Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 28:4 (Autumn 2014)
Article: Book Review: "Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative with Its Ancient Audience," By Philip F. Esler (Cascade, 2011)
Author: Jeff David Miller

PP 28:4 (Autumn 2014) p. 28

Book Review: Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative with Its Ancient Audience, By Philip F. Esler (Cascade, 2011)

Jeff Miller

Esler is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Interpretation at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London, and was principal of St. Mary’s when this book was published. His several books have tended to apply social-scientific approaches to NT studies. The present volume does the same for a handful of OT narrative texts.

A seventy-six page introduction provides two admirable summaries. The first summary traces the history of academic treatment of biblical narrative. Esler promptly distances himself from “other approaches currently in vogue in the scholarly marketplace that are not concerned with reading for original meaning….” In contrast, he offers “a particular answer to the question of how we should read these narratives—in particular by seeking to understand the meanings they would have conveyed to their original audiences in ancient Israel” (3). This section’s overview of scholarship will strike many readers as tedious; the non-specialist could skip this section and move more quickly to the “sex, wives, and warriors” promised in the title.

The introduction’s second summary treats the historical and, especially, the social contexts of OT narrative. Here Esler hits his stride as he lays a foreshadowing foundation for his use of sociology in interpreting narratives. He singles out the following categories for special mention: families and villages; group (as opposed to individualistic) orientation; honor and shame; challenge and response; limited good; patrons and clients; patrilineality, patrilocality, and polygyny; agrarian socioeconomic structure; and high-context cultures. Knowledge of some of these categories (e.g., honor and shame, patrons and clients) is commonplace among scholars of either testament. In contrast, other categories are infrequently encountered outside sociological circles and therefore give the reader high hopes for finding new insights in Esler’s interpretations.

Chapters 3-10 are interpretations of eight OT narratives. Two chapters fall under the title’s category, “wives.” Though six of eight narratives Esler treats are from the book of Samuel, the first is from Gen 38, “Judah and Tamar.” One example of the sociological approach is notice given to the text’s comment that Judah named Er (Gen 38:3) while Judah’s wife named Onan and Shelah (38:4-5). The sociological category spurring this attentiveness is the above-mentioned high-context culture: “to understand what happens in the narrative, we have to read th...