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Reserve Text: John B. Gabel, The Bible as Literature, 5th edition Chapter 19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Chapter 19 Partly in response
to this oversight, and partly following the impetus of women's suffrage
move-ments in the United States, a "Reviewing Committee" of
American women intellectuals led by the notable suffragist Elizabeth
Cady Stanton (1815-1902) decided to publish their own comments on the
Bible, intending to limit their attention to the small part of the Bible
that explicitly focuses on women. Their efforts produced a landmark
work, The Woman's Bible, which appeared in two volumes, in 1895 and
1899. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and the Reviewing Committee knew well that no book in Western
literature had had more impact on women than the Bible. It had been
invoked for two millennia to justify women's place in society; movement
away from biblically defined roles had consistently met with opposition.
Cady Stanton and her associates, aware of the Bible's influence as foundational
literature, believed not only that |
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[328]
_________________________________________ the Bible had been appropriated by men for their own interests, but also that it was itself the product of male authors who claimed a special relationship with God that they used to exploit their own power over women. Cady Stanton explains:
______________________________________________ *Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Woman's Bible (New York: European Publishing, 1895), p. 12. [329] Part of the problem,
clearly, was the Bible's status as authoritative even (maybe even particularly)
in English translation. "Whatever the Bible may be made to do in
Hebrew or Greek," she noted, "in plain English it does not
exalt and dignify woman" (p. 12). Cady Stanton's
approach to the Bible was remarkably "modern" and sophisticated.
To her, the Bible was not the unquestionable, unerring word of God but
a human composition reflecting human concerns. The part that it had
played in the oppression of women was proof enough for her that human
hands and minds lay behind its composition. As a human creation, she
reasoned further, the Bible could be questioned, analyzed, and interpreted.
But noting that biblical interpretation had historically been exclusively
a male-dominated activity, Cady Stanton brought to bear on The Woman's
Bible a conviction expressed by fellow suffragist Mathilda Joslyn Gage
at the 1878 Annual Meeting of the National Woman's Suffrage Association:
namely, the basic right of every woman to interpret scripture. Thus
a remarkable characteristic of The Woman's Bible was that it removed
the Bible from the hands of specialists and handed it to the people
who had been most harmed in the history of its interpretation. Those
who worked on The Woman's Bible were not trained biblical scholars,
but they were nevertheless canny readers sensitive to metaphor, allegory,
and symbolism, and to the manner in which modern readers interpreted
these modes of literature as historical fact. Those of us who study
the Bible as literature--both men and women--in a sense owe a great
debt to the work of the Reviewing Committee for establishing both method
and mandate in biblical studies. The Woman's
Bible--probably because of its radical implications for politics
and theology--proved to be unpopular. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's appeal
to women scholars to investigate the Bible remained largely unheard
until 1964, with the publication of Margaret Brackenbury Crook's study,
Women and Religion. Crook begins her book:
_________________________________________ WOMEN AND THE
BIBLE: ISSUES AND PERSPECTIVES There have been,
in the century after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, many women who have carved
out a role for themselves as feminist interpreters of the Bible. The
word "feminist" here bears some examination. It is feminist
to privilege women's productions over those of men. It is also often
the goal of feminist biblical interpretation to seek to highlight and
reverse the part that the Bible has played in the long history of injustices
against women. Feminist scholars see the Bible as an It is important
to remember that "feminist" is not a monolithic category any
more than "Christian" or "Jewish" is. "Feminist"
scholars evince a variety of interests and a variety of methods, and
often widely differ on what modern readers should do with the recognition
that the Bible is profoundly
male-oriented. On one end of the scale, there are "radical feminist"
interpreters who argue that the Bible is so thoroughly ideologically
loaded with male-dominated, patriarchal concerns that the only option
is to reject it entirely. In 1973, the radical American feminist Mary
Daly spearheaded a movement to reject the inherent patriarchal ideologies
saturating the Bible. Asked if the Bible might still be useful to women
if its patriarchal language and ideology were removed, Daly retorted,
"It might be interesting to speculate upon the probable length
of a 'depatriarchalized Bible.' Perhaps there would be enough salvageable
material to comprise an interesting pamphlet." * Daly calls not
just for a rejection of the Bible, but in her work subverts the entire
English language, the very structure of which she finds deeply informed
by patriarchalism. She calls for women to find a metalanguage to think
and talk about God beyond that which is contained and expressed in the
Bible, beyond "God the Father." Few feminist interpreters
of the Bible, however, have presented a body of work as remarkably controversial
as Mary Daly's. On the other end of the scale, there are many "moderate"
feminist literary critics who study the particular language and characterization
of women in the Bible without finding the need to reject the Bible entirely.
Many of these scholars simply turn the reader's eye to the variety of
ways in which women (or feminine imagery) figure in the Bible. Others
look more broadly at issues of gender in the Bible-that is, the ways
in which gender is operative in the construction of a character or narrative
action. These scholars investigate power relations between the sexes
as well as the social constructions of sexuality, including the ideas
of "femininity" and "masculinity." Feminist literary
critics have developed specific methods and techniques that they employ
when reading the Bible. They aim to "place women back in the center
of the frame," that is, to read the Bible as closely as possible,
paying particular attention to women, to gendered language, and to gendered
imagery. We can now consider three interrelated "points of departure"
for examining the interplay between women and the Bible: 1. The reader must engage in a careful and active reading of the text. By this, feminist literary critics mean that the reader not only should fully engage the text intellectually but must also recognize and acknowledge ______________________________________ Most feminist reading
strategies actively query biblical text and narratives. This process
poses text-specific questions to draw out issues involved in authoring
narratives. Thus a reader might focus on a particular biblical narrative
and pose a series of questions: What character(s) speaks? What character(s)
remains silent? What character(s) acts? What does the author state explicitly
and what only implicitly? What are the ideological concerns or agendas
behind the text, and how does the author use language to convey (or
mask) these concerns? The first step in an active, engaged reading,
therefore, is to develop a dialogical or dialectical relationship with
biblical text. What makes this undertaking "feminist" is that
it seeks to place particular focus on the constructions of women and
gender within this text. 2. Central to most
feminist readings is the assumption that the Bible is a profoundly androcentric
cultural artifact in which women either do not speak directly or are
made to speak against their own interests. It is not enough to ask questions
of a text; the questioner must keep in mind that the answers can reveal
only patriarchal concerns, not the authentic voices of women. Recognizing
that ancient texts written by men speak on behalf of women and thereby
craft modern perceptions of gender is part of a feminist hermeneutical
process often called "unmasking the dominant culture." The
feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza has been the most active
advocate of a reading strategy she calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion."
