Love With An Agenda

Naomi Harris Rosenblatt's book, After the Apple, is subtitled "Women in the Bible - Timeless Stories of Love, Lust, and Longing. Not.

Rosenblatt, good girl that she is, was brought up on Old Testament stories, longing to find strong women in a document written by men and extolling their role in the history of religion. Sometimes, I feel like she is clutching at straws. Rosenblatt is also a psychotherapist, one who never lets an example of male / female relationships go to waste. Granted Old Testament women are archtype heroines and there is nothing in their stories that is not repeated daily in today's graphic newspaper headlines. But nonetheless, it is quite a stretch of the imagination to conclude these women are lusty.

The women Rosenblatt writes about excel in verbal skills rather than in the art of seduction. They are advocates for their children's birthrights and for their place in history. They are vessels to pass along the religious DNA.

Sure Rosenblatt describes more interesting deviant, that is non-Jewish, women like the Queen of Sheba and Delilah, but one senses that they are merely foils to point out the sexual failings of their male counterparts. To the extent that her more normative women, be they Eve the first rebel or Sarah or Rebecca or Bathsheba, are religious prototypes, they appear less fleshy, women of words not senses.