Revision Abishag: American Jewish Women's Midrashic Poems on Abishag the Shunamite

In Sustained Fictions, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg seeks to define a new language or code through which to interpret the “retelling” of the biblical texts. Adopting methods from midrash, intertextuality, and translation studies, she suggests that approach, stance, and filter must be addressed in relating to such “biblical afterlives.” In light of this new critical language, I examine the way in which various Jewish American women poets have treated the theme of Abishag the Shunammite (1 Kgs 1:1-5, 14, 2:13-26). Judaism traditionally barring women from studying, they have been forced to find covert ways to read and interpret its sacred texts. Much of Jewish feminism has thus been devoted to gaining access to the Jewish canon as a whole and the biblical text in particular, what Adrienne Rich called Re-vision. Here, I shall focus on what may be called feminine “midrashic poems” dealing with Abishag—i.e., poems that rewrite the biblical story from a feminine perspective, giving a voice to a feminine protagonist who is silenced in the original text. I shall consider some Jewish American women poets. The first of them will be Louise Glück's 1975 poem "Abishag". From Glück's submissive Abishag, the little-known biblical figure develops into an independent woman in charge of her own destiny (B. Holender , 1991; E. A. Sussman-Socolow, 1999; D. Walders, 2005), working her way from a mere “warming device” into a sexy woman who uses her sexuality to tease the king (S. Kaufman, 1984) or dreams of different sexual relations (L. Barrett, 2007), her sexuality being bound up with her independence (S. Skolnik, 2011).