The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World:

Exploring the Early Messianic Lineage as a Series of New Adams

Author(s): Peter John Barber
Source: Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture , Vol. 22 (Spring 2015), pp.
203-220
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/contagion.22.1.0203

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 The Role of the Androgyne in
the Biblical Subversion of the
Mytho-Sacrificial World
Exploring the Early Messianic Lineage as a Series of
New Adams

Peter John Barber

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

s biblical messianism essentially androgynous? This paper aims to

I explore examples of gender-ambivalent characters in the Hebrew Bible

and to assert the presence of a trend in the character development of
messianic figures.1 This trend indicates intent to subvert mytho-sacrificial
social norms, or what René Girard has called the sacrificial world.2 I argue
that in the following select texts we encounter the promotion of gender
nondifferentiation and equality, at least in certain critical circumstances. In
this manner, the Hebrew Bible includes the countercultural assertion that
nondifferentiation is not the real threat to cosmos, to life and peace, as the
prevailing mythological worldview suggests. Rather it can be a necessary
component in salvific efforts. In fact, the evidence points toward early
messianic figures being defined by their relative androgyny, or nondif-
ferentiation in terms of gender.3 And I suggest that these androgynes would

Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 22, 2015, pp. 203–220. ISSN 1075-7201.
© 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. 203

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204 Peter John Barber

appear to be restorations of the Adam,4 the Lord’s first and closest image-
bearer according to the Genesis creation accounts.
I will argue my reading by first observing the nature of the Adam in the
creation accounts and then by looking selectively at a few examples of
subsequent characters in the Hebrew Bible—namely, Jacob, Tamar, Rahab,
Ruth, and David—that display countercultural androgynous behavior and
are described as, by virtue of their very androgyneity, staving off the threat
of violence and/or death for Israel. This resolving of potentially
catastrophic problems, through violation of the very social distinctions
thought by the religious world to be the protection of society, constitutes
the conquest or subversion of that mytho-sacrificial world.
It is recognized by many students of religion and culture that social
distinctions are enforced as part of an effort to control violence and death in
society:
A single principle is at work in primitive religion and classical tragedy alike, a
principle implicit but fundamental. Order, peace, and fecundity depend on cultural
distinctions; it is not these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce
rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another’s
throats.5

As a result, transgressing for example gender boundaries is not merely

distasteful but dangerous from a cultural or mythical perspective. As René
Girard points out, part of the work of the biblical revelation, or Yahweh’s
liberation movement in the text,6 is to expose this assumption regarding the
need for false distinctions as unfounded because there remains another and
natural way for humans to find peace and life.7
The Bible moves toward nonacceptance of the apparent gender norms of
(ancient Canaanite and surrounding Near Eastern)8 culture, as part of a
larger ideological warfare within the text against oppressive and violent
social categories and practices, which are suitably termed sacrificial and
mythological in the Girardian sense. Girard has discussed how gender
ambivalence is feared by (mythological) culture, being associated with the
threat of chaos, and is therefore one of a number of perceived
nondifferentiated states that are controlled via myth, sacrifice, and law
(culture’s three religious pillars).9
The social categories, including gender roles, that emerge directly from
this mythological fear and its sacrificial response are trappings of the
religious world out of which the Hebrews via the Yahweh-Alone movement
are attempting to find a way, or an “Exodus.”10 As a part of this effort, the

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 205

writers and redactors of the Hebrew Bible offer up androgynous (male-

female) characters (in terms of behavior) that subvert the mytho-sacrificial
assumption that androgyny is a threat to cosmos, by making these
androgynes the heroes and heroines of Yahweh and Israel, the kingdom of
God.
The Yahweh-Alone movement has a number of symbols that emerge for
its articulation in the Hebrew Bible, of which, I suggest, the androgyne
explored here is a central example. Such characters reject the social
expectation for the sacrificial way of thinking and living, which is
symbolized and even actualized in part by their refusal of gender-exclusive
modes of being, and instead recreate a wholeness or oneness. I consider this
phenomenon to represent and actualize a restored “Adam-ness” that
enables the preservation of life in critical moments of imminent violence,
destruction, and/or death.

APPROACH

This paper takes a literary approach to select texts of the Hebrew Bible,
analyzing certain characters’ behavior and social interaction with an eye for
cultural gender categories. I view culture through the lens of René Girard’s
mimetic anthropology,11 which understands culture to be essentially
mythological and sacrificial in nature.12 I assume here that this state of
affairs, the reality that the world’s existence is based upon and maintained
by falsely justified sacrificial violence, directly relates to the presence of
oppressive gender categories in culture and so also occasions the impetus
behind biblical violations of these categories. The paper can be said to
integrate some aspects of feminist readings of these texts with some features
of Girard’s anthropology of violence and religion.13
It is important to contextualize the social restoration motif symbolized
and realized in the Adam-like androgyne. Simple observation reveals that
this recurring salvific androgyne is a part of a larger attempt at restoration of
a fourfold social brokenness that the biblical writers articulate in their
account of the first divorce between humanity and Maker14—the image and
the image-bearers—in Genesis 3– 4 (which is attributed to the J-source, or
Yahwists, by documentary hypothesizers).15 The biblical writers, perhaps
Yahwists, articulate there an essential part of the worldview of the biblical
metanarrative suggested here.16 The four spheres of this divorce are
described as between a human and his/her self, a human and his/her
neighbor, a human and his/her natural environment, and a human and his/

