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Had someone told me a decade ago that I would be teaching a course on “Women and the Bible,” I would have laughed. My academic training in Bible was quite traditional. The word “gender” never entered the classroom. Yet I have just completed teaching my department’s first-ever Women’s Studies course. I serve on the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Program Committee, I helped to devise a joint masters degree program in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women’s Studies, and I am now part of a committee expanding the Brandeis Women’s Studies program into a full-fledged major.
I don’t quite know how this happened to me. Perhaps it began more than ten years ago when I took a comprehensive examination at Brandeis University on the biblical Book of Judges, which contains a disproportionate number of women. At that point, there was no synthetic discussion of the women of Judges, yet even I could see, in some rudimentary fashion, that they were there, were important, were interesting and played a wide variety of roles: Jael, the clever warrior; Deborah, the prophetess and judge; Jephthah’s daughter and her friends, the cult leaders; and the nameless concubine of Gibeah, a victim. There were then no articles discussing these women, and I must admit that I did not spend much time looking for that kind of literature.
The women of Judges retreated to the back of my mind. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on God is King, without ever considering that such an androcentric metaphor might have raised a problem for ancient Israelite women, or wondering if they might have had an alternate metaphor for God.
A turning point in my feminist awakening occurred four years ago, when I taught Judges 19. That text describes the brutal group rape and murder of a nameless concubine at Gibeah. I knew that I had to assign the literature discussing the traditional questions about the composition history of that text, but should I also assign an essay from Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror?1 The goal of Trible’s work, proclaimed in its introduction, is to interpret “stories of outrage on behalf of their female victims in order to recover a neglected history, to remember a past that the present embodies, and to pray that these terrors shall not come to pass again.” I felt uneasy about the epitaphs that begin each of her principal chapters. For example, the chapter on Abraham’s concubine Hagar opened with gravestone marked:
HAGAR
Egyptian Slave Woman
She was wounded for our transgressions; she was bruised for our iniquities.
This quotation is a transformation of one of Isaiah’s suffering servant passages (Isaiah 53:5). I was aghast that Trible had the nerve to reappropriate that holy prophecy for some foreign, “irrelevant” woman. But I took the risk and assigned the chapter. The class was deeply enriched by the experience.
Another push towards feminism came that same year from my Brandeis students. Not being able to teach the entire Hebrew Bible in my course, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, I followed the traditional paradigms of inclusion and exclusion, which meant excluding Ruth and Esther. At Wellesley College and Yale University, where I had taught this course several times, no student had ever suggested that I modify the syllabus. But at Brandeis, some students suggested adding Esther and Ruth. As a dutiful, pre-tenure professor, I listened. For years, I had heard Ruth read in synagogue every Shavuot (Feast of Weeks), and Esther read twice on Purim! Suddenly I discovered how significant and problematic these books are, especially read in tandem. For Esther and Ruth present opposing views on the fundamental issues of foreigners and women, two of the central issues of contemporary feminism, issues that were clearly significant in ancient Israel as well.
Perhaps the turning point for me occurred when I became more interested in the biblical love poem, Song of Songs, where gender issues lie so close to the surface. I read Marcia Falk’s magnificent Love Lyrics from the 045Bible,2 a set of essays and a mini-commentary that discuss the gender issues of the Song with exceptional clarity and vitality.
Falk first made me aware of the remarkably sensual nature of the Song. As a result of her study, I was struck by the centrality of women and the range of roles they take in the Song, many of which are strikingly different from female roles elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.
A final push, largely responsible for my teaching the Women’s Studies course, was a request from a scholarly publication to review two books by Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges and Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death.3 My first reaction to these books was quite traditional: Does the author, whose formal field is comparative literature, really know Hebrew? Why is she using flashy, opaque “litcrit” jargon? Why does Death and Dissymmetry have such a weird cover—two couples dancing together in front of a bleak street, characterized by closed shops protected with metal grates? Yet as I read I realized that Bal was asking new questions, sharp questions, interesting questions, and giving answers that were simply different from any I had found before, Gender issues were at the core of her answers. But her studies were relevant well beyond Judges to women elsewhere in the Bible.4 Perhaps, I thought, I need a course to teach myself more about women and the Hebrew Bible. So I did it.
