No Promised Land: Rejecting the Authority of the Bible
Our next speaker is going to ask some difficult questions—the really tough ones. What if we can’t reclaim a biblical text? And what’s the history of the struggle to open the Bible to women?Pamela Milne is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. She received her Ph.D. at Magill University and has done extensive research in Jerusalem at both the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research. She has also done research at Hebrew Union College and the University of Michigan.
Professor Milne has published widely on feminist issues, and I must say, she manages to find the deeper issues in whatever she touches. For example, her next published paper is going to explore “gynophobic images”—that means women-hating images—in certain biblical texts. She questions our assumptions, and she makes us think. It’s a pleasure for me to introduce to you Pamela Milne, who will speak to us on rejecting the authority of the Bible.—H.S.
In Western culture, the Bible has provided the single most important sustaining rationale for the oppression of women. The very structures of our societies are heavily indebted to the Bible in areas such as law, family, sexual mores and, of course, religion. Because these structures have institutionalized the second-class status of women, the focus of the feminist movement has been on fostering the kinds of changes that will improve the status of women.
From the very beginning of the feminist movement to the present, the authority of Scripture has frequently been invoked by opponents in an effort to slow down or stop this kind of social change. This use of the Bible is rooted in the belief that as the word of God the Bible prescribes certain things, including a hierarchical relationship between men and women. Variations from prescribed forms and relationships are regarded as deviations from the divine will and, therefore, wrong.
Unlike most other literary collections, the Bible has an uninterrupted and extensive history of interpretation stretching over millennia. With few exceptions, this interpretive tradition understands the Bible in a thoroughly patriarchal way.
Patriarchy and Sexism
Before going any further, I should take a moment to define the terms “patriarchy” and “sexism” because they will occur throughout my discussion of feminist approaches to the Bible. Feminists generally use the term “patriarchy” to refer to the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children. The term is derived from Greco-Roman law, wherein the male head of the household had absolute power over all other members of the household. Of course, this system of male dominance existed long before the Greeks and Romans.1 They just gave it clear legal articulation.
The concept of patriarchy is closely linked to another concept, sexism. The term “sexism” refers to the ideology of male supremacy. Sexism is the set of beliefs that establishes and sustains patriarchal institutions and systems.2 One typical manifestation of sexism and patriarchy is the separation of the public and domestic spheres. In a patriarchal society, men confine women to the domestic sphere, over which they exercise control, while they reserve the public domain almost exclusively for themselves. Believing themselves to be intellectually, morally and physically superior to women, men deem themselves better suited to hold all or most of the civil and religious leadership and decision-making roles that govern society. In this way, they exercise control over women as a group.
The desire to control women’s sexuality and fertility seems to be one of the central underlying goals of patriarchal society and is accomplished by limiting women’s freedom of access to the public sphere, as well as women’s legal rights as persons. (Women didn’t become persons in Canadian law until 1929.)
The Bible and Patriarchy
All the societies in the ancient Mediterranean world during the period in which the biblical tradition was formed were patriarchal. It is not remarkable or unexpected, therefore, that a document produced in that context expresses the view that men are superior to women and that women are the property of men. Indeed, it would be remarkable if this were not the case. If the Bible is remarkable, it is because the expression of patriarchy is more, rather than less, pronounced than what is found in religious texts produced by surrounding cultures. Were it not for the fact that the Bible, as a fixed collection of texts, has been regarded by so many people as divinely inspired, and thus authoritative, the contents would be a matter of historical and literary interest only.
Those who were responsible for declaring the Bible the authoritative word of God surely never imagined a world beyond patriarchy, a world in which women would claim equality as they are now doing. But such a world is in the process of emerging. The Bible, which seems to offer a critique of some other forms of oppression, seems to promote sexual oppression. There is certainly no lack of evidence to show that many people who oppose women in their struggle for equality appeal to the Bible for divine support of their views.
David Clines has observed that “the biblical text is in conflict with a principle that is not a passing fancy of the modern world but has become a fundamental way of looking at the world,” namely, that “women are fully human … and that the issue of [sexual equality] is … something we have to get right if we want to be serious people.”3 So serious people, especially feminist people, are having to reassess their relationship to the authoritative status of the Bible as a guide for structuring relationships between men and women in the modern world. To the extent that the very concept of authority is itself a construct of the patriarchal order, feminists need to ask if the Bible serves any useful feminist purpose. My answer to this question is a resounding no.