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206 Peter John Barber

her creator especially in the sense of the image he/she is supposed to reflect
but now no longer does.
An important example of a later story in which a parallel fourfold
restoration of this brokenness is described is in the account of Joseph,
Jacob’s (Israel’s) favored son by Rachel, his favorite wife (Gen. 44:25–34,
45:1–28). In the conclusion of Joseph’s story we have a description of a
fourfold healing of the four social alienations presented in Genesis 3– 4.17
While there is not room here to go into a detailed demonstration of the
relationship between these texts, I think it is important to recognize the
larger ideological movement of which the salvific androgyne, the new Adam
in terms of bigendered behavior, is a part. The androgyne is a part of, and is
symbolic of, the resolution of all contraries; the antagonizing and oppressive
contraries that result from a type of behavior engaged in by the Bible’s first
humans that is self-destructive, that brings death.
The restorative connotation of the androgyne in relation to the four
spheres of social alienation, or mythological distinctions, relates in turn to
the androgyne’s messianic characteristics. It appears that some of the
persons who engage in androgyny are listed in Davidic messianic lineages,
including the one found at the end of the book of Ruth, as well as later
Christian and Rabbinic-Jewish messianic ancestries.18 This essential aspect
will be brought up throughout the following exploratory analysis, as it is
difficult to ignore the significance of all of the androgynes discussed here
also being ancestors of King David.19

DEFINING TERMS

Before proceeding I should clarify my use of some of the terms in the title
and thus far in the paper. By “androgynous” I refer to a character’s behavior
that is atypical of her biological gender in terms of what her culture or
society expects of her, especially in that this behavior is seen as more
characteristic of and appropriate for the opposite sex.20 By “mythological
world” I mean that type of culture or society that collectively makes what
many people today would consider to be false distinctions, false categories
(such as cosmos versus chaos, good versus bad violence, male versus female
behavior, etc.), and enforces those categories oppressively with violent
consequences for violators (and this leads me to what I mean by
“sacrificial”— discussed later).
Such distinctions, such forced differentiation,21 is predicated upon a
more fundamental false premise, which is the perspective that there are two

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 207

kinds of violence, (our) good sort and (their) evil sort, thus necessitating
the quasi-ritual practice of sacrifice or scapegoating of the Other who is
perceived as engaging in evil violence. So by “sacrifice” I mean expulsion or
elimination of the Other. The reality and efficaciousness of this kind of
social mythology and sacrifice is challenged and even conquered (on the
page at any rate) in the Bible, and the biblical salvific androgyne is often at
the center of this restorative work.

THE ADAM

Many biblical scholars are now of the opinion that what we read of in the
first three chapters of Genesis is (inter alia) the creation of a whole,
“genderless” being in the likeness of God, or both male and female in
gender (Gen. 1:26 –27).22 This gender-united being, or androgyne, is only
later separated in two in order that the human may commune with itself
and, in its diversified state, help itself in the work it is given to do on the
earth (Gen. 2:18 –25).23 But the text makes plain that the Adam, the human
being, is to be considered a unity, a oneness because, for example, the two
halves come together in marital union (Gen. 2:23–24). This union is a
symbolic reminder that the two are in reality one being, and it is in bigender
or rather nongender that Godlikeness, or more precisely Yahweh-likeness
(the particular Hebrew God) is manifest.24
This absence of limiting distinctions distinguishes reality from the
delusion that will soon pervade it, which is the manifold false distinction
(divisible into four principal categories as noted previously). Jean-Michel
Oughourlian has recently pointed to this effect in his discussion of the fruit
of the tree(s) of the knowledge of good and evil, and the human and his
woman’s consumption of it that leads to oppressive distinctions.
Oughourlian observes:
The “forbidden fruit” is only a symbol, and it is mimetic rivalry, which is itself the
source of all the oppositional differences in the world, that causes one to eat it. And
yet these differences seem to come out of the fruit as though they were already
contained in it before being swallowed by the humans who will never be able to
digest them. The allegory of the serpent is well chosen: the mimetic venom insinu-
ates itself between the woman and God, then between the woman and the man. From
this point on, false differences invade the field of reality, and reality is everywhere replaced
by illusion.25

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208 Peter John Barber

The first humans’ selfishness and violence in attempting to seize by force

and devour the being or life of their Maker results in the false gender
distinction, the oppressive and rivalry-fraught hierarchy between male and
female, that ever after serves as a principle example and symbol of
Godlessness, of the deformity of humanity.
The story also clearly indicates that there are no specified or expected
roles for each half in supporting the other in doing Yahweh’s work, no
“male” job and “female” job or prescribed sets of behavior or lifestyle. They
come only after the first devouring of the Other, of God.26 We see this, for
example, in the way that the female speaks for the male without any hint of
objection on the part of narrator or character(s) before they make their
mistake (Gen. 2:3– 6). We also see it in the internal “before and after”
contrast formed against the limiting categories that are described only after
selfishness, the will to devour the Other, begins (Gen. 3:5, 3:14 –19). From
this fact we may extrapolate that any human half can and should do/be
whatever is necessary to help, and there are no restrictions on that freedom,
so that ideally any one half should realize the ability to do and to be as much
as possible on its own. Or to use our mythological (i.e., falsely
distinguishing) language, any half should be as “male” and/or as “female” as
it feels it must be to address the needs at hand. In this way a human
creatively (emulating the Creator) realizes oneness, Godlikeness, and
unlimited liberated (eternal?) life.

