Panel Discussion
Hershel Shanks: There’s someone who hasn’t been heard from yet, and we’re going to give that someone a chance now. You’ve been silent all day. Stretch for three minutes, and then you can fire away at us.
Question: I’d like to ask a question that has three parts. First, how did I get the impression the Canaanites really practiced a fertility cult? And second, what about the Israelites? What were the prophets so exercised about? Third, what did the frequent references to the high places mean?
Tikva Frymer-Kensky: The story of how we developed the notion of an orgiastic Canaanite religion is fascinating and has been documented rather well in a book called The Bible Without Theology, by Robert A. Oden, Jr. Oden shows quite clearly the leaf that was taken from Herodotus. But on this matter, Herodotus is extremely biased and unreliable. He reports that once in the lifetime of every woman of Babylon she had to serve the goddess Mellita, whom he calls Ishtar Mellita, by being a sacred prostitute (a Qedesha). She had to go to the courtyard of the temple and sit on the ground until a man propositioned her. She was not allowed to haggle about the price but had to accept whatever was offered, sleep with him, and give the money to Ishtar. Then she was freed of the service and could go home. Herodotus adds that women who did this when they were young and nubile got rid of the obligation in short order. But if they waited too long, they could sit around for four years. (Laughter.)
As you can imagine, this story struck the fancy of classical historians, most of whom quote Herodotus without attribution and just repeat it. When critical biblical scholarship really got going at the end of the 19th century, this orgiastic rite de passage was moved, in a breath, from Babylon to Canaan and became a new mythology of what Canaanite religion was like.
Now partly this reflects the fevered sexual imagination of repressed scholars. (Laughter.) But partly it is more serious and involved with the process of patriarchalization. Patriarchy has a tendency to exclude or denigrate whatever it doesn’t like by sexualizing it. We use words like “whore” and “bitch” as terms of derogation. We use words that refer to copulation as slang terms for doing somebody a dirty deed.
With that kind of mentality, it became almost inevitable that the religion the prophets railed against look more sexual, in particular through the metaphor of females out of control. Take the metaphor of Judah spreading her legs under every tree and on the high places (Jeremiah 2–3, for example). It’s not the women of Judah who are doing this. The passages actually refer to the state signing a political alliance with Egypt, which means, in effect, finding a master other than God and, therefore, fornicating. This is simply another example of the tendency to sexualize what we do not like. Putting it all together, this led to a lively mythology about the high places and what the Canaanites were doing there.
One more thing should be mentioned. The high places and the cult that was practiced there were part and parcel of Israel’s old-time religion. During the prophetic movement, it coincides with the monarchic tendency to control and centralize religious observance. After all, Samuel, in the days before the monarchy, officiated at a high place. By the time of Hosea, however, Hosea no longer likes the high places. He’s kind of a proto-Deuteronomist who supports central control. By the time of Jeremiah, the idea that there are places of worship other than the Temple has become very, very disturbing.
We see the same process in graphic images, like the grand serpent that, according to legend, Moses made. This serpent is kept in the Temple until it is destroyed by Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4) as something foreign to the Israelite religion. As biblical monotheism grows and develops, whatever is jettisoned is labeled foreign, Canaanite and vaguely sexy, in the bad sense, somehow too hot to handle.
This mythology is what led to our writing history as if the Israelites emerged from the desert with a pure faith and came to the wicked cities of Canaan, where they reamed all bad things. In truth, the religion of Israel is the product of continual questioning and questing for God, a response to God’s mandate, a constant reexamination of the past to see what fits into the religious sensibility of the present.
That continual transformation eventually led to the abandonment of the high places and images like the Nechushtan (the snake [2 Kings 18:4]) and the practices of the Qedeshot. The only glimpse we have of what the Qedeshot, sometimes translated as sacred prostitutes, actually did in the Temple is that when Josiah kicks them out he closes off the room where they sat weaving garments (2 Kings 23:7). How that turns into ladies who bed for hire, I do not know. (Applause.)
Q:This is a question for Miss Milne. Does your rejection of the Bible as hopelessly patriarchal mean that you deny the Bible has any spiritual authority for feminists? Does it mean feminists of faith have to start from scratch to work out their relationship with God?
