Transcript
First of all, Dr. Gillespie, regrettably, is unable to be here and he expressed his regrets earlier this afternoon. But secondly, I am the chairperson of the Women and Church and Ministry Committee and therefore I have the honor of making tonight's introduction. Tonight is an extremely joyful time, not only because of our speaker, but because of what this talk inaugurates and inaugurates a series on lectures to do with issues and concerns of women in church and ministry.
For this we are thankful to last year's committee, WICAM Committee, headed by Freda Gardner. I understand we're also thankful to another person on the faculty, Donald Capps, and I know we're thankful to other persons on that committee, and of course to Dr. Gillespie. Now I want to say just two things before I introduce Dr. Trible. First of all, I want to give credit to the artist on this poster, and this is Lois Pavelka's artwork, and she
is the head of the Theological Book Agency, and she had no idea that this was going to happen when she happened to give me this lithograph a few months ago that she had done. And so I think it makes a very perfect poster for tonight and I hope you all have enjoyed it. Secondly, I want... I will let Lois know that applause, she unfortunately had a long time medical appointment for her daughter down in Baltimore, Washington
and could not be here this evening. Secondly, I want to thank Angela Ying because I understand that due to her convincing, all the people who are supposed to be in polity now are now exempt. Dick Armstrong's been around here for a long time, but now he's seen the light just before his retirement. And now I come to the privilege of introducing our speaker. Dr. Trible has many claims to fame. I have about two. One of them
is that when I was four, my father made me jump out of the car at a gas station down south and say, quick, Betty, put your hand in this man's hand because this man shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln. And so I jumped out and had the pleasure of shaking hands with someone who had shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln. My second claim to fame is that too many years ago, at least for me, too many years
ago, I had the privilege of having as my teaching fellow when I was taking a course with Dr. Meilenberg up at Union Seminary, won Phyllis Trible. And I know that I had to speak to her for some reason and my recollection is, and knowing me and I do, is that I needed a sort of little bit extra time on the paper I was doing. And so I searched for her in the library and lo and behold,
on a rainy afternoon, I found her and she understandably gave me whatever extension it was. She also gave me a grade that has allowed me to introduce exegesis in my classes with a little bit of humor because the grade was so bad that that's the reason I've gone on to learn how to do exegesis and try to teach other people. Now Phyllis Trible probably does not remember that rainy afternoon, but I remember it well and how
marvelous it's been to know that this person has become so well known for such legitimate, valid, important, significant reasons. I'm so happy tonight to introduce to you Dr. Phyllis Trible. Her name, of course, you know from the books that she has written. She has written The God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. She has written The Texts of Terror. When she wrote the second one, she commented that writing the first was a real joy, but writing the
second contained a great deal of pain. I have only joy now to introduce to you the Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York City who is going to talk to us on the topic, The Pilgrim Bible on a Feminist Journey. Dr. Trible. For people in church and ministry, the question of the Bible looms large. What is it? What does it have to do with us? How do we understand and interpret it?
Though such questions confront every generation of believers, the questions are being posed more sharply in our time by the challenge of feminism to faith. So I thought that in this, the first lecture of a new series at Princeton Seminary, we would do well to examine feminist interpretation of the Bible, to explore tonight whence it has come and whither it is going. But I shall begin with a disclaimer. I alone cannot encompass such a topic. Feminist interpretation
of the Bible is not monolithic. Never has it been and never will it be. The endeavor is fraught with tensions, even contradictions, and no one of us can pontificate about what it is, from whence it has come and whether it is going. Who among us, for example, can speak for my friend Nobuko Kawano, who just two days ago returned to Japan to try to teach Bible in that patriarchal culture? Or Mercy Oduyoye, whom some of you
may remember, who struggles with it in an African environment? Or friends I have in Australia or in South and Central America. Who can speak for these people? Not I, not I, not I, nor can I speak for black women, Hispanic women, Asian women in the American scene, nor for Jewish feminists, nor for Mormon feminists, and there are some, Roman Catholic feminists, and so on. To each her own a voice, to each her own a view, to
each her own a vision. But if all we have are these individualistic or culturally differentiated words and worlds, then all we have is isolation, you in your mental box and I in mine. That is not feminism, but rather a betrayal of it. Thus, assured of a sisterhood that sees differently from the way the world sees, the patriarchal world that is, I do make bold this evening to speak about feminist interpretation of the Bible, to sketch certain
trends that are not idiosyncratic, but rather representative of the journeys of many who seek to redeem scripture from the confines of patriarchy. So in tracing my own pilgrimage, I give voice to some of the concerns of others. Now this story begins in the early 1970s when Mary Daly was speaking widely throughout the country, both in the U .S. and other places, and I happened to move to Boston around that time. I listened attentively to what she
had to say, not having to be convinced of feminism, but knowing that it was bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. At the same time, I also knew, decidedly at variance with Daly, that scripture fed my in rich and beneficial ways. That the Bible I grew up with in Sunday school, where sword drills were routine, and if you don't know about sword drills, that can be the first question for the panel. Where sword drills
