If The Bible’s So Patriarchal, How Come I Love It?

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Early in the 1970s, I listened to animated discussions about feminism. I did not have to be converted. At the same time, I also understood that Scripture nourished my life, that the Bible I grew up with in Sunday school continued to feed me. To be sure, I had learned in college and graduate school that Scripture differs from what the church taught about it, but never did critical scholarship diminish my love for the Bible. 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 say it is not so.

But there was the rub. A “feminist who loves the Bible” produces, in the thinking of many, an oxymoron. Perhaps clever as rhetoric, the “feminist who loves the Bible” offers no possibility for existential integrity. After all, if no man can serve two masters, no woman can serve two authorities, a master called Scripture and a mistress called feminism. And so my predicament grew as I heard the challenge: 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 assertion is true, then I was of all women most wretched (or whatever adjective seems fitting: confused, schizophrenic, misguided, conservative or just wrong). That predicament has spurred rewarding study.

The Bible was born and bred in a land of patriarchy; it abounds in male imagery and language. For centuries, interpreters have exploited this androcentrism to articulate theology; to define the church, synagogue and academy; and to instruct human beings, female and male, in who they are, what roles they should play and how they should behave. So harmonious has seemed this association of scripture with sexism, of faith with culture, that few have ever questioned it. Understandably, then, when feminism turns attention to the Bible, it first of all names patriarchy.

To name means more than affixing a label. To name is to analyze and also to indict. The Bible promotes the sin of patriarchy. Though both Testaments come under censure, I work here within my own scholarly domain of the First Testament (traditionally known among Christians as the Old Testament).

A feminist reader observes the plight of the female in ancient Israel. Less desirable in the eyes of her parents than a male child, a girl remained close to her mother, but her father controlled her life until he relinquished her to another man in marriage. If either of these male authorities permitted her to be violated, she had to submit without recourse. Thus Lot offered his daughters to the men of Sodom to protect his male guests (two angels) (Genesis 19:8); Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to remain faithful to a foolish vow (Judges 11:29–40); Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13:1–22); and the Levite from the hill country of Ephraim participated with other males to bring about the betrayal, rape, torture, murder and dismemberment of his own concubine (Judges 19:22–30).

Although not every story involving female and male is as terrifying as these, nevertheless, the narrative literature makes clear that from birth to death the Hebrew woman belonged to men. They ruled her life.

What such narratives show, the legal corpus amplifies. Defined as the property of men (Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21), women did not control their own bodies. A man expected to marry a virgin, though his own virginity need not be intact. A 047wife guilty of earlier fornication violated the honor and power of both father and husband. Death by stoning was the penalty (Deuteronomy 22:13–21). Moreover, a woman had no right to divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1–4) and, most often, had no right to own property. Excluded from the priesthood, she was deemed far more unclean than the male (Leviticus 15). And her monetary value was less (Leviticus 27:1–7).

Evidence abounds for the subordination, inferiority and abuse of women. One has no difficulty in making this case against the Bible, it is the sine qua non of all feminist readings.

Yet this recognition has led to different conclusions. Some people renounce Scripture as hopelessly misogynous, a woman-hating document with no health in it. Some reprehensibly use the patriarchal data to support anti-Semitic sentiments. They maintain that ascendancy of the male god YHWH^a demolished a historic (or prehistoric) era of good goddess worship. A Christian variety of this view holds that whereas the “Old” Testament falters badly, the “New” Testament brings improved revelation. Other individuals consider the Bible to be an historical document devoid of continuing authority and hence worthy of dismissal. The “who cares?” question often comes at this point. In contrast, others despair about the ever-present male power that the Bible and its commentators promote. And still others, unwilling to let the case against women be the determining word, insist that text and interpreter provide a more excellent way. Thereby they seek to redeem the past (an ancient document) and the present (its continuing use) from the confines of patriarchy.

This last approach is my niche. Combining scriptural critique and feminist perspective shapes a hermeneutic that makes a difference. It begins with suspicion and becomes subversion. But the goal is healing, wholeness, joy and well-being.

Reinterpretation characterizes this hermeneutic. It recognizes the polyvalency of the text but does not make the Bible say anything one wants. Between a single meaning and unlimited meanings lies a spectrum of legitimate readings. Some assert themselves forcibly; others have to be teased out. Reinterpretation also recognizes diversity. Despite attempts at harmonization by ancient redactors and modern critics, the Bible remains full of conflicts and contradictions. It resists the captivity of any one perspective. Even the winners who prevail bear witness to the losers. Understanding that every culture contains a counterculture, feminism seeks these other voices in Scripture. Reinterpretation exploits diversity and plurality.

The familiar story in Genesis 2–3 illustrates reinterpretation. For centuries exegetes have used this text to legitimate patriarchy as the will of God. Their powerful exposition has burrowed its way into the collective psyche of the Western world. We think we know what the text says. Major assertions include:

• God creates man first and woman last.