Reading with "suspicion" means, in this case, that we understand
that biblical texts are androcentric, the selective articulations of
men that act to craft and support patriarchal social structures and
ideals. A step beyond the recognition of the Bible's androcentrism is
the reader's refusal to accept the text as either objectively "authoritative"
or "true." Instead, the feminist reader maintains a position
of critical "suspicion" and distance from the implicit motives
of biblical authors. 3. The Bible does
not help us to understand much about the lives of ancient women. It
helps us to understand, primarily, how ancient men thought about women.
No amount of careful reading of the Bible will reconstruct the lives
of real ancient women, because this was not the concern of the biblical
authors. Rarely, if ever, do women in the Bible speak for themselves.
Female characters do speak, of course, but these characters were created
by men, not by women. Even if we choose to focus pri- [333] marily or exclusively
on women in the Bible--and there are many books out there that do this--we
cannot truly learn about the lives of real women who lived during the
vast expanse of time in which the various writings of the Bible were
composed. We can learn only about the ways in which men felt compelled
to portray women. It might be helpful
here to start with an example of a feminist "reading" of one
particular character in the Bible, using the strategies we have outlined
above. We might start with Mary, the mother of Jesus, in two of the
places where she appears: the gospel of Matthew's infancy narrative
(Matt. 1:1-2:23) and the gospel of John's account of the miracle of
Cana (John 2). You may have noticed in your own readings of the Bible
that its female characters are often "flat," that is, lacking
dimension or characterological depth. Thus a careful reader will notice
that Mary has no dialogue in Matthew's narrative of her miraculous pregnancy
(Matt. 1:18-2:23); she is simply acted upon and spoken about by male
characters, in this case the angel of the Lord and Joseph. We have no
idea from this gospel how she feels about her predicament, but consider
what a young woman might have felt in that situation: she is pregnant,
though she has no idea how or why. Given the unusual circumstances of
her conception, she might not even know herself that she was pregnant
until her body began to show the unmistakable signs. A reader will notice,
too, that not only are Mary's emotional responses to her pregnancy never
detailed, she is never given an explanation for what is happening to
her body. In this gospel, the angel of the Lord explains Mary's pregnancy
not to Mary but to Joseph, in his dream at 1:20. In a classic case of
literary irony, the reader shares her knowledge of why Mary is pregnant
with the omniscient (male) narrator and other male characters, though
Mary herself remains in the dark. In Matthew's infancy narrative, Jesus' mother Mary is more of an object than a character; she functions primarily as a human receptacle for the unborn Jesus. In the gospel of John, Mary functions as a sym- _________________________________
Female characters,
then, although they cannot teach us about ancient women, can teach us
a great deal about ancient attitudes toward the sexes, about the manner
in which biblical writers envisioned and understood the proper roles
for men and women, and about the writer's ultimate theological goals. Now that we have
some basic critical tools for examining the broad [336] As is frequently
pointed out in this book, the Bible is a composite document, comprising
various genres of literature such as genealogies and king lists, laws
and legal prohibitions, tribal and founding narratives, proverbs, poetry
and psalms, parables and teachings. Each genre is shaped by slightly
different societal rules, and accordingly, women are represented differently
in different types of literature. It will be appropriate to take a brief
look at some of the ways in which women appear in these different genres. WOMEN WITHIN
THE BIBLICAL GENRES To begin, we can
consider genealogies and other lists. These are records of ancient societies,
important documents detailing the origins and memberships of tribes
and clans. Genealogies are not the most interesting reading, and often
students are tempted to simply gloss over them. But genealogies can
be very revealing! A careful reader might notice, for instance, that
women are almost entirely absent from the genealogical lists of Genesis
4:17-26,5:1-32, and 10:132. Since these lists are largely patrilinear-that
is, they trace ancestors through the male line of family succession-it
is not particularly surprising that women are absent. But there a few
interesting exceptions in which women do appear in these lists. In Genesis
4:19, for instance, a descendent of Cain named Lamech takes two women,
Adah and Zillah, as his wives. These two women bear sons who play prominent
roles as bringers of culture (4:20-22). By their presence in this list
of esteemed ancestors, these women appear to be recognized in a maledominated
literary form for their contribution to the development of culture. In New Testament
genealogies, there is an interesting difference between Luke's list
of Jesus' progenitors, which excludes any mention of women by name (Luke
3:23-38), and Matthew's list (Matt. 1:1-16). A close reading of Matthew's
genealogy of Jesus reveals, in the course of forty-one generations of
male ancestors of Jesus, the names of four women: Tamar (1:3), Rahab
(1:5), Ruth (1:5), and the wife of Uriah (i.e., Bathsheba) (1:6). Why
these four women? They are hardly the most prominent matriarchs in the
Old Testament. It may be that these women were selected because each
bore a child under the cloud of scandal: the widow Ruth bears the child
of her husband's kinsman Boaz so that she may continue her husband's
family line (Ruth 2-3); the wife of Uriah is drawn
into an adulterous relationship with King David by whom she conceives
Solomon (2 Sam. I I: 1-26); Rahab is a prostitute Gosh. 2); and the
widow Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and seduces her father-in-law
to secure her familial rights and the succession of her husband's family
line (Gen. 38). Perhaps, then, the author of Matthew's genealogy of
Christ deliberately included four women whose personal circumstances
with respect to the status quo mirrored, by loose analogy, Mary's plight
as the mother of a child conceived outside of wedlock. They were all
women whose sexual morality was questioned or questionable but who also
bore their liminal sexual identity willingly to further the line of
Israelite succession that would lead, ultimately, to the birth of] esus
the Messiah. Their identity as mothers, furthermore, is paramount; in
every case, Matthew describes the women as "mother [of] ...,"
breaking the repetitive rhythm of the male genealogical for mula that
repeats the word "father" like a refrain. For the author of
the gospel of Matthew, these four women's questionable morality is vindicated
or justified by their theological importance as mothers and the way
in which they pre-figured Mary as ironic heroines. In fact, they act
to prefigure, prepare, or point the way to the culmination of the genealogical
line: not]oseph (whom the author of this material pointedly refuses
to call]esus' father), but Mary, "of her was born]esus." In
this way, we can see that a supposedly ideologically "neutral"
document like a name list or genealogy actually contains the potential