Pamela J. Milne: I think I’d have to say no, it doesn’t mean that someone can’t draw spiritual nourishment from the Bible. But I would prefer that they didn’t try to do that. The reason I say that is because I think it is time for a more social and less individualistic approach to the Bible. The way I understand positions such as Professor Trible’s and Professor Frymer-Kensky’s (not what we heard today in the discussion by Professor Frymer-Kensky, but from my personal discussions with her) is that the Bible does something for them as individuals. I would like us to think about women as a social group.
Now maybe this reflects a difference between the way Canadians and Americans think. (Laughter.) In the United States, there is a tremendous emphasis on individuals, on individual rights, on protecting individuals and thinking in terms of individuals, whereas in Canada we tend to think more in terms of group rights. So maybe I have a more social point of view.
For me, drawing personal or individual spiritual sustenance from a text like this does not compare in importance with the damage the Bible has done to women as a social group. In other words, by continuing to give individual or personal validity to this text—because it gives you religious sustenance or because it is religiously authoritative in your life—you may contribute to the ongoing social oppression that has been so problematic for women and continues to this day.
So my preference would be that we think on a bigger scale. If it comes to a choice between dropping or denying authority to a text such as the Bible, on the one hand, or taking care of myself, my own spiritual needs, on the other hand, I would opt for the group, for the social rather than the individual concern.
I’m not denying that feminists can find spiritual value in the text as a result of their ability to read it the way they choose. But when we move from the individual feminist perspective to conventional social uses of the Bible, I have concerns. I would prefer to see feminists leave it behind. I completely agree with Professor Frymer-Kensky that going back and reclaiming the goddess traditions from Mesopotamia as a starting point for new feminist spirituality is not where it’s at. I can’t see any point in spending time doing that.
I have suggested in some of my writing the kind of strategy you heard a bit about from Professor Schaberg. You can also find it in the writings of women such as Mieke Bal. To some extent these feminist scholars look at women’s writings and, at the very least, juxtapose expressions of women’s religious experiences to texts like the Bible. Personally, I’d like woman-positive texts to replace the Bible. But at a minimum, we have to get women’s religious experiences in there in a way they have not gotten in there by limiting ourselves to the biblical text.
Frymer-Kensky: I want to jump into this discussion for a moment. The key words are “authoritative text’’ and “authority.” The Bible, when we study it in its original context and language and intertextually and with all the modern techniques, is an extremely complex document that revels in a multiplicity of voices, that is filled with gapped texts, that demands that the interpreter complete the text, that raises all kinds of significant issues, that critiques its own society and confesses its divided opinion about everything. The Bible is a document of struggle, of God-wrestling. It is the record of a society and the response of individuals who constantly go back over their history and think about these things.
Most of this is obscured by our religious traditions, which have simplified the stories and the text and distilled particular messages from it and used them to bludgeon people, especially women, but others as well, into a vision of an orderly world with a hierarchic system and vision of power. But it’s important to listen to the Bible’s own words—the mandate to seek justice, the mandate to be holy—and to the description, at its best, of a God who is just and merciful and gracious and people loving. We should take every story and every idea presented through interpretation as authoritative and submit it to this simple test—is this justice as I have been taught by the Bible and my religious tradition to understand it? Are people being treated as completely human? Does this lead to a holy society in which everybody is valued as being made in the image of God?
When we learn to do that—and not simply accept the authority either of our religious leaders or of traditional interpretations, or even of the written word itself, but to keep this dynamic process going—then we’re into true spiritual nourishment, nourishment for our communities as well as for us as individuals. Then the Bible can serve as a nourishing factor. But the more it is used as a proof-text and a bludgeon, the more it is forced into constrictive modes of life-denying interpretation, the less valuable it is. (Applause.)
Jane Schaberg: I want to say a word about the notion mentioned by Professor Milne of replacing the Bible. I think you disempower Margaret Atwood’s image, and other images like hers, if you think in terms of replacing the Bible. Atwood doesn’t mean to replace the Bible. She means the hanged heron to draw on the image of the crucified innocent one. I like to think of a slide over a slide, a transparency over a transparency, rather than replacing one image with another. We need the tradition, the aspects of the prophetic tradition and aspects of the Christian tradition that empower resistance to domination.
