Discovering Women in Scripture

008

Nearly a decade ago, I was approached by a worker in my building, who asked me what I knew about Miriam. His Sunday school class was studying the story of the Exodus, and he wanted to be able to contribute to the discussion. Knowing that I taught college courses in biblical studies, he hoped that I would be able to recommend something for him to read that would be comprehensive and up to date. He was not interested in a strongly theological statement. Just the facts. That is, just the latest information about a biblical woman by people who were experts in the study of such figures.

There was a sophistication to his queries that impressed me. He wasn’t content merely to read the narrative in the Book of Exodus. Unlike many readers of Scripture, he was aware that the Bible, although in regular use in countless households, churches and synagogues in the contemporary Judeo-Christian world, is not a contemporary document. It wasn’t written yesterday, or even the day before; and it wasn’t written in English. He realized that because of the great antiquity of the Bible and because of its availability to most modern readers only in translation, the nuances and subtleties of many stories, laws, poems and other genres of biblical literature could be lost on the modern reader. Indeed, sometimes even the general meaning and significance of a text can be difficult to grasp for a 21st-century reader, removed from the biblical setting by thousands of miles and thousands of years.

As we continued to talk, I pointed out that Miriam is only one of a series of 12 female characters that figure in the Exodus story, that she is called a prophet before Moses is, that she—not Moses—is probably the author of the long Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, and that the negative as well as positive traditions about her signify her prominence in ancient Israel.^a He scratched his head and sighed, muttering words I’ve often heard from my undergraduate students: “How come I never heard about all of that?”

For me, this was a defining moment. I knew that I had to find a way to make current scholarly research about the women of scripture available to everyone.

One of the most exciting aspects of biblical scholarship in the last decades of the 20th century has surely been the burgeoning of what has been called feminist biblical scholarship, that is, scholarship that seeks to explore the status and role of women in biblical texts and in the ancient world that produced them. But very little of this research trickles down to nonacademics. To be sure, I could refer readers to occasional articles on figures such as Miriam, Mary and Eve in periodicals such as BR. For the most part, however, the tremendous outpouring of work produced by scholars eager to explore the life stories, legal status, social roles and literary depictions of biblical women is not easily available to or usable by nonspecialists.

As my conversation with the fellow asking about Miriam came to an end, Women in Scripture was born. I was certain that I wanted to publish a book that would make this recent research accessible to nonacademic readers.

Early on, I decided that the book should be comprehensive. At first, my notion of comprehensiveness was that the text would cover the full Jewish and Christian canons. That is, it would deal with the female figures in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and New Testament as well as the women in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books that are considered canonical by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. I at once enlisted Ross Kraemer of the University of Pennsylvania for her expertise in the New Testament and Toni Craven of Brite Divinity School, at Texas Christian University, for the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books. Together, we named the book Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

With their input, my notion of comprehensiveness was greatly expanded. The three of us agreed that the book would have a dictionary format and that it would be fully inclusive. That is, it would include not only every named woman of scripture, but also the countless female figures whose names are never mentioned, such as the wives of Lot (Genesis 19:15–26) and Noah (Genesis 6–8), the martyred woman with seven sons (4 Maccabees 8–18) and the woman who anoints Jesus (Matthew 26:6–10//Mark 14:3–9). Furthermore, the book would present the general or generic females that abound in places such as biblical legislation (for example, the women whom a priest can or cannot marry, in Leviticus 21:7–8) or the various groupings of women in New Testament epistles (including the women who profess reverence to God, in 1 Timothy 2:9–15, or the sisters to whom the risen Jesus has appeared, in 1 Corinthians 15:6).

Our insistence on inclusivity created an unusual—perhaps unique?—challenge for us as editors: How could the dictionary 059model, based on the alphabetical listing of entries, accommodate the hundreds of unnamed biblical women?