to make a deliberate point on a very subtle level. Laws and Legal Rulings Laws and legal rulings are a second type of documentary material constituting large sections of the Old Testament. Women figure in these patriarchal codes as property or commodities, and as legally disadvantaged compared to men. Exodus 20:17, for instance, lists women as part of a man's legal property, along with a man's house, slaves, and livestock. Most laws in the Hebrew Bible are constructed in such a way that the ontological inferiority of women appears to have been taken for granted. Even the relative economic values of men and women differ; between the ages of twenty and sixty, when human beings are at their most productive, the book of Leviticus (Lev. 27:3-7) assesses the value of men at fifty shekels but women at only thirty shekels! Purity laws portray women consistently as essentially defiled and defiling, particularly because of menstruation and childbirth (Lev. 12, 15). These purity laws are not to be confused with notions of hygiene or uncleanliness; instead, they aimed to keep the male priesthood of the Temple cult ritually pure enough to stand in Yahweh's presence. This cultic purity (Hebrew qedushah or tohorah) |
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[338] could easily be
"canceled out" if priests came into contact with most bodily
fluids including their own; thus semen was as polluting as menstrual
blood. A man incurred pollution (Hebrew tum'ah) during sexual intercourse
because of his own seminal emission, not because he came into contact
with a woman. Women's purity, on the other hand, did not need to be
as carefully regulated as men's or as priests' purity, simply because
in this culture, women (unlike men) could never stand in the presence
of Yahweh. The ancient Israelite
conviction that women could not stand in the presence of Yahweh is brought
home poignantly in arguably the most significant episode outlining the
nature and status of the Law in the Old Testament: when Moses receives
the Ten Commandments from Yahweh (Exod. 19-20). Accordingly, one of
the most disturbing passages for feminist biblical interpreters occurs
in this same narrative, when Moses warns his people at Exodus 19:15,
"Be ready for the day after tomorrow; do not touch a woman."
At the moment when the people of Israel stand ready to receive the covenant,
Moses turns to them but recognizes and addresses only the men. The issue
here was one of ritual purity, since a seminal emission made both sexual
partners temporarily impure. But Moses does not say, "Men and women,
stay away from one another." What disturbs feminist readers is
not just the author's tacit assumption that women are defiling--it is
that as he turns to the "people," women are for all intents
and purposes invisible; in this passage, Moses' implied audience, the
"people of Israel," consists only of men. Is there any way
around the conclusion that women seem to have been excluded from Mosaic
Law and treated as pariahs in the Deuteronomic and Levitical codes?
Some readers of the Bible point out that compared to other ancient law
codes, women actually fare better in the Bible. In other roughly contemporaneous
texts, like the Hammurabic Code, women are valued even less highly.
A careful reader might notice, too, that many Levitical passages carefully
balance legislation for men and women without unduly favoring men; consider,
for instance, Leviticus 15:13-15 with Leviticus 15:28-30, where almost
identical wording is used to describe how both men and women can cleanse
themselves from ritual impurity. In any case, it is helpful to place
ancient laws in their proper social context: they were constructed by
members of an elite male priesthood preoccupied with purity issues,
often far removed from the social realities of women. Although many people assume that the Old Testament emphasizes laws while the New Testament emphasizes revelation and the life of Jesus, there are actually many passages and sections of the New Tes- |
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[339] tament that, one
way or the other, present a new set of laws aimed at Christians, often
to replace or "update" the laws of the Hebrew Bible. To give
only one example, an important set of laws in the Pastoral Letters (I
Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) known as "household codes"
have particular bearing on the status of women. Examples of these codes
are found at I Timothy 4:12; 6:1 I, and 2 Timothy 2:22 and 3:10. Their
purpose is to delineate the appropriate social and domestic roles for
members of an extended household and a fledgling church. Although these
codes do not have the rhetorical force of divinely ordained law, they
have nevertheless been hugely influential in the construction of women's
ideal role in Western society. Consider the words ascribed to Paul in
I Timothy 2:11-14: "During instruction, a woman should be quiet
and respectful. I give no permission for a woman to teach or to have
authority over a man." The author then invokes his particular reading
of Genesis 2 to justify his understanding of the proper social order:
"A woman ought to be quiet, because Adam was formed first and Eve
afterwards, and it was not Adam who was led astray but the woman who
was led astray and fell into sin." His reading is not a summary
of Genesis 2 but an interpretation of it. Modern readers might argue,
for instance, that both Adam and Eve were led astray, and that the Genesis
narrative itself never includes the term (or the notion of) "sin."
Nevertheless, I Timothy 2:11-14 is a remarkable piece of early Christian
legislation that employs Hebrew scripture for its justification and
that through its presence in the Christian canon has been used for two
millennia in the subordination of women. Since laws are
primarily prescriptive--that is, they represent not social reality but
social ideals of behavior--many women interpreters of the Bible advocate
reading "against the grain," a subversive reading technique
designed to highlight the manner in which laws are constructed according
to male concerns for maintaining domination over women. To return to
the example of I Timothy 2:11-14, the author of this passage adds a
final word on women's proper place: "Nevertheless she will be saved
by childbearing, provided she lives a sensible life and is constant
in faith and love and holiness" (I Tim. 2:15). Rather than take
these words at face value as biblically mandated law, we might read
"against the grain" and infer from them that at the end of
the first century C.E. when I Timothy was composed, many Christian women
were evidently electing to remain childless and perhaps even to play
more active roles as teachers or ministers. By contrast, the fledgling
Church needed to establish and control its new communities. Women's
decisions to abstain from having children, then, probably threatened
to destabilize many early Christian movements. Thus ecclesiastical "laws" [340] or sanctions were
created to serve the needs of this community. Household codes are therefore
not descriptive of social reality but rather prescriptive, strongly
advocating a set of behaviors to curtail women's activities. Reading
"against the grain," we can recognize that the ruling that
states that women will be "saved" by staying at home and giving
birth was immediate, contextual, and in a sense, in reaction to what
women were actually doing. Tribal Narratives and Founding Stories Genesis, Numbers,
and Exodus place at their center stories of the patriarchs. The patriarchs
lead by virtue of their position as mediators between God and the people.
