The Berated Politicians: Other Ways of Reading Miriam, Michal, Jezebel and Athaliah in the Old Testament in Relation to Political and Gender Quandary in Sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya and Uganda as Case Studies

Type Thesis or Dissertation - PhD Thesis
Title The Berated Politicians: Other Ways of Reading Miriam, Michal, Jezebel and Athaliah in the Old Testament in Relation to Political and Gender Quandary in Sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya and Uganda as Case Studies
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2011
URL http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2936/1/2011Kulobaphd-1-2.pdf
Abstract
Indeed, Miriam, Michal, Jezebel and Athaliah are politically killed off in the Hebrew Bible. Certainly, no one would tell from the Hebrew Bible that these women were people of significant political and leadership profiles; but merely as wicked in the history of humanity. All their political significance and contributions were literary and ideologically mutilated and separated from their names and left in the wild to be eaten by stray dogs. Their decapitated and fragmented images minus their political profiles have been ingested into an ideological system that regulates gender world order and influences social, intellectual and linguistic discourses and pictorial misogynistic polemics in the modern world. Figuratively, the remains of these women have been preserved in the way politicians of the ancient times and recent past would keep remains of their opponents. Ancient rulers would preserve a head (skull) of a particular enemy. David in the Bible cuts off Goliath’s head (1 Samuel 17:51); and the Philistines cut off Saul’s head (1 Samuel 31:9). In the Roman Republic of early 1st Century BC, political enemies like Marius and Sulla were decapitated and their heads displayed in the Forum Romanum. In 1355 Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice in medieval Italy was beheaded and his head hanged in a public place for staging a coup that was aborted. English traitors especially during the Elizabethan era were mutilated and their heads customarily spiked on London Bridge and other public places. In all these mutilations, other parts of the body were never accounted for. Stray dogs and other scavengers ate them as the case was with Jezebel in 2 Kings 8.

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