Feminist Approaches to the Bible by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 978-1-935335-84-9
Publisher: Biblical Archaeology Society
Published: 2012-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

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

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