We solved this problem by dividing the dictionary into two parts. The first part is a traditional alphabetical listing of all the named women in scripture. It contains 205 entries, from Abigail to Zipporah. The second part is devoted to the unnamed women and is organized according to the order in which these women first appear in the Bible. (We decided to follow the order in the New Revised Standard Version, the best modern English translation that includes the full Jewish and Christian canons.) This section extends from the first female created in Genesis 1 to the bride of Revelation 18. (An entry on Eve, the first named woman, whose story begin in Genesis 2, appears in the first part of the book.)

As we worked, we decided that our inclusiveness should extend even to those female figures who are not human beings. We compiled a list of female deities and demons, such as Artemis, Asherah and Lilith. We identified abstract qualities personified as women (such as Iniquity, Wisdom and Wickedness), and we located geographical or political entities symbolized as women (for example, Earth as Mother in 2 Esdras; Woman Jerusalem/Zion in Isaiah). For these figures, we added a third part to our book.

Although it was relatively simple to create an entry list for part one (named women) of Women in Scripture, locating all the unnamed women for part two proved to be challenging. We could think of no electronic way to implement such a search; so we did it the old-fashioned way, by reading verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book. We hope we’ve discovered all the female figures, but we wouldn’t be surprised if we missed a few, if for no other reason than some female figures are sometimes obscured by English translations.

Let me give one example: Psalm 68:11 refers to certain people proclaiming divine victory over enemies, and Isaiah 40:9 mentions heralds announcing news of God’s presence. In both cases the Hebrew word for these messengers is the feminine participle, designating female messengers of joyful tidings, a fact not apparent in translations. We have provided entries for these figures and for others who have been similarly lost in translation.

Part two, devoted to the unnamed biblical women, is the largest section of the book, with about 600 entries. This may seem puzzling at first. The abundance of unnamed women cannot be simply attributed to biblical sexism, however, since many male characters also remain anonymous—such as the pharaoh of the Exodus. Rather, the omission of women’s names may result from literary strategy, biblical androcentrism or concern with patrilineality (tracing descent through the male line).

Whatever the reason for the many nameless women (and men) in the Bible, we are not the first to wonder about them. Since antiquity, both Jewish and Christian tradition have given them names. Noah’s wife (Genesis 6:18, 7:7, 13, 8:18), for example, has been assigned more than 103 names in postbiblical discussions of the Genesis Flood story. For the New Testament, people such as the Canaanite (or Syrophoenician) woman and her daughter (Matthew 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30) have been given names in ancient Christian sources.

Conceptualizing and then producing Women in Scripture turned out to be more complicated than we had ever imagined. It also took much longer than we had anticipated. We spent seven years soliciting, collecting and editing contributions from more than 70 scholars, both male and female, from America, Europe and Israel. But we also did not anticipate how extraordinarily exhilarating the collaborative work on this project would be.

Until relatively recently, virtually all the interpreters of scripture were men. Over the long centuries of Jewish and Christian biblical study, perspectives on female figures have been provided by male theologians, sages, artists, writers, clergy and even scientists. Directly or indirectly, this male-dominated interpretive tradition has affected the way all of us, female and male, read the Bible. My experience in teaching and writing about biblical and Israelite women has made me realize that when it comes to passages dealing with women, the traditional interpretive materials are often biased. They sometimes ignore women; they sometimes misrepresent them. Although I remain neutral on the question of whether or not such male-dominated scholarship intentionally distorts or ignores many of the female figures of the Jewish and Christian canons, I am passionate about the need for more balanced scholarship on gender-related matters.

Over and over again as we worked on Women in Scripture, we were amazed at the clarity and perceptiveness with which both famous and obscure female biblical figures were delineated and evaluated. We can only hope that the excitement of our collaboration will perhaps now be replaced by the satisfaction of knowing that our hopes of making information about all biblical women available to nonspecialists may be realized.

Nearly a decade ago, I was approached by a worker in my building, who asked me what I knew about Miriam. His Sunday school class was studying the story of the Exodus, and he wanted to be able to contribute to the discussion. Knowing that I taught college courses in biblical studies, he hoped that I would be able to recommend something for him to read that would be comprehensive and up to date. He was not interested in a strongly theological statement. Just the facts. That is, just the latest information about a biblical woman by people who […]