Death and Dissymmetry

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Coherence of Politics and the Politics of Coherence
Two Views of the Book of Judges
How History Constructs Itself
The Construction of a Different History
The Coherence of Dissymmetry
Heroes of Might and Women of Death
Lethal Ladies
Gender, Sex, and Dissymmetry
Other Female Characters
The Language of Power
2. Virginity and Entanglement
Bath-Jephthah: The Daughter's Gift
Negation and Denial of Womanhood
Freud Entangled
Love at First Sight
Bath's Survival
3. Virginity Scattered
Paradoxes of Virginity
Nonvirginal Virgins, Virginal Spouses
Between Virgin and Wife: Caught Between Men
4. Violence and the Sacred: Contribution to the Ethnography of Fatherhood
The Raw and the Cooked
In the Name of the Law: Proper Sacrifice
Manoah's Failed Fatherhood
In the Name of the Vow: Improper Sacrifice
Bath-Jephthah versus Ben-Abraham: A Case for Separation
Dreaming Fire: Violence without the Sacred
The Body Became Voice, or the Reinforcement of Culture
5. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: From Speech-act to Body Language
Speech-acts: The Word Become Flesh
Samson's Riddle: The Word Became Woman
The Riddle as Vow and the Vow as Riddle
The Daughter's Body Language as a Challenge to Fatherhood
The Mouth of the S/Word
6. The Architecture of Unhomeliness
Oppositions
Limits
Dialectic
Unhomeliness Revisited
The Empty House Is Haunted
7. The Displacement of the Mother
Explicit Mothers: Jephthah's and Abimelech's, Samson's and Micah's
Explicit Mothers: Sisera's and Israel's
Displaced Mothers: Yael
Displaced Mothers: The Woman-with-the-Millstone
Displaced Mothers: Delilah
Mothering, Murdering, Making Love: Yael
Clytemnestra's Absence
Conclusion
The I, the Eye, and Objectification
The Incoherence of Coherence
Once Upon a Time
Once More: Body Language
Appendix 1: A Model for Narratological Analysis
Appendix 2: Notes on Language
Notes
Bibliography
Index