Scripture and Modern Israeli Literature 291here. No less important, it is remarkable for graft ing the Bible’s female sac-
rifi cial “heroine,” Jephthah’s anonymous daughter, over the conventional
male trope, the aqedah. Th is blending shakes up a bit the androcentric na-
ture of the modern retelling of biblical human sacrifi ce as it has unfolded
so far, even if this was not Oz’s original intention. It thus helps me intro-
duce the following crucial question: how did the dialectics exposed in the
brief history outlined here — both the typically “eff eminate” characteriza-
tion of the biblical aqedah and its oedipalization and hence masculiniza-
tion by Israeli literature since the late 1960s — aff ect Israeli women writers?
Given the centrality of the biblical sacrifi cial trope in the emotional
and psychic economy of Israelis at large, its male-specifi c gender naturally
raised a question for women: how are they to enter a millennia-old con-
versation between son, father, and their paternal godhead in heaven? Th is
problematic has been oft en expressed in the literature through the question
“Where was Sarah?” Th is challenge is usually directed at both the biblical
narrative that excluded the fi gure of wife and mother from its religious/
national urtext, and the contemporary scene, where women, in Israel as
elsewhere, were slow to enter open public debates over “national sacrifi ce”
and hence were hesitant in engaging its major biblical trope.
We may say, then, that there was a certain structural mirroring between
Hebrew culture up to the 1980s and the ancient scriptural tradition that
had famously excluded Sarah from its religious sacrifi cial urtext. Sarah was
not alone in this exclusion. More oft en than not, ancient sacrifi ce, espe-
cially blood sacrifi ce, was not the business of women in any religious cult,
near and far. It is clear, then, that ancient Judaism shared with its neighbors
its preference for male sacrifi cers. So the question is, how did Sarah’s mod-
ern descendants fare in a contemporary world that inherited such a male-
centered tradition of sacrifi ce and martyrdom?
If my reconstructed history is accurate, although women’s interventions
in the general debate over national sacrifi ce were few and far between,
they were oft en ahead of their time, sensing the shift ing underground and
trying to off er their remedies. Some women throughout the 20th century
did intervene — and oft en spearheaded a new approach to both contem-
porary and biblical issues. Among them we can count, to name just a few,
the poet Rachel, who in the 1920s protested the application of the appel-
lation qorbanot (victims?) to her generation, the Second Aliya, and in her
poetry avoided at all costs the terms aqedah or qorban; theater critic Mar-
got Klausner, who was the fi rst to pan the oedipalization of the aqedah by
the 1948 generation, arguing that there is no agreement between the Jewish