Teaching any course changes the teacher as well as the students. But the impact on me of teaching Women and the Bible was much greater than the impact of other courses I have taught. I have discovered the extent to which women are in the text, both in the written words and, as many feminist biblical scholars have noted, in the silences.
Teaching problematic texts about women convinced me that a fully appropriate role for the college professor is to confront in class the ethical issues that these texts raise. There is a relation between the values of the text and those of the students; and classes can and should encourage creative personal confrontation with the past that will engender positive personal transformation and social action. This is a dangerous venture, however, for I strongly believe that university religious studies courses must not be used for indoctrination.
During my teaching this past spring, I especially grew to appreciate two texts I had taught many times before.
The first is the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments), which I taught as part of a unit on women in biblical law. As an observant Jew, a product of over a decade of primary and secondary day-school education, I could rattle off the Ten Commandments from memory. Yet, forced to reread the text within the context of my course, a new issue jumped up: To whom is the Decalogue addressed? This is no trivial question, for after all the Ten Commandments represent the only public revelation, without a prophet as intermediary, to a large group of Israelites. The significance of its last law hit me with astounding power: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” Clearly, it is only the male Israelites who are being addressed here, an idea reinforced by part of the framework of the Decalogue (Exodus 19:15), which notes of Moses, “And he said to the people, ‘Be ready for the third day: do not go near a woman.’” This verse is especially distressing, for it clearly suggests the equation that “people” equals men.
I was shocked that I had never seen this before, but again, most standard commentaries do not note the point. What should I do with that exclusion, which clearly was so problematic to most of my students?
In the past I might have said, let the students work it out. But now I felt that if I ignored the matter, I would become responsible for the students’ (further) alienation from the Bible. For that reason, I ended the course with sections of Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective,5 which begins with the problem I had “discovered” concerning the exclusion of women from the revelation at Sinai. Plaskow’s book is a theological discussion of Judaism and women then and now. Central to her thesis is that rabbinic Judaism creatively reinterpreted the Bible, and she argues forcefully that modern interpreters must do the same, particularly regarding the status of women and the gendering of God. Reading Plaskow helped my students appreciate their own power as textual interpreters who can understand the past in light of the present and the future.
For several years I had concluded my Introduction to the Hebrew Bible with the Song of Songs—after all, the students are entitled to a biblical view of sex and desire at the end of a long semester. I had always focused on chapter 5, verses 2–7, which are among the most ambiguous, beautiful verses in the Bible. They begin, “I was asleep, but my heart was awake. Listen, my lover knocks, ‘Open up for me, my sister, my beloved, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is full of dew, my curls with moisture of the night.’” On hearing these verses most students become quite alert, and begin to wonder: Is this a dream-fantasy or dreamy reality? Is the male lover really outside the door, or are the “door” and “knocking” a metaphor for intercourse? These questions had always been raised in class discussion, but we did not discuss the last verse (5:7), “The watchmen who go round the city found me; they hit me, they bruised me, those who guard the city.” That verse had always disturbed me, and I had used a professor’s prerogative to omit that which is disturbing.
Suddenly, that verse jumped out at me. It seems to describe a rape scene, though I had not seen that stated clearly in any of the literature I had read. After all, the Song is supposed to be idyllic, tranquil, speaking predominantly through a woman’s voice, perhaps even reflecting a female poet. But I and the class suddenly found new questions: How does a rape fit into various interpretations of these lines? If the woman of this episode is no longer dreaming, does it reflect what could actually happen to an Israelite woman who wanders the streets at night in search of her lover—instead of her lover gently removing her clothes, she is brutally stripped and raped by those who are supposed to guard? Or is this scene still part of a dream? Do women dream or fantasize of such rape? This last question, as you might guess, is not raised in the standard biblical commentaries, though it emerges directly from a close reading of the text. The ensuing class discussion of rape dreams and fantasies did more to bring that verse alive than all of the commentaries I had previously read.
From my experience in teaching Women and the Bible, I have begun to understand that gender, the study of socially created differences between men and women, can be as relevant to biblical studies as ancient near eastern texts are, as Hebrew philology is. It is now different Bible I read, and a different Bible teach. To paraphrase 1 Samuel 10:6, I have become a different person.