Although patriarchy was certainly not invented by the authors of the Bible, most feminists, including most feminist biblical scholars, now concede that patriarchy is deeply ingrained in the Bible. In the early stages of feminism, many feminist theologians and biblical scholars hoped that an essential Bible could be separated from its patriarchal dimensions, that a nonpatriarchal canon-within-the-canon could be extracted from the whole and reclaimed for use in the future egalitarian feminist world. Today, that hope has all but disappeared, and other strategies for salvaging a nonpatriarchal, authoritative tradition are being explored. In my view, these new strategies not only are proving unsuccessful, but they have intensified the dilemma for those who want to identify themselves as Jewish feminists and Christian feminists, rather than simply as feminists.
Although I think feminists should abandon the idea of an authoritative Scripture because it is more detrimental than beneficial to women seeking equality, I emphatically do not think feminists should abandon study of the Bible. Feminist analysis of the Bible and the history of biblical interpretation can make an important contribution to the contemporary feminist movement. In fact, I would argue that no other literary text in the Western world is more in need of feminist criticism than the Bible.
Not many seem to appreciate the importance of this task, however, because feminist biblical scholars find themselves somewhat between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the negative reaction to critical investigation of the Bible, especially feminist criticism, from the religious right. And the hard place is the chilly indifference of many feminists toward feminist biblical scholarship.
Raising critical questions about the Bible has always been a dangerous activity. We need only think about the trouble Galileo got himself into by using the newly developed telescope to prove the theory that the earth revolved around the sun. Science notwithstanding, there were powerful men who believed that the Bible taught otherwise, and Galileo’s work was condemned. He spent the last decade of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years to clear his name in the Catholic church.
Even issues that had far less cosmic significance could endanger a scholar’s life or career. For example, prior to the Protestant Reformation, suggesting that Moses may not have been the sole author of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) was something scholars only dared to do in vague, veiled or posthumous ways out of fear for their reputations, their jobs or their freedom.
If critical scholarship involving the Bible has sometimes been a dangerous enterprise for male scholars in the past, it should not be surprising to learn that critical feminist scholarship harbors difficulties and dangers for women scholars today. Feminism, after all, may be the most important revolutionary development since the Copernican revolution.4 Like the Copernican revolution, it is changing the very way we understand our world. It is changing what we regard as central and peripheral. Whereas the claim that the earth revolved around the sun threatened the centrality of man’s place in the universe, the feminist assertion of women’s equality threatens the centrality of man’s place even on earth. It is not a threat that is taken lightly.
Until very recently, just being a feminist scholar diminished employment prospects at all but the most progressive academic institutions. But the dangers of being a feminist biblical scholar can go well beyond this. The stakes can be quite high, high enough to bring threats of violence. The next speaker, Jane Schaberg, is a case in point. Her thought-provoking work on stories about the birth of Jesus, along with her work on Mary Magdalene, have produced hate mail (male?), death threats and worse.
Last year, after an article on her research appeared in the Detroit Free Press, someone set fire to her car while it was parked in the driveway of her residence. I think her work has drawn such extreme hostile reactions because it touches directly, and in such a challenging way, on the central patriarchal paradigms of womanhood in Christianity. Many people, even in a society as secular as this one, take the Bible, or at least their understanding of it, very seriously. The application of feminist principles to study of the Bible can, therefore, be perceived as extremely threatening.
But, in addition to hostility from those who oppose feminism or critical biblical scholarship, or a combination of the two, feminists who work with the Bible experience an additional and unusual problem. Feminist biblical scholarship is looked upon with suspicion, even disdain, perhaps as much by other feminists as by traditionalists, though for very different reasons.
Gerda Lerner, in her book The Creation of Patriarchy, illustrates this attitude quite clearly. She criticizes feminist biblical scholars such as Phyllis Trible, Phyllis Bird and John Otwell for trying “to balance the overwhelming evidence of patriarchal domination [in the Bible] by citing examples of a few female heroic figures or women who take independent action of one sort or another.” Such examples, in Lerner’s opinion, are insufficient to prove that women had either a high status or a status equal to men in the biblical tradition.5
The uneasiness of other feminist scholars toward feminist work on the Bible arises from the suspicion that no matter how sexist the Bible proves to be, the majority of feminist biblical scholars will defend the religious authority and spiritual value of the Bible. As Letty Russell, a Christian feminist theologian, puts it, feminist biblical scholars remain “marginal to a great deal of feminist scholarship because they continue to uphold the value of biblical materials in spite of their patriarchal bias against women.”6
Other feminists suspect that feminist biblical scholars subordinate the ideology of feminism to the sexist ideology of the Bible and biblical tradition when they acknowledge the Bible as religiously authoritative. So the issue of the authority of the Bible, I believe, needs to be addressed more directly. In order to see where we stand with this issue now, I want to examine what I regard as some of the key strategic developments in feminist approaches to the Bible.