Milne: I’d like to make one last comment. My concerns are really pragmatic. One of the difficulties we face now is illiteracy. When I go into the classroom, I’m faced with students who have difficulty reading the written text. They have not grown up reading and writing. They’ve grown up watching TV and listening to tapes and CDs.
Unlike some of the other panelists, I don’t teach in a religious institution. Like Professor Schaberg, I don’t teach theological students primarily. I teach in a provincial university, so I get ordinary students off the street. And most of them have never cracked the Bible. They may sign up for a Bible course, but only about 10 percent of them are familiar with the Bible. To think that they are going to become literate enough to read the Bible with the sophistication needed for feminist reinterpretations takes more optimism than I have.
I think most people today encounter the biblical tradition through other means—through TV preachers (mostly fundamentalist), through movies, through musicals. They don’t, for the most part, encounter it in the traditional way of opening the book and reading it. They might read little bits of it in a church context, if they still go. But Bible literacy is on the decline. So, for me, the problem is overwhelming. I just don’t know how the transformation of understanding along the lines suggested by feminist reformists can be accomplished.
Shanks: You’re making a kind of a political decision, aren’t you, Pam? You don’t deny that women can draw rich spiritual nourishment from the Bible, when read sensitively, the way Phyllis Trible or Tikva would read it. I wonder, if you were to apply the same tests that you apply to the Bible, if you wouldn’t have to throw out all ancient literature. As we heard from Tikva, they were all patriarchal societies, and we were, too, until very recently. As a matter of fact, as you pointed out to me at lunch, we still are. (Laughter.) So we would almost have to throw out everything.
Tikva has spent much of her scholarly career studying clay tablets, which are so unattractive with those little chicken-scratchings on them. And yet she has taken those texts, like any mythology (even if you want to denigrate the biblical text as pure mythology), she has taken them and found richness in them. Are you saying that, because of the political problem, because we can’t separate the Bible from the powers that be who use it to suppress women, that we should discard it as irrelevant, even though we can find spiritual nourishment in it?
Milne: No, I think I made my position clear. I don’t think we can discard the Bible because it pervades our culture in so many ways. I mean, we can’t even buy some computers without coming in contact with the image of Genesis 2–3. It’s planted right on the front of the computer. (Laughter.)
There’s so much in our society that we can’t understand or deal with without being in contact with the Bible in some way. And there are many important things in ancient literatures, including the Bible, such as the reconstruction of women’s lives in history. We know women weren’t absent from history. Most of our written records just don’t talk about them very much.
From a feminist point of view, the process I see going on with feminists who take a historical approach, which I think is perfectly legitimate academically, is very much needed. In that sense, I’m not advocating throwing out the Bible. It’s an important historical document. It’s an important literary document, too, and can be studied purely as a literary document.
Shanks: How about as a spiritual document?
Milne: I think the dangers the Bible poses outweigh the benefits. That is not to say that individual women cannot derive spiritual value from it. Clearly, two, perhaps three, of the people on this panel do. But my concern is how to minimize the negative consequences if you’re going to accord the Bible some kind of authoritative status.
When Phyllis was talking about teasing elements out of the text, these bits about Miriam, I thought to myself, if we took this book out into the streets of this city and asked people to read this or that text, what are the chances they would see these things on their own? It takes great literary insight to find these kinds of things in this text. Realistically, how successful can we be in teaching an entire society to use it this way, to find those messages in it? People are becoming less connected to the biblical tradition rather than more connected to it.
Trible: I’d like to say a couple of things. So-called people on the street, or laypeople, come up with all kinds of surprising readings of the text. They play hunches that scholars may never have dreamt of. The scholar may think that she has teased something out, but later she learns that a particular Bible study group in a particular church always thought that was the case anyway. (Chuckles.) So the lines get blurred. The Southern Baptist missionary I spoke of was not a theologian educated in biblical studies. In fact, scholars would have told her at the time that she was way off the wall for saying that woman was created last and was, therefore, the best.
