Feminist Interpretations of the Bible: Then and Now

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Feminism—and the movement arising from it—may be the most important revolutionary development in human history. It seeks nothing less than the true equality of women. Some have compared the feminist movement to the Copernican revolution: Like the Copernican revolution, the feminist movement has already changed the way we view and understand the world.¹ We almost forget that so many things we take for granted—like women’s right to vote or to get an education—were won only after a long struggle by many women and a few men committed to the belief that women are entitled to full equality with men.

Feminism is multifaceted and diverse. It has been called a movement, a political theory, an outlook, a worldview and a philosophy. Today its influence can be seen everywhere: in feminist legal theory, in feminist medical practice and in feminist approaches to science. Perhaps we should talk about feminisms to emphasize the range and diversity within the feminist movement. One central aspect, however connects the multiple visions of feminism: It is a response to women’s concrete experience of oppression in a male-dominated world. The goal of all feminisms is, ultimately, to change the world, to make it a place in which women are fully equal to men—legally, economically, politically and socially.

Not surprisingly, religion has also been the subject of considerable feminist attention. Most major religions are perceived as playing an important role in defining women as inferior and in sanctioning the oppression of women by men.

Feminists working to win the vote for women found they had to pay special attention to the Bible because it was so frequently used as a weapon against suffrage for women. For example, at the third National Woman’s Rights Convention held in Syracuse, New York, in 1852,^a a group of “belligerent ministers” came to disrupt the convention. When a woman delegate proposed a resolution claiming that the Bible recognized women’s equality with men, these ministers read out loud biblical passages to disprove women’s equality. Among the passages they read were 1 Timothy 2:11–15 (“Let a 039woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty”) and Ephesians 5:22–24 (“Wives, be subject to your husbands, as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands”).² Another text frequently quoted by men to prove women’s inferiority was Genesis 3:16 (“To the woman [God] said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’ ”).

For women, undermining these scriptural “proofs” of male superiority was essential because the Bible was such an authoritative document. Thus the earliest feminist biblical criticism (or feminist hermeneutics) in America began in the 1800s in the context of the suffrage movement.³

Early champions of women’s rights like Judith Sargent Murray (c. 1790) initially tried to ignore these religious arguments in the hope that reason alone would be enough to convince people of the equality of the sexes and of women’s right to educational opportunities. Eventually, however, she had to provide her own metaphorical interpretation of the Bible, beginning with the Adam/Eve story in Genesis 2–3. Her efforts at biblical interpretation were rebuffed, however, with the assertion that interpreting Scripture was the prerogative of male clergy, not of women.

Some 19th-century American feminists like Lucy Stone were unwilling to accept biblical injunctions that wives had to be submissive to their husbands, but they were also unable to abandon the Bible and biblical tradition. Stone was determined to attend college to study Hebrew and Greek so she could learn for herself whether or not the men who had translated the Bible had distorted the text. In 1843 she went to Oberlin College in Ohio, the first American college to admit women along with men. There she formed a deep friendship with Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be ordained a minister in the United States.

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The need to interpret the Bible also arose among abolitionists. Many early feminists were deeply involved in the movement to abolish slavery. Those who defended slavery relied on passages like Leviticus 25:44–46, 1 Kings 9:20–22, Colossians 3:22–4:1 and 1 Timothy 6:1–2, in which slavery is sanctioned or at least accepted. The abolitionists, on the other hand, argued that the Bible was a culturally conditioned document and that passages such as these should not be read literally nor regarded as divine prescriptions for all time.

In the 1830s women like Angelina and Sarah Grimké, daughters of a southern slave owner, moved to the north where they could openly express their antislavery views. The Grimké sisters’ abolitionist speeches to groups of women in private homes were so effective that they gained a following among men as well, and they were asked to make a speaking tour throughout Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Orthodox Congregational clergy, however, took great exception to the Grimké sisters’ public speeches; women were not supposed to speak in public to mixed audiences. In 1836 this clergymen’s group issued a Pastoral Letter and two Clerical Appeals citing biblical characters such as Eve and Jezebel and New Testament texts such as 1 Timothy 2:9–15 to denounce women who took public and independent roles. Other texts they cited included 1 Peter 3:1–7 (“Wives, accept authority of your husbands … Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord”); 1 Corinthians 11:3–12 (“Christ is the head of every man, and husband is the head of his wife … [I]f a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off hair … [A] man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man”); 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 (“Women should be silent in churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says”). These passages did not relate to slavery, but were used to put down women who were publicly active as abolitionists.