Two Hundred Years of Feminist Interpretation
Many people are not aware that in this country feminist efforts to counteract the use of the Bible in the oppression of women are as old as the feminist movement itself, which goes back at least 200 years to the end of the 18th century. Within these 200 years, there have been two distinct waves of feminism separated by a gap of about 40 years, from about 1920 to the 1960s, when feminist activism was diminished.
Between the first and second waves of feminism, a change seems to have occurred in the role played by feminist analysis of the Bible in the feminist movement as a whole. In the first phase of feminism, a feminist critique of the Bible and Bible-based religions, especially Christianity, was deemed essential by some of the most prominent leaders of the feminist movement. In the current phase, the work of feminist biblical criticism has become rather peripheral. One reason for this change is, no doubt, that Christianity provided the operating framework for 19th-century America to a greater extent than it does today.
Stepping outside a traditional religious framework would have been more difficult then than it is now; at least it would have been less socially acceptable. Today, many feminists regard the Bible, and the religious systems connected with it, as largely irrelevant, neither a help nor too much of a hindrance to the central tasks of transforming legal, political and educational systems.
The First Phase
The first phase of the women’s rights movement directed its energies at liberating women from the constraints of the domestic sphere. In particular, this meant women having access to education equal to the education available to men, gaining the right to participate in the public debate on major social issues and securing the right to vote.
The work of Judith Sargent Murray, a liberal Universalist from Massachusetts, is often cited as marking the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States.7 Murray was among the first to advocate equal educational opportunities for women. She was also one of the first to challenge traditional interpretations of the Bible, which were offered in defense of the status quo. When she published her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” in 1790, Murray appended a passage written ten years earlier to a male friend.
From that extract, we learn that her views on education for women had already met with opposition. Furthermore, we learn that the Bible was being used as a proof-text for women’s inferiority and subordination to men. The ultimate argument for denying women the same education as men was, apparently, that God had created women as secondary and inferior beings. Therefore, they did not merit the same education as men.
Murray’s male friend must have used the Adam-Eve story in Genesis 2–3 as his primary supporting evidence for the theory of male superiority because, in her response to him, Murray provides her own, somewhat mocking, and very nontraditional interpretation of that story.8 She summed up her interpretation of the text with this taunt:
Thus it would seem, that all the arts of the grand deceiver … were requisite to mislead our general mother, while the father of mankind forfeited his own, and relinquished the happiness of posterity, merely in compliance with the blandishments of a female.9
It is not difficult to guess how Murray’s friend had used the Adam-Eve story because it had such a clearly established place in Christian theologies of woman. Although the Hebrew biblical tradition virtually ignored it,10 the story took on new life in the intertestamental period, when it was taken up in early Jewish writings but became especially important in Christian writings.
As the story was elaborated, the character of Adam was idealized while Eve became the source of evil and the cause of man’s fall.11 Christian theologians through the centuries, both Catholic and Protestant, constructed theologies of women primarily on the basis of this text. These theologies typically depict woman as secondary and inferior to man because she was created after him.
The interpretation of this text and its negative application to women are well represented in the writings of the second century Christian author, Tertullian (c. 160–240 C.E.). To Tertullian, every woman is Eve, and Eve is the devil’s gateway and the destroyer of man, who is the image of God. It is because of Eve that Christ had to die.12 It is hard to imagine a heavier guilt trip than the one laid on Christian women with this use of the text.
More than a thousand years later, the same story provided the justification for executing many women as witches. Women were thought to be prone to witchcraft because witchcraft comes from carnal lust, and carnal lust has been insatiable in women from the time of Eve onward. For it was Eve, not the devil, who seduced Adam, and for this reason she is more bitter than death.13 By Judith Sargent Murray’s time, there was probably no other biblical text that had a more concrete, negative impact on women’s lives. Murray’s attempt at reinterpreting the Adam-Eve story did not meet with approval from male clergymen, many of whom found the very idea of a woman interpreting Scripture highly offensive.
By the middle of the 19th century, another area of conflict had emerged. Women who attempted to participate in the public debate around the practice of slavery again found the Bible being used to exclude them. Quaker women in particular had become quite prominent in the abolitionist movement. These women organized women’s antislavery associations, wrote booklets for women urging them to support the abolitionist movement and lectured on the subject to groups of women in private homes. The work of Angelina Grimké was especially popular. Her lectures in New England drew large audiences of women.
