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Chapter Three Daughter Zion the Gendered Presentation of the Assyrian Crisis in First Isaiah, Zephaniah, and Nahum

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Chapter Three Daughter Zion the Gendered Presentation of the Assyrian Crisis in First Isaiah, Zephaniah, and Nahum Chapter Three Daughter Zion The Gendered Presentation of the Assyrian Crisis in First Isaiah, Zephaniah, and Nahum Having treated the gendered metaphorical complexes that the authors of the Assyrian inscriptions used to describe their encounters with foreign rivals, we turn now to the gendered representation of the Israelite-Assyrian encounter in the Bible. An immediate difference between the two sets of texts that will be noted and analyzed in this chapter is a shift in the focus of the gendered metaphors from masculine imagery to feminine. The Assyrian texts focused on their king's successful performance of masculinity and bolstered the king's masculine claims through the depiction of foreign rivals as those who had failed in the masculine contest of warfare. The biblical authors who wrote about Assyria, as will be shown below, focused instead on the feminization of Jerusalem, their capital city, and the language of unrivalled, royal masculinity was reserved for their god, Yahweh. One of the Bible's earliest and most sustained metaphorical complexes describing the Israelite-Assyrian encounter was that of Jerusalem-as-woman. From First Isaiah's portrayal of the young virgin Daughter Zion scoffing at the romantic pursuit of Sennacherib through Deutero-Isaiah 's depiction of Yahweh's renewal of marriage vows with Jerusalem, this metaphor of Jerusalem as a woman became part of an involved and canonically evolving metaphorical complex that captured the prophets' imaginations in their attempt to grapple with the power of the Assyrian empire. This chapter will delineate the parameters of the Jerusalem-as-woman metaphorical complex (hereafter "Jerusalem Complex") in light of current theories of metaphor. It will then compare the Jerusalem Complex to other prophetic, metaphorical representations of the Assyrian encounter in order to ascertain the reasons for the canonical prominence and ideological power of the Jerusalem Complex. Finally, having established a clear definition of the workings of the Jerusalem Complex, I will trace its development beginning with each of its earliest formulations in First Isaiah, Zephaniah, and Nahum during the period when Assyria was still an empire. Then in chapter four I will continue to chart the development of the Jerusalem Complex in the post-Assyrian period by analyzing its transformation under Jeremiah and Ezekiel and its renewal within Deutero-lsaiah, where it came to be applied to the encounter with Assyria's imperial successor, Neo­ Babylonia. Daughter Zion 61 THE JERUSALEM COMPLEX DEFINED THE CHARACTERS IN THE JERUSALEM-ASSYRIAN ENCOUNTER The Jerusalem Complex is a metaphorical bundle that the prophets used to dramatize the historical encounter with Assyria as they experienced and remembered it. As a drama, this complex featured several characters, the most prominent of which was the woman, Jerusalem. The centrality of Jerusalem as the capital of Judah is a reflection of the Judean identity of most of the biblical prophets as well as the historical and hence canonical survival of Judah and its inhabitants following the Babylonian Exile. Jerusalem-as-woman is introduced within the Bible under various pseudonyms. She is Zion, Daughter Zion, Jerusalem, Daughter Jerusalem, Judah, Faithless Judah, Oholibah, and she is often an unnamed woman addressed with a series of second-person feminine singular imperatives. Jerusalem's story overshadows and subordinates that of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. Still, there is an Israel-as-woman metaphorical complex (hereafter the "Israel Complex") that constitutes an important precursor to the Jerusalem Complex. This Israel Complex is not nearly as defined or developed as what we will find with the Jerusalem Complex. An examination of the featured elements of this metaphorical complex is important, however, because, as we will see, many of the metaphorical elements that are mentioned but not fully developed in the Israel Complex are later incorporated into the Jerusalem Complex. The first hint we have of an Israel Complex is found in Amos 5: 1-2 where the prophet portrays Yahweh as raising a dirge over the house of Israel saying, "She has fallen and will never again rise up, Virgin Israel. She has been abandoned on her soil with no one to raise her up." Amos' dirge personifies the whole of Israel as a virgin woman. This metaphorical woman, however, is in no way connected to Yahweh-the-husband or Assyria-the-lover. These verses in Amos 5 open what has been called "The Book of Woes," a self-contained unit within Amos made up of chapters 5-6, which Francis Andersen and David Noel Freedman have characterized as a book of "woe rather than doom, warning rather than judgment."1 The significance of this statement is that within these chapters, the prophet expresses hope that there is still time for Israel to repent and avoid disaster. These sentiments of hope are 1According to Andersen and Freedman, the Book of Woes is found in Amos chapters 5-6 and is delineated by the conclusion to the Book of Doom at the end of chapter four and the opening of a new Book of Visions beginning in chapter 7 (Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Amos: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 461 ). .
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