were routine and memory versus mandatory, that Bible continued to make a claim upon me as an adult woman. To be sure, I had learned in college and later in graduate school that the Bible is rather different from what Sunday school teachers teach and what some preachers had also preached. But not even critical and sophisticated ways of studying it had supplanted or diminished my love for it. There is power in the document and it need not work
adversely for women or for men. This I knew and this I know, no matter how much others may rush to say it isn't so. But there was the rub. To know that one is a feminist and to know that one loves the Bible is in the thinking of many, at best an oxymoron. Perhaps clever as a rhetorical statement, but surely not a possibility for existential integrity. After all, if no man can serve to masters, no woman
can serve to authorities, a master called scripture and a mistress called feminism. And so my predicament grew as I heard the challenge that Daly and others proposed and continued to pose. Choose ye this day whom you will serve, the God of the fathers or the God of sisterhood. Biblical religion is the God of the fathers. In it is no resting place for a feminist. If this be true, then I am of all women most wretched. You
see I can't even talk without borrowing something from the Bible. Or choose the adjective, confused, schizophrenic, misguided, conservative or just plain wrong. Now to sketch how this perceived predicament is working itself out in my life is the intent of this lecture. Let us begin with a statement I have never doubted, with an observation that is overwhelming and with a description and a condemnation all rolled into one. The Bible was born and bred in a land of
patriarchy. It abounds in male imagery and language. For centuries interpreters have explored and exploited this male language to articulate theology, to shape the contours and content of the church, the synagogue and the academy and to instruct human beings, female and male and who they are, what roles they should play, how they should behave. So harmonious has seemed this association of scripture with sexism, of faith with culture that few have ever questioned or analyzed it. Understandably then,
when feminism turns attention to the Bible, it first of all names patriarchy. To name means more than putting a label or a tag of identification upon scripture. To name is to explore, to investigate, to analyze, to articulate and then something more. To name is to indict, to convict the Bible of the sin of patriarchy. So feminist commentators might observe the plight of the female in ancient Israel. Less desirable in the eyes of her parents than a
male child, a girl stayed close to her mother but her father controlled her life until he relinquished her to another man for marriage. If either of these male authorities permitted her to be mistreated, even abused, she had to submit without recourse. Remember Lot offering his daughters to the men of Sodom to protect a male guest. Or Jephthah sacrificing his daughter to remain faithful to a foolish vow. I know the Bible just says a vow, I added
the adjective. Amnon raping his half-sister Tamar and the most terrible of all the Levite from the hill country of Ephraim, participating with other males to bring about the betrayal, rape, torture, murder and dismemberment of his own concubine. Not every story involving female and male in scripture is so terrifying as these, but nevertheless the narrative literature makes clear that from birth to death the Hebrew woman belonged to men. And what the narratives show, the legal corpus
amplifies. Defined as the property of men, women did not control their own bodies. A man expected to marry a virgin, though his own virginity need not be intact. A wife found guilty of earlier fornication was said to have violated the honor and power of both her father and her husband and her penalty was death by stoning. In ancient Israel a woman had no right to divorce and most often no right to own property. Excluded from the
priesthood, she was considered far more unclean than the male and her monetary value was less. Evidence for the subordination, inferiority and abuse of women in scripture is abundant. Feminism has no difficulty in making this case. One might say it is the sine qua non of feminist readings of the Bible. And yet recognition that the Bible is a patriarchal document has led to different conclusions within the feminist conversation. As we have already noted, some feminists, be they
secular or religious, denounce the Bible as hopelessly misogynist. It is, they tell us, a woman-hating document and there is no health in it. Such a blanket judgment, however, usually fails to evaluate the evidence in terms of Israelite culture. Some other feminists reprehensibly use these patriarchal data to support anti-Semitic sentiments. They may posit a prehistoric or early historic era of good goddess worship that they say got undercut, discredited and demolished by the ascendancy of the
bad patriarchal god Yahweh. Or if such feminists are Christian, they may believe that whereas the Old Testament is terrible on these issues, the New Testament brings an improved revelation. If you think this, I have one suggestion for you. Read the New Testament sometimes. Anti-Semitism, in whatever form, must not be allowed to pollute feminism. Still, other feminists read the Bible as a historical document, devoid of any continuing authority and hence worthy of dismissal. Who cares is
the question that often comes at this point. But if we are attuned to the world, the church and the synagogue, we know that a lot of people care. They enlist the scriptures in support of their political and social agendas. Thus, some other feminists succumb to despair about the ever-present male power that the Bible and its commentators hold over women. And still others, unwilling to let the case against women be the determining word, insist that the