But when men began attending her lectures, she roused the wrath of the orthodox clergy. Women were not to speak or teach in public. To these religious gentlemen, it was clear from 1 Timothy 2:9–14 that women should not teach or have authority over men. They should, instead, be silent and submissive. As wives, they should be submissive to their husbands (1 Peter 3:1–7; Ephesians 5:21–24; Colossians 3:18–19). The Council of Congregationalist Ministers of Massachusetts issued a pastoral letter in 1837, which reads in part:
The appropriate duties and influence of women are clearly stated in the New Testament. Those duties and that influence are unobtrusive and private but the source of mighty power … The power of woman is her dependence, flowing from the weakness which God has given her for her protection … we cannot, therefore, but regret the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers.14
(They wouldn’t have attended this seminar!) Others found more physical ways of expressing their displeasure. Wherever Angelina or her sister Sarah spoke, they could expect to encounter opponents hurling stones and rotten eggs at them, along with verbal abuse. 15
The use of the Bible as a weapon against women’s public activities forced women in the antislavery movement to take up the issue of women’s rights in the context of biblical interpretation. Sarah Grimké herself entered the debate, charging that the arguments put forward by the clergy were based upon false translations, perverted interpretations and usurped authority.16
At the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women’s rights convention, the role of the Bible and institutionalized religion in the oppression of women was a topic of discussion, and women began the task of analyzing the Bible from a feminist perspective in more earnest. The struggle between the women’s movement and the churches now centered on political enfranchisement, the right to vote. Once again, all the biblical proof-texts were trotted out in an effort to show that the ballot box was not the proper sphere of women. Catholic spokesman Orestes Brownson proclaimed that women’s suffrage would destroy the Christian family. (Interestingly, the liquor industry, worried about the effect of the women’s temperance movement, was as keen to prevent women from voting as were the churches.)17
Most feminists, on the other hand, were convinced that the Bible was being misused. They felt certain that when correctly interpreted the Bible would provide no evidence of female inferiority or subordination to men. Some feminists, like Lucy Stone, studied Greek and Hebrew so they could read the Scriptures in the original languages for themselves. But their efforts were not very successful in reducing opposition to the idea of women’s equality in the major Christian churches. On the contrary, opponents of women’s suffrage succeeded in excluding women from the Fifteenth Amendment, which extended voting rights to black men (1869).
Toward the end of the 19th century, still striving to obtain the right to vote and still experiencing opposition from organized religion, feminists seem to have taken two different paths. One path was to ignore religious opposition altogether; the other was to confront it more directly. Two of the central leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the latter path because they were convinced from their many years in the women’s movement that the Bible had been a powerful and effective weapon in the war against women’s rights.
Up to this point, feminists had taken the view that the problem was not with the Bible itself but with male misinterpretation of the Bible. Feminist critics had relied on two main strategies. The first was to counter traditional interpretations of texts like Genesis 2–3 with women-positive interpretations. The second was to counter negative female characters, such as Jezebel, with positive ones, such as Miriam and Deborah.
Gage and Stanton, however, reached a different conclusion. They were convinced that the Bible itself was the problem. The Bible could be used effectively against women because it was a patriarchal document containing degrading teachings about women. The new task for feminist biblical criticism, therefore, was to expose the Bible for what it was and to counteract the influence of organized religion on women’s lives.
In her book Women, Church and State: The Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex (1893), Matilda Gage charged that belief in the secondary and subordinate status of women is a cornerstone of Christianity, a component inherited from Judaism. The oppression of women, in her view, was part of the fabric of the religion and not simply a cultural element that could be overcome through reinterpretation. Gage also observed that women’s increasing freedoms throughout the preceding hundred years had been won in spite of, rather than because of, the Christian church.18
Two years later, in 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, in which she examined all biblical texts pertaining to women (or at least the ones she thought pertained to women). By the end of this exercise, Stanton had come to the conclusion that the Bible contains degrading teachings about women and that these teachings form the foundation of the Christian view of women.19 Having reached this conclusion, Stanton tried to convince women not to regard the Bible as the word of God but to regard it merely as a collection of historical and mythological writings by men. If the Bible is not divinely ordained, women are under no moral obligation to accept its directives.20
Not surprisingly, the religious establishment did not welcome her views. In fact, the clergy denounced Stanton’s book as scandalous, a work of the devil.21 What was surprising, however, was that The Woman’s Bible received a very cool reception from many feminists. The leadership of the suffrage movement had been taken over by young, wealthy and conservative women who were concerned that such a work would damage the credibility of the movement. In 1896, the National American Suffrage Association voted to disavow any connection with Stanton’s work.22 This seems to mark the end of the first period of feminist biblical interpretation. The conclusions reached by Gage and Stanton seemed too frightening to pursue.
