Women in the Bible

Most of the women described in this study were atypical biblical women. Israelite women, like women in most cultures of the world, had status principally within the home. However, exceptional women occasionally had prominent roles outside the home and dared to assert themselves. The chapters contain biographical sketches, with comparisons to contemporary women's roles, of two dozen women. Beginning with Sarah of Ur and ending with Priscilla of Rome, their lives range over an era of nearly two millennia. These women were, at crucial times, sagacious in decision making and skillful in executing their decisions. They made such a distinctive mark on the events of their time to be remembered by subsequent generations as more than breeders of male heirs. Each woman's story relates how a dynamic woman was able to swim against the strong currents of patriarchy. To make explicit the relevancy of this study, the brief biographies are related to such current feminist issues as surrogate parenting, gender stereotyping, and civil disobedience over unequal treatment by governments.

The impetus for this book was the startling realization that within early Christianity, which is characterized by healing, no women are explicitly commissioned to heal. The work begins with a search for the women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period, finding them honoured in inscriptions, named by medical writers, and stereotyped by playwrights and other literateurs. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era, is a world in which women functioned as healers as well as healed and that healing was a site of contestation in relation to gender. The interpretive lens brought to bear on the wide range of sources used in this study is a multi-dimensional one informed by feminism, post-colonialism and ecological studies. The methodology is socio-rhetorical drawing on tools from medical anthropology. The turning of the multi-dimensional lens and these tools on the gospels, informed by the context constructed in the first part of the study, enables new interpretations of the stories of women healing to emerge. A woman pours out healing ointment; healed women bear on their bodies the language describing Jesus and the stereotyped demon-possessed women of the Lukan gospel may, indeed, be healers.

The women in Jesus' life are a raucous and rowdy bunch, including "riotous" foremothers, "loose women," and "distressed daughters of Israel." Reading these new ways of interpreting women in the Gospels, male New Testament scholars have discovered liberating perspectives. In seven scintillating studies, Spencer explores among others the genealogy of Matthew's Gospel to discover the riotous yet righteous nature of Jesus' foremothers, slave girls and prophetic daughters in Luke-Acts, and women leading men in the Gospel of Mark 5-7. Scott Spencer, a virtuoso young New Testament scholar, provides his own lively forays into reading the Gospels through women's eyes. He shows what it is like for a man to read stories about the women in Jesus' life from a new perspective. Spencer is an able and inventive scholar whose broad-ranging insights and engaging style make his work very accessible.

The status of women in the ancient Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts has long been a contested issue. What does being a Jewess entail in antiquity? Men in ancient Jewish culture are defined primarily by what duties they are expected to perform, the course of action that they take. The Jewess, in contrast, is bound by stricture. Writing on the formation and transformation of the ideology of female Jewishness in the ancient world, Zlotnick places her treatment in a broad, comparative, Mediterranean context, bringing in parallels from Greek and Roman sources. Drawing on episodes from the Hebrew Bible and on Midrashic, Mishnaic, and Talmudic texts, she pays particular attention to the ways in which they attempt to determine the boundaries of communal affiliation through real and perceived differences between Israelites, or Jews, on one hand and non-Israelites, or Gentiles, on the other. Women are often associated in the sources with the forbidden, and foreign women are endowed with a curious freedom of action and choice that is hardly ever shared by their Jewish counterparts. Delilah, for instance, is one of the most autonomous women in the Bible, appearing without patronymic or family ties. She also brings disaster. Dinah, the Jewess, by contrast, becomes an agent of self-destruction when she goes out to mingle with gentile female friends. In ancient Judaism the lessons of such tales were applied as rules to sustain membership in the family, the clan, and the community. While Zlotnick's central project is to untangle the challenges of sex, gender, and the formation of national identity in antiquity, her book is also a remarkable study of intertextual relations within the Jewish literary tradition.

The biblical image of Eve has powerfully influenced ideas about women for the past two millennia. Yet, as Carol Meyers argues in Discovering Eve, the image of the first of women as subservient and dependent does not represent some irreducible historical truth. Rather, it represents the androcentric constructions of a group of urban elite males (including, most notably, the Apostle Paul and Rabbi Yohannan) who had a decisive effect on the founding of Judaeo-Christian traditions. Meyers produces convincing evidence, archaeological, scriptural, and sociological, that ancient Israelite woman fulfilled a role very different from that of the biblical Eve. The real Eve, she demonstrates, was a figure of some social substance, a strong and important figure in the social and familial milieux.

