Iris' voice is not an easy one to hear. The problem of listening to the voices of biblical women is never simple, even when they are more present in the text and we have access to their words and actions. We cannot access the lives of actual historical women, but the text does provide a window into the biblical world. The author(s) did not write in a vacuum, and the real women of that time created the cultural context out of which the characters were drawn.
Biblical characters, both women and men, function in a mythological capacity within our own society: as historical memories transmitted through a religious text that was, and remains, meaningful to a people. They are often used as exemplars of ethical behaviour. And yet, none of the biblical characters is perfect; the models they present are of human behaviour, complete with confusions and flaws. Some of these flaws are relatively minor, some are much more serious. Iris' act is to look back. The action itself seems relatively minor. And yet the consequence is extreme: she is turned into salt.
How can we read such a story in our own time and place? What purpose can we find in this narrative? It is at the very least ambiguous, if not actually authoritarian, senseless, and cruel. Iris' absence and/or silence leaves us with gaps that beg to be filled. Following in a long tradition of biblical commentary that has added its own reconstructions to the narratives, we can imagine the rest of the story of Iris and find our own meaning in the text. What follows is such an imagining.
|