Second Phase
During the first period, feminists studied the Bible out of necessity, and their critique was an essential part of the struggle for women’s rights, but few of them had professional training in biblical scholarship. By the time feminists took up the study of the Bible again, in the 1970s, there had been some important changes.
Women now had much greater access to theological training. As a result, those who studied the Bible did so as professional biblical scholars and theologians. Critical study of the Bible, however, no longer seemed to have a central place in the feminist movement. The work of feminist biblical scholars seemed less directly connected to the social revolution and more connected to the theological and academic worlds.
What had not changed appreciably, either in society as a whole or within the mainline churches, was the understanding of the Bible’s teaching on women. After a century of feminist effort, traditional antiwoman interpretations remained the norm.
The work of Phyllis Trible on the Adam-Eve story is usually cited as marking the beginning of the second phase of feminist biblical criticism. And I really can’t emphasize too strongly the influence Professor Trible has had in shaping the second phase. In tackling Genesis 2–3, Trible picked up where 19th-century feminists, prior to Gage and Stanton, had left off. She focused on the Bible as a literary text and examined its content, language and rhetorical structures.
Like many of her 19th-century sisters, Trible undertakes her work from inside a Christian faith context. She tries to demonstrate, in more convincing ways than before, that the Adam-Eve story has been seriously misinterpreted through the centuries. Words have been misunderstood, organizing structures have gone unnoticed, and the silences of the text have been filled with male-biased speculations.
At times, Trible sounds very much like Murray in mocking the tendency of male interpreters to fill in the blanks with male-serving musings. How might the story have been understood if women had been doing the speculating over the centuries, she asks. The text doesn’t say why the serpent approached the woman instead of the man, but women could tell you it was because the woman was more intelligent—she was the theologian and translator. Why did the man eat the fruit offered to him by the woman? Because he was belly-oriented.23 You get the point.
Like most of her feminist predecessors, Trible locates the antiwoman problem more in the interpreter than in the text itself. Although she readily concedes that the patriarchal stamp of Scripture is permanent, she remains convinced that the intentionality of biblical faith is not patriarchal. For her, the intentionality of biblical faith is salvation—for men and women.
In addition to identifying this intentionality in Genesis 2–3, Trible has worked on numerous other biblical texts, such as Ruth and the Song of Songs, which have not been as habitually used against women by male theologians over the centuries. These texts do not need to be “rescued” in the same sense as Genesis 2–3. They provide a counterbalance—Song of Songs by redeeming the love story gone awry in the garden and Ruth by telling a woman’s story in a man’s world and thereby transforming the male culture it reflects. As Trible reads these and several other biblical texts through her feminist lens, she finds them placing patriarchal culture under judgment and affirming the equality of male and female.
But there are other stories, she readily concedes, that can not be rescued or understood this way. These are the “texts of terror” that describe women being abused, raped, mutilated and murdered—women like Hagar, Jephthah’s daughter and the Levite’s concubine. These stories she neither excuses nor attempts to reclaim but focuses, instead, on the suffering of the female victims. She calls for repentance in the hope that such horrors will not be repeated.
In all of her work, Trible, to her credit, has been both open and clear about her interpretive goals. As a consciously ideological approach, feminist work should be done for the benefit of women in some way, but not all of us are as frank as Trible about the purposes of our work. She is a Christian feminist who loves the Bible, despite the fact, to use her words, that “evidence abounds for the subordination, inferiority and abuse of women.”24 Believing there are dimensions of the Bible that can be separated from patriarchy, the niche she claims for her work is that of redeeming the past (an ancient document) and the present (its continuing use) from the confines of patriarchy.25 Although the canon as traditionally formulated is not acceptable to her, she does think feminist canons-within-the-canon can be established.26
Much feminist work on the Bible has followed Trible’s lead. In the interests of time, I will mention just a few illustrative examples drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures. These examples in no way represent the many directions and interpretive strategies being used today by feminist biblical scholars. They only highlight what I perceive to be the ongoing problem presented to feminists by the notion of the authority of the Bible. Considerable work has been done by Jewish and Christian feminist scholars on a wide range of biblical texts, including Ruth, Esther, the Song of Songs, Lady Wisdom and Judith (one of the books of the Apocrypha, which is part of the canon for Roman Catholics), in an effort to discover countercultural, woman-liberating dimensions within the Bible.27
Although this work goes on, there has been a shift in emphasis by many feminist scholars away from the reclamation project. Optimism about its viability has diminished, and many have turned to the task of exposing the full dimensions of patriarchal ideology in the Bible without making any attempt to rescue the Bible from this ideology.