Although the patriarchs' behavior may not always fit within modern parameters
of morality or heroism, there is no question that various biblical authors
meant the patriarchs to stand as powerful exemplars for a man's proper
relationship to his God. Part of that proper relationship included the
unstated and unquestioned assumption that women were primarily commodities
and essential only for reproduction. By "commodities," we
mean that women had primarily economic value, not just for their ability
to bear children to share the burden of labor and protection of the
tribe, but also for the dowries that they brought to a marriage. Women
thus served important, albeit passive, roles in the transmission of
wealth through marriage and kinship ties. In the ancient
world, women were also war trophies. The rape of women during invasion
served multiple functions: to channel male aggression, to defile another
man's property, but also to mark women (and by extension, their peoples)
as now part of the conquering group. There is an old story about a conversation
between a tribesman and a modern ethnographer: the tribesman points
out a settlement in a neighboring village and explains to the ethnographer,
"They are our enemies; we marry them." Thus in Judges 2 I,
for example, the Benjaminites use wife stealing and rape as a way to
forge new kinship identities. The secondary status of women in tribal
narratives also accounts for stories such as the rape of Dinah with
its tragic consequences (Gen. 34)' Although her rape at the hands of
Shechem renders Dinah "unclean" (Gen. 34: 5, 27) and what
not long ago people used to call euphemistically "used goods,"
this story is not so much about the victimization of women as it is
a tale of male rage and vengeance. Dinah's brothers respond to the violation
of their sister by raping a number of women from Shechem's tribe, an
act that is seen in Genesis as appropriate and morally justifiable. One more "founding story" bears some attention: the creation of the Abrahamic Covenant (Gen. 12:2; 13:15-18; 15:1-21). In this story, [341] Yahweh lays out
a mutually binding contract with his servant Abraham. Yahweh promises
to give Abraham land and offspring ''as numerous as the stars"
if Abraham consecrates his (male) children to Yahweh. The mark of this
covenant is male circumcision. Remarkably, women are absent from the
Abrahamic Covenant, leading some Jewish feminists to ponder whether
Jewish women are really Jewish at all, since they are not technically
bound by the covenant, the tangible symbol of which is a marking or
mutilation of the male body. In this sense, the Abrahamic Covenant stands
as the foundational story of patriarchy as father-right, a story that
gives women no part to play in the foundation of the "people of
Israel" other than as breeders, and a story that marks men's privileged
relationship with their deity into the flesh of the male generative
organ. Parables and Teachings The parables of the gospels are a unique literary form. As didactic literature, they depend on illustrative vignettes that deliver complex and abstract information to the reader or listener in terms that she will be likely to understand. Thus the parables employ analogy to describe the "Kingdom of God" or the "Kingdom of Heaven"; they indicate what things are like the Kingdom in a provocative way that encourages reflection and contemplation. From the perspective of women and the Bible, the parables stand apart because they appear to have been designed for two separate audiences-one male, the other female. Thus parables are often paired, reflecting both male and female experiences of the world. For example, in both Matthew and Luke, the Kingdom of God is like a (male) farmer sowing the tiny mustard seed that grows into the large mustard plant, but it is also like a woman adding a tiny bit of yeast to dough that is able to make three measures of flour rise (Matt. 13:31-33; Luke 13:18-21). Through the use of simile and the linking of these analogies to what was traditionally "men's work" and "women's work," the author of these passages delivers the same message to both men and women. Two parables in the gospel of Luke-those of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-6) and the lost coin (Luke 15:7-9)-function similarly: to deliver a message about God's desire to seek out sinners rather than the righteous of Israel. In all these paired analogies, we might notice, women's work is portrayed as of equal merit to men's work; it stands for the same thing. Furthermore, women in these parables are neither inferior to nor dependent on men. This attention to women as an audience is remarkable for its time and may give us hints as to the truly revolutionary nature and appeal of the early Jesus movement, particularly to women, Some concluding
observations are in order here. First, we must keep in mind that each
type of literature expresses its own particular concerns and agendas.
Metaphors of the feminine in poetry do not tell us about the social
lives of real women in the ancient Near East. Ritual regulations established
by and for a male priesthood limiting women's access to the holy do
not necessarily mean that women as a whole were limited in their social
functions or looked down upon as defiling. The absence of women from
tribal lists or genealogies does not mean that women were not active
participants in society as mothers or as transmitters of culture. At
the same time, this is not to say that, generally speaking, women in
the ancient Near East enjoyed greater emancipation or freedom than that
which is revealed in the Bible. The ancient Near East was a male-oriented,
male-dominated culture in which women's activities were almost always
severely curtailed. Second, it is important to remember that the different
types of literature in the canon emerged over more than a millennium,
from a broad range of ancient societies. The best we can do as modern
interpreters of the Bible is to recognize the multiplicity of voices
and sources contained therein, and to locate each discussion or portrait
of women within its particular historical and social context. Is God in the Bible
masculine or feminine? For many, the answer is obvious: God is male.
Yet feminISt biblical interpreters in the last two decades have encouraged
readers to be more thought On the other hand,
it is difficult to argue that Yahweh is not a he, since often in the
Bible Yahweh shows many of the male qualities associated with other
Near Eastern deities. He is a king, a mighty warrior, and an arbiter
of justice. He is also the leader of a tribal confederation that he
delivers from bondage and oppression. These roles--deliverer, ruler,
warrior, and judge--are traditionally male occupations, although there is of course
nothing essentially "masculine" about them. In fact, in the
everyday religious lives of ancient Israelites, Yahweh the warrior-leader
was effectively "paired" with the goddess Asherah, who was
worshipped by Israelites and the later Judahites. Yahwists outlawed
her cult in a bloody struggle recounted in 2 Kings (see particularly
2 Kings 22ff.). The triumph of a male warrior-god over a goddess (who
could also, in the ancient world, be associated with war and warlike
qualities) served to highlight the language of female suppression and
domination--not because Asherah was necessarily "feminine"
as a goddess, but simply because Yahweh, at least in the minds of the
Yahwists, was the better, stronger warrior whose cult more successfully
advocated the qse But there are also
a number of places in the Bible where God is described with feminine,
maternal metaphors, such as Hosea 11:3-4 or Isaiah 42:14: "groaning
like a woman in labour, panting and gasping for air." God's love
for humankind, therefore, can be articulated as a sort of "womb-love"-as
penetrating, fundamental, painful, miraculous, and beautiful as the
love of each mother for her child as she brings it into the world. In
fact, the Hebrew root word from which words for "compassion"
and "mercy" derive come from the word rechem, which means
"womb." The few instances
when God is given feminine attributes or imagery do little, however,
to lessen the overall impression that God is associated with qualities
traditionally gendered male, such as dominance, aggression, and bellicosity.