No longer was the task solely the abolition of slavery. The establishment of women’s rights also had to be addressed. Since the Bible was the main weapon used not only to support slavery but to oppress women, it was a major barrier to equality.

Most feminists of the time believed that the Bible itself was not the source of women’s oppression. The real problem was the bias of male translators and interpreters. Women therefore concentrated on reinterpreting the Bible.

One might suppose that their efforts at reinterpretation would find strong support in rapidly emerging “higher” biblical criticism, which focused on the human dimension of biblical texts, on questions of authorship and historical development and on literary aspects of the Bible. Higher criticism started from the assumption that the Bible was to be investigated like any other historical document and interpreted on the basis of the evidence. This more intellectual and reason-based approach to interpreting the Bible ought to have provided a welcoming environment for feminist reinterpretation, but this did not happen. There is no logical reason why this did not happen. Rather, the determination of biblical scholars to ignore and exclude feminist concerns and questions seems to have been based principally on insensitivity, if not outright prejudice—attitudes that remained common in the discipline until quite recently.

One feminist strategy countered negative feminine images with positive ones. When opponents of women’s rights appealed to Eve, Jezebel and Paul’s attitude toward women, feminists appealed to other texts that reflected the equality of men and women, for example, Joel 2:28 (“I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” quoted in Acts 2:17–18); Romans 16:7 (a reference to Junia, a woman, as a prominent apostle imprisoned with Paul) and especially Galatians 3:28 (“There is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”). They pointed to biblical characters like Miriam, Deborah, Jael, Huldah, Phoebe and Priscilla, as well as to Jesus’ own attitude toward women.

A second feminist strategy was to identify the perceptual bias of all-male biblical interpretation and to emphasize the need for women to be trained in biblical languages and criticism, to become actively involved in biblical interpretation. From this would come feminist reinterpretations of the very texts that had been used against women by the opponents of women’s equality. The most important of the texts needing reinterpretation was, of course, the Adam/Eve story in Genesis 2–3.

Not all feminists agreed that the Bible, even if properly reinterpreted, would support women’s demand for equality. Some, such as Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, contended that religious anti-feminism went much deeper than simple sexist interpretation of the Bible.

In 1893 Gage published a book entitled Woman, Church and State: The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex.⁴ Here she examined the multiple ways in which, she contended, Christianity had degraded women, not only 042through Scripture, but in its canon law, and its advocacy of practices like celibacy. Christianity, she argued, “has been of very little value in advancing civilization but has done a great deal toward retarding it.”⁵ Gage found the creation story in Genesis 2–3 to be the cornerstone of the church’s oppression of women.⁶

A systematic effort to subject the Bible to feminist analysis was Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s multivolume Woman’s Bible, published in the 1890s.⁷ Stanton, like Gage, saw the foundation of women’s oppression in the biblical creation story of Genesis 2–3. Also like Gage, she thought the problem was much deeper than improper translations and interpretations. For Stanton, there was no escaping the fact that the Bible itself contains “degrading teaching” about the position of women.⁸ This “degrading teaching” was not divinely ordained, but was rather only the patriarchal views of ancient men for which men later claimed divine authority. The Bible was, in her view, one of the most formidable barriers to women’s social and political equality.

Neither Gage nor Stanton regarded themselves as irreligious nor their works as attacks on religion itself. Rather, they attacked the perversion of religion that degraded women and made religious traditions like Judaism and Christianity into weapons of oppression to be used against women.

Their views were hardly popular, and they paid a heavy price for their outspokenness, even among feminists. Compared to other women involved in the suffrage movement, Gage is hardly ever mentioned.⁹ She has been denied her rightful place in the history of the women’s movement. Stanton’s Woman’s Bible was dismissed both by religious conservatives who found it outrageous and by political feminists who found it irrelevant.¹⁰

For whatever reason, after Stanton’s Woman’s Bible, feminist biblical scholarship for the most part disappeared until the 1970s. When it surfaces again, it has a much less political cast.

Feminist biblical scholarship since its emergence in the 1970s can be divided into two phases, with the possibility of a third phase just beginning. In the first phase, the effort was to reclaim the biblical text for women by using a feminist perspective to find and emphasize aspects of the Bible that are positive for women. In the second phase, some feminist scholars have concluded that some biblical passages are so offensive they cannot be reclaimed and that therefore these passages must be rejected.

