Elisabeth Cook

This essay focuses on the production and performance of masculinities in Ezra 9-10. I address Ezra’s performance of mourning and body modification rituals in Ezra 9–10) and explore the ways in which this performance configures male bodies, gendered identities and socio-religious power relations in the narrative world of the text.

Offering a reading of the intermarriage debate and expulsion of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, this book engages with the production and performance of masculinities in this biblical text, shifting the focus away from the 'foreign women' to the men who are the primary actors in this work.

This approach addresses the diversity of masculinities and the ways in which they are implicated in the production of power relations in the text. It explores the ‘feminized’ masculinity of the peoples-of-the-lands, the unstable masculinity of the golah, Ezra’s performance of penitential masculinity, and the rehabilitation of divine masculinity. The rejection of the marriages and the call for the expulsion of the women and children are addressed as sites on which masculinities and power relations are configured. In doing so, this book sheds light on how women and the traits and performances culturally ascribed to women, femininity and inferior masculinities, are appropriated to produce masculinities and negotiate power relations between men. It posits that the debate in Ezra 9-10 is not,　ultimately, about the women themselves, but about bringing the masculinities, bodies and practices of dissenting men under the ‘management’ of those who wield the Torah in the narrative world of the text.

The focus of this presentation is the character of Yhwh in the book of Ezra, specifically the construction of the masculinity of Yhwh. The analytical category I amploy  is drawn from critical studies of masculinities and the growing scholarship on ancient West Asian and biblical masculinities. It speaks to an issue that I suggest, is at stake in the text and is a matter of concern for those who are represented by and in this narrative world: the ability of Yhwh to perform as a supreme male deity. I consider some of the issues in the book of Ezra that might raise doubts concerning the masculinity of Yhwh and then address strategies by which Yhwh is rehabilitated in this narrative world so that he may be proven to be “good at being a male god”.  I then turn to the debate over the marriages to ‘foreign women’ in Ezra 9-10 to consider the significance of Yhwh’s masculinity for the configuration of social and religious power within the golah and for those represented in and by the text.