Questions on Renita Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets

Which of the following best describes the goal or aim of Renita Weems’ book, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets?
1. Dr. Weems seeks to examine how popular norms and attitudes about women lent themselves to exploitation by the Hebrew prophets, who tried to get their male audiences to be faithful to Yahweh.
2. Dr. Weems seeks to undermine confidence in biblical imagery and suggests that the message of the prophets, while it may have once been valid, can no longer be used.
3. Dr. Weems seeks to condemn the prophets for their use of violent imagery while upholding the basic elements of their message.
4. Dr. Weems seeks to convince her reader that because the prophets used violent imagery regarding women, violence against women has divine approval.
Why do authors (including biblical authors) use metaphors?
1. Metaphors help obscure the meaning of what the author is saying so that only those who are a part of the author’s community will understand.
2. Metaphorical speech has tremendous power over the human imagination and can sometimes communicate powerfully what no amount of paraphrase or explanation could communicate with the same force.
3. Metaphors are an easy way to communicate without having to be precise about what one means, so an author can use them to address many different sets of circumstances without needing to be specific.
The biblical prophets used five types of human relationships as metaphors to portray the relationship between Yahweh and Yahweh’s people. Which of the following is not one of those relationships?
1. Husband/Wife
2. Master/Slave
3. Brother/Sister
4. King/Vassal
What makes the husband/wife relationship, the releationship of master and slave, and the relationship of kings and vassals particularly useful metaphors for the prophets’ view of the relationship between God and God’s people? Which of the following best expresses the reason these relationships were attractive choices?
1. They were all unequal relationships of power and punishment, allowing the prophet to portray God as the stronger and more authoritative partner.
2. These relationships were based on gender, and since the prophets and their male audiences saw God as male, the analogy worked particularly well.
3. All of these relationships involved violence, allowing the prophet to portray God as violent and therefore to be feared.
Renita Weems describes the marriage metaphor as a “controlling” metaphor. What does she mean by this?
1. Those in power use the metaphor to control the activity of those they wish to subjugate.
2. The metaphor draws on unconscious assumptions to represent a particular reality. It does this in such a way that it allows people to think about that reality more coherently, but it also makes it virtually impossible for them to think about that reality without referring to the metaphor.
3. The metaphor is inseparable from the reality it represents, so that the reality does not exist without the metaphor.
The marriage metaphor proved more useful than the other relationship metaphors used by the prophets because only this one involved ________, which helped strengthen the prophets’ emotional appeal.
1. Power
2. Punishment
3. Shame
4. Fear
The Hebrew prophets used several relationship metaphors to depict God's relationshop with God's people. Each of these popular metaphors asserted in its own way all of the following things except one. Which one is not one of the things these metaphors communicated?
1. The relationship between God and humanity is a relationship of unequals.
2. The relationship is one of mutual expectations and responsibilities.
3. The burden of the relationship falls on the subordinate partner, whose responsibility it is to not to dishonor the dominant partner.
4. God has the power to punish.
5. God’s people have no reason to fear God.
To succeed in their efforts, the Hebrew prophets must have had some definite notions of what their audiences were like and the kinds of signals to which their audiences would respond. Which of the following is not one of the things we can reasonably assume to have been true about those audiences?
1. a. They were largely, if not exclusively, male.
2. b. They assumed that women should submit to male authority.
3. c. They knew their neighbors' custom of portraying cities as wives of the gods.
4. They worshipped only Yahweh.
Which prophet most clearly uses the marriage metaphor to contrast the former Israel (in the early days of the nation's relation to Yahweh) with the present Israel (when the people had become unfaithful to their loving God)?
1. Hosea
2. Jeremiah
3. Ezekiel
Which prophet develops, in two long chapters, a more explicit treatment of the turbulent, even violent, relationship of God to Israel than what is found in the other two, with Jerusalem being portrayed as the promiscuous wife treated in strongly misogynistic and violent ways by her offended husband?
1. Hosea
2. Jeremiah
3. Ezekiel
Which of the following is not one of the things accomplished by the prophets use of the marriage metaphor?
1. It suggested that Israel is responsible for Israel’s fate. God is not to be blamed.
2. It helped make sense of the people's experience of God as unpredictable.
3. It placed restraints on the ways men could treat the women under their control.
4. It gave weight to the prophets’ commitment to monotheism.
Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all speak of Israel's unfaithfulness as the unfaithfulness of a wife and speak of God as the betrayed husband, but they also speak of Israel's reconciliation to God, using language of romance to describe the reconciliation. Which of these these three prophets gives the strongest place to discussion of reconciliation as a balance to the earlier discussion of infidelity and punishment?
1. Hosea
2. Jeremiah
3. Ezekiel