for a hateful woman in the
marriage bed. In the Hebrew, “in the marriage bed” is a passive verb, which
means “is married/is sexually possessed.” Fox’s proposal to revocalize the verb
tibaʿel as tivʿal and to understand it as “gain mastery” is
unconvincing because b-ʿ-l does not appear in this sense as an intransitive
verb elsewhere (despite the noun baʿal, which does mean “master” as well
as “husband”). The transitive verb generally has the sexual sense indicated
above. The hateful woman enjoying conjugal consummation is part of a series of
figures whose fate is disturbingly not what it should be, after the slave who
rules and the scoundrel who prospers, and before the slavegirl who dispossesses
her mistress. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019], 3:448)