But these qualities are not themselves in herently "male";
they are male because our society (and many of the societies of the
ancient Near East) likewise essentialized them as male or masculine.
Accordingly, some feminists have objected to seeing biblical language
of God's birthing, for example, as inherently "feminine." Giving birth is
something women do. The act itself is not "feminine." To see
all Yahweh's acts of nurturing and parenting as "feminine"
and all acts of discipline and aggression as "masculine" speaks
not to the transcendent reality of those qualities but to our desire
to "fix" or assign these qualities to biological sex. These
decisions, and perspectives, about what is inherently "masculine"
and what inherently "feminine" are ultimately culturally determined. How these essentialized
notions of gender come into place in the character of God in the Bible
is actually fairly complex. Consider the example of Genesis 1-2, when
God creates the world in six days. Some feminist scholars see in Genesis
1-2:4a the founding myth of primordial patriarchy, in which God, the
masculine Sky Father artifex (one who creates by making or crafting
something) replaces the feminine [344] However, the Genesis
creation myth does appear to work with the category of gender in interesting
ways. To begin with, it seems to mirror other Near Eastern combat myths
such as the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian narrative in which creation
takes place through the vanquishing of a monster. In the Enuma Elish,
Marduk slays the great sea monster Tiamat (who appears once to have
been a deity in her own right) and divides her body to create the seas
and the sky. In the Enuma Elish, therefore, domination of the cosmos
occurs through the ritualized slaughter and subsequent dismemberment
of the divine female. And while Genesis picks up on this story-there
are traces of the Babylonian word for Tiamat in the Hebrew word for
"the deep," tehom, when God divides the firmament and establishes
the sky above and the deep below-the theme of the slaughter and dismemberment
of a divine sea goddess is present only vestigially, in the feminine
gender of nouns such as tehom. In this way, the creation myth of Genesis
is actually less misogynist and patriarchal than earlier Near Eastern
myths of creation. Genesis 1 also
contains traces of another divine female "character." In Genesis
1:2, "God's spirit" hovers across the water. In the Hebrew
language, the word for "spirit," ruach, is feminine. Some
Jewish readers of Genesis 1:2 during the hellenistic period interpreted
the roach (which can also be translated as "breath" or "wind")
as God's feminine partner and counterpart, a divine feminine creatrix
working in concert with God. This partnership is expressed most eloquently in Proverbs 8:23-31:
This feminine partner
of God was identified as Wisdom, to the point that in some hellenistic
circles, Wisdom was elevated to a sort of god dess in her own
right. Wisdom even shows up in some early Christian interpretations
of the Bible as the divine female Sophia, who is responsible both for
the creation of the world and for the implantation of the divine breath
or soul into all human beings. If the elevation
of God's breath to the wisdom goddess Sophia provides a remarkable example
of how language of the feminine divine shaped the reading of the Bible
over two and a half millennia, there are also indications that such
language was actively suppressed, even masculinized, to serve the aims
of patriarchy. Certain Christian writers replaced the feminine creative
agency of Wisdom with the dynamic, preexistent male Logos. In the prologue
of the gospel of John, for example, it is the (male) preexistent Christ
who was with God and who assists God at creation: "In the beginning
was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God" (John
1:1). Paul, too, notes that Wisdom and Christ are identical: "We
preaching a crucified Christ. ..who is. ..the wisdom of God" (I
Cor. 1:23-24). The transformation of the female Wisdom into the male
Christ supported Jesus' status in Christianity as a "son of God"
created alone in the "image of God." This emphasis on Christ's
maleness, in turn, reflected and justified a system of patriarchal rule.
In this system, a woman could know God only through a man, since in
the established, descending hierarchy of divine reflection, a man stands
closer to God through shared maleness than does a woman. That only men
reflected the "image of God" became in some New Testament
writings a cosmic principle; thus Paul notes in his first epistle to
the Corinthians, "But I should like you to understand that the
head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head
of Christ is God. ...But for a man it is not right to have his head
covered, since he is the image of God and reflects God's glory; but
woman is the reflection of man's glory (I Cor. I I: 3, 7). Before concluding
this section on feminine imagery in the Bible and the ideological ends
that this imagery has served, it is important to discuss a few instances
in which the Bible's feminine imagery takes particularly ugly, troubling
forms. In prophetic literature, Israel is seen as the feminine, earthly
counterpart to God. While some biblical authors liken Israel to God's
"bride" (Jer. 2: 2 -3; Hos. 2: I 5), more troubling to feminist
readers is the common identification of Israel as an adulteress or even
a "whore." In Hosea 2: 1-3, for instance, Israel's capital
Samaria is likened to a sexually depraved wife stripped naked, imprisoned
in her house by her husband, and prevented forcibly from carrying on
her adulterous liaisons. God's "legitimate" role, according
to Hosea, is one of domestic abuser, who physically abuses his wife
to punish her for what he jealously perceives as her sexual infidelities. The characterization of Israel as "whore" and God as the angry, [346]
Commentators have
wryly noted the absence of this particular passage from Sunday school
curricula; but the language of violence Jeremiah employs here is part
of a widespread, enduring cultural system in which women's sexual identity
is invoked to justify violence against them. Israel's shortcomings in
meeting the calls of the divine are thus developed in gendered metaphors
that invoke the most negative terms possible for human women. But why? This question sits
at the center of womanist biblical interpreter and theologian Renita
Weems's book, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex and Violence in the Hebrew
Prophets (1995). Weems argues that the language of the prophets
is deeply and troublingly violent. Although this language is often "explained
away" as "merely metaphor," she wonders aloud in her
introduction (entitled "A Metaphor's Fatal Attraction") "what
in the image of a naked, mangled female body grips the religious imagination?"