Early works in contemporary biblical scholarship surveyed texts about women and texts using feminine imagery in the Bible. People like Phyllis Bird¹¹ and Leonard Swidler¹² examined a wide range of texts of importance to women—the creation stories of Genesis 1–3; the laws about marriage, divorce, sexual behavior and religious observance in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy; and the good-woman/bad-woman imagery in Proverbs 1–9. Constance Parvey performed the same service in the New Testament, looking at women like Martha and Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene who were disciples of Jesus; the Christian widows and prophets who appear in Acts; and women like Priscilla and Phoebe, mentioned by Paul as a co-worker and deacon respectively.¹³

These surveys seemed to show that the Bible contained both positive and negative texts about women. Some passages—the legal material—portray women and women’s sexuality as men’s property; 1 Timothy 2:11–15 shows how women’s role had become very restricted as the early Christian community moved into its third generation. Nevertheless, feminist scholars generally thought that much in biblical tradition could, with the help of feminist interpretation, be regarded in a positive light.

Since these surveys of the 1970s there has been a flood of feminist criticism. This coincides with a significant increase in the number of women who have become professional biblical scholars. Quite expectedly, much contemporary feminist analysis focuses on Genesis 2–3 because the Adam/Eve story has been used so extensively to support the notion that women are secondary and inferior to men. Phyllis Trible, who has written the best known and most important work attempting to reclaim this creation story as a positive one for women, rereads Genesis 2–3 from a feminist perspective to demonstrate that “the intentionality of biblical faith … is neither to create nor to perpetuate patriarchy but rather to function as salvation for both women and men.”¹⁴ Thus, Trible translates ha-’adam not as “Adam” or even “man,” but as “earth creature.” Ha-’adam should be translated, she says, in relation to ha-’adamah (the earth) from which it was taken. “Earth creature,” Trible concludes, is neither male nor female when first created by God. Only after woman is created in Genesis 2:22–23 can ha-’adam be thought of as male. Moreover, the woman should not be considered an inferior “helper” (ezer), says Trible, but a “companion” corresponding to the ha-’adam. This woman does not “tempt” the man; instead she is an intelligent and responsible “theologian” who talks with the serpent and accurately repeats the command not to eat the fruit from the tree in the midst of the garden (Genesis 3:3).¹⁵

For Trible and many other feminist biblical scholars seeking to reclaim the Bible, the 043androcentrism (male-centered interest) and misogyny (women-hating) so often associated with this text is not actually in it; it is put there by sexist interpretations. Trible is convinced that Genesis 2–3 is really a liberating text for women. But through the centuries it has been badly abused by male interpreters. This was probably the view of most feminist scholars in the first phase of contemporary feminist biblical criticism.^b

Today, however, in the second—current—phase of feminist biblical criticism, many, if not most feminist biblical scholars find it difficult to reclaim this story. For example, David Jobling finds it difficult to believe that in a culture as patriarchal as ancient Israel anyone would be capable of writing a story as “feminist” as the one Trible imagines Genesis 2–3 to be.¹⁶ Susan Lanser questions Trible’s reading of ha-’adam. Since the text uses masculine pronouns for ha-’adam from the beginning of Genesis 2 and since a female helper is created for ha-’adam, most readers would naturally infer that ha-’adam is male, sexually as well as grammatically.¹⁷ Still others question whether the Hebrew word traditionally translated “helper” can really be translated as a “companion corresponding to it.”^c The only thing Eve does to help, as David Clines points out, is bear children and thus fulfill the command in Genesis 1 to be “fruitful and multiply.” Over the centuries theologians repeatedly used this text to support their view that women were suited only for motherhood. The translation “helper” is in fact quite accurate in not suggesting equality because equality is simply not implied by the Hebrew vocabulary.¹⁸

This kind of “sober second thought” about how much of the Bible can be reclaimed in a positive way for women is typical of the second phase of contemporary feminist criticism. Even Trible, in her second book, Texts of Terror, turns her attention to biblical stories that contain so much violence toward women that she has to admit they cannot be positively reclaimed. She looks at the stories of Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21, Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11, and the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. In these stories women are enslaved, raped, murdered, gangraped and mutilated. So horrible are these acts of violence toward women that Trible can only identify with these abused women and read sympathetically in memoriam to them so that their suffering is not forgotten.¹⁹