text and its interpreters provide more excellent ways. Thereby, they seek to redeem the past, an ancient document, and the present, its continuing use from the confines of patriarchy. Now, you may recognize this last approach as my niche. I recognize that the Bible is a patriarchal text, but then I approach it with the conviction, indeed the realization, that scripture can be redeemed from bondage to patriarchy, that that redemption is already at work in the text, and that
the articulation of it is both desirable and beneficial. And sometimes, it is also fun. To bring together the self-critique that operates in scripture with the concerns of feminism is to shape a hermeneutic that makes a difference. A hermeneutic that begins with suspicion and becomes subversion. Subversion for the sake of redemption, for the sake of healing, wholeness, joy, and well-being. What specifically are the elements of such an approach? Reinterpreting familiar text is one element. Reinterpretation
does not mean making the Bible say what I want it to say. It does not hold that there are no limits to interpretation, and that the text can, in effect, be rewritten. No. But it does recognize the polyvalency of the text, that any text is open to multiple interpretations, that between those who adamantly hold fast to only one meaning, and those who breezily claim that it can be manipulated to say anything, between those extremes is a
wide spectrum of legitimate meanings. Some of these meanings assert themselves forcibly, others have to be teased out. Reinterpretation also recognizes the diversity of scripture. The Bible is not a single-minded document, but rather teams with diverse voices and views. In spite of attempts to harmonize it by ancient redactors working within it for canonization, or by modern commentators working from outside it for authority, the Bible comes to us full of struggles, battles, contradictions, and problems. It refuses
to be the captive of any group or perspective. Fittingly, if ironically, even the winners who prevail in scripture bear witness to the stories of the losers. In the very process of discrediting these stories, the winners gave them canonical status. Understanding that every culture contains a counterculture, feminism seeks those other voices in the Bible. So it is open to exploiting the diversity and plurality of scripture. And further, reinterpretation emphasizes the pilgrim character of the Bible. It knows
that all scripture is a pilgrim, wandering through history, engaging in new settings, and ever refusing to be locked in the box of the past. Every generation or group who engages the text comes to it from certain perspectives not adopted by others, with certain questions not asked by others, with certain issues not raised by others. One group may see what another did not, while at the same time acknowledging that we all see in part not in whole.
So this Pilgrim book has maintained a lively dialogue with generations of readers for weal or for woe. Feminist reinterpretation then respects the historical, sociological, political, and existential journeys of the text. To illustrate reinterpretation, let us return tonight to that most familiar of all familiar texts, at least for me, the story of the garden in Genesis 2-3. We hardly need reminding that this text has been employed throughout the ages to legitimate patriarchy as the will of
God. So powerful has this interpretation been that it has burrowed its way into the collective psyche of the Western world. We think we know what the text says. And one of the great ironies for me is how many feminist, religious, and secular accept the dominant patriarchal reading of this story. They accept the reading that would say the man is created first and the woman last, that this order of creation makes her subordinate to him, that she
is also depicted as derivative having come from his side, that she is described as his helper, namely his assistant, not his equal, that further she is the seducer, the one to be blamed for the disobedience, and that she is cursed and she is punished by being explicitly subjected to the rule of her husband. If this be your exegesis of the text, then be clear that your understanding is no different from the traditional patriarchal reading. The difference,
if you are a feminist, will come in not in your interpretation then, but in your evaluation, in deciding whether or not this story is to hold power over your life. And given such an interpretation, the choice is clear for the feminist. She denounces the story. She rejects the story, a response with which we are all familiar. But that is not the response of this feminist, as you no doubt may know. Long ago, I asked myself this
question. How come, if as it certainly appears, this story is so terribly patriarchal, how come I like it? How come it feeds and nourishes my life? How come I feel no anger in reading this story, no embarrassment in claiming? How come it gives me a sense of well-being in spite of its tragic ending? And in pondering those questions, I thought then that there had to be another interpretation at work in the text, an interpretation that
remained to be ferreted out. Sometime after first having these thoughts, fragments from the past began to surface in my memory. I remembered years ago a Southern Baptist missionary who, having returned from foreign lands one summer, was assigned to teach Bible study to a group of GAs, as we were called. Now, for those of you who may not know, in Southern Baptist churches, and I'm told even to this day, there were two groups for little boys and
little girls. Little girls were called and are called GAs, which means girls auxiliary. Little boys are called RAs, and that means royal ambassadors. Now, this missionary woman, a product herself of a conservative patriarchal denomination, was assigned to teach the GAs. They didn't matter. And upon a day, she took us out into the mountains and she said to us, little girls, everything that God created got better and better. What was the last thing God created? In unison
and with great vigor, we replied, man, and she said, no, woman. Now, hers is not the exegesis with which I have ended up, but nonetheless, to this day, I am grateful for her word. It resonated deeply within, though at the time, I knew it not. Many years passed, and upon a day, I was sitting in a classroom at Union Theological Seminary. The course was Old Testament theology, the professor, a learned scholar who no one would ever