Initially, there were just a few who voiced feminist doubts about the recoverability of women-positive dimensions. Esther Fuchs was the most notable as she explored the subtle ways patriarchy was expressed through biblical texts. Her suspicions were that patriarchal ideology went much deeper than the words on the page. In one study, she examined the motif of deception and discovered that although both male and female characters make use of deception they do so for different motives, and their anions are evaluated on different bases.
Deception is more of a defining characteristic for women in the Bible than for men, and it is a characteristic that promotes male fear of women. Good women use deception to benefit their Israelite menfolk, while bad women use deception to benefit themselves. Men, on the other hand, can deceive for their own benefit and still be evaluated positively. This gender-biased use of the deception motif was an important factor, Fuchs argued, that contributed to the growing gynophobia—fear of women—that seems so powerful and pervasive in writings from the post-Exilic period.28
Soon, others were also bringing a hermeneutic of suspicion to their reading of the biblical text. In Gale Yee’s work on Proverbs 1–9, she raised doubts about Lady Wisdom. Rather than detaching this figure from her context, as many others had done, Yee looked at how she was contrasted with another female figure, the Strange Woman. The voices of these two women are described as being so similar that a man has difficulty telling one from the other. The choice is critical, however, because following the voice of Wisdom brings life but being seduced by the voice of the Strange Woman brings death. Although some see positive value in the image of Wisdom as a woman, Yee alerted us to the ways this text pits women against women and encourages male fear of women. The Strange Woman bears a remarkable resemblance to ordinary women whose voices become voices of seduction seeking to destroy men.29
Other feminists are now raising questions about whether the story of Esther is suitable for inclusion in a woman’s canon-within-the-canon. Is Esther really the kind of role model feminists want to promote? Itumeleng Mosala is among those who have recently reassessed this text. As a black, feminist, South African scholar, she wanted to see what such a story might contribute to black women’s struggle for liberation in the South African context. Her conclusion is that this biblical text does not support women in their struggle, not only because it uses a female character to achieve patriarchal ends, but also because it sacrifices gender issues to nationalist issues and suppresses the issue of class altogether.30
The suitability of the Song of Songs has also been called into question. Trible’s work was groundbreaking on this text, too. And many share her view that the Song is a symphony of love in which there is no male dominance or female subordination.31 In the introduction to a recently published volume, A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, Athalya Brenner claims that “there is virtual consent among scholars today that some … of the poetry of the Song of Songs should probably be attributed to female perspectives or even authorship.” In Brenner’s view, the social attitudes expressed in this text are “generally non-sexist,” and the female figure and voice are prominent.32
But cracks have even begun to appear in the feminist consensus about this text. A recent study of the Song of Songs by David Clines illustrates this shift.33 Not only does he challenge the suggestion of female authorship, a theory that is tenuous at best, but he also finds this a very sexist text, one that is especially dangerous because the sexism is insidious. “A more blatantly sexist text,” he argues, “would do less damage than one that beguiles.” According to Clines, both the author and audience are male and Israelite.
Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, Clines argues that this text, like all texts, owes its existence to a desire to repress social conflict, a desire to allow oppressors to deny their role as oppressors and to enable the oppressed to forget their suffering. The desire of the male author of the Song of Songs is to repress the conflict of interest between the sexes by providing a literary representation of male and female lovers who are more or less equal. This literary representation masks the reality that in ancient Israel, as in most societies known to us, men as a group have power over women as a group, and women have virtually no power outside the domestic setting within which they are regarded as men’s property. As Clines reads it, the Song of Songs is actually a man’s dream about a woman’s love, a dream about a woman who is forward in love-making but who does nothing all day but fantasize about him. The woman in this text is not a real woman. She is a male-constructed woman, constructed precisely to serve the needs of the patriarchal system.
The character of Judith has also attracted attention, particularly from Roman Catholic scholars, as another text that might offer a women-positive role model. Judith, you will recall, saves the Jewish people from destruction by the Assyrians by seducing the Assyrian general, Holofernes, into a drunken stupor, cutting off his head with his own sword and carrying it back to the townsmen of Bethulia to be displayed on the town wall. Several biblical scholars, some of them feminist, have described Judith as a feminist heroine or a feminist kind of heroine. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, reads the story as a heroic biography based on feminist irony.
