Bible Books

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The Many Images of Biblical Women

Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel

Phyllis A. Bird
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 291 pp., $19.00 (paperback)

Although the origins of modern feminism are difficult to pin down, one commonly cited point of beginning is the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. During the following century, women focused primarily on the right to vote. But some feminist leaders in this country, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and the National Woman Suffrage Association with Susan B. Anthony in the 1870s, believed that discrimination against women involved not just voting rights but also religious issues.

In 1895, to address what she perceived as traditional Christianity’s disdain for and even neglect of women, Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, an analysis of sections of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament in which women are denigrated—or are conspicuously absent, according to Stanton.^a

This first wave of the feminist movement ended in 1920, when women in the United States were finally granted the right to vote. A second wave emerged in the 1960s with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Like their 19th-century counterparts, Friedan and her followers (who founded the National Organization for Women in 1966) sought primarily to address political issues. But once more, concerns about religious discrimination, including the Bible’s portrayals of women as subordinate to men, entered the debate.

Two landmark articles from the 1970s mark the first attempts of this generation of feminist Bible scholars to address this sort of discrimination: Phyllis Trible’s “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation”¹ and Phyllis A. Bird’s “Images of Women in the Old Testament.”²

In the years that have passed, both Trible and Bird—and scores of others—have continued to address issues concerning women and the Bible. But while Trible’s major contributions are readily available in her books God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives,³ Bird’s works have, until now, only appeared in scattered sources, many difficult to find.

Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities remedies this by collecting into one book most of Bird’s works on women in ancient Israel, including one never before published in English. Bird groups her 12 articles topically, beginning with general articles on women in ancient Israel. Her landmark “Images of Women” leads off this section. In it, Bird begins by simply quoting several different Hebrew Bible passages concerning women, thereby pointing out that there is no one biblical image of women, but many diverse ones. This leads her to look more carefully at how women are represented in different types of biblical texts—in the legal materials, say, or in the historical writings.

Because of her interest in looking at biblical women within a specific context, Bird turns next to the role of women in ancient Israelite religion. Although she notes that in Israel’s male-dominated cult, this role is 013necessarily marginal (there are no women priests, for example), she nevertheless argues that women probably did play a crucial religious role in the sorts of home-centered worship (e.g., festal meals) that the Bible only rarely describes.

The next essays in Bird’s book are more specific still, on the image of women in Genesis 1–3 and the portrayal of the harlot in several Hebrew Bible texts. The book concludes with two articles that address the implications of feminist biblical scholarship for modern (especially Christian) communities of faith. Bird in particular considers questions of translation (should we replace the Bible’s male-dominated language with more gender-neutral terminology?) and the role of biblical authority in today’s world (how can we sustain a biblically based faith despite the Bible’s obvious sexism, racism and so on?). Bird’s answer to the first question is no. She argues that the translator has an obligation to the ancient author to transmit his word as originally rendered. To the second question, she responds that for her, authority must be grounded in individual experience, meaning that she recognizes the Bible’s authority only insofar as it is able to reveal a living God relevant for our own day.

I suspect that these last two articles, as well as Bird’s general overviews, will be of the greatest interest to most BR readers; the more specific articles on Genesis 1–3 and on the character of the harlot rely heavily on linguistic arguments and a close textual analysis, and thus are probably more suited for scholars.

But in all the articles, Bird’s methods are clear. She insists that any analysis of a biblical text must be grounded in a description of ancient Israel’s social and conceptual world. We must, for example, understand the place of the harlot within ancient Israelite society before considering what it means for Tamar, say, to “play the harlot” in Genesis 38. The harlot, Bird argues, is an ambivalent figure in the ancient world, despised on the one hand, yet tolerated on the other: hence Tamar’s father-in-law Judah can condemn his daughter-in-law for her alleged whoring but approach a prostitute himself without qualm. By stressing the ancient social context, Bird breaks from Trible, whose analysis is more literary. Bird and Trible also differ in their overall viewpoints: Although Trible acknowledges the misogynistic qualities of many biblical texts, she strikes me as ultimately optimistic about redeeming the Bible from its androcentric bias; Bird, on the other hand, is more pessimistic (or simply more realistic?) in describing the “sexist nature of the Bible’s social world 014and thought world.” Moreover, Bird’s pessimism, by her own admission, has grown over the years as she has discovered “the Bible to be more deeply and pervasively androcentric” than she previously realized.

