9 ‘P aSSing Strange’: gender CroSSing in the Story of JoSePh and eSther* My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs; She swore, in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; ’Twas pitiful. ’twas wondrous pitiful, She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d That heaven had made her such a man . . . Shakespeare, Othello I.iii.158-63 This chapter engages in a close study of the analogies between the Joseph and Esther narratives in the Hebrew Bible, drawing on the methods of femi- nist hermeneutics and rabbinic exegesis. Until this point, I have argued that deceit is a particularly feminine art of subterfuge, the way the weaker ‘sex’ seizes the reins of power from her male counterpart in the social hierarchy. But as Simone de Beauvoir once famously asserted, ‘One is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one’. 1 The traits associated with ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ are social and cultural constructs integral to patriarchy; ‘woman’ is passive, corporeal, irrational, emotional, the quintessential objectiied ‘other’. But these traits may equally map onto a man, culturally or socially deined as ‘femme’. And so the art of discretion or deceit as a feminine mode of subterfuge is not bound to the second sex; it is engendered, but not biologically determined. Joseph and Esther are both feminine igures. * This chapter was originally presented on the panel ‘Comparative Feminist Studies of Scripture’ at the SBL Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD, November 24, 2013. A ver- sion of this chapter was published as ‘“Passing Strange”—Reading Transgender across Genre: Rabbinic Midrash and Feminist Hermeneutics on Esther’, in JFSR 30 (2014), pp. 81-97. 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 301. For a critique of de Beauvoir’s characterization of ‘feminine’ and ‘woman’, see the discussion in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990), esp. pp. 8-34. Adelman_A.indd 198 9/30/2015 5:03:15 AM