The stories Trible examines contain very overt and obviously misogynist elements. Other feminist scholars in this second phase have explored more subtle ways in which the biblical writers victimize women and promote inequality between men and women. Esther Fuchs has devoted many articles to exposing the insidious ways in which women are portrayed as devious and dangerous and as good only when doing something to benefit a man.²⁰ Deception, for example, is both a male and female trait in the Bible, but it is very differently valued when used by men and by women. In Genesis 12, for example, Abram passes off his wife Sarai as his sister so pharaoh won’t kill him in order to take her; this deception carries a positive value. However, when a woman uses deception for her own benefit (e.g., Potiphar’s wife, in Genesis 39, falsely accuses Joseph of trying to rape her; Delilah, in Judges 16, deceives Samson to learn the secret of his strength in order to turn him over to the Philistines) the deception carries a negative value. Only when a woman uses deception to benefit Israelite men (e.g., Jael in Judges 4–5 deceives the Canaanite general Sisera) is it deemed acceptable, though still suspect. As Fuchs shows, in late biblical books like Ecclesiastes (e.g., Ecclesiastes 7:26: “Woman is a trap … more bitter than death; her heart is snares and nets, her hands are fetters. One who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her”), deception by women becomes a motif that reflects a full-blown fear of women.

Another feminist biblical scholar, Renita Weems, has analyzed the marriage imagery in Hosea 1–3 where it is used as a metaphor for the divine-human relationship.²¹ Male biblical scholars have generally found this a helpful image and effective in communicating the intimacy of the bond between God and human beings. Weems, however, points out that the relationship between God and human beings is, by definition, a hierarchical one. Humans are not the equal of God. So when the prophet, Hosea, metaphorically associates God with the husband and Israel with the wife in a marriage relationship, the message is subtly but effectively communicated that a wife is no more equal to her husband than Israel is equal to God. This problematic message is made even worse by its association with sexual violence in Hosea 2 where the husband-prophet threatens to strip Gomer, his wife, naked, kill her with thirst, barricade her with thorns and expose her private parts.

As a result of studies like these, feminist biblical scholarship in its second phase has been considerably less optimistic than it was in the first phase 052about the extent to which the Bible can be reclaimed in a positive way for women. We can see the move from the first phase to second phase in a scholar like Cheryl Exum, for example. In an early study of Moses’ birth,²² she showed how patriarchal interpretation had overlooked 053or downplayed the important roles women—the Hebrew midwives, mother of Moses and pharaoh’s daughter—took in the liberation of Israel from Egyptian bondage. The problem, Exum argued, was principally with the interpretation rather than with the biblical text itself. Exum’s more recent work, however, has located the source of the problem in the text itself. She now seems primarily interested in identifying the patriarchal functions of biblical narratives and in showing how women are made to speak and act against themselves in order to serve male purposes. In her recent studies of Jephthah’s daughter and David’s wife Michal, Exum explores how phallocentric ideology in the Bible functions to manipulate and render silent the female presence.²³ Thus, Jephthah’s daughter is nameless; she offers no protest when she is murdered (“sacrificed”) by her father as a result of his rash vow.^d As for Michal, though she saved her husband’s life (1 Samuel 19:11–17), she is abandoned by David and ultimately rebuked, left childless and killed off by the narrator who simply eliminates her from the story. Exum seeks to uncover the literary mechanisms that the Bible’s male voice uses to silence and eliminate women characters; by identifying these mechanisms, Exum hopes to recover at least something of the women’s voices in these stories.

The studies I have mentioned focus primarily on the literary dimensions of text. Similar developments have occurred in historical studies. The best-known example is Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s landmark study of women in the New Testament,²⁴ in which she recovers the central—and equal—roles women played in the Jesus movement: women like Martha of Bethany, a “beloved disciple” who became the spokeswoman for the community’s belief that Jesus is the Messiah (John 11:5–27), and Mary Magdalene, the primary apostolic witness to the resurrection of Jesus (Mark 16:1–9; Matthew 28:1–10; John 20:1–18).^e Schüssler Fiorenza then traces the steps by which women were progressively segregated, restricted, marginalized and eliminated from leadership roles as the early church institutionalized with a male-dominated hierarchical structure modeled on the patriarchal house-hold. Schüssler Fiorenza wants to write women back into early Christian history by reconstructing their roles from the fragmentary evidence that survives in the canonized books of the New Testament the as well as in other non-canonical documents from the same period.

Feminist historical critics like Schüssler Fiorenza have indeed significantly changed the way we view the past. Obviously women were not absent from the past; they are only absent in the records of the male writers and historians. Because of their low status in a male-constructed world, women in antiquity have remained almost invisible.

