"I cannot find any reason for this story to have been written": An empire-critical, anti-patriarchal reading of the Joseph narrative

Beall, Erin Jessica

Item

"I cannot find any reason for this story to have been written": An empire-critical, anti-patriarchal reading of the Joseph narrative

Beall, Erin Jessica

Date

2025-12-02

Abstract

Genesis is a collection of strategically remembered and crafted stories that reached final form in the Persian Period. Among its main purposes is the establishment of formative and rather requisite national identity, cultural memory, and social touchstones—many of which are decidedly patriarchal, nationalistic, and ethnocentric. It is strange, then, to center the latter 25% of that book around a feminine young boy who reads as gay even to early interpreters and whose Hebrew ethnicity is ceremonially exchanged for Egyptian. I read Joseph’s as a counternarrative to the overarching themes of patriarchal, kyriarchal, and hierarchal power-over-the-other in the Hebrew Bible, which seems confirmed by Joseph’s legacy as partially forgotten, partially obscured, partially rehabilitated, and largely marginalized everywhere from the rest of the Hebrew Bible; the Second Temple Period literature; the Dead Sea Scrolls; the early Jewish materials like the midrashim, Targumim, and Talmudim; and Rabbinic sources. Utilizing an intersectional approach drawing from feminist, queer, and postcolonial hermeneutics, I argue that Joseph is a liminal figure who straddles binaries and whose gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are in constant flux. What is more, these fluctuations mark Joseph as a paradigm of how colonized, oppressed, queer, subaltern, and otherwise marginalized people, both among early exilic and modern readers, can 1. embrace their nondominant identities as theologically and socio-politically valid, 2. avoid the pitfalls of power and performance that ensnare Joseph, and 3. develop a horizon of hope for a queer future marked by preference for the marginalized.