The Intercourse of Knowledge

Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book, which builds on the author's earlier work in On Gendering Texts, studies how, by what means and to what extent human love, desire and sex, and possibly even 'sexuality', are gendered in the Hebrew Bible. Following a classification and gendering of the linguistic and semantic data, the investigation looks into the construction of male and female bodies in language and ideologies; the praxis and ideology of sex, procreation and contraception; deviation from socio-sexual boundaries (e.g. incest, rape, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution); eroticism and "pornoprophetics". Finally, the work discusses some of the wider sociological and theological implications of the findings.