Let me also put in a word for communities of faith who are studying the Bible and, in particular, groups of women within churches and synagogues who have been banding together for years and years now and for the difference they have made in those denominations and in the larger arena.
Also, let me put in a word for crossing the lines between Judaism and Christianity. Tikva and I met years ago at the University of Michigan when I was out there speaking, and she was a respondent. Something caught fire between us, and over the years we have continued our conversation. We have also shared participation in communities of faith within our own religions. And we have a dream. I guess now it has to be an eschatological vision (Laughter.)—that one day the two of us will write a little book we’ve long talked about called Feminists Who Love the Bible. It would have a double authorship, and it would cross the line between Judaism and Christianity. (Applause.)
Schaberg: I would like to respond to this issue of social readings and individualistic readings. In Detroit we are privileged to have a large African American community. God knows, if any group has been oppressed by a document such as the Bible, it’s this group. But I am often astonished at the liberating insights that come from the African American student community and from African American scholars studying the Bible. Pam quoted Itumeleng Mosala, whose life has been involved in the struggle in South Africa. She argues that if you’re involved in struggle, you hear struggle in the text. And so those kinds of readings from those kinds of communities are very interesting to me.
Shanks: I’d like to ask Tikva a question following up on her expose of allegedly orgiastic Canaanite religion. How would you fit into this picture the enormous number of figurines archaeologists have dug up. They tend to be of two types—one, the rather heavy, large-bellied, big-breasted woman we tend to interpret as a fertility figure, and the other, the slender, curvaceous, often gold figurines from Canaan that emphasize the genitals, not the big breasts of a suckling mother but …
Schaberg: Two little apples is what you’re looking for. (Laughter.)
Shanks: Right, thank you. How would you fit that into your picture of Canaanite religion?
Frymer-Kensky: The large-breasted lady the mother tends to be is, we think, a fertility symbol, in the sense, perhaps, of facilitating childbirth and suckling, nurturing and guarding the child. The erotic figure is no less a fertility figure because she is very much the personification of sexual power in the universe. The sexual act leads, as far as we can tell from Sumerian texts, to agricultural fertility.
Why one was more prominent than the other is a question that, in the absence of texts, is hard to answer. We do know that one of the great preoccupations of Canaanite mythology, as we have it in Ugarit, Syria, in about 1400 B.C.E., is the passing of power from fathers to sons. The rise of the next generation is one of the central dilemmas of patriarchy, how young gods take over from El and El’s wife, Asherah, the mother of the gods.
But along with the coming of the new generation into positions of prominence, younger females, perhaps, come into greater cultic use, as witnessed in the figurines, of which we have a few gold ones and some molds, from which thousands of cheap clay ones could be made.
In Israel we don’t have these younger female figurines in the biblical period. But it is worth noting what we do have. We have a rather neutral figurine, a figure in the round, with a tree trunk for a bottom and breasts on the torso and a nondescript head, sometimes just a pinch of clay. The essential aspens are the breasts, which has long been noted, and the tree trunk, which has sometimes been mis-seen as a pillar but which definitely flares on the bottom like a tree trunk. This is the lactating, nourishing, nurturing aspen of the universe and may represent what had been meant earlier by Asherah in Israel.
It may also represent God, because what we can see from biblical word-pictures of God is that God is a nongenital, divine being with a beard and breasts. I’m not saying the text actually describes either the beard or the breasts (unless you want to say Shaddai has to do with breasts), but God has both the executive powers of the young male and the nurturing and procreative powers of the breasted figure. If we imagine God as a talking torso with beard and breasts or as a great tree connected to the earth, then we wind up with a figure that can go in any direction in terms of gender and sexuality—an infinite possibility of unity. What Western tradition has done with that we all know.
Shanks: Are you saying the Israelite God is depicted in the Bible as genderless?
Frymer-Kensk:y No, sexless.
Shanks: What is its gender?