This conclusion might suggest that Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities is a depressing and demoralizing book, at least for those of us committed to the modern feminist cause, but instead, I found it to be a glorious snapshot of feminist biblical scholarship during the last 25 years.

Bird hints that she is working on book-length studies of women in ancient Israel. As we eagerly anticipate these volumes, we should take great pleasure in the superb appetizer she has offered us now—a comprehensive collection of essays that shows us how far today’s generation of feminist biblical scholars has come.

The Context of Scripture

Volume One: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World
Ed. by William W. Hallo
K. Lawson Younger, Jr., Associate Editor
(Leiden: Brill, 1997) 599 pp., $124.00 (hardback)

One of the great monuments of 20th-century biblical scholarship is the massive orange volume Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, more familiarly known as ANET. This book was published in 1950 under the able editorship of James Pritchard and was considerably updated in the third edition, in 1969. Pritchard recruited the best scholars of his day to translate an array of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hittite, Canaanite and other West Semitic texts that shed light on the religious, literary and historical context of the Hebrew Bible. The book was an enormous success, and several generations of graduate students and biblical scholars have relied on it for knowledge of the classic texts of the ancient Near East.

Although ANET is an intellectual monument, all monuments eventually grow weathered and old. In the field of Near Eastern studies, ANET has been out of date for some time. Since its publication, archaeologists have unearthed many previously unknown texts and have found additional portions of previously known texts. Philologists have also gained a clearer understanding of many difficult details in the texts. A successor to ANET has long been needed.

William Hallo, a distinguished Assyriologist at Yale, has responded to this need by assembling many of the best scholars of our day to create a new “ANET.” The Context of Scripture will be a three-volume series, with one volume each on “canonical” texts, monumental inscriptions and archival texts. Judging from the first volume, this will be a worthy successor to ANET, creating a new standard in the accessibility of ancient Near Eastern literature.

This first volume contains superb annotated translations of many important religious and literary texts from the ancient 016Near East. Five large sections are devoted to Egyptian, Hittite, West Semitic, Akkadian and Sumerian compositions. Within each cultural sphere the texts are divided into those with a divine focus, a royal focus and an individual focus. While one might quibble with these subdivisions, I think Hallo’s distinctions are apt and helpful, as long as one doesn’t press them too far. The distinctions are generally warranted—for example, myths have more of a divine focus, epics have more of a royal focus, and proverbs and instructions generally have more of an individual focus. This is not to deny that epics and instructions also involve the gods and that myths often pertain to the institution of kingship; but by making these distinctions, Hallo injects some order into the mass of texts and provides a nice avenue of comparison among the texts of different cultures.

If there is a valid complaint concerning COS (I presume this will be the acronym), it is the theoretical justification of this state-of-the-art compendium of ancient Near Eastern texts. Can we in good conscience regard the ancient Near East as primarily “the context of Scripture”? For biblical scholars, such a designation may be apt, and no doubt this phrase will describe the motivations of many future readers. However, it seems a little ethnocentric to describe the ancient Near East and its literature as primarily a context for a different book.

In fact, this moniker wears a bit oddly when one considers the breadth of the texts included. Clearly, relevance to the Bible was not the main criterion. In the volume, each text is laid out with a space, between the columns of translation, where biblical parallels are listed (by chapter and verse). But on many pages, this middle margin is entirely blank. For example, the comical Akkadian text “At the Cleaners” has no obvious relation to the Bible, nor does the Egyptian “Satire on the Trades” (for both texts the middle margins are blank). But the reader’s sense for Akkadian and Egyptian belles lettres is enhanced by the inclusion of such texts. The volume is not as bibliocentric as the title indicates and is the better for it. The often blank middle column subtly suggests that these literatures are valuable in their own right, not just as context for something else.