accuse of being a feminist. Carefully, with great detail, he executed the story of the garden. All that he said, I fervently recorded in my notes. In the years that followed, I rarely, if ever, checked those notes until that day came when another fragment of the past surfaced in my mind. Then I sought out the notes, and surely enough, found what I thought I remembered. The professor said something like this, the portrayal of the man in the
garden is not the portrayal of a patriarch. Whereas the woman is depicted as alert, intelligent, and sensitive, the man comes off as passive, bland, and belly-oriented. End of quote. And surely enough, I saw as I reread the story that the woman does contemplate that tree, finding it good to eat, a physical concern, pleasant to see, an aesthetic dimension, and desirable for wisdom, a sapientral motif. Her vision encompasses the gamut of life, and only then does
she eat. But by contrast, the man who was with her. Now most of your translations do not include that little phrase, who was with her, though in the forthcoming new RSV, it will be back in there. But the man who was with her, it's a telling phrase deleted by translators, going all the way back to Jerome. Simply, she gave to the man, but the text says she gave to the man who was with her, and what
did he do? He just ate. How grateful I am, and shall always be, for that insight from the lips of a patriarchal professor, a chauvinist to this day. Don't ask me in the question period who he is. He knew not what he was doing, but at some deep level, his exegesis resonated with latent feminist bones and flesh. And yet a third fragment of thought emerged. This time an obscure footnote I once read in a discussion of
Genesis 2-3. It came from a male writer who at the time knew nothing of feminism, but the note observed that the world's first statement of patriarchy, your desire is for your man, but he rules over you, comes not in the context of creation, but in the context of disobedience and judgment. Could it be, that little footnote asked, that some in ancient Israel questioned male dominance? For that footnote, I too am grateful. These and other fragments
of thought that surfaced after years of lying dormant, helped me to reinterpret Genesis 2-3 from a feminist perspective. A reinterpretation that runs counter to tradition in seeing the text not as legitimation, but rather as critique of patriarchy. A reinterpretation that begins not first with man created from the dust of the earth, but rather with the human created from the humus. That is, we can preserve in English translation the pun that is clearly present in the
Hebrew, ha-adam from ha-adamah, the human from the humus. And so undercut any ordering of creation, for sexuality does not emerge in the story until the end of chapter 2, where male and female, but really female and male, appear simultaneously. The problem is language can never say two things simultaneously, and it must order the vocabulary. But if you push it on the ordering, it is the word for woman isha that occurs before the word for
man ish. One of the nice things about this story is every time you push it in terms of traditional reading, it runs away from the tradition. Take, for example, aza, the helper fit for, and just look up aza in the lexicon, and you will see that overwhelmingly in the Bible, it is a word used for God. And if you think God is inferior to Israel, something is wrong with your thinking, right? So this text, when pushed,
takes us where tradition has not dared to take us. And the reinterpretation of it happens through convergences. The polyvalency of the text, the challenge of feminism, and existential awareness, gifts from the past, hints and guesses, hunches, and play the hunches, and see what happens. But let me say it simply and confessionally, it happened because of the goodness of God. Reading texts with a feminist perspective does not mean, however, that every text will turn out to be
less patriarchal or non-patriarchal, in contrast to traditional exegesis. In some cases, our analysis will show just how much more patriarchal a text is. And in these instances, the challenge to redeem scripture must be met in a different way from our handling, for example, of the creation story in Genesis. Now, the little book, Text of Terror, illustrates this principle. For there, we looked at the stories of Hagar, Tamar, the unnamed woman, and the unnamed daughter of
Jephthah. Throughout the history of biblical theology, these four stories have not received great attention. Among the reasons, surely some have to do with the fact that they report things the establishment wishes not to acknowledge. Use and abuse of women, male violence and brutality, misogyny in all its ugliness. For anyone to give these stories happy endings would be preposterous. Yet to succumb to their suffering defeat and victimization would be dangerous and destructive. So the challenge here is
difficult and demanding. To retell these stories in memoriam on behalf of the female victims, not just to expose misogyny and certainly not to perpetuate victimization, but to reappropriate the past in a dialectic of redemption. In this appropriation, in this reinterpretation, we remember in order not to repeat. And so in establishing a memorial, we make a call for repentance. Shall I illustrate that briefly by the most terrible of the stories, the betrayal, rape, murder, and dismemberment of
the concubine. A Levite whom we shall call the master and his concubine have a problem. The text is not very clear about whose fault it is. Did she do something wrong to him or did he do something wrong to her? We can't be sure. But at any rate, she decided to leave him. The only instance I know in the text of a woman deciding to leave a man, that was hardly an option in Israel. And she
went home to daddy. She went back to Bethlehem. And after a while, he decides to go after her to bring her back. And the text is very kind to him, I think, at that point, because it says he wishes to speak tenderly to her heart to bring her back. And so he travels there to Bethlehem. And he is received in the home of her father in typical oriental hospitality, which is male bonding. Oh, do come in.
