Gender, literary characterization and history: Re-writing the stories of Deborah and Jezebel

This dissertation studies the characterization of Deborah and Jezebel, in the biblical texts and in the histories of Israel. In order to compare the texts, this study recognizes that written histories and the biblical text are narrative texts, amenable to analysis using literary tools. The focus of this study is characterization in narrative, using techniques set forth by Genette, Bal, and Phelan.;The characterization of six actors in two biblical texts is considered. The characters are Deborah, Sisera, and Jael in Judges 4-5, and Jezebel, Ahab, and Elijah in 1 Kings 16-2 Kings 9. The character set contains two Yahwists, two non-Yahwists and two religiously ambiguous characters. Each pair contains one male and one female. This allows for a study of the effects of gender and religious affiliation on characterization. The biblical characterizations are compared with the presentation of the characters in a selection of histories of Israel.;Chapter one outlines the methodology developed and the choice of characters and histories. Chapter two presents the characters in the Judges text. The character is presented first as he or she appears in the biblical text, then as he or she is characterized in the histories. Chapter three has a structure parallel to chapter two, presenting the characters from the Kings text.;The dissertation concludes with a summary of the characterizations and a discussion of conclusions and implications. The methodology developed is found to yield a number of interesting conclusions and possibilities for further study. This study finds that gender and religious affiliation often affect characterization in the texts of the histories and that issues of characterization are fundamentally important to the writing of history. More specifically, this study finds that the power of the women tends to be reduced in the histories, and that women and men receive different kinds of characterizations in the texts. It is found that the historians are deeply affected by the theological structuring of the text, especially in the way that they positively assess Yahwistic characters.