MESSIANIC ANDROGYNES AND NEW ADAMS

Should the reader surmise that this thesis is too conjectural, I hope to show
that my reading is well supported when we read of example after example of
characters that practice just such shocking gender ambivalence in the stories
that follow in the Hebrew Bible. We encounter characters that simulta-
neously offend mythological social categories and fulfill the Lord of life’s—
the Hebrew God’s—will of saving lives and preserving the way of life. In so
doing, these persons become messiahs and forebears of messiahs.27 I begin
with the story of Jacob, renamed “Israel” by the Lord. He is the son of Isaac,
the promised son of Abraham. We read Jacob’s story in Gen. 25:19 –35:29.28
First let us note some examples of his gender-ambivalent description.
Jacob is described as smooth of skin (Gen. 27:11), in contrast to his hairy
brother (Gen. 25:25), and as preferring to stay in the tents with the women
rather than going out in the field to hunt and work like Esau (Gen. 25:27).
Jacob also cooks in the kitchen with the women (Gen. 25:29). It has been

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 209

suggested that Jacob is “cultured” and Esau “uncultured,” and therefore

Jacob is more able to carry on the family and so preferred in the story.29 But
this does not reflect the evidence in the text of the cultural milieu, I think.
Esau is clearly the better “man” and favored by his father and among
androcentric culture as a result. He is more capable, or willing, to do what is
expected of a male.
Jacob is clearly favored in the text, not because he is more “cultured”
but the opposite. Jacob, or Israel, is a quintessential biblical androgyne and
so can be said to well mirror the Adam. When he is older, Israel himself will
make his favored son some clothes (Gen. 37:3),30 which is clearly in the
domain of the “female” in the gendered, mythological world and is likely an
ability he developed while in the tents. Jacob does at other times display the
ability to work hard as a shepherd and to fight well in combat (e.g., Gen.
32:24 –32), commonly male-gendered attributes. Consequently, Israel has
been considered the most androgynous character in the Hebrew Bible. As
Yael Feldman concluded, “He is as close as the Hebrew tradition has ever
come to a representation of androgyny.”31
Now let us consider this androgyne’s salvific role. Israel’s ability to be
whatever “gender” he need be to whatever degree enables him to creatively
solve genuine threats to successful life and existence for himself, his family,
and his people. Behaving androgynously enables, for example, nonsacrificial
solutions to the threat of defeat and death. Jacob engages in blackmail to
gain his brother’s birthright, and trickery, considered by many to be the
weapon of women, to steal his father’s blessing (Gen. 27:1– 41). James G.
Williams has noted how this interaction between Jacob and his brother
Esau, in his gaining of the birthright through trickery, constitutes a
subversion, or sacrifice, of the sacrificial itself.32 Jacob also employs trickery
to overcome impediments placed before him by his father-in-law (Gen.
30:30 – 43). He later attempts to placate his “manlier” brother Esau, who
intended to slay him, by giving a series of gifts (Gen. 32:1–33:20)—
something done later by a female, Abigail,33 to placate David’s murderous
wrath (1 Sam. 25:14 –35)—instead of turning to violence himself.34
Alternately, however, Jacob engages in single combat with the angel of
the Lord and defeats him (Gen. 32:24 –32, and here receives the name
Israel), clearly demonstrating culturally masculine abilities. In each of these
circumstances, Jacob employs various androgynous states of being to
address direct threats to the continued livelihood and existence of himself,
his family, and his people. It deserves mentioning that Jacob is prayerful
during his trials, and he asks the Lord of life to preserve him and his

