Jamais aconteceu nem se viu coisa igual: uma análise do discurso de Juízes 19-21

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the discursive perspective of Judges 19–21, the discourse of violence against the Levite’s Concubine, and its developments. This corpus, as part of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, deals with an anonymous woman, the Concubine, the second wife of the Levite, a member of the priestly class of Ancient Israel, who, after a ‘conflict’ with her husband, flees to her father’s house, but is sought out by her husband. On the way back, she is gang-raped in place of her husband, dies, and is finally dismembered by him, and her body parts are delivered to the Tribes of Israel as a call to war. The developments then follow: a fratricidal war of the Tribes against the Tribe of Benjamin, the rapists, who were almost extinct. As a palliative measure to the genocide, the virgin girls of Jabesh-Gilead were handed over to the Benjaminites for forced marriage, and then the young women of Shiloh were kidnapped. In other words, this religious discourse, led by Jewish priests of the Persian satrapy of Yehud (Judea), places women in a situation of fragility and death. Faced with such an explicit body of violence, we used Dominique Maingueneau's Discourse Analysis to recognize the discursive intentions for the production of meaning. Methodologically, we first started with the discursive field of Judges 19–21, where we researched the History of Biblical Israel to find the terrain of the discourse, that is, the network of positions, divergences, and convergences from which the discourse emerges. This is where we revealed the Jewish priestly class as the promoter and articulator of the discourse and, therefore, of violence, even if discursive. In the second moment, we studied the theater of discourse, which are the scenes of enunciation, the generic commitment, since genre is a fundamental part of discursive realization. This is where we pointed out the importance of scenography, that is, the background of the discourse, as the “inventor” of a priestly story. Finally, in the third moment, we sought the body of the discourse, that is, the discursive ethos, where we understood the tone of voice of this enunciator. In other words, this priestly class, inventing a story for its exercise of power. Thus, this research demonstrates the relevance of Discourse Analysis to analyze a corpus from Antiquity, as well as shedding some perspective on discussions about confronting violence against women in religious discourse.