In my own work on Judith, I attempt to show that feminists should be wary of promoting a story or character like Judith. Although Judith acts with uncharacteristic independence and heroism, she is a character who is completely male-imaged, a woman who presents herself from a thoroughly male perspective and serves only the needs and interests of the men of the community and their male-imaged god. Moreover, Judith’s actions revolve around the dynamics of men’s fear of women’s seductive powers.
The “warrior” role that Judith plays is the role of the femme fatale. Her voice and body are the weapons she uses to destroy a man, just as the father in Proverbs 1–9 had warned his son the Strange Woman would do. Judith is praised because she unleashes these weapons only against an enemy. She does not harm her own because she is a man’s woman who can do only what her male creator allows. But a male reader of the story understands that without such literary constraints real women may not be as selective about which men they destroy. As a character, Judith promotes fear of women and women’s sexuality, not the equality of women, to male readers for whom the story was written.34
While feminists have been giving sober second thoughts to texts that looked like promising candidates for a woman-friendly canon, they are also having doubts about Trible’s reinterpretations of Genesis 2–3. Since I’ve discussed these studies in detail in articles in Bible Review and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, I won’t go over them here. Suffice it to say that all of the arguments presented by Professor Trible today have been called into question, and few feminists remain as optimistic about the recoverability of this text as she is.35
New Developments
So, after 20 years of second-generation feminist investigations of the Bible, we seem to have followed the same path as our foresisters. We initially attempted to locate the patriarchy problem in interpretation. But the more work we did, the more evidence we found that pointed to the Bible itself. But just when the prospects of recovering a nonsexist, authoritative Bible were looking quite bleak, a new strategy appeared for shifting the problem out of the text.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, biblical scholarship in general was focused very much on the Bible as a literary text. More recently, scholarly interest has begun to move in the direction of focusing instead on the reader and the process of reading. The scholarly question is no longer simply what the Bible means but how it means. Meaning, it is argued, involves more than decoding features of a text. It is a dynamic process of interaction between text and reader.
It was argued that every text has gaps or silences and that every author assumes readers bring some knowledge to their reading. Readers actually create new texts by combining their knowledge with what they encounter in the written text. This development in thinking seems to offer a new possibility to feminists who want to salvage the authority of the Bible. The strategy is to relocate meaning away from the text to the reader or the process of reading.
Mary Ann Tolbert, a feminist New Testament scholar thinks this strategy might be particularly useful to Protestant feminists. Because Protestantism made Scripture the sole religious authority, the idea of dropping any part of the Scriptures from the canon is unthinkable. At the same time, the Bible cannot be excused for its acts of “textual violence” against women on the grounds that it reflects past cultural norms. But if meaning is relocated in the reader rather than the text, then women can learn to read the Bible as women and exercise the freedom of making feminist readings authoritative rather than the text itself.36
A stronger articulation of this strategy is found in the work of Mary McClintock Fulkerson.37 For Fulkerson, all meaning is a social signifying process—real meaning does not reside in texts and, therefore, cannot be gotten from texts. Instead, meaning is to be found in discursivity or the community of interpretation. So, if meaning is not a property of the text, then the Bible cannot be deemed sexist, and there is no direct correlation between the Bible and the oppression of women. According to Fulkerson, oppression is not an attribute of Scripture but a function of its being read.
There is part of this argument that I find attractive. I would certainly agree that meaning arises in the interaction between text and reader. But I am not willing to go as far as Fulkerson in shifting meaning from the text to the reader or to communities of interpretation. In my view, it is precisely because readers bring their own experiences and contexts to the reading process that multiple readings of any text produce multiple interpretations. However, if a text does not limit the semantic range in some way, then it hardly matters what text we use to produce meaning. If a text has no real meaning if it cannot be sexist (or, presumably, racist, classist or anti-Semitic), then it should not matter whether we read the Bible, Playboy or Ku Klux Klan literature.
I am more persuaded by Mieke Bal’s argument that both text and reader must be held accountable for meaning. For Bal, meaning is a readerly product but is rooted in the possibilities of the text. The text is the provider of meaning in the first moment, while in the second moment, “the reader formulates an ordering and reworking of the collection of possible meanings offered by the text.”38 Although Bal is decidedly not interested in the question of the authority of the Bible per se, she is interested in the ethical responsibility for and the political consequences of reading.