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210 Peter John Barber

descendants (Gen. 32:11–12), and the Lord God does so, so that Israel
comes to the conclusion, “I have seen God face to face so that my life has
been saved” (Gen. 32:30; my translation). Israel the androgyne has
experienced unity with God, a new Adam-ness.
Next let us look at Tamar the Canaanite,35 the unlikely wife of Judah.
Her story is much shorter than Jacob’s but no less significant in that she
single-handedly preserves Judah’s lineage and the messianic lineage of
David. To do this, and having been unjustly and ungraciously spurned by
Judah as a spouse for his last remaining son (Gen. 38:1–14), Tamar becomes
the initiator and decision maker for Judah without his knowledge. She
decides to dress as a prostitute and deceptively entice Judah (Gen. 38:14 –
19), who fathers twins on her (Gen. 38:27–30). When Judah becomes aware
of with whom he slept and what she has done for him and the existence of
his family, he admits that she is more righteous than he (Gen. 38:24 –26);
she is the better man. This is quite an admission especially for the male
founder of a great (the greatest?) biblical house.
Tamar’s culturally malelike autonomous initiative, decision making,
and righteousness, combined with her cultural femaleness in tricking and
seducing Judah by allowing herself to be perceived as a harlot, result in an
androgyne preserving life. As Johanna Bos has noted, she steps into a
masculinity vacuum vacated by Judah to fulfill his duty of siring the next
generation.36 At the start of this story it appears that Judah’s line will simply
fade away, but as Bos observes, “[Tamar] then moves to the center of the
narrative to change the course of events toward success/increase of life.”37
Her androgynous behavior saves life. Tamar is a true “Israel-ite” because of
her Jacob-like behavior, and so a new Adam also.
Rahab of Jericho,38 like Tamar, is not initially an Israelite but a
Canaanite. She does not come from the “right” background from a
mythological perspective. (And this is true of the next character addressed,
Ruth the Moabite, as well.) But these three women, messianic ancestresses
all, save the future savior(s) of Israel (and humanity, some have concluded)
at critical moments in the precarious phenomenon that is existence.
Rahab is a prostitute and also runs a lodge of some kind in Jericho
(Josh. 2:1). She is described as being the decision maker in her father’s
house, perhaps even the head of it (Josh. 2:12–13, 6:25), which strikes us
mythological readers as countercultural on two counts: her being a woman
and a prostitute. Her story is filled with cultural gender ironies in her
interactions with two male spies sent from Joshua, whom she “out-males” in
their respective behavior at every turn in the plot.39 In contrast to Rahab,

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 211

who displays as much culturally male as female behavior, one scholar

observes that the soldiers in this story are men who “do not behave in a
masculine manner.”40 Yair Zakovitch concludes, “Even the sexual element,
a fundamental part of the ‘woman who rescues a man’ story-type, is toned
down not only to fit the conservative character of the Bible but also in order
to scorn these military men who do not live up to their more manly
prototypes.”41 Rahab is juxtaposed with these a-cultural males in her own a-
cultural behavior in terms of commonly held cultural and religious gender
expectations. And her behavior is the sole cause of the saving of lives in this
story.
She saves the lives of these men who claim to be saving her (Josh. 2:15–
16) and simultaneously opens the door for Joshua and Israel’s safe entrance
into Canaan (Josh. 2:9, 2:14), into the land promised by the Lord of life to
Abram. As simultaneously prostitute, trickster, savior, prophet, self-
appointed director of operations, and family leader, Rahab is another
androgyne who saves the day, saves life, and saves Israel. Tikva Frymer-
Kensky has concluded that Rahab is a new Israel, which is affirmed in her
salvation taking place under a similar symbol, the red cord marking her
father’s house, like the red blood over the houses of Israel.42 But she is a new
Israel also in her new Adam-like behavior that mirrors Jacob-Israel’s
androgynous behavior. Rahab’s salvation and her loving and life-saving acts
are often read as a bellwether that Israel will continue to survive into the
future.43
Ruth the Moabite (and great-grandmother of David), for her part, is
the daughter-in-law of Naomi, an Israelite of Ephrathah (Bethlehem)
sojourning in Moab, who has recently lost her husband and both of her sons
(Ruth 1:2, 1:4 –5).44 In the vacuum of males Ruth takes it upon herself to
become male enough for her mother-in-law Naomi to get them through, to
save their lives and the Judahite messianic line that they represent. Naomi
also takes on culturally male characteristics during this time. In fact, it has
been demonstrated that all three of the main characters in this story (Boaz
being the third) behave androgynously at times, and all three are members
of the Davidic and messianic lineage. Of this Jon Berquist writes:
In the book of Ruth, the social roles of the main characters (Naomi, Ruth and Boaz)
undergo observable changes involving the addition of various roles. This process of
characterization corresponds to the sociological theory of role dedifferentiation, by
which persons respond to crisis through adding roles, including roles that would be
socially inappropriate in normal times.45

