 11 Solomon's error ­ loving foreign wives
The mother of Rehoboam was Naamah the Ammonite.

Ahab and Jezebel.
1 Kings 16:31 And as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, he took as his wife Jezebel daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him.

19:1 Ahab told Jezebel all that Eliha had done, and how he had killed al the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying "So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow."
1 Kings 21 the story of Naboth's vineyard.
Naboth: I will not give you my ancestral inheritance." He lay down on his bed, turned away his race, and would not eat.
His wife Jezebel came to him and said, "Why a re you so depressed that you will not eat."
Do you not govern Israel? Get up, eat some food, and be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite."

221:19 dogs lick Ahab's blood

21:223 The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel.
25 Indeed there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, urged on by his wife Jezebel.
2 Kings 9:30 Jezebel's violent death..

Now what are the tensions. What does the fear of the foreign wife expose about the patriarchal system.

Identity runs through the male line. The wife is appropriated into the patriarchal family. The man infuses his identity into the woman through the act of intercourse. Women assimilate into the man's family.

In the pattern of patriarchy exogamy and exchange characterize marriage.
Men remain in their familiar environment from childhood through their lives surrounded by their family. Girls spend their early years in a liminal zone preparing to leave their birth home and then spend their adult years in the liminal zone of crossing another family's threshold. Her position in that household is secured only when she produces a male heir. She is the potential usurper of the mother. Tradition then characterizes the relationship between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law as a rivalry.

The laws against exogamy ­ marrying a foreign wife or marrying one's daughter to a foreigner expose the following:
Women have influence over husbands.
Women educate children.
Women are preservers of traditions.
The cult may be run and maintain and adjudicated by men, but women have immense power over cultic purity.

Stories allow one to explore the tensions inherent in systems, the contradictions, how ideological systems can victimize the individual, how the emperor has no clothes.

The fear of the foreign wife stands intention with mandate to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger.

Look for foreign wives again:

Joseph marries Asenath
Moses marries Zipporah
Joshua's spies enter the land and go to the home of Rahab.
Rahab marries an Israelite (Salma 1 Chron 2) and has a son Boaz who marries Ruth.

Ruth:

What tensions does Ruth expose:

What do we fear about foreigners?
That they will not keep our customs; they will violate our laws.

Who is Ruth? Is she not the Moabite who speaks the language of the Israelite covenant theology, the Moabite who knows the requirements of Israelite family law? She denies her own language, her own spirituality, her own kinship claims.

Esther
Flip the question around
What do foreigners fear?

Esther and Diaspora Judaism - being the foreign wife rather than marrying one
After exile always more Jews outside the land than in.

What the king says is law. Despotic but shown to be absurd, yet dangerous. Doesn't even know the name of the people he has condemned to death.

Foreigners are capricious. Vashti story. One day they may command massacre next elevate one to quasi-kingship. They can give you everything one day and take it away the next.

p. 75 The Feminine Unconventional "Haman's unjust rage against one individual is so inflated that it becomes genocidal "

Avoiding raising the ire of your hosts.

Look at how the politeness language works.

5:3-8

Ester stands at door
He holds out scepter
King: what is your request? It shall be given you, even to the half of my kingdom (Herod?)
Esther: If it pleases the king, let the king and Haman come today to a banquet that I have prepared for the king.

At banquet
King: What is your petition? It shall be granted you, and what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled."
Esther: This is my petition and request: If I have won the king's favor, and if it please the king to grant my petition and fulfill my request, let the king and Haman come tomorrow to the banquet then I will do as the king has said.

Chapter 7
King repeats same line
Esther: If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me ­ that is my petition ­ and the lives of my people ­ that is my request.

Chapter 8
Ester spoke again to the king, she fell at his feet, weeping and pleading with him to avert the evil design of Haman.
King holds out scepter again
Esther: If it pleases the king, and if I have won his favor, and if the thing seems right before the king, and I have his approval, let an order be written to revoke the letters devised by Hamangiving orders to destroy the Jews who are in all the provinces of their king, for how can I bear to see the calamity that is coming on my people? Or how can I bear to see the destruction of my kindred?

King:you may write as you please

Mordecai writes letters: that allow the Jews to assemble and defend their lives, to destroy to kill to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attach them, and to plunder on a single day.

Esther goes back a second time and asks for a second day and that the ten sons of Haman be hanged. (9:11-15)

Collaboration for survival is no sin.
Marrying your daughters to the other may be your salvation. Esther never truly ceases to be a Jew even though she cannot possibly be keeping kosher. Note the purpose of the fast before she acts. The symbolic cleansing?

The fate of Diaspora Jews is the fate of Israel. Is the emigrant less a member of the community? Do they betray their community? Forsake their community?