Ep102. Texts After Terror, Rhiannon Graybill

I sat down with Rhiannon Graybill to talk about how we tell biblical rape stories and how we might tell rape stories differently (content warnings for discussions of rape and sexual violence). We discuss the twofold sense of "after": 1) after Phyllis Trible and related approaches of feminist biblical interpretation, and 2) after the event of terror (as in not letting the suffering or darkness of the texts consume all the interpretive space around them). We also discuss her framework of fuzzy, messy, and icky, as well as what it means to do unhappy readings. Along the way we explore the Graybill's use of millennial and Gen Z women's fiction, why predation might not be the best fit when talking about King David, and why we need more than more than consent as the arbiter of whether a story is a rape story.

Buy Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible

Rhiannon Graybill is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. She holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her research interests include prophecy, gender and sexuality, horror theory, and psychoanalysis and ancient Near Eastern literature. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016). Her current projects include a study of sexual violence and rape in the Hebrew Bible (under contract with Oxford University Press), the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on Jonah (with Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner), and an edited volume on Margaret Atwood and the Bible (with Peter Sabo).

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