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212 Peter John Barber

This androgynous behavior of Ruth and the other two serves directly in
preserving this family line at a critical moment in the larger biblical
narrative. In his mimetic anthropology René Girard uses a similar term,
nondifferentiation, to describe this state of being, a state that can only be
sustained by reciprocal selfless love. If a member (or members) of the group
fails to love, then the egalitarian unity quickly and usually violently reforms
back into oppressive hierarchical categories of behavior.46
Ruth and Naomi “cleave” to each other (Ruth 1:14), the term used for
the union of male and female halves of the Adam in the creation account in
Genesis (Gen. 2:24). They are helpmeets, and their androgynous behavior
sustains their lives, the life of their family, and their people. Together they
are able to establish themselves in Bethlehem again (Ruth 2:1–9). Ruth (and
Naomi) then initiate(s) a sexual encounter with a relative of Naomi’s
husband named Boaz (Ruth 3:7–11), and they (all three?) become the
parents of King David’s grandfather (Ruth 4:13–17). Ruth employs behavior
culturally ascribed to both male and female genders to achieve this
unexpected and life-preserving outcome. Ruth is another androgynous
savior, a new Adam. Berquist concludes, “The surprising end demonstrates
the power of the story, in which people permanently destroy gender role
boundaries in mutually profitable ways.”47
And now let us turn to David, son of Jesse, who is considered a messiah
himself and the forebear of messiah(s) (e.g., 1 Sam. 16:1; Jer. 23:5– 6).48 As
we have just seen, his existence is made possible by a lot of very (culturally)
gender-unorthodox behavior by a lot of people before him, and he himself
does not disappoint in this regard. David is praised for his attractive
appearance, including beautiful eyes (1 Sam. 16:12), a perhaps unusual
observation for describing a male character. But he also loves and is
affectionate with Jonathan, the brother of one of his wives (Michal), more
than any of said wives (e.g., 1 Sam. 18:1– 4, 19:1–2, 20:3– 4, 20:17, 20:41). In
addition, David engages in celebratory and apparently risqué dancing
during a religious festival, behavior that is undoubtedly the domain of
females (1 Chron. 15:29). His behavior shames and angers his wife, Michal.
It is very apparent that David also engages in a great deal of culturally
masculine behavior, shepherding as a boy (e.g., 1 Sam. 16:11) and
successfully engaging in combat as a champion (1 Sam. 17:41–54), as well as
leading Judah’s and Israel’s men in warfare (e.g., 1 Sam. 18:5). David’s
androgynous behavior has been noted by scholarship.49 At times such
writers use these aspects of his character description for proposing biblical

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 213

homoeroticism, but this possibility is outside the focus of this paper. It

suffices to note that David is an androgynous character.
David does more than his share of bloodshed, but his androgynous
behavior also saves lives. The love between David and his brother-in-law
Jonathan enables him to be saved from Jonathan’s father, King Saul (1 Sam.
19:1–2), so that David himself is able to take the throne in the future, which
Jonathan willingly surrenders in love to David (1 Sam. 20:1– 42). The people
love David for his dancing, and it coincides with his bringing the Ark of the
Covenant up to Jerusalem for the first time (2 Sam. 6:12–16), establishing
life-saving religious and social stability for Israel. David’s androgynous
behavior clearly serves him in preserving his own life and the life of the
people of Israel. He may certainly be considered another salvific androgyne,
notwithstanding his obvious violent behavior. In fact this violence is
identified by the Lord in the text as keeping David from his presence (e.g., 1
Chron. 28:3; Psalms 51). Nevertheless, David remains an image of a new
Adam, though his behavior is certainly more morally ambivalent than those
salvific androgynes that preceded him.

GENDERLESSNESS AND REBIRTH

I have certainly been selective in this analysis, but look what emerges from
focusing on these characters. In this brief exploration I have drawn together
the collective observations of a number of biblical scholars to show that one
central feature of the biblical articulation of salvation— or continued life
preservation—is a very practical disregarding of the central false social
distinction of gender that, if abided by, is fatal for persons and groups.
According to the familial history laid out in the Hebrew Bible, it would have
meant very quickly the nonexistence of the entity of Israel. In this socially
subversive message of the Hebrew Bible, we encounter the transcendence
of religious society—the prevailing mytho-sacrificial modes of thinking,
seeing, and living that are (perhaps) ironically self-destructive.
René Girard has metaphorically referred to religion or culture as the
placenta that is discarded once a child is fully born.50 The Hebrew Bible
paints a similar picture in part by means of androgynous characters like
those explored here, articulating the gradual transcendence of sacrificial
violence as a tool for controlling violence itself (i.e., religion), and replacing
that way of death with the way of love and life. The bridle of the law, of
sacrificial violence, is able to mitigate against the symptoms but is unable to
fully eradicate the underlying illness, as it were. And these early androgynous

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214 Peter John Barber

messiahs display the sort of nonsacrificial behavior, rejecting the walls that
the mytho-sacrificial world erects to control violence, which moves in the
direction of the new way and new life that the Hebrew Bible thus offers
Israel and humanity.
The purpose of reiterating again and again this message of freedom
from unnatural social constraints—typified in the universal subject of
gender divisions—is to articulate an alternate way of living on the earth,
what could be summarized as a freer and potentially nonviolent way. This
way practices and celebrates unity in egalitarian diversity. The nonviolence
in the text is borne out when we observe that in the stories just surveyed,
every time that an androgynous solution is employed it results in an
outcome that minimizes and even avoids violence and death and preserves
life.
Finally I would like to point forward to later reception of the motif of
the biblical salvific androgyne in the messianic lineage, as it is found in
nascent Christianity and subsequent Christian literature. The notion there
of Jesus and his followers as realizers of the new Adam themselves (e.g.,
Rom. 5:14; 1 Cor. 15:22– 45), as becoming angels in the sense of being
genderless or androgynous (e.g., Matt. 22:23–33), is likely a continuation of
the biblical motif explored here.51 In any case, in this exploration of the
gender behavior of five members of early Israel, and of the early Davidic or
messianic lineage, it is clear that androgynous behavior that serves the
divine work of creating and preserving life is a regularly recurring feature.
These androgynes approach the nature of the unified Adam, as described in
Genesis, before it crumbles into false distinctions and oppressive inequality.
The culturally subversive theme running through these characters’ stories
serves a larger biblical attempt to combat mytho-sacrificial modes of
thinking and living, the world as we know it.