Feminist literary scholars have also brought about significant changes in the way we read, understand and relate to the Bible. Feminist work from the first phase of contemporary feminist criticism has taught us to see women and female imagery in the Bible that we previously overlooked or undervalued. Feminist work from the second phase, however, has taught us not to be overly optimistic about finding a “woman-friendly” Bible. It has taught us to be suspicious readers of male-authored texts, to become aware of the ways the biblical text sometimes prevents us from seeing, 054hearing and empathetically relating to women characters.

All of this still leaves feminists reading male texts, albeit reading them much more critically than ever before. In addition, the results of the second phase of feminist analysis have created serious difficulties for many women who want to remain within biblically based religious traditions such as Judaism and Christianity.²⁵ Mary Ann Tolbert points out that feminist research has solidly documented the “over-whelming misogyny of Western religious traditions.”²⁶ Having become conscious of this mutilation of our minds, spirits and bodies, women can never again pledge unquestioning allegiance to existing religious hierarchies and institutions.²⁷ For Protestant feminists, for whom Scripture alone is authoritative (the principle of sola scriptura), the antiwoman perspective of the Bible seems to place them in the dilemma of choosing between accepting the authority of the Bible or respecting themselves as whole human beings.²⁸ Some feminists are even opting out of Christianity as the only way to preserve their own integrity.²⁹

Recently, feminist biblical scholars have been looking in new directions. A third phase in feminist biblical criticism may be emerging in which feminists search for ways to incorporate women-authored material into and/or place it beside the male-authored biblical text. This approach recognizes that women’s lives need to be affirmed and women’s religious experiences need to be reincorporated if women are to continue within biblically based religions. Although relatively few examples of this kind of feminist biblical scholarship have appeared as yet, the work of two women seems especially promising. Mieke Bal is not a biblical scholar, and she is not interested in the religious authority of the Bible, only in its cultural function.³⁰ Nevertheless she won the 1991 Biblical Archaeology Society’s Publication Award for the three best books relating to the Old Testament [Hebrew Bible].³¹ Bal calls herself a “narratologist” who studies narrative texts and describes how they are constructed.³² She examines how narratives offer possibilities to readers who elaborate them to produce meanings in their readings. Bal poses three basic questions to narrative texts: who speaks, who sees and who acts.³³

In many biblical stories the author has made the women characters silent by denying them dialogue and often by even denying them a name. One narratological strategy Bal uses in such cases is to make silent woman “speakable.” So, for example, she gives names to nameless women. Jephthah’s daughter is named “Bat” from the Hebrew word for “daughter.” Samson’s unnamed bride is given the name “Kallah” from the word for “bride.” The Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 who is gang-raped becomes “Beth” to play on the Hebrew word for “house,” a central motif in the story.³⁴ Although this strategy does not in any way make the women characters “equal” to or independent of the men in the stories, it does enlarge the biblical story in a way that gives fuller characterization to the women. Although Bal, herself, does not regard the Bible as religiously authoritative, her naming strategy can, nevertheless, be a useful one for feminists who remain believers.

Another promising strategy is exemplified by Jane Schaberg. One strategy she has used is to read the traditions about Mary Magdalene through the work of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).³⁵ The modern writer became the lens through which Schaberg viewed Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is a particularly tragic example of what happens to women in male tradition. Historically, she seems to have been one of Jesus’ closest disciples and traveling companions and the primary witness to his resurrection but her character is assassinated until she is remembered erroneously as a prostitute. The lens provided by the writings of Virginia Woolf is helpful for gathering and focusing the divergent images of Mary Magdalene because, Schaberg argues, both were “Outsiders to the patriarchal circus, and neither of them Apostles.”³⁶ What is vital about Schaberg’s strategy is that it places women’s writings beside the male biblical text and uses them to gain a new perspective, an alternative vision, that is much more woman-focused and woman-friendly.

Such analyses hold significant promise for changing the relationship between women and the Bible. They point to challenging new modes for feminist biblical scholarship to explore in the 21st century. After 200 years of feminist biblical scholarship, the task of changing the Bible from a sword used against women to a ploughshare used by women in our struggle to achieve equality and to have our humanity recognized is not yet finished.

Feminism—and the movement arising from it—may be the most important revolutionary development in human history. It seeks nothing less than the true equality of women. Some have compared the feminist movement to the Copernican revolution: Like the Copernican revolution, the feminist movement has already changed the way we view and understand the world.1 We almost forget that so many things we take for granted—like women’s right to vote or to get an education—were won only after a long struggle by many women and a few men committed to the belief that women are entitled to full equality with men. […]