Let us have a feast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. And you keep waiting for him to get together with her, but she seems to have faded from the story. And so for a whole day, the two men corrals in this act of hospitality. And it goes on into the second day. And it is late into the second day when the master says, well, I think I better think about going home, getting back to my own home. But he
still hasn't spoken to the woman, much less spoken tenderly to her. And the father prevails upon him to stay. Yet a third day, oh, do have one more drink. That would be a loose interpretation of the text and stay a while. And so into the third day. And finally, the rivalry between the two males is settled when he announces this time I'm really going. And he takes his possessions, his a**, his servant and his concubine, and
he sets out to go home, never having spoken to her, nor has she been a part of the celebrations. And the servant finally speaks, master, we're not going to make it home. It's too late in the day. Let's stay up there in Jerusalem on the hill. And he says, oh, no, we don't stay with foreigners. We're going to stay with our own people because then we will be secure. And they press on into the tribe of
Benjamin to the little town of Gibeah. And they wait in the town square for the hospitality of the brothers. And it does not happen. And finally, an old man comes through and he says, I don't know what you're doing here. And they explain. And he says, it's not safe for you to remain in this square. I am not a Benjamite, but I'm living here temporarily. Come home with me. And he takes them home. And then again,
there is the act of male bonding with the party. And they're inside the house. Watch the threshold because that is the boundary line in the story. They're in the house having a wonderful time when the knock comes on the door. And the men of Gibeah are out there saying, we know you have a male guest. Give him to us that we may abuse him sexually. And the old man says, my brothers. And that's a great irony
in that we don't do such things in Israel. And they said, but we're going to do it. We want to do it. Give us this man. And he said, no, I won't do that, but I'll make a substitute. I have a virgin daughter and he has a concubine. We'll give you each untouched soil and seasoned soil. Take them both. You may have them. No, we don't want them. We want him. And the master then becomes so
upset by the possibility of this that he takes his concubine and throws to them outside. He's done so harriedly. They even left the object out of the sentence, just threw to them outside. In that long night, she is the only character in the story who crosses that threshold. Now, if Israel were interested in pornography, at this point, the story would grow in length. But it does not. Instead, it shrinks. And very simply, but poignantly and terribly,
it says, all night they raped her. And in the morning, they let her go. Go? Where is she to go? Back to her master? And so she does. And the most poignant note, her hand upon the threshold. And as the reader, I say, who will let her in? After all, inside the house is a zone of safety. And though you cannot undo the rape of the evening, you might at least bring her back to a zone
of safety. Who will do that? The old man whose house it is, but he does not. The narrator of the story, the omnipotent narrator, the omniscient narrator that Flannery O'Connor likes to talk about. Please, narrator, let her in. But the narrator does not. Her own master, let her in? No, he does not. Well, how about God? But God is not in the story. So the master opens the door and then speaks to her for the
first and only time. Get up and let us be going. And the Hebrew says she did not reply. The Septuagint says she did not reply because she was dead. But the Hebrew leaves open the question, dead or alive. And he puts her on the donkey and they continue home. And when they get home, he took the knife. And as soon as I saw those words, they just leaped off the page because they resonated with something else
in the Bible. And surely enough, I looked it up and only twice in all of scripture do you have that exact phrase, he took the knife. And you know the other one. It's Abraham took the knife to do what? To slay his son. And it's made very explicit in the Genesis 22 text what the purpose is in taking the knife. How can we bear that? We can bear that because we know the story doesn't work out
that way. But in the Hebrew version of the concubine story, he took the knife dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. He cuts her in pieces. Is she dead or alive? Is he her murderer? The text leaves it open. But he cuts her in 12 pieces and he sends those pieces to the tribes of Israel as a call to warfare against the wrong done to him through the violation of his property. Now about that time in the story,
the narrator enters with instructions to the hearers to consider, take counsel, and speak. That is an invitation for a response to the story. And we ought to work with that on a number of levels. First, look at the text itself and see if there is a response. And indeed there was. It was the response of ancient Israel of the tribes. And that was a response of unrestrained violence. They went into the tribe of Benjamin and they