This brings me back to the work of David Clines. In his study of Song of Songs, Clines asked what effect reading such a text has on the reader, a question, he observes, that biblical scholars have rarely asked.39 But it is a question that forces us to confront the issue of ethical responsibility and the politics of social power.
Until the rise of feminist criticism, readers of the Bible, or at least the community of interpretation, were almost exclusively male. We can discern the effects of the Bible on these readers by examining their commentaries. It is precisely because the biblical texts had the effects they did on male readers, and because of the social power of men in patriarchal societies, that women experienced the political consequences they did, consequences that ranged from being excluded from the public domain to being burned as witches. There is not a lot we can do about the past effects except document them, condemn them and work to see that they never happen again.
But what about the effect on readers today? Surely it makes a difference whether the reader is male or female, white or black, young or old, rich or poor. Such differences must account, at least in part, for the range of meanings produced by readers of the Bible.
When Clines puts this question to Song of Songs, he finds that most past readers read it not as a text about human love but as a text about the love of God for Israel or for the church. Allegorical or metaphorical interpretations were characteristic not only of celibate clerics prior to the Reformation, but also, and perhaps surprisingly, of Jewish and Protestant readers prior to the 19th century. He suggests, therefore, that the effect of this text on past male readers has been to produce interpretations involving a massive repression of sexuality. This, Clines asserts, is a testimonial to male fear of female sexuality and the refusal of male readers to come to terms with their own sexuality.
It seems apparent that Song of Songs has not had the effect of transforming power relations between the sexes in ancient Israel or in any society since then. And it is too late for it to have any major impact on contemporary social change because many other models for relations between the sexes now exist. But the male reader of today shares the male biblical author’s perspective in a way that women readers do not. To the extent that the woman in the Song is the object of the male gaze, the text functions as a kind of soft pornography for men today in much the same way as it did for male readers in ancient Israel. At least that’s what Clines argues.
The effect of a text like Judith may also be quite different on male and female readers. The message about the dangers of the femme fatale may largely be lost on women readers, while it may resonate with many other such messages men receive about the dangers of women and women’s sexuality.
If we relocate meaning from the text to the reader or the reading process, does this alleviate the dilemma of biblical authority for Jewish and Christian feminists? Personally, I do not think so. It still leaves women reading the same male texts. We may have become much more sophisticated at being suspicious readers and at reading the text as women rather than adopting the male author’s perspective. We may have become much more adept at constructing feminist meanings. But in my view, as long as we accord authoritative status to the biblical tradition, we accord authoritative status to patriarchy and sexist ideology.
Unlike our feminist sisters in other fields, we are not able to alter the canon by dropping some of the male texts and adding new women-authored texts. We are stuck with a collection within which women’s voices have been virtually silenced and have to be teased out, if they can be found at all.
If we claim authoritative status for feminist readings, then we embroil ourselves in a power struggle with interpretive communities within which traditional patriarchal readings are normative, and there is, as yet, no compelling evidence to suggest that such a struggle can be won. Feminists have, after all, been working at this for 200 years, but the feminist view of the Bible is hardly normative in major Christian or Jewish denominations. Moreover, if we take this approach, we are still left with the problem that meaning is gendered. Men and women may construct very different meanings of the same text, meanings that arise from our differently gendered experiences. The effect of the reading process may, therefore, be quite different for men and women.
One of our principal feminist goals must be to ensure that the biblical text does not have the devastating effects on women’s lives in the future that it has had in the past. I cannot see how shifting the locus of meaning and authority to the reader can accomplish this, short of teaching all men to read as women.
In my view, there is little in the recent work of feminist biblical scholars on this question of authority that eases the concerns of other feminists. At present we are witnessing attempts in many spheres to undo the recent social gains women have made. The malestream media and the religious right have done much to make feminism the f-word of the nineties. This is a time of so-called backlash or, more accurately, neosexism, and it is not difficult to find new examples of the Bible being used in the same old ways as a weapon against women.
There is a significant need for feminist critical analysis of the Bible and its effects on our society, but I doubt we will be perceived as serious feminist people as long as we try to fit the notion of an authoritative sacred canon into a feminist paradigm. The more important task, in my view, is to situate our work more centrally within the ongoing struggle for women’s equality.
Our next speaker is going to ask some difficult questions—the really tough ones. What if we can’t reclaim a biblical text? And what’s the history of the struggle to open the Bible to women?Pamela Milne is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. She received her Ph.D. at Magill University and has done extensive research in Jerusalem at both the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research. She has also done research at Hebrew Union College and the University of Michigan.
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