Weems's aim, in unmasking metaphors of domination, is to simultaneously
unmask the way in which language functions powerfully to authorize and
legitimate male violence against women. If we understand
that the Bible is an anthology of works of literature, we can begin
to see how language works powerfully to create authority. God's giving
birth "like a woman" or caring for the people of Israel "like
a mother" does not make God a woman. God's "raising the [347] skirts" of
Jerusalem and exposing "her" shame in anger does not make
God a male rapist. Metaphor and simile function in the Bible to express
analogy, not identity. But if we forget that God is sometimes "like"
a male and begin to think that, in its place, God "is" a male,
we are misunderstanding language while at the same time allowing ourselves
to be deeply influenced by it. Many feminist scholars see this act of
for getting, of reading metaphor literally, as an act of idolatry. It
is "idolatry" because what is being worshipped is a verbal
"image" of God, not God's transcendent reality, which is by
definition beyond humanly created language and socially constructed
categories of gender. More often than not, we are left after reading
much of the Bible with an image of God not as nurturing mother but as
an angry and vengeful father and husband. The ideology of "father-right"
expressed through biblical, even poetic language justifies not only
the subordination of women but even the most egregious acts of violence
against them. Only the recognition that language is humanly constructed
can move us away from interpretations of ideological absolutism with
its sometimes tragic human consequences. A brief survey of the female character in the Bible should start with the Bible's first narrative, the creation of Adam and Eve and the so-called Fall of Man in Genesis 2-3. No other biblical narrative has played such a profound role in defining "normative" roles for women, or for creating the convictions that women are inherently sexual, deceitful, impulsive, and rebellious. Remarkably, these viewscome not from Genesis 2-3 itself, but from the history of its interpretation, from early exercises in biblical exegesis to John Milton's Paradise Lost. Genesis 2-3 is a narrative about the transition from an idyllic, well-provisioned Eden closely monitored by God to an imperfect "real world" with its cycles of time and change, birth and death, and a human race that must work hard to exist. As a narrative, it is also remarkable for its female protagonist. It is Eve (identified only in Genesis 2-3 as "the woman," just as Adam is merely "the man") who drives the narrative action, not Adam, who plays an almost comically passive role. The man takes the fruit from the woman like a baby (3:6) and is quick to blame the woman for offering it to him in the first place (3: I 2). On the other hand, the woman makes a reasoned (and reason able) decision to take and eat the fruit. Her action initiates a moment from which culture evolves in its manifold forms: in established gender roles, the development of agriculture, the human domination of animals, the wearing of clothing. The woman emerges in Genesis 3 as no |
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less than a culture
bringer, like the Greek hero Prometheus who steals fire from the gods
and brings it to humankind. The woman's role as culture bringer is perhaps
reflected in the Hebrew name that Adam bestows on her, "Eve,"
which contains a wordplay that lauds her as the "mother of all
those who live" (3: 20). But Eve's significant
role in initiating human civilization is obscured by more traditional
patriarchal evaluations of the first woman as inherently deceitful and
sexual-two character qualities that seem to conveya deep distrust of
women. Nor is Eve the only female character in the Bible through whom
the theme of the deceitful woman is expressed. Indeed, many of the Bible's
heroines achieve their goals through deceiving their husbands, fathers,
or enemies. Trickery and deception mark the narratives and characterization
of, for instance, Rebekah, Rachel, and Tamar, and the midwives, mother,
and sister of Moses (Exod. 1-2). In Genesis 27, Rebekah drives the action
of the narrative as the primary actor. She tricks the dying Isaac into
giving his blessing to Jacob rather than to Esau, his favorite son,
thus successfully manipulating the continuation of the Abrahamic line
and promise through Jacob. Rachel tricks her father-in-law Laban by
stealing from him the teraphim (household gods); when he comes in search
of them, Rachel sits on them and tells Laban she cannot get up, because
she is in the middle of her menstrual period (Gen. 31:19, 30-35). Tamar
disguises herself as a prostitute and tricks her father-in-law, Judah,
into having sex with her to secure her rights under the laws of Levirate
marriage, ensuring that her offspring will continue her husband's familial
line (Gen. 38). But readers should
not misinterpret trickery as a negative trait of biblical women. Male
characters in the Bible also act as tricksters. Consider Abram passing
off his wife, Sarai, as his sister in the folktale-like "wife-sister"
tales (Gen. 12:10-20; 20:1-18; 26:1-17), or Jacob tricking Esau out
of his birthright (Gen. 25:29-34). In fact, the trickster figures prominently
in the folklore and folktales of peoples traditionally lacking political
voice or power. An example of trickster tales familiar to American readers
might be the Brer Rabbit stories circulated among Mrican American slaves
in the plantation South. In these tales, the hero Brer Rabbit often
gains the upper hand through tricking the more powerful or sophisticated
Brer Fox or Brer Bear. Far from simple allegory or fable, trickster
tales betray a moral complexity: they express instances in which underdog
characters learn how to exploit and subvert authority, to negotiate
complex power relationships in society through superior cleverness and
determination. Given women's lack of power in the ancient Near East,
the adaptation of trick- ster motifs to
the female character reflects an authentic means for women to exert
power subversively and successfully in a patriarchal system. Rebekah,
by transferring her husband's final blessing from his favored son to
her own, exerts the only power a woman possesses in a man's world; her
actions are not without dangerous implications and self-sacrifice, and
she accepts the consequences of deception: "On me be the curse,
my son!" (Gen. 27:13). Rachel, for her part, employs a patriarchal
perception for her own ends; she uses the male-created law that a menstruating
woman is "unclean" and should not be touched to prevent a
man from touching her and discovering her hidden cache of household
gods. Tamar the widow plays with male sexual desire and the patriarchal
division of women into "virtuous" and "loose," moving
from one category to another and back again to achieve her goal of securing
the marriage and offspring necessary for her and her family's survival. The "deceitful woman" is a narrative theme more sophisticated than the themes of some other female characters who populate the Bible: the barren woman (Sarah, Rachel, Elizabeth; the unnamed mother of Samson in Judges 13), the unloved or abandoned woman (Leah, Hagar; the unnamed "adulteress" of John 7:52-8:11), the violated virgin (Dinah), and the dangerous hypersexual woman (Delilah, Salome, J ezebel, and the Whore of Babylon). These are not portraits of real women, but the archetypal, stock characters of folktales. The motif of the barren woman reflects the culture of the ancient Near East where married women unable to conceive suffered humthation, failing at the only social role afforded to them; but it also serves to highlight the theme that with Yahweh's help, all things are possible. Since the miraculous or extraordinary circumstances of a hero's birth also form a common motif in mythology, the theme of birth from a previously barren woman is not so much about an authorial concern with women's sorrow and humthation as it is a stock element provided to support a man's heroic, privileged status. The dangerous sexual temptress, by contrast, amplifies men's fears of losing control to women in the complex power negotiations between the sexes through the only power men cannot fully control: sexual attraction. The sexual siren bent on the wanton destruction of a man-like Herodias' daughter traditionally known as Salome who demands John the Baptist's head as "payment" for her dance (Matt. 14:1-12; Luke 9:7-9; Mark 6:14-28)-represents a distillation of these fears. Thus all these biblical figures, however good or bad, however well articulated or merely sketched out as characters, are not historical portraits of real women. They come from a wellspring of motifs or archetypes common to world mythology--a point explored by Not all female
characters in the Bible are merely caricatures or stock character "types."
