Wine, Women, and Witless Kings

Within biblical literature, Daniel 5, Esther 7, Judith 12:10–13:10, and Mark 6:14–29 share a similar narrative arch. The study aims to answer: to what extent are these stories structurally germane and what is the intention of such a narrative? 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.