Wine, Women, and Witless Kings: A Feminist and Postcolonial Interpretation of the Royal Banquet Tales

Three methodologies are employed, accordingly. In the first interpretive pass, Formkritik and Gattungskritik determines the full extent to which the four biblical stories are structurally parallel; and this is corroborated by a germane piece of Hellenistic literature. In the second interpretive pass, a feminist-critical (reformist perspective) reading is undertaken, given the prominent presence and influence of females in the story type. In the third interpretive pass, a postcolonial-critical (decoloniality) reading is adopted due each text’s depiction of the Jewish people in a colonised state.

The original results include: [1] the identification of a new biblical form and genre, i.e. royal banquet tales among the sympotic genre; [2] the possibility that these texts served as propaganda for women courtiers of a Jewish state; [3] the likelihood, that based on the hidden-transcript nature of the four tales, they functioned to theologically satirise foreign kings and their fragile kingdoms.