Some are finely and sensitively drawn, and we learn a great deal about
their motivations, their desires, and their sense of self. Three of
the matriarchs of Genesis-Rachel, Sarah, and Hagarcall upon Yahweh to
explain or ameliorate their plight, and all three receive answers and
divine favor. Sarah, on overhearing that she will conceive in her old
age, bursts into incredulous, even scornful laughter (Gen. r8:r2). When
Yahweh questions Abram sharply on his wife's lack of faith (r8:r3),
Sarah quickly backtracks: "I did not laugh" (Gen. r8:r5).
Here, Yahweh gets the last word not once but twice: "Oh yes, you
did laugh," he responds to her. And of course, that spring, Sarah
bears Isaac, whose name means "he laughs'" (see Sarah's pun
at Gen. 2 r :6). Rebekah, suffering from the crush of two battling fetuses
in her womb, asks Yahweh in desperation, "If this is the way of
it, why go on living?" (Gen. 25:2r-23). Yahweh answers her with
a prophetic statement underscoring her importance as a vessel bearing
two nations (Gen. 25: 2 3). Finally, the Egyptian slave woman Hagar,
cast out to die by her mistress Sarah in the wilderness of Beersheba,
places her child Ishmael under a bush and retreats far off so that she
does not have to endure the sight of his death (Genesis 21:16; see the
alternative version of the story at Genesis 16:1-15). Hearing the infant
Ishmael howling in the wilderness, Yahweh speaks to Hagar directly:
"What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the
boy's cry in his plight" (Gen. 21:17). These incidents make it
clear that female characters, too, can converse with God, and the nature
of that conversation is not fundamentally different from that between
male characters and Yahweh. In fact, Yahweh makes a separate covenantal
promise to Hagar closely related to the Abrahamic Covenant: "Go
and pick the boy up and hold him safe, for I shall make him into a great
nation" (Gen. 21:18; compare 17:7-8, 16). Hagar, as a consequence,
becomes the only woman in the Bible to name God: "Hagar gave a
name to Yahweh who had spoken to her, 'You are EI Roi,' by which she
meant, 'Did I not go on seeing here, after him who sees me?'" (Gen.
16:13). Female characters can also become central actors in the Bible as martial heroines, playing out one of the dominant themes of the Old Testament: the necessary and divinely sanctioned domination of the people of Canaan through acts of violence and aggression. The heroine of the book of Judges, Deborah, is described as both prophetess and judge, and explicitly depicted as a leader of men (Judges 4:8-9). Deborah's prophecy that Yahweh will give over the Canaanite leader Sis- [351] era "into
the hands of a woman" is fulfilled whenJael, the wife of Heber,
lures Sisera into her tent and drives a tent peg into his temple with
a hammer when he is sleeping (Judges 4:21). For this deed, Jael is commemorated
in one of the oldest parts of the Bible, the Song of Deborah: "Most
blessed of women be Jael / (the wife of Heber the Kenite); of tent-dwelling
women, / may she be most blessed" (Judges 5:24). The story of Deborah
is echoed in the tale of Judith from the book that bears her name. (She
is one of four women for whom a book in the Bible is named; the others
are Esther, Ruth, and Susanna.) The book of Judith is an extraordinarily
well-crafted work of ancient literature, replete with chiastic structures,
irony, suspense, narrative inversions, double meanings, and tensions
based on a series of binary oppositions: women versus men, Jews versus
non-Jews, courage versus cowardice. Judith is a widow, steadfast in
her piety, renowned for her beauty. The author takes pains to establish
Judith's blameless character; hers is the longest genealogy given for
any biblical woman, tracing back to her ancestor Jacob (Jth. 8:1). But
to what extent is Judith meant to represent a real woman? Her name,
which means only "Jewess," has led many observers to suggest
that she is a personification of the land of Israel-an interpretation
favored, incidentally, by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. Although
her behavior as a widow is beyond reproach, she too bears elements of
the trickster. Her words are full of outright and manipulative lies
(10:12-13; 11:11-15); her part of the dialogue with Holofernes in his
tent-a masterful scene of narrative suspense and tension-is full of
double entendres that she and the reader share, leaving Holofernes the
comical victim of literary irony (II: 5; 11:6; 12:18). And as the book
of Judith is full of tensions, so too is the character, Judith. Is she
a feminist heroine, a true woman warrior; or a bloodthirsty projection
of patriarchal fears, the embodiment of women's "lethal love"? A final category
of female character worthy of brief examination is the forgotten, mute,
or terrorized woman. In 1984, feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible
published her Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical
Narratives, in which she highlighted and thus honored many of the
forgotten, nameless women who were violated within the patriarchal,
misogynist worldview of the Bible. Thus she discusses in detail the
rape of Tamar by Amnon (2 Sam. 13), the story of Dinah (Gen. 34), and
most poignantly, two horrifying stories from the book of Judges: the
unnamed concubine who is offered up to strangers in an act of "hospitality,"
gang raped and tortured, then dismembered by her master (Judg. 19:1-3°),
and the sacrificial killing of a daughter by her own father, Jephthah
(Judg. 11:39). Jephthah slaughters his vir-
________________________________ Where female characters are not given the opportunity in biblical narratives to speak for themselves, one technique feminist readers some times employ is called amplification. Amplification involves creative imagination and a modified version of a Jewish rabbinic practice called midrash ("commentary") to fill out the parts of a narrative where female characters are unable to speak. Amplification restores voice and agency to biblical women. A feminist amplification of the Sarah and Hagar story, for instance, might explore and expand upon the relationship that the two women might have had-a relationship of no particular interest to the biblical authors. Feminist midrashic readings have creatively illuminated not only Hagar's plight as an outsider, a slave, and an unmarried pregnant woman rejected by both the man who impregnated her and his angry wife, but also her status as the only woman to whom God appeared directly in the wilderness and the only woman in the Bible to "name" God. Feminist midrash also amplifies the thoughts and sorrow of Sarah, as she wakes in the morning to find that Abraham has gone at Yahweh's behest to sacrifice her only child, conceived in her old age after a lifetime of suffering the heartrending fate of being barren in a society that prized female fertility. With the techniques of amplification or feminist midrash, feminist interpreters move from critiquing and analyzing fiction to creating it. The resulting literature can have extraordinary beauty and power. Furthermore, the popularity of such recent works of feminist midrash such as Anita Diamant's The Red Tent (1997),* which amplifies the story of Dinah and the other women of the Bible, speaks to the need for modern authors to recast biblical women into fuller, more vibrant roles. GENDER AND THE
PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION No study of the
Bible as literature can be complete without a discussion of the problems
inherent in translating ancient languages into modern English. And no
study of "women and the Bible" can be complete without a discussion
of the issues concerning gender that emerge during the translation process.