All students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East will be grateful for this impressive and authoritative work. It is wonderful to have so much of ancient Near Eastern literature in one collection, translated by the best scholars in the field. Although it will cost and weigh nearly as much as a small used car, this trilogy will be a treasure. Much praise is due to Hallo, Younger and the many contributors.

The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition

Edited by David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck, Bruce E. Zuckerman, Marilyn J. Lundberg and James A. Sanders
(Grand Rapids and Leiden: William B. Eerdmans and E.J. Brill, 1998) li + 1,016 pp., $255.00 (hardback)

If $255 seems like a lot of money for a book, look at it this way: The average novel weighs 1 pound and sells for about $30. This book, weighing in at 13 pounds, costs only $19.62 a pound. Considering that, the book is not so expensive after all.

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And it is a treasure—a facsimile edition of the world’s oldest complete Hebrew Bible—the Leningrad Codex, or Leningradensis, to Latin aficionados, or simply L for short. Among Hebrew scholars, it is also called Keter, or Crown, as is another, unfortunately now incomplete, yet older, manuscript, the Aleppo Codex; in contrast, L is, in the words of managing editor Astrid Beck, “almost a thousand years after its writing…still in almost mint condition.”

The volume also includes 16 carpet pages—intricately crafted, gold-decorated pages of geometric designs incorporating tiny Hebrew letter inscriptions as design elements (called micrography)—reproduced in full color (photo, above).

BR readers already know a good deal about L from the widely praised article by Beck and publication editor James Sanders.^b But this volume now gives access to the manuscript itself. The general editor is David Noel Freedman, who has frequently appeared in BR’s pages. The remarkable photographs of the codex were taken by Bruce Zuckerman and his brother Ken, assisted by Marilyn Lundberg and Garth Moller. The team arrived in Russia in 1990, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, with 50 pieces of luggage containing various kinds of expensive and highly suspicious-looking technical photographic equipment. Their first hurdle was getting all this through Soviet customs.

The Leningrad Codex contains not only the biblical text (with vowel marks and accents), but also extensive marginal notes, known as Masorah. The editors estimate that there are about 60,000 Masoretic notes in the entire text. The Masorah are divided into Masorah Magna and Masorah Parva (big and little), “an almost inexhaustible source for biblical textual research, as well as for Hebrew linguistics,” writes Victor Lebedev, who was curator of the collection that houses the codex in the Russian National Library in (now) St. Petersburg, in his introduction.

The Leningrad Codex provides the basis for the most authoritative Hebrew text of the Bible. Although the Aleppo Codex is perhaps a half century or so older (it dates to about 935; L, to sometime between 1008 and 1010, according to its various colophons), the Aleppo Codex is incomplete. As University of Toronto scholar E.J. Revel writes in his preface, “If [the Aleppo Codex] had been preserved complete, L would have been second only to A as a manuscript of the biblical text. As it is, L is second to none.”

Most of us will not actually read the text from this book. But it is inspiring just to have it on the shelf.

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An Introduction to the New Testament

Raymond E. Brown
The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1997) xlv + 878 pp., $42.50 (hardback)

The Bible did not simply drop full-form out of heaven, but is the product of millennia of human selection, preservation, reproduction, translation and interpretation. Every student of the Bible needs to realize this at a deep level (and early in the course). For an intelligent and informed reading of the New Testament, the reader must constantly consider what came before these texts, what was happening within Christianity during the New Testament period and how the texts have been appropriated by church and culture in the ensuing centuries. Introductions should help to expand and deepen the reader’s repertoire of background knowledge of the salient historical, social and literary information.