Looking deeply into biblical stories of female friendships in order to extract greater truths, this compelling work explores the sacred dimension of friendship through the lenses of faith, tradition, and scripture, revealing the often overlooked voices and experiences of women in the Old and New Testaments. (Social Issues)

In Her Testimony is True, the Gospel of John is analysed as a rhetorical work that uses the metaphor of a trial in order to persuade readers that the Messiah is Jesus. John's presentation of women as witnesses in that trial is examined within the framework of Jewish law and custom regarding women as witnesses. Maccini concludes that the role of the women as witnesses follows no stereotypical pattern; that the women as witnesses, like the men, are treated as individuals, not as a class; and that in no case do any of the women bear witness in a way that breaches Jewish law and the custom of the contemporary culture.

For hundreds of years, Paul's letter to the Galatians has been a flashpoint of controversy among Christians. Why did Paul write the letter, and what was at issue in the controversy over Torah observance, particularly male circumcision? Has the letter with its classic contrast of faith in Christ and works of the law served to divide Jews from Christians and Christians from one other? Radically reframing the debate, Tatha Wiley's fresh approach decisively shifts the Galatian question to focus on the social consequences of Paul's bitter disagreement with the circumcision preachers and specifically the implications of the dispute for Gentile women in the community. Wiley maintains that Paul's argument of equality in Christ was directed to and for the situation of women, whose newly won status was jeopardized by the preaching of Paul's opponents. By looking at the issue of circumcision from the angle of the Gentile women of Galatia, Wiley cuts to the core concerns of the dispute: gender privilege, religious authority, and the life-changing implications of Christian commitment.

Introduces the reader to an extraordinarily rich variety of critical experiences, which far transcends the limitations of conventional biblical scholarship' (Prooftexts). This provocative collection of essays begins where Exum's earlier literary-feminist study, Fragmented Women, left off: with the questioning of the androcentric bias of the biblical text and with the aim of subverting its patriarchal perspective. It moves on to stake out new territory for feminist biblical criticism by considering what happens to biblical women in popular culture, in art, and in film and by foregrounding questions about the ways gender interests affect interpretation and about the roles and responsibilities of commentators and readers. Six essays approach gender bias in representation and in interpretation from various angles: 'Bathsheba Plotted, Shot and Painted'; 'Michal at the Window, Michal in the Movies'; 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle'; 'Prophetic Pornography'; 'Is This Naomi?'; and 'Why, Why, Why, Delilah?''

This book is for anyone interested in religious studies and women's studies, as well as for biblical scholars. It offers a feminist oppositional reading of the biblical text. The main argument is that the Bible constructs a fictional universe in which women are shown to be intent on promoting male interests, and, for the most part, appear as secondary characters whose voice and point of view are often suppressed. In their limited roles as mothers, wives, daughters and sisters, women are constructed as male-dependent pawns intent on securing the status of their male counterparts. The Biblical narrative highlights the contribution of women as reproductive agents and protectors of sons. In this challenging collection of essays, Fuchs focuses on type-scenes as a way of demonstrating the mechanisms by which the texts validates male power and superiority. She also deconstructs the Biblical sexual politics by asking whose interest is being served by the 'good' women of the Bible.Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement series, Volume 310.

The Bible contains many stories of prostitution. Feminist and liberation readings of these biblical narratives have often made sex workers invisible. 'Sex Working and the Bible' examines stories of biblical prostitution through the experiences and understanding of sex workers today. The Bible narratives - ranging across Rahab in the Book of Joshua, the story of Solomon and the two prostitutes, the anointing women traditions, and the apocalyptic vision of the whore of Babylon in Revelation - are set within both a practical and theoretical framework. This radical book offers a new, more inclusive way of approaching issues of gender, sexuality and prostitution in the Bible.

Women in the Bible, Qumran and Early Rabbinic Literature: Their Status and Roles portrays the tension between the unity of husband and wife and their different legal and social status from a wide range of perspectives, as deduced from the texts of the three corpora. The volume discusses the related topics of divorce, polygamy, woman's obligations to fulfill precepts, membership in the community, genealogy and attitudes toward sex, such as rejection of asceticism. Women in the Bible, Qumran and Early Rabbinic Literature begins with an objective interpretation of the biblical narratives of the Creation and the Fall, the intellectual basis of Jewish attitudes toward women, and then analyzes the divergent interpretations of Qumran and the Rabbis, the grounds of their distinct doctrines and halakhot.