NOTES

1. By “messianic figures” I mean persons in the messianic lineage of David who themselves
engage in salvific acts by means of their androgynous behavior (on this see below), and
who establish a type or pattern for messiahs. That they serve this last function is
indicated, I think, in that they are regularly named as a part of messianic lineages (on this
see below).
2. For example, see René Girard, “The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence
and Religion,” interview by David Cayley (Toronto: CBC Ideas transcript, March 5–9,

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 215

2001), 15. Girard uses this term in his discussion of how tragedy, in part, reinforces or
upholds scapegoating as normative for maintaining peace.
3. I think these texts are teaching that the real threat to life and peace is not a lack of
difference and a lack of hierarchy but a lack of acceptance of the strange Other (love),
and a lack of freedom to be an Other (liberty). René Girard’s mimetic anthropology and
scapegoat theory, especially his writing in book 2 of Things Hidden since the Foundation of
the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1987), help us to understand the way that the biblical texts reveal the false
distinctions and sacrificial oppressions that order traditional society, and how these texts
articulate an alternative ordering mechanism for humanity.
4. There is in fact an Israelite tradition, of uncertain antiquity, of viewing the Adam as
originally androgynous. See, for example, the Rabbinic Midrashim of Leviticus Rabbah
12:2. I would like to thank James G. Williams for pointing this out to me, as well as for a
number of other important observations, incorporated herein, that he made as a gracious
reader of this paper.
5. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), 49.
6. See Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of
Apocalyptic Faith, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), 141– 62, for one
description of the presence and nature of the Yahweh-Alone movement in ancient Israel.
I must, however, state that apart from Cohn’s acknowledgement of the phenomenon in
ancient Israel, I contest many of his views on it, including his late dating of its rise. I agree
instead, for example, with Newman (1985; for more on which see note 10), who views this
movement as occurring at the outset of and instigating in part the Israelite settlement in
Canaan, in cooperation with the other Hebrews of the region.
As I have discussed in a previous paper that employed Girard’s insights extensively on
this very matter (see Peter John Barber, “The Combat Myth and the Gospel’s
Apocalypse in the Harry Potter Series: Subversion of a Supposed Existential Given,”
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 24, no. 2 [2012]: 185), there are two defining
characteristics of the Yahweh-Alone movement, which are directly related to one
another. The first and most obvious is the ascendance of a single god, the god of victims.
And the second, that in fact gives rise to the first, is the awareness of and censure of
scapegoating.
7. See Girard, Things Hidden, 147– 49, 264 –70.
8. Some feminist biblical scholars appear to have suggested that the ancient Canaanite, and
even more broadly Near Eastern, culture(s) in which nascent Israel was formed exhibited
the same sort of societal gender distinctions in terms of normative behavior as we
experience in our own time and place. For example, Carol L. Meyers, Discovering Eve:
Ancient Israelite Women in Context, rev. ed. (Toronto: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1991),
writes, “Feminist anthropological scholarship, in its insistence that gender differentiation
is a salient feature of any cultural system, has opened the way for this study of the Israelite
woman” (7– 8). Another example is Lillian R. Klein, From Deborah to Esther: Sexual
Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), who states, “In the narratives,
the world outside the home was the domain of men; within the home, the women had

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216 Peter John Barber

more authority: essentially, authority over their children. Such social structures are to be
found to this day among some Middle Eastern religious groups, and they are a valuable
resource for studying the social milieu of the Hebrew Bible” (x).
9. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 126 –30, discusses androgyny in this fashion within his
analysis of the festival of Dionysus.
10. This apparent war against oppressive social differentiation and categorization found in
these texts of early Israelite counterculture has been argued to parallel the sociopolitical
situation on the ground in the context of their backstory and composition in Late Bronze
Age Canaan; see Murray L. Newman, “Rahab and the Conquest,” in Understanding the
Word, ed. J. Butler et al. (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1985), 167– 81. The texts
describe a social movement that is central to early Hebrew and Israelite (anti-)identity
and that continues to typify the biblical worldview in later Jewish and Christian tradition.
Newman supports an important assertion from the influential research of George
Mendenhall on Late Bronze Age Canaan (1962), which is that the Hebrews (a social
rather than ethnic designator for the disenfranchised of society) including (and
instigated by) the Israelites, found comfort and confidence in the ideas of the nascent
Yahweh-Alone movement (of the late thirteenth century BC) to assert a greater freedom
and egalitarianism onto their world that at the time may aptly be dubbed “feudalistic” or
a dimorphic society (171–72). (This is not unlike today’s 99 percent and 1 percent
dimorphism.)
11. Girard states in various places that all culture is characterized at its heart by sacrifice of
the Other. For example, see Girard, “The Scapegoat,” 33, where he concludes that “all
societies believe in witch-hunting” in his discussion of this phenomenon in the Middle
Ages. The foundation and maintenance of every culture is the sacrifice (scapegoating)
that brings unity to the group.
12. For a summary of René Girard’s mimetic anthropology of violence and religion, the
reader may wish to refer to a summary of his theories, like that offered in René Girard,
The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad and Herder, 1996).
13. Individual scholars and works are cited and quoted in due course below.
14. ”Divorce” is one translation of the classical Hebrew term for the “casting out” from the
Lord’s Garden (Gen. 3:24).
15. For more on the documentary hypothesis’ application to these texts and the “Yahwist”
source, see, for example, E. A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, vol. 1,
The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 21–38.
16. For the descriptions of the four social directions of brokenness, see Gen. 3:7–24, 4:11–14.
These are described in the text as direct results of the choices of the human and his
woman, and Cain their firstborn. These characters are explicitly said to have cursed
themselves by their choice to “devour” the Other. I say “devour” because consumptive
behavior and/or imagery accompanies both events, and this imagery continues to occupy
a central place in subsequent, similar stories in the Hebrew Bible and even into the New
Testament. (For an exploration and analysis of the Biblical consumption metaphor for
violence, see Peter John Barber, “Rediscovery the Meaning of John 6:53: The Two Ways,
the Lord’s Ambivalent Table, and Mimetic Theory” [master’s thesis, University of British