Frymer-Kensky: Male. He represents authority. The verbs are always male, and the adjectives are always male, and most of the metaphors, not all, are male. But God is sexless in the sense that the sexuality we find in pagan religions is missing. Absent from the Bible are images of a male God whose potency is located in his upright genitals. There are no hymns to the phallus as a source of fertility, as a source of power. Think, for example, of representations in Greece of the phallus as the great weapon.
So we have a far less sexed figure in the Bible. It’s a masculine figure in terms of social order because it reflects the society that conceived of it. When society no longer associates authority with maleness, there is the possibility of understanding God as also gender free.
Shanks: Does God have feminine characteristics?
Frymer-Kensky: That depends on what you mean by feminine characteristics. When God is nurturing and loving and compassionate, is that God the Father or God the Mother? If we say that’s God the Mother, then we give men permission not to be compassionate and not to be tender and not to be nurturing. When God is strong and a warrior, is this God as male, or is this the force of disorder that is sometimes associated with a female? Our social structures have decided which characteristics are male and which are female, and we read them into our picture of God.
Certainly the God of the Bible stresses both—God’s role in fertility and God’s role as tender, compassionate and nurturing, alongside the more classical attribute of forcefulness. We need to remind ourselves that our gendered metaphors are not the only ways of conceiving God. Even in the text, which some of us have been taught is authoritative, we find God the rock, God the tree, God the lion. Hosea is full of metaphors for God that are not just God the husband or God the father, other images of the deity besides biological metaphors.
Shanks: Hebrew linguistics is full of gender. What about feminine names for God, like Shekhinah?
Frymer-Kensky: Yes, in the Bible we get “the one who writhed in labor for you,” that is, God writhed in labor for Israel or for humanity. Is that a female image? Is that a male image? Normally we’d say that’s a female image. Or the God whose “wombs resonate with tenderness.” Male gods in Sumer were called “big of womb,” too. Is this a feminine aspect of their being? Or have males co-opted the characteristics of the female and left them with nothing of their own? That’s a value judgment.
God is also said to be, in a very ancient poem, the one who bestows the blessings of breasts and wombs. Some male scholars have looked at that and said that must not be God; that must be a vestige of the goddess Asherah who has disappeared from the text. But who says that? The text doesn’t say that. It says God gives us the blessings of breasts and wombs.
Trible: The passage you mentioned in Deuteronomy 32:18—writhing and labor pains giving Israel birth—has traditionally been translated (check the Jerusalem Bible if you want the text) “You forgot the God who fathered you.” (Chuckles.)
Frymer-Kensky: One of the purposes of vernacular translations, as you all know, was to render the Bible accessible. The translators realized that this is a complex text. The preface to the earliest English translation of the Bible, the Tyndale Bible, says specifically that one of the aims is to cast light upon the dark places and simplify what is confusing. You can look at these texts and see where choices have been made to get rid of things that might be troublesome to the patriarchal image, to simplify ambiguities and make women pasteboard figures.
Trible: Yes, the Bible is clearly patriarchal. On that everybody on this panel agrees. But translations have made it worse.
Q: Dr. Schaberg, because of the Beloved Disciple’s proximity to Mary Magdalene in John, and because Mary Magdalene is described in Gnostic texts as the one Jesus loved most, and also because the Beloved Disciple threatens Peter and John and Mary does not protest, can Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple be considered one and the same? Have you ever looked at this possibility?
Schaberg: In an old article, the author—I can’t think of the name—proposed something along those lines. If there was some connection in the past, by the time you get to the Fourth Gospel, in the text itself, the Beloved Disciple is male. Male pronouns are used. And he also appears at the crucifixion as a character separate from Mary Magdalene. So there can be no identification there.
Q: I want to ask the panelists about the issue of language, about the fact that the language of religion, both in the Bible and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is so sexed. The whole concept of a deity is sexed.
Frymer-Kensky: We need to remind ourselves constantly of this. One way, of course, is to substitute inclusive language. Another way is to substitute, occasionally and randomly, blatantly female language. Still another way is just to keep talking about it.
There is no doubt that the received tradition challenges us. We are supposed to repair the world. We have a broken world, and we have a deeply flawed religious tradition. The job of our generation is to improve it. This has been the job of every generation, but some have ignored it.