Against the majority opinion, this study argues that the Lukan Parable of the Talents (Lk 19.11-28) is a story about the use and abuse of power. The parable is also the story of those who suffer adverse consequences when they oppose unjust power structures. This suppression of challenge to oppressive structures evidenced in the Parable of the Pounds fits a pattern that operates in other parts of the Lukan Gospel. We meet it, for example, in the arrest and killing of John the Baptist by Herod, and in the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. The Parable of the Pounds can be seen as a paradigm for the stories of those characters in the Lukan Gospel who 'lose their pound' when they challenge an oppressive structure, where 'pound' becomes a metaphor for what one has that can be potentially taken away by those in a position of power. This study argues that this pattern of 'taking away the pound' is also seen within stories of women characters who resist patriarchal ideals and expectations. The Parable of the Pounds is used as a lens through which to view the characterizations of Lukan women. New lenses provide new opportunities for perception. This study explores what is opened up by this way of viewing the text. In particular, it explores the ways in which the dynamic of the Parable of the Pounds gives insight into the dynamic operating in the Lukan women's characterizations. LNTS

The biblical stories of Lot's daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, share much in common - singular women who are left to rely upon their own wits to achieve some measure of victory over the men around them. Scholarly interpretation of these women often reduces them to mere stock characters who inform civic notions about Israel, the perennial underdog who, like these women, achieves against great odds. Or, they reflect the trickery and moral ambiguity inherent in their line as ancestresses of the House of David. However, when read for their gender information (and not for what they can tell readers about Israel), one finds women who employ strategies of deception and trickery, motivated by individual self-interest, in order to successfully maneuver within the system to their benefit. Such initiative can be seen as valorous: they save themselves through their own pluck and ingenuity. Thus, a close consideration of these stories finds that heroic biblical women carry their essential weapons upon and within themselves in their drive, their resolve and their cleverness. Using methods from biblical study as well as folklore, this study identifies biblical women motivated by self-interest coupled with deception and an incidence of the bedtrick, an instance of sexual trickery that challenges the text's power and gender dynamics. This identification puts Lot's daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba, in league with female heroes from folk tale and legend. By contrasting and comparing common motifs and actions with traits established by other non-biblical female heroic narratives, strong heroic themes are located in all four narratives. This offers a dynamic argument for identifying the female biblical heroic. This work concludes that this new identification of heroic women in the Bible profoundly affects further interpretation of the Bible.

Cheryl Anderson examines the laws relating to women that are found in the Book of the Covenant and the Deuteronomic law. She argues that the laws can be divided into those that treat women similarly to men (defined as "inclusive" laws) and those that treat women differently ("exclusive" laws). This study then suggests that the exclusive laws, which construct gender as male dominance/female subordination, do not just describe violence against women but constitute a form of violence against women. As a non-historical critique of ideology, critical theory is used to offer analytical insights that have significant implications for understanding gender constructions and violence in ot ancient and contemporary settings.

Beattie undertakes a comparative survey of the treatment of women and marriage in three different kinds of text: an authentic Pauline letter (namely 1 Corinthians); the deutero-Pauline literature (Colossians, Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles); and some tractates from the Nag Hammadi library (giving particular attention to the Gospel of Philip, the Exegesis on the Soul, the Hypostasis of the Archons and the Gospel of Thomas). The theoretical position she takes is based upon the neo-pragmatist thought of Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, the former's notions of 'contingency' and 'redescription' being of particular importance.The aim of this book is twofold: to draw attention to the contingency (that is to say, the situatedness and vested interests) attendant on all acts of interpretation; and to engage in a redescription of the category of 'gnosticism' to which the Nag Hammadi texts have traditionally been assigned, and thus also of the canonical texts as seen in relation to them. It is not the intention to suggest in a simplistic fashion that the Nag Hammadi texts should somehow displace the canonical documents as the 'correct' reading of Paul, but rather to show that texts can be read in ways as diverse and numerous as the goals of their interpreters.JSNTS 296

The fourth gospel presents the reader with an early Christian text in which women and men are treated as a discipleship of equals as this term is broadly understood in the work of Elisabeth Sch ssler Fiorenza but qualified with respect to her discussion of the meaning of 'equality' when applied to gender. Specifically, the gospel contains six examples of 'gender pairs' of characters (a widely-accepted lukan feature). The members of each pair are portrayed in a parallel or contrasting faith encounter with the Johannine Jesus which is of substantial theological importance to the gospel's stated purpose (John 20-31). The six pairs are the mother of Jesus (2-1-11) and the royal official (4-46-54); nicodemus (3-1-12) and the Samaritan woman (4-4-42); the man born blind (9-1-41) and Martha (11-1-54); Mary of Bethany and Judas (12-1-8); the mother of Jesus and the beloved disciple (19-25-27); Mary Magdalene (20-11-18) and Thomas (20-24-29).

