Queering Reproductive Time in 4 Ezra

• In Event: Queering the Futures of the Past: Reading Ancient Jewish Eschatology and Apocalypticism with Queer Theory

Abstract

Metaphors of pregnancy and birth are common in biblical and early Jewish apocalyptic narratives. Scholars have long identified the utility of these metaphors in apocalypses for depicting the period of waiting and then ultimate transformation that is part and parcel of human gestation and childbirth (see for example deLong 2012, Flannery 2012). Certain Jewish apocalypses such as 4 Ezra “play” with the lengths of gestation and pregnancy in imagining the end of the current age and the beginning of a new one. 4 Ezra describes children who are born early (at 3–4 months) yet thrive (6:21); the earth as a body pregnant with souls, whose length of gestation is eons rather than months (4:40–42); and a “mourning woman” who experiences barrenness for 30 years, before she is transformed into (or “births”) an eschatological city (9:43).

These texts can be productively viewed through the lens of chrononormativity, “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,” which operates on a social level as chronobiopolitics, “teleological schemes of events or strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, child rearing, and death and its attendant rituals” (Freeman 2010). In this paper, I argue that “counterchrononormative” imagining of the maternal body in the context of an apocalypse like 4 Ezra functions to challenge “imperial time” and thus the imperial forces that apocalypses imagine overthrowing. The alternative temporality of pregnancy and birth as imagined in 4 Ezra interrupts the march of imperial time and thus helps usher in a new, eschatological age.

Author

• Sari Fein, Smith College