But we can no longer ignore the feminist and racist and Eurocentric aspects of our religious tradition. We have read the Bible in a way that has invalidated Asian cultures, for example, but Asian Christians won’t accept that any more. They’re trying to come up with new ways of synthesizing the Bible and their culture. African American churches are trying to improve the tradition, to nourish groups in struggle, as are oppressed people all over the world. Women and men with an inclusive vision of humanity have to wrestle with God and become heretics in the service of heaven.
Q: Professor Milne, you mentioned Matilda Gage. I read something about her a while ago, just a thumbnail sketch. Am I correct in assuming that she was a leading suffragette in the early days but that she rejected the Bible completely and all organized religion as the single worst enemy of women in the history of the world? Or is that an overstatement?
Milne: You’re asking whether Matilda Gage rejected the Bible and religion as basically the enemy of women and women’s rights. Yes, I think that’s what set her work apart from the work of the vast majority of 19th-century feminists. She really did see organized religion as a fundamental obstacle that women came up against again and again.
I see the 19th century as much the same as the 20th century, that is, the majority of feminists who look at the Bible—I think that’s fairly clear from this panel—still have a positive relationship to it and to organized religion. Most 19th-century feminists stood inside an organized religion. Only a few, like Gage and, I think probably Cady Stanton (by the time she wrote The Woman’s Bible), rejected the authority of organized religion and the authority of the Bible. Having said that, I don’t think you should conclude that they were irreligious.
Q: Wasn’t her (Gage’s) father a free thinker when she was growing up?
Milne: You are probably correct, but I have not looked at that part of her life. Let me make a few comments on the previous question, though. You have to distinguish between individual spirituality and organized religion. What early feminists rejected was organized religion and the Bible as the text of organized religion. But they were profoundly religious women in some ways. There weren’t a lot of alteratives in those days; there aren’t many even today. There aren’t many religious/spiritual alternatives for women.
That’s what Tikva was talking about earlier. Women are casting about for something to replace this tradition, which has been pervasive in our society. Some women have tried to go back to the ancient goddess traditions and resurrect them, to reclaim them as a basis for women’s spirituality. I don’t think that can be done. Nor do I think it is the best use of women’s energies. We would face all of the problems we face in reclaiming the Bible in a positive way for women, and more. We would have to teach women the basic mythology, to begin with. Then we would have to teach them how to alter it and suppress all the patriarchal stuff in it. It just doesn’t seem like a good use of our energy or time to me.
But in the 19th century, it would have been more difficult to have a completely secular point of view. I think Gage and Cady Stanton had a deep sense that organized religion was putting up very serious barriers to women’s equality, and they didn’t think organized religion was going to change.
Q: I have a question for Miss Trible. What do you make of the claim that the Epistle to the Hebrews may have been written by a woman, possibly a lady called Aquila?
Trible: Although the question is addressed to me, the Second Testament expert is at the other end of the table. So I’ll let her respond.
Schaberg: Of all the documents in the Second Testament that have a likely claim, the Epistle to the Hebrews is worth looking at from that angle. Some have suggested that if Prisca (Priscilla) wrote anything that would be it. She’s certainly one of the names that was remembered. I think she is listed three times—twice named before her husband Aquila. And she was known as a teacher. The Epistle to the Hebrews is interesting because it does not favor the creation of a Christian priesthood.
But whether or not we have writing by women in antiquity is difficult, maybe impossible, to judge. A few years ago, some people said they could tell if a woman or a man was playing the piano. (Chuckles.) Virginia Woolf said there was such a thing as a woman’s sentence, but we don’t really know what that might be. But if any Second Testament document merits being looked at along those lines, the Epistle to the Hebrews would be it.
Hershel Shanks: There’s someone who hasn’t been heard from yet, and we’re going to give that someone a chance now. You’ve been silent all day. Stretch for three minutes, and then you can fire away at us.
Question: I’d like to ask a question that has three parts. First, how did I get the impression the Canaanites really practiced a fertility cult? And second, what about the Israelites? What were the prophets so exercised about? Third, what did the frequent references to the high places mean?