Making sense of Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians 11-14 regarding both the role of women in public worship and the value of tongues and prophecy for the unbeliever has long posed challenges for any lay reader or scholar. Despite numerous explanations offered over the years, these passages remain marked by inconsistencies, contradictions, and puzzles. Lucy Peppiatt offers a reading of 1 Corinthians 11-14 in which she proposes that Paul is in conversation with the Corinthian male leadership regarding their domineering, superior, and selfish practices, including coercing the women to wear head coverings, lording it over the have-nots at the Lord's Supper, speaking in tongues all at once, and ordering married women to keep quiet in church. Through careful exegesis and theological comment this reading not only brings internal coherence to the text, but paints a picture of the apostle gripped by a vision for a new humanity in the Lord, resulting in his refusal to compromise with the traditional views of his own society. Instead, as those who should identify with the crucified Christ, he exhorts the Corinthians to make love their aim, and thus to restore dignity and honor to women, the outsider, and the poor.

"[This] is a timely topic, one that has not yet been dealt with. Miller writes clearly and competently. The first chapter sets out her method, which draws from both literary critical and feminist work. She then treats the women of Mark's Gospel in sequence. Her work will provide a helpful supplement to the standard commentaries. It will also be useful in women's studies classes, and provides a nice example of a balanced feminist interpretation of the Gospels." -Dr. Alan Culpepper, Mercer University, Atlanta.Miller examines the accounts of women in Mark's gospel and interprets them in relation to Mark's definition of discipleship and his understanding of new creation.

Volume 2 of Women in the Biblical World: A Survey of Old and New Testament Perspectives encompasses the latest research in feminist biblical scholarship. New angles of interpretation and fresh perspectives regarding often overlooked biblical women will be gained from the pages of this volume. This volume focuses on such women as Tamar, Deborah, Manoah's wife, Queen Vashti, and Job's wife. Attention is also given to socio-historical backgrounds lurking behind the biblical text (such as women in Greco-Roman education and syncretism in Ephesus), demonstrating how these backgrounds directly influenced the writings about women. Some emphasis on contemporary application is also stressed regarding problematic passages, such as 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. This multi-faceted approach to women in the Bible will prove to be invigorating, refreshing, and enlightening for all to read.

In Women in Their Place Jorunn Økland takes the archaeological remains at Corinth as a starting point from which to develop an interdisciplinary, theoretically informed reading of Paul's utterances on women in 1 Corinthians 11-14. In this section of the letter Paul deals with the ritual gatherings and describes the ekklesia as a of ritual space distinct from domestic space. Økland assesses the text within a larger context of four different gender models found in temple architecture, rituals and literary texts. Whilst Paul's teaching in the letter effectively engendered 'church' as male space, his use of a variety of gender models left early Christian women with many other notions of ritual space to explore.

The last third of the 20th century has witnessed an eruption of interest in the women in the Bible. In this field, Phyllis Trible's Texts of Terror is a landmark among those studying women of the Bible. Focusing on stories of the maltreatment of women, Trible paved the way for subsequent feminist exegetes who have been very critical of such stories in the Bible, and who see Christianity as an irredeemably patriarchal religion. It is commonly said that these Old Testament stories of rape, murder, torture, and abandonment passed without comment until recent times. In this book, however, John Thompson points out that many neglected pre-modern Christian interpreters have wrestled with the texts of terror throughout the centuries, sometimes writing volumes 'between the lines' of scripture out of an apparent concern for the women in these stories. Thompson traces and analyses the interpretation of the stories of Hagar, Jephthah's daughter, the Levite's wife, and Lot's daughters from the earliest Church Fathers through to the Reformation.; He argues that the neglected and largely inaccessible commentaries on which he draws not only shed light on how these troubling stories have been seen in the past, but can speak to Christians who are battling over how the Bible ought to be read today. Here, Thompson traces and analyses various Christian interpretations of these Bible stories of women. In drawing attention to views other than Texts of Terror, Thompson speaks to Christians who are battling over how the Bible ought to be read today.