The English language, like the biblical languages Greek and Hebrew,
is gendered. English grammar has three genders, masculine, feminine,
and neuter, although the neuter remains only in a limited form. As most
writers at the college or university level now recognize, the convention
of using gender-specific language such as "man" or "mankind,"
as well as the habitual and exclusive reliance on the male pronoun "he"
to modify all ambiguously gendered nouns such as "child,"
"person," or "reader," can act to obscure or negate
the participation of women in history. Con _____________________________________________________ |
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[354] sider the English
use of "man" as a collective noun. "Man" stands
in opposition not to "woman" but to "animal" as
an ontological category. It incorporates,
not opposes, "woman," though only implicitly. Yet "woman"
really means "man's partner" or "the opposite of man,"
not the "opposite of animal." The noun "woman,"
unlike "man," never means "human being" generally
or as a whole. "Woman" is but a subset of "man." To combat the interpretive
problems inherent in gender-exclusive language, a group of translators
and linguists produced in 1990 a controversial new English translation
of the Bible, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). It is important
to emphasize that the translators of the NRSV did not aim to expunge
"sexist" or misogynist language from the Bible itself. They
agreed that the Bible is the product of a patriarchal culture; their
job was not to fundamentally alter its contents Although most modern
readers are sympathetic to the notion of a [355] gender-neutral
Bible, there are translation points that have raised considerable controversy.
This is really not surprising, for gender-neutral translations undermine
our own patriarchal conditioning in which the masculine is prioritized
and sanctified and the feminine is repressed or rejected. When the familiar,
comforting expressions of the Bible are replaced by the unfamiliar,
some people reject them as "untraditional" or even "unfaithful
to the Bible." But consider that the function of language is not
always to reassert the familiar; language can work subversively, too,
to shock readers out of complacency. Terms like "fishers of all
people," back in the first century, would have struck most readers
not as comfortingly familiar but as shockingly new. Indeed, many interpreters
see biblical literature as often transgressive and revolutionary, encouraging
its readers to see the world differently. In the production of modern
gender-neutral translations of the Bible, we are forced to see not only
a familiar text but even ourselves differently. From this experience,
we can begin to see the power of translation in furthering ideas of
gender: language is powerful, and it is implicitly ideological. Could any of the
biblical authors have been women? For some time, scholars have at least
entertained this possibility. An American scholar of the Hebrew Bible,
Richard Elliott Friedman, raises the issue in his book, Who Wrote
the Bible? (1987).* Friedman notes that while many of the writings
of the Old Testament clearly reflect the concerns of men-particularly
male priests-there are other writings that seem particularly sympathetic
to women. He gives the example of the portrayal of Tamar in Genesis
38. Not only do these passages focus attention on a female character,
but in them Tamar acts independently to come up with a plan to redress
the wrongs done to her, and she manages to elicit the apology of Judah,
who reiterates her rights. As we have already seen in this chapter,
equally sympathetic to women are some of the narratives in Genesis about
Eve, Hagar, and Rebecca. Furthermore, the narratives most sympathetic
to women in the Bible all derive from what scholars call the J source.
As best we can reconstruct, J wrote from the Judean court of King David.
It is possiblealthough not extremely likely-that in that courtly context,
women writers might have been able to author works beloved and authoritative
enough to later become part of the canon. Friedman's musings that J
might have been a woman in David's court formed the starting point [356] It is difficult
to argue that any part of the New Testament could have been written
by a woman. Nevertheless, various people have raised the question of
whether the gospel of John or the gospel of Luke might have had female
authors, although for different reasons. Some have speculated that the
mysterious "beloved disciple" on whose breast J esus reclines
his head at the Last Supper (13:23) might have been Mary Magdalene,
who later composed some of the earliest material in that gospel, but
there are too many reasons to discount this hypothesis. Even if we set
aside the issue of whether or not a woman would have been literate enough
to compose early gospel material, Mary Magdalene lived in the early
first century-rather earlier than even our earliest gospel. As for the
gospel of Luke, many have pointed out that Luke renders the character
of Jesus' mother, Mary, more fully than other gospel writers. In particular,
Luke's treatment of the conception and birth of Jesus-the so-called
infancy narrative that opens the gospel (Luke 1:52:52)-gives the character
of Mary both agency and dialogue. Indeed, it is worth comparing Matthew's
infancy narrative, in which the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph
and tells him that Mary is to conceive, with Luke's infancy narrative,
in which Gabriel appears to Mary (and never to Joseph, who plays only
a vestigial role here). We can read Mary's response to the angel's words
expressed both through a description of her emotional state ("She
was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what the greeting
could mean," Luke 1 :29) and in her dialogue ("Mary said to
the angel, 'But how can this come about, since I have no knowledge of
man?'" Luke 1 :34). Mary's hymn of praise known as the Magnificat
(Luke 1:46-79), finally, is unique in New Testament literature (although
it draws heavily on Old Testament archetypes, particularly Hannah's
Song of Praise on the birth of her son, Samuel) (1 Sam. 2:1-10); in
it, Mary sings not merely as a woman, but as a prophet and the bearer
of the Messiah. In the entire New Testament, Luke's infancy narrative
reveals at the very least an authorial sensitivity toward women, and
the desire to define a female character in terms at least as rich and
nuanced as male characters. But it is wise to be thoughtful about what we, as readers, are really doing and thinking when we suspect that just because a female charac- ________________________________
Patricia Demers,
Women as Interpreters of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press,
1992). Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds., Women's Bible Commentary.
Expanded, with Apocrypha (Louisville WestrninsterlJohn Knox Press,
1998). |
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