murdered every woman and child in the tribe of Benjamin. And they were on their way to wiping out all the men of the tribe of Benjamin, but 600 of them escaped to the caves. And then somebody says, oh my goodness, if we do this, we won't have the 12 tribe system anymore. One less tribe in Israel. We better stop. And somebody says, but you only have 600 males left. How are you going to replace your tribe
with 600 men? Ah, remember Jabesh-Gilead down here. It didn't help us in this revenge. We'll make it pay. Make it pay, make 400 of its women pay. And they took 400 of women from the little town of Jabesh-Gilead and gave them to the men of Benjamin. The rape of one has become the rape of 400. But somebody says 400 women for 600 men will never work. Well, we'll get 200 more tonight because the daughters
of Shiloh are having their dance up there. And we'll hide in the bushes, we'll abduct them and take those virgin daughters and give them to the tribe of Benjamin. Now the rape of one has become the rape of 600. And the corporate body of Israel female is being dismembered. That was how ancient Israel considered, took counsel and spoke at least a part of ancient Israel. The narrator also is a part of ancient Israel or if you
prefer the editor. And the editor has a different response because the editor prefaced the story and concludes the story with a political word. In those days, there was no king in Israel and every each did what was right in his own eyes. In other words, the solution to this problem is a political one. Just change your system of government and these terrible things won't happen. So they got a king. And in the days of David, there
was a king in Israel and Amnon son of David raped Tamar daughter of David right in the royal precincts and father David did nothing about it. So I doubt very much if that is going to be an effective response to such a thing. Consider, take counsel and speak. Now there are also some other responses in the text but they are at first more subtle. It is where this story occurs in relation to what follows it. And
if you are reading from the Hebrew Bible, once you finish with the closing chapters of Judges, you move into Samuel and what is the first story you read in Samuel? If you tell me it's about Samuel, I will send you back for a different answer. It is about Hannah of which Samuel, of whom Samuel is a part. And it's a wonderful story of male and female in the days of the Judges that provides a striking juxtaposition
and contrast to the concubine and her master. And you say, but I do not read the story that way because I use English translations and Samuel doesn't follow in my text from Judges and that's all right too because what does follow? The little book of Ruth also set in the days of the Judges and what a beautiful picture there is of Boaz and Ruth and the working out of the story of two women struggling for survival
in a patriarchal world and the coming to their aid of Boaz and the elders of Bethlehem. And so the canonizes, whether consciously or not, have responded to this horrible story of the concubine through juxtaposition of text. They show us it does not have to be the way of the concubine. Now, if I were preaching a sermon on this passage and people and women in church and ministry preach sermons and you may think I have been doing
that tonight, I would then turn to you and say, how do you respond to this story in your own time and in your own place? Consider, take counsel and speak. And what are we doing by this? We are creating a memoriam to this sister of the past even as we say, never again. A memorial is a call for repentance. And so we have illustrated a second approach in feminist interpretation of the Bible. The first approach, the
reinterpretation of familiar text. The second approach to take some stories which may be quite unfamiliar to us that have been hidden to us stories of terror and to reinterpret them on behalf of the female victims, to see them from a different stance than that which traditionally has been the case. Now, if we assert that over centuries, patriarchal exegesis has neglected certain texts because they are too threatening, we need not assume that all the texts that have
been neglected are texts of terror demeaning to women. I want to come to a third point. To the contrary, there may be some text of female strength and wholeness. Texts that hint at a woman's tradition in ancient Israel that male redactors could not squelch no matter how hard they tried. And in such a series of texts that most recently has occupied my research, some of you know that I've been particularly interested in the exodus traditions in
recent years to the many women who appear in them, to how and where these females are portrayed, and most especially to the figure of Miriam. So let us look at those for a moment. So eager have interpreters been to get Moses born that they pass very quickly over the pericopes that lead to his advent. Of course, we all know that a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph, that he dealt harshly with the
Hebrew people, afflicting them with heavy burdens, that the more he oppressed them, the more they multiplied and threatened him, and that finally he issued an order to kill all their newborn sons. These things we've all heard, but we have failed to focus attention upon the ironies of the king's action as they highlight two midwives. What delight ancient Israel must have had in telling the story. Think of the mighty king of Egypt, pharaoh of the two lands,