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 217

Columbia, 2012].) The choice to “devour” draws a curse upon these characters that
moves out from them in four directions. This is seen in that the texts describe four
broken relationships for each character: between him and himself, him and his neighbor,
him and creation, and him and the creator.
17. In a paper entitled “Number Symbolism and Joseph as Symbol of Completion” in the
Journal of Biblical Literature 98, no. 1 (1979): 87, James G. Williams effectively shows how
the Joseph story is intended to be read (inter alia) as a restoration, at the end of Genesis,
of the brokenness at the beginning of the book, thus forming a kind of inclusio. He also
notes in that article how Joseph may be regarded as another androgynous figure, or as I
assert here, a restored Adam to some extent.
18. We need not look to later Jewish and Christian reception, however, because the Hebrew
prophets already speak of David’s line as messianic, as in anointed or chosen by the Lord
to the work of saving lives. For example, Hosea writes, “Afterward the sons of Israel will
return and seek the Lord their God and David their king; and they will come trembling to
the Lord and to His goodness in the last days” (Hosea 3:5 [NASB]). Also see Isa. 9:1–7;
Jer. 23:5– 6, 30:8 –9, 33:14 –15; and Ezek. 34:23–24, 37:24 –25.
19. David son of Jesse was a great king of Israel considered a part of or the father of the
messianic lineage, on which refer to the previous note. To read a fine summary of David’s
life as presented in the Hebrew Bible, see David M. Howard Jr., “David” in The Anchor
Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (Toronto: Doubleday, 1992), 2:41– 49.
20. See note 8.
21. This forced or manufactured difference is juxtaposed with the natural sort found in the
ecological world, or creation/nature, and so we must distinguish “world” from “earth,” as
I think biblical literature often does. By manufactured versus natural gender, I refer to the
understanding that there is biology and then there is culture, and while they may
influence each other over time, they are always largely distinct. There is the way in which
nature (biological humanity) operates, and then there is the way in which humans
behave culturally or religiously. It is noteworthy that the Hebrew Bible is atypical of
ancient mythologies in its recurrent prizing of human association with the creation over
against civilization, a fact that has received considerable scholarly attention over the
years.
22. In Gen. 1:26 –7 we read, “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to
Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and
over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the
earth.’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male
and female He created them” (NASB). Also see the important analysis of the Adam of
the creation accounts by Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread,” in Eve and
Adam: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender, ed. Kristen E. Kvam
et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 431–38. For a similar treatment, see
Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), 21–22.
23. It is also important to remember that, while considering the possible different sources of
these two creation accounts may be helpful for understanding the composition history of