Father Raymond Brown, professor emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, wisely begins his Introduction to the New Testament with concise treatments of composition, copying and canon formation. Brown’s introduction does a splendid job of priming the reader. No one is better than he at illuminating the nuanced intertextual connections between the Old and New Testaments or at setting the scene within Judaism just before the advent of Christianity. His judgments are carefully reasoned and his arguments well balanced.

Brown also delves into the hot issues of hermeneutics (such as how to read the New Testament) and inspiration. These subjects are important because so many people read the Bible naively or with strong convictions about the authority of the Bible or, most often, with a strange combination of the two. Brown’s short survey of various methods used by biblical critics helps to raise interpretive awareness among readers as they begin to ask themselves, Why do other people read the New Testament in different ways, and why do I read as I do? Some will be disappointed, however, by the meager attention Brown gives to social-scientific and literary-critical approaches, arguably the two most influential methodologies in current biblical studies.

By definition, introductory texts play the bridesmaid to the Bible; they are secondary texts meant to assist readers in understanding the primary (canonical) texts. Brown devotes a chapter to each of the 27 New Testament books in canonical order. The bulk of each chapter serves as a mini-commentary and reading guide that includes a general analysis of the contents, themes and thought of the book. The rest of each chapter treats authorship, place, date, background, disputed issues and special problems. Brown’s own approach is signaled by his discussions of the “literal” and the “fuller” senses of scripture, and by his interpretive practice throughout the book. For Brown, the literal sense refers to “what the biblical authors intended and conveyed to their audiences by what they wrote.” The fuller sense incorporates the critic’s reflections on further revelation, the broader framework of the canon and various appropriations of the text over the centuries. We might call the literal and fuller senses the historical and the salvation-historical dimensions of Brown’s hermeneutics. Brown’s appeal to the fuller sense of 020scripture might be welcomed by those who read or teach the Bible in a Christian faith-oriented setting, but it will be severely questioned by many who do not.

To determine the literal meaning, Brown relies almost exclusively on the traditional historical-critical methods used throughout this century, and especially on composition criticism, a slightly modified version of redaction criticism, which is, in turn, an outgrowth of source and form criticism. Each of these methods was designed to help scholars reconstruct realities behind the text rather than understand how the New Testament works as literature: Source criticism sought to isolate written sources used by the authors; form criticism focused on oral tradition that contributed to the Gospels; redaction (editorial) criticism worked out how the evangelists put their sources together; and composition criticism looks at the documents as organized wholes. Increasingly, however, scholars have recognized the inadequacies of these methods for dealing with texts as sophisticated literary works. In Brown’s terms, historical methods as developed in traditional biblical scholarship are poorly suited for the task of determining what authors “intended and conveyed to their audiences” in narrative and epistolary literature. Furthermore, historical-critical approaches generally fail to ignite the interest of general readers and students, probably because they presuppose linguistic and historical skills that beginners simply do not possess. In teaching and introducing the New Testament, it is better to hook beginners on issues of characterization, plot, conflict, theme and so forth, and then bring up source and redactional issues at an advanced stage of study.

New Testament introductions come in two basic flavors. First, there are the so-called handbooks, which really aren’t introductory at all. These reference works cover all scholarly options on such issues as date, authorship, audience, purpose and possible sources for each New Testament book. The second, more common type of introductory text is designed primarily for beginning students and other interested readers who are not very familiar with the Bible. These truly introductory texts provide beginning readers with basic information and interpretive frameworks. Although Brown locates his impressive new introduction within this second category, the idea that his massive and erudite tome is appropriate for students in religious education classes or Bible study groups strikes me as wishful thinking, a publisher’s daydream. By gravitating toward the historical-critical issues, repeatedly taking up issues with biblical critics (and not just in footnotes) and including hefty bibliographies of mostly scholarly works, Brown pegs this introduction above the reach of most beginners. A far more plausible setting is the college or seminary classroom or the library of someone systematically studying the New Testament in private, especially if supplemented by literary-critical and social-scientific contributions. I will use this wonderful book often to check on historical information.

The Many Images of Biblical Women

Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel