Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021) and Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016). She is the co-author (with John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie) of Jonah: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (Yale Anchor Bible, 2023).

• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: Reading Sexual Violence


• 1. Fuzzy, Messy, Icky: How to Read a Rape Story


• 2. The Edges of Consent: Dinah, Tamar, and Lot's Daughters


• 3. Narrating Harm in the Bathsheba Story: Predation, Peremption, and Silence


• 4. Rape and Other Ways of Reading: Hagar and Sarah in the Company of Women


• 5. A Grittier Daughter Zion: Lamentations and the Archive of Rape Stories


• 6. Sad Stories and Unhappy Reading


• Conclusion: After Terror


• Bibliography


• Index

Texts after Terror offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, #MeToo, and feminist theory.