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218 Peter John Barber

the Pentateuch, it is not helpful to allow that consideration to interfere with the need to
look at these two creation accounts synoptically or as a compositional (or at least
redactional) unit, and this for two reasons. First, the compilers or redactors were happy
leaving them side by side or intertwined (depending on how one parses them) and so
saw them as mutually informing and collectively articulating a coherent narrative history
to them. And second, later reception of this compiled literary unit read these stories as
one great story, allowing the content of one to bleed into and augment the next and so
on, so that we too must now take seriously the final product as being a literary whole. If
we do not, we risk divorcing ourselves from writers, redactors, and early receivers— even
within the Bible itself—and so misunderstanding their meaning and misappreciating
their influence.
24. The Lord God is juxtaposed quite clearly, I think, in this text and many others that
follow, to another type of deity. The identity and nature of the God of Israel, or Yahweh,
is entirely bound up in the biblical movement away from sacrificial religion and culture.
25. Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2010), 67, italics mine.
26. When speaking of the God of the Hebrews/Israelites I use the terms “God” and
“Yahweh” interchangeably, but I am referring always to “the Lord God,” or Yahweh.
27. I use the term “messiah” here in the sense of doing the work of the Lord of life, which is
saving lives, or taking on the role of savior. The term itself translates as “anointed” and
implies being chosen to do the work described. A common epithet of the Lord is “the
Lord lives,” “the living Lord,” or, perhaps more accurately, “He is alive,” since Exodus 3
understands the tetragrammaton YHWH to be translatable “He Is,” because “he” calls
himself “I Am” (or perhaps, “I will be[come]”). As noted, the larger biblical narrative
suggests that the restoration the Lord of life seeks for his image-bearers is holistic in the
desire to restore the Adam, which is described as involving the resolution of the four
relational fractures that constitute death.
28. For an introduction to this biblical figure, see Stanley D. Walters, “Jacob Narrative” in
The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:599 – 608.
29. See Donald B. Sharp, “The Courting of Rebecca: A Yahwistic Portrait of the Ideal ‘Bride
to Be,’” Irish Biblical Studies 22, no. 1 (2000): 26 –37.
30. Alternately, the form of the verb “to make” used here could be rendered “he had made.”
As such, it is possible to read this in the sense that Israel himself did not do the work but
had another make the clothes.
31. Yael S. Feldman, “‘And Rebecca Loved Jacob,’ but Freud Did Not,” Jewish Studies
Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1994): 72– 88.
32. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of
Sanctioned Violence (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 40 – 42. A key biblical literary
device for articulating the subversion of the sacrificial in this story, and expertly
interpreted by Williams, is the use of what I have termed the consumption metaphor for
violence. The clear and negative use of language of devouring flesh and drinking blood
(the life) attributed to Esau here in requesting Jacob’s cooking, alongside the duping of

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The Role of the Androgyne in the Biblical Subversion of the Mytho-Sacrificial World 219

Esau by Jacob in actually and perhaps surreptitiously giving Esau a vegetarian dish with
bread to eat, serves to illustrate a redemptive return to a pre-Fall state, or “new Adam-
ness” (in Gen. 1:29 –30, humans and animals were commanded by the Lord God to be
herbivores only). In this way Israel “plunders” Esau’s inheritance, “binding the strong
man,” taking his house from under him, the second son “liberating” the house of the first
son, replacing a “wild beast of a man” with a “smooth man.” This last image in the story is
also an image of restoring the Adam from its self-degradation to the level of the beasts,
and it often coincides in the Bible with the subversive consumption imagery.
On the frequent occurrence in Judaeo-Christian scriptures of this distinctly biblical
consumption metaphor for violence employed with intent to subvert sacrificial violence,
see Barber, “Rediscovering the Meaning of John 6:53.” For a more recent discussion see
the same scholar’s “The Consumption Metaphor for Violence in Paul’s Letters: Galatians
5:15 and Its Relatives” (2013), a paper delivered at the Colloquium on Violence and
Religion in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
33. The story of Abigail may be read in 1 Sam. 25:1– 42.
34. Alternately, Jacob’s series of gifts sent ahead to Esau may be viewed simply as good
diplomacy rather than an act with any inherent culturally feminine qualities.
35. For an introduction to this biblical figure, see Gary H. Oller, “Tamar” in The Anchor Bible
Dictionary, 6:315.
36. Johanna W. H. Bos, “Out of the Shadows: Genesis 38; Judges 4:17–22; Ruth 3,” Semeia 42
(1988): 37– 67.
37. Bos, “Out of the Shadows,” 39.
38. For an introduction to this biblical figure, see Leonard J. Greenspoon, “Rahab” in The
Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:611–12.
39. See Yair Zakovitch’s expert unpacking of these humorous ironies, these subverted
cultural expectations, in Yair Zakovitch, “Humor and Theology or the Successful Failure
of Israelite Intelligence: A Literary-Folkloric Approach to Joshua 2 [Rahab],” in Text and
Tradition, ed. Susan Niditch (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 75–98.
40. Zakovitch, “Humor and Theology,” 75.
41. Zakovitch, “Humor and Theology,” 96.
42. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Reading Rahab,” in Tehillah le-Moshe, ed. M. Cogan et al.
(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 61.
43. Frymer-Kensky, “Reading Rahab,” 67.
44. For an introduction to this biblical figure, see Phyllis Trible, “Ruth, Book of” in The
Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:842– 47.
45. Jon L. Berquist, “Role Differentiation in the Book of Ruth,” Journal for the Study of the
Old Testament 57 (1993): 23–37.
46. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 126 –30.
47. Berquist, “Role Differentiation,” 36.
48. See notes 18 and 19.

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220 Peter John Barber

49. For example, James E. Harding, The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception
(Sheffield, England: Equinox, 2013); and Anthony Heacock, Jonathan Loved David:
Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex (Sheffield, England: Sheffield
Phoenix, 2011).
50. René Girard, “The Scapegoat,” 1: “Religion is the means through which the order, and
the peace, which is created by the first murder, gradually turns into a cultural system.
Humanity is the child of religion. In a way, religion is like the placenta which protects the
newborn and gets discarded when he’s really born.”
51. Frymer-Kensky has noted, in her discussion of the character Rahab, that later Jewish and
Christian traditions receive Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth as the finest models for emulation,
being listed in messianic lineages as well as discussed in the most favorable light
elsewhere in these groups’ scriptures; Frymer-Kensky, “Reading Rahab,” 67.

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