male god incarnate, deigning to speak directly to midwives. Moreover, memory preserved the names of these women, Shiphrah and Puah, while obliterating the identity of the king so completely that he has become the burden of innumerable doctoral dissertations. They're lined up on the shelves. Who was the pharaoh of the Exodus? Now, as if his anonymity were not sufficiently humiliating, the story reports that not even the king's presumed omnipotence can sway these midwives from obedience to God. These
two females are the first to oppose the pharaoh openly. They act alone with no advice or assistance or instructions from males. They fought the will of the oppressor to affirm life for both females and males. Midwives, they are murderers they will not be. And what Shiphrah and Puah began, other Hebrew women continued. Remember the woman who conceived and bore a son and when she saw how good he was, she hid him three months and when she
could hide him no longer, she took from him a basket made of bull rushes. She put him in it and she placed it among the reeds at the river's bank. And his unnamed sister, her presence by the way, is a clear indication that contrary to patriarchal wishes, Moses was not the first born of the children, his unnamed sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. In quiet and secret ways, the defiance
of the oppressor continues as a mother and daughter scheme to save their baby son and brother. And then this female portrait is enhanced even more by the opportune appearance at the river of the daughter of Pharaoh accompanied by her maids. Now that phrase daughter of Pharaoh captures the tension of the situation. Like Shiphrah and Puah, like the mother and the sister, she's a woman, but unlike them, she belongs to the oppressor. She is the daughter of
Pharaoh. How will the oppressor's daughter respond to illegal acts of female slaves on behalf of life? What message will she give to her own maidens who accompany her? We know. She instructed her maid to fetch the basket, she opened it, she saw the crying baby, she opened her heart to him even as she recognized his Hebrew identity. She drew him out of the water, thereby becoming herself the first deliverer of the Hebrew people. Have you thought
of that? She models by drawing Moses out, she models and gives to Moses his role as forthcoming deliverer. The daughter of Pharaoh has aligned herself with the daughters of Israel. Filial allegiance has been broken, class lines have been crossed, racial and political differences have been obliterated. And the sister, having seen it all from a distance, dares to suggest the perfect arrangement, a Hebrew nurse for the baby boy, specifically the child's own mother. That's quite a portrait.
Female slaves, mother and daughter scheming with an Egyptian princess and her maidens to defy the Pharaoh. It is a collage of women uniting for salvation and their unity defies expected behavior and established categories of relationships. They break the bonds of family, class and nation. They are the first to oppose the oppressor and they act independently indeed entirely alone without male leadership or male presence. Humanly speaking, I think it would be interesting for someone to write at
least an MA thesis on this proposal. Exodus' faith comes into being as a feminist act. Have to deal with the matter of anachronisms, but you could do that. Now after these beginnings, this Exodus story proceeds to legitimate Moses through a legend depicting a burning bush and much dialogue between the deity and the chosen one, the call of Moses. Repeatedly, Moses is told that he must demand the Pharaoh to let Israel go. If Pharaoh refuses, then God
will slay the firstborn of the Egyptian monarch. Just after these words, however, Moses himself is almost slain. The story is obscure, impossible to sort out clearly. It has to do with a nocturnal visitor, a deity seeking to kill and with an act of circumcision. The adult Moses appears not to have been circumcised. And so is in mortal danger. This time his deliverer is not the Egyptian princess, but his wife Zipporah. She saves him from death, completes
his childhood through circumcision and thus in effect brings him to adulthood. If the Exodus story began with women, here it continues because of the quick thinking and action of another female. But then the woman's story is quickly submerged once again as Moses, Pharaoh and the deity struggle through the plagues and the sea crossing. I said it in one sentence, but it goes on and on for chapters. After the strife is o 'er and the battle done,
Israel summarizes the victory won. So Yahweh saved on that day Israel from the hand of the Egyptians. The people feared Yahweh and they trusted in God and in Moses, God's servant. Here the elevation of Moses increases as he appears in parallelism to the deity. And at this point, the story proper closes and a poetic unit begins. We move from the summary of the story to a song. Moses becomes musical leader of the sons of Israel. Then
Moses sang and also the sons of Israel, a song to Yahweh. Now it's quite a long song and we're not going to do it all here tonight. I just want to quote the opening stanza. I will sing to Yahweh, most glorious deity, horse and rider God has hurled into the sea. The poem continues by proclaiming the power of God to lead the people into Canaan and it culminates with the affirmation, Yahweh will reign forever and ever.
