We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (But Still Have a Ways to Go)

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It’s happened. After years of being eclipsed by our colleagues in the Jesus Seminar and by Dead Sea Scroll scholars, those of us engaged in feminist Bible study have finally made it into one of the big news weeklies. Sure, we’ve gotten some media notice before, in more highbrow publications, such as The Atlantic Monthly, and in magazines that specifically cover biblical scholarship, such as Christianity Today and, of course, Bible Review. But only now have our attempts to analyze women in the Bible gone big time, making the August 10, 1998, issue of U.S. News & World Report. And we’re no mere filler, either: U.S. News devotes seven lavishly illustrated pages to Cullen Murphy’s article “The Bible According to Eve.” The designation “Special Report” is stamped across the front page.

I freely admit: I delighted in this fanfare. It was exciting to see the work I do so glamorized—and the celebrity wanna-be in me loved seeing the names of my peers among the likes of such modern-day luminaries as Monica Lewinsky.

Still, I have quibbles. First, I have territorial concerns. My own field of specialization is the Hebrew Bible, and I thought my “Testament” got a little shortchanged. Not shortchanged in terms of column inches: By my rough count, Murphy granted the women of the Hebrew Bible and the women of the New Testament equal time. And not shortchanged in terms of the number of biblical women mentioned: Indeed, in this regard, the Hebrew Bible comes out a little better, as Murphy begins his story with Delilah and elsewhere comments on Eve, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Jael, the daughter of Jephthah, the wise women of 2 Samuel, Jezebel, Huldah and Noadiah. Compare the relatively short list of New Testament women who get mentioned by name: Mary, the mother of Jesus; Mary Magdalene; and the sisters Mary and Martha.

Yet a lot of names were missing in Murphy’s article—the names of contemporary feminist Hebrew Bible scholars. I found only four: Mieke Bal, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Carol Meyers and Phyllis Trible. Twice as many feminist scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity were represented: Bernadette Brooten, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Karen L. King, Ross S. Kraemer, Amy-Jill Levine, Elaine Pagels, Jane Schaberg and Karen Jo Torjeson. Granted, this need not be a problem, but it does seem to reflect a Christocentric perspective. Murphy offers an extensive discussion about the ways in which New Testament feminist scholarship has influenced modern Christian theology. But the only modern Jewish trend he mentions is that today, in the light of feminist work, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform Jews admit women to the rabbinate. Moreover, the one Jewish feminist theologian he cites—Judith Plaskow—is discussed in terms of a Christian issue: her evaluation of Jesus and his attitudes toward gender equality.

In discussing the New Testament materials, Murphy further makes clear that there is much diversity in various scholars’ interpretations of the Bible. For some, for example, the focus on virginity in the Mary story implies a denigration of female sexuality and so keeps her from playing a role today in a theology of liberated women. For others, however, Mary is an affirming character, one who embraces the divine plan for Jesus’ conception even though it puts her at risk with her husband and her community. Murphy’s headline blurb also suggests his interest in the different points of view voiced by today’s feminist biblical scholars: “A diverse group of scholars is reinterpreting the role of women in the Good Book and in ancient religious life” (emphasis mine).

But when I looked for a discussion of diversity among Hebrew Bible feminist scholars, it just wasn’t there. Thus, while Phyllis Trible’s landmark attempts to read Eve redemptively in Genesis 2–3 are cited, there’s no mention of David Clines’s provocative (and witty!) rebuttal, “What Does Eve Do to Help?” nor of radical feminist theologian Mary Daly’s more scathing critique of Eve as emblematic of the Bible’s androcentrism. Elsewhere, when Murphy speaks of Carol Meyers’s current project, editing A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament, he describes it as something that will “unite” about 70 feminist biblical scholars. Phrasing like this undermines the very picture of diversity in feminist biblical scholarship that the article purports to tout.

This is not just nit-picking. To me, the diversity of Hebrew Bible feminist scholarship is the most exciting aspect of the enterprise in which I am engaged. I call myself a feminist historian of religion, which means that I am primarily interested in comparing biblical literature to the religious literatures of other ancient Near Eastern 054peoples. I’m interested, for example, in the ways in which the portrait of the military leader Deborah in Judges 4–5 corresponds to Canaanite mythological portraits of the warrior-goddess Anat. But my work would be greatly impoverished if I did not have access to the more anthropologically and historically based reconstructions of Carol Meyers and Jo Ann Hackett, both of whom argue (in somewhat different ways) that the relatively decentralized character of earliest Israelite society (a society without permanent leadership and without a national political and religious center) allowed women to assume leadership roles that would have been unattainable in a more centralized society. And still other feminist scholars of the Hebrew Bible rely on a literary approach, trying to analyze the Bible’s stories as stories, without significant reference to anthropological data, historical circumstances, religious ideologies or antecedent civilizations. I think here of scholars like J. Cheryl Exum and Phyllis Trible. Trible, moreover, has expressed concerns about the way the Bible is used in contemporary communities of faith, particularly Christian. She thus reveals herself not only as a feminist literary critic of the Hebrew Bible but as a theologian. A presentation of this multiplicity of perspectives would have enriched U.S. News’s “The Bible According to Eve.”

To be sure, anyone who reads about his or her field in the media typically reacts by claiming, “Well, it was a pretty good story, but they just didn’t get it quite right.” Still, because this is the first time we feminist biblical scholars have “crashed” one of the great bastions of the mainstream American press, I would have liked to have seen our portrait perfectly rendered. But I’m resigned to watching for the follow-up accounts. Time? Newsweek? We’re waiting.

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Guest columnist Susan Ackerman’s new book, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel, will be published in November.

It’s happened. After years of being eclipsed by our colleagues in the Jesus Seminar and by Dead Sea Scroll scholars, those of us engaged in feminist Bible study have finally made it into one of the big news weeklies. Sure, we’ve gotten some media notice before, in more highbrow publications, such as The Atlantic Monthly, and in magazines that specifically cover biblical scholarship, such as Christianity Today and, of course, Bible Review. But only now have our attempts to analyze women in the Bible gone big time, making the August 10, 1998, issue of U.S. News & World Report. […]