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The Watcher at the Window: Cultural Poetics of a Biblical Motif

The "woman at the window" motif has figured prominently in discussions of gender in the Hebrew Bible. Yet scholars have failed to note that these "women at the window" constitute just one element of a larger motif complex that includes male watchers as well as men and women who pass through windows in specific narrative contexts. When these motifs are analyzed systematically across the texts in which they appear, certain thematic constants emerge. Women at the window appear in contexts that signal the downfall of despised kin groups and political regimes, while men appear at the window in contexts of threat to the Israelite "house" as a fundamental unit of social relations. Men and women pass through windows, finally, in contexts of political transformation that are dependent on the relationships between kin groups. Cultural poetic methodology lends power to the interpretation of biblical narrative by uncovering the deep cultural and ideological structures that drive narrative forward and by forestalling scholars' tendency to impose their own gendered ideologies upon biblical texts.