So literarily and theologically, this long litany of triumph climaxes and closes the Exodus story. How puzzling then is the narrative text that follows. In capsule form, it recapitulates the struggle at the sea, thereby returning to the event that preceded closure. Now that recapitulation jars, it is awkward, it is repetitious, it seems misplaced. And if you are an attentive reader, you begin to suspect tampering with the text. And as you read on, the suspicion intensifies. For a
subsequent unit ever so small, focuses on Miriam and the women of Israel. Then Miriam the prophet, the sister of Aaron, took timbrel in her hand and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dances and Miriam answered them, sing to Yahweh, most glorious deity, horse and rider God has hurled into the sea. After her brief song, the text returns away from the events at the sea to the crises of the wilderness. Thus Miriam's words
become the definitive ending for the Exodus account. And yet they provoke discussion rather than closure. Look for example at the song Miriam chants. It repeats with variations the first stanza of the long poem earlier attributed to Moses. You recognize that. Now this repetition suggests that Miriam's contribution is derivative and Moses is original. After all, he can sing an entire song. She can remember and then not perfectly only the first stanza. By comparison, her performance seems deficient
as does this entire small unit that awkwardly follows the grand mosaic ending. As a second closure, it is anticlimactic, no more than an afterthought, a token of the female presence. Divergent in length, content and emphasis, the two endings work in tension, not in tandem. The mosaic conclusion overpowers the Miriamic to raise the question of why the latter ever survived. And ironically, scholarly answers to this question, scholars I might say who cannot be accused of a feminist
bias. One of them was the professor of Professor Sakenfeld. These teachers who worked on this question long before feminism came around and trying to answer why is the Miriamic ending there saw in their exegesis that actually it functions to diminish Moses and to highlight Miriam. They argued that the very retention of a Miriamic ending in the presence of a mosaic avalanche argued for the antiquity and authority of that Miriamic ending. So tignacious was the tradition about
Miriam that redactors could not eliminate it no matter how much they tried. In fact, once upon an early time before editors got jobs, the entire song of the sea, not just the first stanza, was ascribed to Miriam and the women of Israel. Later, redactors who were intent upon elevating Moses took the song right out of her mouth and gave it to him. You remember Moses was inarticulate. They gave it to him in the company of the
sons of Israel. Thus, they constructed an ending for the Exodus story that contradicted the older tradition. Unable to squelch this tradition altogether, they appended it in truncated form to their preferred version. And to separate the two endings as well as to introduce the Miriamic appendage, they recapitulated a verse about the struggle at the sea. By such a procedure, the redactors both preserved and destroyed the women's story. They kept Miriam, but they diminished her importance and they
heightened the apotheosis of Moses. Their work was carefully done, but it did not yield perfection. Like the beginning then, the ending of the Exodus story belongs to women. They are the Alpha and Omega, or we should say the Oliphantau of deliverance. Providing continuity between the two groups in times is the figure Miriam. At the bank of the river, we first meet her. At the shore of the sea, we find her again. She is mediator, percussionist, lyricist,
vocalist, prophet, leader, and theologian. In both places, narrated discourse reports tension between her and Moses, tension that advances from sibling references to competing portraits of leadership. Between these narratives of beginning and ending, Moses has ruled over the Exodus account. But within and behind the text, conflict mounts. The female voice struggles to be heard. A Miriamic presence counters a Mosaic bias. And so we offer here an example of a third avenue of reinterpretation from a feminist perspective
on scripture in which you reclaim a neglected text and reinterpret it subversively. Now I stop here, but if you think that the story is not ended, you are right. It continues as in hidden ways it has over the centuries to seek a counter voice or counter voices of redemption to the dominant noise of patriarchy. The details remain, many details remain to be worked out, but the difficulty of the task is tempered by its potential. Feminist interpretation
of the Bible, whence has it come? About that, I have made some comments this evening. Where is it going? About that, let me say just a few things. We need to do much more exegesis than we have yet done. And we need to do it in context with the whole conversation of the ancient Near East. And we need to do it with all the methods available to us. And then what is my eschatological vision? Well, out
there somewhere in the future, wouldn't it be wonderful to pursue a feminist theology of the Hebrew scriptures? Now, they say, do you know they? They are always saying things. They say it can't be done, but we shall see. We shall see if a convergence of feminism with the self-critique of scripture can liberate the canon from the confines of patriarchy. Meanwhile, let us not rejoice too soon in this challenge. Like Jeremiah, I sense that enemies are
all around to reproach and denounce. Furthermore, let us remember that we seek not to triumph, but to heal and to be healed. And finally, let me make a plea for more workers in the vineyard. The fields are ripe unto harvest, but the laborers are few. I suspect they are few because the work is hard. There is no instant payoff, and there is always the risk that we are making fools of ourselves. But be of good cheer.
God uses the fools of this world to confound the wise. (applause)