• The order subordinates her to him.

• She is derivative, having come from his side.

• She is his helper, his assistant, not his equal.

• She is the seducer, the one who is blamed for disobedience.

• God curses her through subjection to the will of her husband.

All feminists who hold this exegesis ironically mouth the patriarchal reading. Consequently, they must denounce and reject the story.

But that is not the response of this feminist. Long ago I asked myself: How come, if the story is so terribly patriarchal, I like it? How come I feel no anger in reading it, not embarrassment in claiming it? How come it gives me a sense of well-being in spite of its tragic ending? In pondering these questions, I sensed that another meaning must be available. To articulate it became the challenge. Sometime after that, fragments of thought began to surface. I remembered the Southern Baptist missionary who, having returned from foreign lands many years ago, was teaching Bible study to a group of G.A.’s, as we were called. (G.A means Girls’ Auxiliary; the corresponding boys’ group was known as R.A.’s, Royal Ambassadors!). This woman said, “Girls, everything that God created got better and better. What was the last thing God created?” In unison and with vigor, we replied immediately, “Man.” And she said, “No, woman.”

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Though hers is not the precise exegesis I now espouse, nonetheless to this day I am grateful for her insight. It resonated deeply within, though at the time I knew it not.

Years later I was sitting in a classroom at Union Theological Seminary. The course was Old Testament Theology; the professor, a learned scholar but hardly a feminist. With great detail, he explicated the story of the Garden. All that he said I fervently recorded. In the years that followed, I seldom checked those notes. Then one day another fragment of thought surfaced. I sought out the notes, and there it was. The professor had 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.” Surely enough, as I reread I saw that the woman contemplates the fruit, finding it good to eat (a physical concern), pleasant to see (an aesthetic dimension) and desirable for wisdom (a sapiential motif). Her vision encompasses the gamut of life. Only then does she eat. By contrast, the man who was with her (a telling phrase deleted by translators going all the way back to Jerome’s Vulgate) simply ate. How thankful I am for that insight from the lips of a patriarchal professor. He knew not what he was doing, but at some deep level his exposition resonated with feminist flesh and bones.

In due season a third memory surfaced. It pertained to an obscure footnote by a male writer who at the time knew nothing of feminism. He observed that the world’s first statement of patriarchy, “Your desire is for your man, but he rules over you” (Genesis 3:15), comes not in the context of creation but of disobedience and judgment. Could it be, he asked, that some theologian in ancient Israel questioned male dominance? For that footnote I am also grateful.

These and other fragments of thought emerged after years of lying dormant. They helped me to reinterpret Genesis 2–3 from a feminist perspective.¹ Such exegesis counters tradition in reading the text as critique, not legitimation, of patriarchy. The polyvalency of the text, the challenge of feminism, hints and guesses—these convergencies made possible a new understanding. Let me say simply and confessionally: All this happened because of the goodness of God.

Interpreting the Bible with a feminist hermeneutic does not mean, however, that every text turns out to be non-patriarchal, or at least less so. In some cases, analysis shows how much more patriarchal a passage is. The challenge to redeem Scripture must then be met differently from my handling of the creation account. Texts of Terror illustrates this procedure.² It focuses on Hagar, Tamar, an unnamed woman and the unnamed daughter of Jephthah. Throughout history they have received scant attention. While the establishment prefers to forget its use and abuse of women, feminism wrestles with the meaning of it all. To accord these stories happy endings would be preposterous; yet to succumb to their suffering would be destructive. The demanding task is to retell them on behalf of the victims. In undertaking this project, I have endeavored not just to expose misogyny and certainly not to perpetuate crime but rather to appropriate the past in a dialectic of redemption. Reinterpretation remembers in order not to repeat. Its memorial calls for repentance.

If patriarchal exegesis has neglected threatening passages over the centuries, we need not assume that they are all texts of terror demeaning to women. To the contrary, they may be signs of female strength, hints of a women’s tradition that redactors could not entirely squelch.^b Such a series of texts now occupies my research.

The story is not yet finished. There are miles to go in exegesis and appropriation. At times, travel is difficult and dangerous. Like Jeremiah, I sense that enemies are around to reproach and denounce. At other times, the journey is fun. I know the joy of discovery, wholeness and wellbeing. Where will it all end? In my eschatological vision we move toward a theology of gender redemption, the healing of female and male.

This article was adapted from “The Pilgrim Bible on a Feminist Journey,” Auburn News, Auburn Theological Seminary (New York, NY), Spring 1988.

Early in the 1970s, I listened to animated discussions about feminism. I did not have to be converted. At the same time, I also understood that Scripture nourished my life, that the Bible I grew up with in Sunday school continued to feed me. To be sure, I had learned in college and graduate school that Scripture differs from what the church taught about it, but never did critical scholarship diminish my love for the Bible. There is power in the document, and it need not work adversely for women or for men. This I knew and this […]